Roasting the Old-Growth
Remember the old-growth? You know, the ancient forests that were in such dire peril that the largest sector of Oregon’s economy had to be shut down to save them? Remember the Clinton Plan and northern spotted owls?
Nobody logs old-growth anymore, but the USFS sure does burn it to a crisp.
Oregon old-growth is going up in flames and smoke today in a slew of USFS Let It Burn fires. Among them:
The Middlefork Fire has been “monitored” for a month while it grew to 20,000+ acres. It spread from a tiny spot to encompass the entire Middle Fork Rogue River watershed. It burned in every compass direction including east over the Cascade crest toward Klamath Falls. Now it has moved into Crater Lake National Park. This is all according to plan. Firefighters gape and gawk, and occasionally set backfires from a long distance.
The forests burning in the Middlefork Fire are not second growth plantations. They are “unmanaged” old-growth, spotted owl nesting forests. Trees as old as 600 years are being incinerated. The plan all along was to incinerate them. “Save the Old-Growth” was always a euphemism for “Screw the Economy” and “Lay Waste to the Land.”
Three weeks ago the Rattle Fire in the Boulder Creek Wilderness was less than 1,000 acres and under control. Then the fire management team was ordered off because they had done too good a job of suppression. Yesterday the Rattle Fire was pegged at 15,000 acres and still growing. Two-thirds of the BC Wilderness has been roasted and the fire has spread out of the wilderness to the west, south, and east. The goal is to incinerate the entire thing and whatever collateral forests get in the way.
Is the Boulder Creek Wilderness old-growth? This is what Wilderness.net has to say about it [here]:
Small waterfalls and rapids connect the series of quiet pools that make up Boulder Creek, a tributary of the North Umpqua River. The rapids run south and west, channeling through the heart of the Wilderness. Numerous streams feed into Boulder Creek, quenching the thirst of the old-growth timber that towers over its banks. Ponderosa pines flourish on Pine Bench, near the lower end of the Wilderness, and are thought to be the largest such stand this far northwest of the crest of the Cascade Mountains. The rocky monoliths and outcroppings attract (and challenge) technical rock climbers, especially in the southern portion’s Umpqua Rocks Special Interest Geologic Area. Elevations range from 1,600 feet to 5,600 feet. Low elevation means the 15 miles of maintained trails remain clear and can provide access to the Wilderness year-round.
Burn, baby, burn the most precious forests in Oregon and some of the most magnificent forests in the world. That’s the plan. It’s being done on purpose. We have to “reintroduce” catastrophic stand-replacement fire in order to recycle the forest. The new push from the enviro-nazis is to scrub the landscape clean of old-growth to make room for widdle baby twees.
Westside Cascade old-growth in Bull of the Woods Wilderness is being incinerated as you read this by the Lake Lenore Fire. That’s just east of Opal Creek, the vaunted old-growth battle ground. Same forest, but now it’s not being “preserved” by brave hippies who sit in trees. Nope, it’s being incinerated as the USFS watches (whoops, I mean monitors) the fire. No hippies in those trees today. If there were, they’d be toast.
All the Portland enviro set were just gaga over new wilderness on the Mt. Hood National Forest. A million postcards (or something like that) were sent to the Oregon Congressional Delegation demanding, cajoling, and threatening violence if they didn’t declare new wilderness on Mt. Hood.
Today that “wilderness” is aflame in the Gnarl Ridge Fire, a fire that was contained and controlled a month ago but allowed to smolder by the USFS. Now it has exploded from 500 acres to 2,500 acres and is threatening homes on private land.
One of the quiet complaints about wilderness designation is that fires that erupt in wilderness do not stay there. Occasionally (almost invariably) the fires spread to private property. That’s a bummer for the homeowners, but the wilderness freaks don’t give a shit. They blame the homeowners for the audacity of living in their homes on private property within 30 miles of the wilderness incineration areas.
The wilderness freaks are loud and belligerent. They demonstrate and shout and carry on like crazed monkeys. The homeowners are not heard. As a result, megafires explode out of wilderness areas every year and destroy private homes, much to the delight of the wilderness freaks who hate the human race with a fiery passion.
Guess who steers the USFS fire policy? Is it rural residents or the urban howling inflammatory, anti-human, anti-forest freaks?
The unrestrained megafires burning today in Oregon old-growth forests answer that question pretty clearly.
by bear bait
Setting aside old-growth in late successional reserves is a 100% guarantee that those trees will be destroyed by fire within 25 years. Wilderness is a death sentence for forests.
It is very frustrating that so many befuddled people do not get that. They think that by banning all stewardship treatments somehow all the trees will be saved. That’s exactly wrong. Not only will all the trees die, the forest itself will be hugely altered and brush will eventually dominate.
Or they think, as does the USFS, that murdering forests is a good thing. Mother Nature, the great fire goddess, commands her pagan followers to burn baby burn, and they do so like good little sacrificial lambs. Everybody benefits from dehumanized landscapes, or so says the Chieftess.
The spotted owl was a handy surrogate for old-growth, and old-growth is a handy surrogate for landscape-scape holocaust, and landscape-scale holocaust is a good tool for crushing the economy, and that’s the ticket to a glorious New Age of total world communism. It’s the same old grey, drab, stand-in-a-bread-line Dystopianism.
There’s equality in serfdom under the thrall of the Fearless Leader. People just want to be sheep. The whole freedom thing is a failed experiment, because deep down people want to led by the nose. Freedom of thought, indeed the ability to think at all, is the first thing people sacrifice, willingly, for bread and circuses.
This 3,000 acres a day here and 2,000 there, and you end up roasting BILLIONS of board feet of timber. Sort of like burning bags of money, except nobody gives any value to timber on Federal lands. They had better some day, because they are going to find themselves in a jackpot when some judge dismisses a trespass because the USFS has no value for timber. They used to have a value for timber. Not anymore.
Some think that there is a Congressional answer to the insanity. Not a chance. Congressmen and women don’t have a clue, don’t want to have a clue, and are no more than stinky sock puppets for their 23 year old handlers, all from someplace a Sarah Palin has never been. The best and brightest, all fresh from a liberal education in some university, run Congress. You just THINK your Congressman runs something other than his or her mouth. Even that is carefully scripted, vetted, and approved by the fuzzy faced young handlers. Our experiment in democracy is just that: an experiment run by kids just out of school..
It is COOL to burn forests in this Edenic view of Darwinian regeneration. Only those responsible won’t be around to see how it all comes out. It does, you know, take more than 500 years to replace a 500 year old tree. Fat chance anyone will remember that some forward thinking Forest Supervisor gave the go ahead to burn it all. Our forest legacy of charcoal. Trading trees for charcoal in the belief that a new tree will keep us safe from global warming. You can wish in one hand, and crap in the other, and we all know which hand fills first…or at all.
Wildland Fire Use is crapping in one hand. That a new forest will come back like the one that burned is what you find in the empty hand. Many were formed by what I call “creep aforestation” where the shade and drip line from one tree allows another to sprout, and so on down the mountain and up from the bottom. One tree at a time a little ecosystem is built, and in many, many years, an old growth forest. It is the only way a seedling can survive summer ground temps of 180 degrees F or more. To get a 500 year old tree in those sites might take a 1,000 years. That any are there is a product of those who came before. Snags don’t cut it. The sun grows trees and kills their offspring by the trillions.
Failed reforestation is on land that can’t support trees without cohort tree protection. The tree that will shelter a seedling from wind, sun, and drip fog water on it is gone. In many instances, there are species that will pioneer and make shade, but they are not what was burned. It takes several stages of forests to replicate the one that burned, and again, if it does happen, it will take more than hundreds of years. Somehow, that is not what I imagined designated Wilderness to be, that land off limits to logging and salvage would be incinerated in the name of forest health, and ESA listed species had no protection from Federal arsonists by conspiracy.
I really did not think that people were that stupid. But, when education, common sense and ability have taken second seat to gender, ethnicity, and racial slot filling for a couple of generations, this is the land management we should expect from public employment. The job is not important. It is all about how the workers respect each other and how non-hostile the workplace can be. And the pension at the end, of course. Society’s just reward. We don’t get the forest we wanted. We get the forest we have. And there is a vapid young new age forester there to burn it.