SOS Forests

Destroying Forests Has Destroyed the US Forest Service

The US Forest Service is bankrupt. They have spent their entire 2008 fire budget of $1.2 billion, and an additional $400 million besides, and it is still mid-August, and fires are burning right now in every western state.

The extra $400 million spent to date is coming out of non-fire USFS programs [here]. There is a hiring freeze, forest rehabilitation projects on burns of prior years have been canceled, as have been every other kind of USFS project, and layoffs are forthcoming.

The attitude expressed by USFS Chief Gail Kimbell is, “pray for rain.” Maybe we should pray for a new Chief.

Useless and unnecessary fires have consumed the budget.

The Basin/Indians Fire  burned 244,000 acres and is the 3rd largest fire in California history. With more than $120,000,000 spent on fire “suppression,” it is now the most expensive fire in California history, and the 2nd most expensive in U.S. history (the Biscuit Fire in Oregon in 2002 cost $150,000,000). Most of those acres were incinerated in backburns. The Long Range Fire Implementation Plan was not suppression but burn it all.

The Iron Complex on the Shasta-Trinity NF will burn over 100,000 acres at a cost of over $70 million. Those fires could have been contained and controlled a month ago, but the Plan from ignition was to burn, baby, burn.

The combined acreage burned in Northern California forests this summer exceeds 500,000 acres and the cost of “suppression” is in excess of $300 million. Many of those megafires are still burning, consuming thousands of acres and tens of millions of dollars every day.

Hundreds of spotted owl nesting stands have been destroyed. More than $5 billion in timber values have been incinerated. Endangered salmon spawning streams have been boiled and the erosion yet to come will bury the spawning gravels. Whole watersheds and habitats have been destroyed.

A dozen firefighters have lost their lives.

The total costs will be paid over decades to come.

Yet the burns go on and on. That is the plan, after all: to incinerate as much of our National Forests as possible. The Ten-Year National Fire Plan as designed by the Nature Conservancy (there’s an oxymoronic name) and the Wilderness Society, and embraced by USFS leadership, calls for more than Let It Burn; it demands forest holocaust at any price.

Congress doesn’t care. They throw away money like tissue paper. They gave the multinational giant Weyerhaeuser a $182 million tax break for nothing. They gave Plum Creek $510 million for cut-over land that will go to the Nature Conservancy for their “private” burn, baby, burn program [here]. (Yes, I know, the article say only half the money will come from the feds. But ask yourself, where do the funds that bankroll TNC come from? If you guessed the US Treasury, give yourself a gold star.)

Pray for rain? That won’t help. Gail Kimbell has made it her personal mission to incinerate the 191 million acres of USFS forests and an additional 400 million acres of private forestland, too. She calls it her “Open Space” program. Burning America’s Forests to the Ground would be a better name.

The mantra from the USFS is that catastrophic forest fires are “good” for forests. They can’t say why, and indeed they violate every national environmental law in the process. The illegal fires do not save money, either; the fact is they broke the budget.

The Dead Tree Press revels in Let It Burn. The Portland Oregonian goes so far as to blame private firefighting contractors for the high cost of incinerating entire watersheds, landscapes, and regions. The Oregonian joyfully killed Oregon’s forest industry, and now they seek to kill the remnants that have hung on as firefighters.

That is the common Dead Tree Press anti-forest position, which is a trifle hypocritical in that they are themselves in the wood products business. Newsprint come from logging, after all. But no matter. If it hurts America, they are all for it.

No candidate for President or any other political office is running on a Save The Forests platform. It is a non-issue. The only mention of forests in political campaigns this year is the frequent hoorah to declare them all “wilderness” and then burn them to the ground.

Destroying forests by catastrophic fire is the accepted notion holding sway over all our political parties, including the Losertarians. The Democommies take the cake though, or should we say, the prize ashes. They wish to incinerate America’s forests in the name of anti-Capitalism and Global Warming, which makes no sense no matter whether you are a GW alarmist or a skeptic.

The USFS is dying behind it all. They have lost their forest experts, the people who care about forests, and replaced them with fire-happy nincompoops. The simple job of reporting on active fires has been aborted again and again this summer by every federal fire reporting center. I should know. I took it upon myself to track forest fires this summer. The reports are late or missing, often wrong, and done in such a sloppy manner as to give the impression that fire reporting is deeply resented by the handful of incompetent functionaries assigned the task.

And now that’s all there is left of the USFS. Bankrupt incompetence and sloppiness that are deadly to forests, firefighters, residents, and communities throughout the rural (and sometimes urban) West. That once proud and vibrant land management agency has sunk into the depths. They have positioned themselves to be enemies of forests and indeed of the American people. They have become a criminal conspiracy of eco-terrorists.

It is tragic and it is sad, but mostly it is catastrophic disaster after disaster. Our forests are being destroyed by the very people we hired to protect them. The public has been conned. The propaganda-induced fear of forestry has become the desire to incinerate the Public Forested Estate and much of the Private Forested Estate as well.

Former homeowners standing in the charred ruins of their former homes are told that they are guilty, that home ownership is not American anymore, that the American Dream is dead and rightfully so because it was a bad thing for the planet, that smoking wastelands are the ideal now, that the wholesale incineration of forests is the New Way, that America is the Home of the Wolves and the Land of Disaster, that blackened charred forests are preferred over green ones, that the role of our government is to Burn, Baby, Burn.

As we mourn the fallen, the vanquished, and the burned out, we might also mourn the passing of the US Forest Service. It really was a great outfit once. Those days are gone, however. It is a snag-filled smoking ruin now, much as our former priceless, heritage American forests.