SOS Forests

Incinerating Wyoming Forests With Impunity

The Shoshone and Bridger-Teton National Forests are engaged in deliberate criminal arson and incineration of Wyoming public and private forests. And they are proud of it.

The Casper Star Tribune reported the gloating over the illegal scorched earth policies yesterday [here]:

Rain, snow drench wildfires

By CHRIS MERRILL, Casper Star-Tribune, 09/03/2008

LANDER — Mother Nature has doused Wyoming’s two major wildfires with rain and snow, reducing both to smolder through the underbrush, forest officials said Tuesday.

They warned, however, the return of hot, dry weather could reinvigorate the blazes. Both fires have been consuming beetle-killed trees in western Wyoming for more than a month.

Neither fire has been extinguished, but both have cooled tremendously and should stay calm for at least the next few days, representatives of the Shoshone and the Bridger-Teton national forests said.

And even though the Gunbarrel fire has cost the federal government nearly $10.5 million so far, officials are saying it has been economically valuable — even cheap if one considers the ecological benefits.

The Gunbarrel fire, ignited by lightning on July 26, has burned almost 105 square miles of dead and fallen pine trees between Cody and Yellowstone National Park.

The New Fork Lakes blaze, caused by an out-of-control camp fire on July 29, has scorched more than 23 square miles of dead, dried-out trees, 19 miles north of Pinedale.

Wapiti District Ranger Terry Root said the Gunbarrel blaze consumed trees that “needed to be burned” west of Cody. The “decadent” timber was in the wilderness, and it couldn’t be removed otherwise, he said.

“So burning is really our only option to recycle the forest,” Root said. “We feel like it has actually been pretty good, economically — actually pretty economically valuable. It comes out to about $153 an acre.”

It costs the U.S. Forest Service about $300 per acre to perform fuel reduction projects regionally.

The result will be a 35-mile stretch of rejuvenated forest in the coming years, Root said.

“We lost no private residences, no structures, and we had no serious injuries. We’re looking at it as a real success,” he said.

That’s where we are at, sports fans. The USFS is “treating” your forests with catastrophic fire with no EIS, no EA, no NEPA process, deliberately, with malice aforethought, in full recognition that their activities are outside the law, and they are proud as peacocks about it.

There are no, repeat no, ecological benefits from holocaust. The habitat has been destroyed, the air polluted, the streams fouled, and the forest eliminated from the landscape permanently.

There is no such thing as “recycling” forests. The Shoshone NF officials made that up out of the clear blue sky, or should we say, out of the smoky haze. They cannot cite one case where forest has returned to incinerated land on the Shoshone NF.

Indeed, absolutely no forest science exists that supports the claims of Terry Root et al. There was no prior evaluation of forest conditions, no documented analysis of forest health, no prescription for treatment, no predicted outcome, and there will be no analysis of fire effects.

The holocaust was planned and codified in secret documents in the Shoshone NF files. Congress did not mandate the burning, nor did Congress fund it. What Congress did mandate is that the Shoshone NF by law must engage the public in scoping, comment periods, and application of the best available science. That’s NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. But the Shoshone NF gave the finger to NEPA and spit on the law.

More from the Casper Star Tribune article:

Mary Cernicek, spokeswoman for the Bridger-Teton National Forest, said about an inch of rain north of Pinedale has stopped the trees from igniting, but the New Fork Lakes fire is still creeping through the undergrowth.

“If the weather were to change, and things were to dry out, it could flare back up in the wilderness area,” Cernicek said. “There is still a lot of beetle- and bug-killed timber there. But right now it’s policing itself.”

Firefighters will continue to make sure the blaze stays in the wilderness area, and will keep steering it toward the beetle-killed trees, she said.

Because the New Fork Lakes fire has remained quite a bit smaller than the Gunbarrel blaze and has not posed as much of a threat to man-made structures, the total cost has been about $2 million, or less than 20 percent of the Gunbarrel fire’s price tag.

What the article failed to state is that the New Forks Fire [here] is not an official whoofoo (WFU) because it was not ignited by lighting. It was a human-caused fire, but the Bridger-Teton has treated it like a “natural” burn.

The New Forks Fire has been burning since July 29. Recreational users have been banned from the Bridger-Teton NF for the entire month of August. The fire has crowned and plumed and devastated the forest. The forest will not return but will be replaced by brush and exotic weeds.

Wyoming Congressperson Barbara Cubin has issued no statement. She is utterly clueless, or else approves of illegal catastrophic immolation of Wyoming forests, despite the fact that Congress has never addressed the USFS forest incineration program.

The illegal destruction of forests by a rogue agency operating outside the law and with no scientific justification is a travesty and a tragedy. What a waste! What arrogance and stupidity on the part of the USFS!