Whoofoo Kaput?
The latest scuttlebutt from fire community insiders is that whoofoo is no more.
Orders have come down from on high forbidding the use of WFU, aka whoofoo, aka Wildland Fire Use.
The new terminology is “fires used for resource benefit,” or foofurb.
Evidently my invention of the term “whoofoo” got under their skin. After three years of my needling the National Interagency Fire Center with whoofoo, they decided to dumpsterize it.
Unfortunately, nobody told the 30 or so National Forests that wrote whoofoo (WFU) into their Land and Resource Management Plans (LRMP’s).
Granted, the secret conversion of LRMP language constituted Federal crimes in the first place. Altering any National Forest plan is supposed to require a NEPA process, but there were no (none, zero, zip) NEPA processes invoked when the LRMP’s were rewritten, clandestinely, in the dark of night, by gremlins, across the Nation.
Now, however, all those altered plans must be altered again because foofurb has replaced whoofoo in the parlance.
The Kaibab NF, home of the Warm Whoofoo, now has a foofurb going (the Ruby Foofurb) that has topped 4,600 acres. That’s just a midget compared to the 58,400 acre Warm Whoofoo, but it could be a record for foofurbs.
Foofurbs don’t really “benefit resources.” If they did, the USFS would be willing if not anxious to demonstrate such with normal NEPA exercises. But they know that the whole foofurb deal is a Big Lie and are desperately afraid of transparency of any kind. Can’t let the public in on what transpires on public lands.
It’s hush hush. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Just ignore the fire plume, the choking smoke, the forests burned black, the streams filled with poisonous ash and mudslides.
That’s just Smokey the Foofurb doing his thing. And before you know it, Smokey will be foofurbing your property with his handy aerial drip torches. It’s for your benefit. Be sure to thank him.
by bear bait
My bad, the Kaibab foofurb is dinky compared to three (count ‘em three) Gila NF foofurbs:
Meason Foofurb (6,990 acres)
Willow Foofurb (8,850 acres)
Diamond Foofurb (16,800 acres)
There’s a lot of money being spent on burning the Gila, a “forest” of largely scrub brush. For millennia the Gila was a “sky island” pine/grass savanna maintained by residents with anthropogenic fire, but now it is a brush patch maintained by outsider government bureaucracies that burn your money like so much trash.
The Oregon legislature passed the bill to end field burning of straw, of straw piles, and of straw-removed fields flamed over with propane burners mounted on trailers. There is a minor exception for some really steep fine fescue and bent grass fields, where cultivation or grazing induces a lot of erosion. Those fields are tucked into the hills on the edge of the Cascade forest region, and downwind from Portland.
Curiously, no mention is made of “resource use fire” which can be practiced on the the two-thirds of Oregon not governed by State law. And, because it is a Democrat controlled legislature with a super majority in both houses, with the whole of the elected administration Democrats also, you do have to wonder if their minders and money changers, campaign donors, and political fellow travelers of the Far Left, who have actively encouraged through Green NGOs this benign neglect by fire, have blinded the Legislative majority as to the outputs of wildland fire and their contribution to Krugman’s Planet Demise pronouncements. Whatever, Oregon’s environmental agenda is driven by urban comfort ideals and never by science unless it can be cherry picked to support some armchair ideologue.
Burn, baby, burn. If you look at Inciweb, the USFS is happily burning away in Arizona and New Mexico in hopes the monsoonal thunder storms will put them out before conflagration size. That there has been no accounting of the air pollution (and carbon emissions) from the fires, but hard-nosed criticism of the Black Mesa coal-fired power plant, is just more of the hypocrisy from above.