SOS Forests

A Holocaust Party

The USFS is planning to celebrate megafires and the wholesale destruction of America’s forests. It’s a Party!!! according to Brett French of the Billings Gazette:

New method of fighting wildfires to get airing

By BRETT FRENCH Of The Gazette Staff, September 23, 2008 [here]

In a conference at Jackson, Wyo., dedicated to wildfire issues, Timothy Engalsbee sees a “coming-out party” of sorts for the Forest Service’s latest means of directing responses to wildfires.

Appropriate Management Response (AMR) will be discussed by its authors Thursday at “The ‘88 Fires: Yellowstone and Beyond.”

Engalsbee calls it a coming-out party because AMR has largely been drafted in secrecy, he said.

Tim Engalsbee of Eugene, Oregon was featured in a series by the Eugene Weekly, Flames of Dissent: The local spark that ignited an eco-sabotage boom — and bust [here].

But Tim has graduated from all that and is now allegedly a spokesperson for firefighters. At least, the Billings Gazette thinks so:

As executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology [acronym: FUSEE, like the pyrotechnic device also called a flare] and a former wildland firefighter [among other pursuits, read Flames of Dissent], Engalsbee sees AMR as the best way to guide fire management in the future.

But all that aside, the USFS is having a party, a festival of fire. There will fun and games. Fire is the new toy of the USFS, according to Brett French:

The Forest Service has toyed with AMR for years. It was employed in 2007 on fires in southwestern Montana, where it met with mixed reviews by firefighters, the public and fire managers.

The idea behind AMR is that a fire is allowed to burn in areas where it’s deemed ecologically appropriate, such as a wilderness area, while being fought if it is next to valuable resources, such as homes, or where it threatens lives.

As it was initially written, under AMR one fire could be managed for both scenarios if it were burning on the edge of a wilderness area near a community. But directives implemented by the Bush administration in 2003 overrode that scenario, requiring that a fire either be suppressed or allowed to burn. The directives also required suppression of all wildland fires if they were human-caused - again defying the original intent of AMR.

Fun and games with fire, that is, and AMR has replaced whoofoos as the arsonistic game of choice. The “original intent” of AMR is a matter of some speculation, but French is right in that the Bush Administration did not create it and tried to put the kibosh on it.

The decision to rewrite AMR and turn it into a Let It Burn program was made this year, not by the Bush Administration per se, but by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC), the federal advisory board that oversees the National Fire Plan [here]. The WFLC has been captured by radical environmental groups, none of whom support or have ever supported George W. Bush. Sadly, GWB has lost control over the Executive Branch and pro-holocaust crazies have subverted the WFLC.

More from Brett French and the Billings Gazette:

With implementation of AMR, the Forest Service would do away with Wildland Fire Use - or allowing naturally ignited fires to burn in remote and roadless areas where they don’t threaten property, lives or other valuable resources. Managing a fire for such ecological benefits is based on fuels, weather forecasts and the terrain in which the fire is burning.

What ecological benefits? That contention is so far off the mark as to be from the Planet Neptune. There are no ecological benefits from catastrophic fire. None. Zip, zero, nada.

Catastrophic mid-summer fires in dense and overgrown forests cause massive biological death, erosion, air and water pollution, and lingering effects such as conversion of forest to fire-type brush. The impacts to vegetation, wildlife habitat, recreation, scenery, fisheries, downstream water users, and forest-based communities are deleterious and debilitating.

Fire hazard is not abated by burning forests. Often there is more dead fuels after the fire than before. Instead of being precluded, future fires are made more frequent and more catastrophic. The Silver Fire (1987, 100,000 acres) was followed 15 years later by the Biscuit Fire (2002, 500,000 acres). The Marble Cone Fire (1977, 187,000 acres) was followed by the Indians/Basin Fire (2008, 244,000 acres). And so on.

The USFS has NEVER made the scientific case for ecological benefit from fire. The process to do that is via NEPA, but AMR (like WFU) has never been subjected to any NEPA examination. No Environmental Impact Statement has ever been written for AMR. No scientific analysis of the alleged benefits and/or obvious detriments of AMR has seen the light of day.

The USFS is toying with AMR. They are not experimenting. There has been ZERO scientific evaluation. All the pro-AMR contentions are specious nonsense without foundation in the environmental sciences.

In full realization of the above, the USFS wants to change the subject of the AMR debate from science to economics. From French’s article:

Yet AMR would contain many of the same tenets as Wildland Fire Use. In 2007, federal firefighting agencies defined AMR as moving “from aggressively attacking wildfires of all sizes to a more risk-informed performance-based strategy that will reduce costs by increasing flexibility in wildland firefighting decisions.”

Saving money is one of the main reasons for implementing AMR. As wildfires have grown in size and intensity because of drought, climate change and reduced logging, the costs of fighting them has also increased dramatically. Last year, more than 85,700 wildfires burned 9.3 million acres at a cost to the Forest Service of $1.4 billion. The Interior Department spent an additional $450 million.

The plan to “save money” (if in fact there ever was one) has failed utterly and miserably. In 2008, the year of AMR implementation (new fangled version), the USFS has spent over $2 billion dollars on fire “suppression” when only 4.7 million acres have burned. That does not include DoI expenditures. Toying with AMR has resulted in a 40 percent increase in expenditures despite burning only half the acres!

It doesn’t take an economist to see the bankruptcy of the “save money with AMR” notion.

What about those glaring  facts that contradict the Government babble? French has an answer:

The increasing number of homes being built near public lands has also escalated suppression costs. This year, almost half of the Forest Service’s budget was dedicated to fighting fires, an amount that has been exceeded in part because of large fires in populated areas of California.

False. The expensive megafires in California were mostly in UNPOPULATED areas. Megafires burned 640,000 acres in NorCal in the least populated area of the state at a “suppression” cost of nearly $400 million and not one home has burned. That’s AMR for you.

On the Central Coast behind Big Sur the Indians/Basin Fire burned 244,000 acres at a “suppression” cost of $120 million where 28 residences were burned. But the bulk of the money was not spent defending residences in the Ventana Wilderness where there are no homes. In fact, when the fire reached homes the federal firefighters turned tail and ran, and homeowners had to crash road barriers to defend their own homes without federal assistance. It was Katrina all over again. (Surprising that the Mainstream Media was so agog about the lack of federal assistance in New Orleans during Katrina but so nonchalant about it in Big Sur during the Basin Fire).

The doubletalk jabber coming from the Mainstream Media could explain a problem the USFS is having: they can’t seem to communicate the wonderfulness of AMR:

Explaining Appropriate Management Response to the public, firefighters and fire managers poses its own problems.

A Forest Service study found confusion over exactly what AMR entails, outlining the difficulty the agency has in explaining the program to the public, as well as to its own personnel and cooperators.

“Describing AMR as new, or as a significant policy change, had confused agency personnel, interagency partners, and the public,” a 2007 report stated.

The report goes on to state that “many unresolved issues remain,” including getting state agencies to buy into the concept.

Buy in? We have already bought into the tune of $2 billion. The buy-in is so enormous that the 2008 budget of the USFS has been shredded and blown away on Let It Burn. With no public oversight whatsoever. Just like the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiasco. Taxpayer dollars heaved into a burn barrel by secret conspirators holding secret meetings, jamming their pockets with our money and jamming the gears of good government.

But let’s have a party to celebrate all that. Whoopee. Have some cake. The peasants can eat fire.