SOS Forests

Holocausters Sue to Stop Another Healthy Forest Thinning

This kind of story comes in through the digital grapevine every week. Usually I just sigh and skip them. I weary of the constant barrage. But once in awhile I throw a post out there about the demise of rational forest management, just so the holocausters know that we know what they are doing.

Which is their damnedest to burn America’s forests down.

With the stupified knee-jerk Dead Tree Press as their mouthpieces.

Here’s the story:

Suit: USFS skirted law on timber sale

By EVE BYRON, Helena Independent Record, May 6, 2010 [here]

Two environmental groups are claiming in a lawsuit that officials with the Helena National Forest coaxed a state agency into changing the designation of an area as elk winter range in order to get a timber sale near Elliston under way.

In the complaint filed this week in U.S. District Court, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council say they have copies of e-mails that show the federal agency pressured Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials to “help them evade the law” by changing the elk designation from winter range to summer range. …

Note the headline. The Helena IR has tried and convicted the USFS of criminal activity, based spurious claims made in yet another lawsuit by radical enviros. The rads allegedly have “emails” to prove their charges.

Interestingly, when the Climategate emails were splashed across the world press in the greatest scandal in the history of science, the Helena IR didn’t mention them. In fact, a search of their archives reveals zero mention of Climategate. But no matter.

What matters is that the Elliston Face Hazardous Fuels Reduction Project is a thinning designed to removed hazardous fuels, including beetle-killed pine, from areas on the Helena National Forest directly upwind from the town of Elliston, MT. If a fire was to ignite in those fuels on a windy summer day, a holocaust could result that would incinerate public and private land and quite possibly burn down the town.

Which is exactly what the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council want to have happen. They are fully aware of the fire danger. They want it actualized. They want the town to burn to ashes, and the forest, too.

So does the Helena IR. Massive disaster and tragedy, especially if people are killed, sells newspapers.

You can read all about the Elliston Face Hazardous Fuels Reduction Project [here] (5.1 MB). Some selected excerpts from the EA:

The Elliston Face project area is located near the town of Elliston, Montana in dense forests of Douglas-fir, lodgepole pine, and aspen with minor amounts of ponderosa pine. The project would use a variety of treatments including intermediate harvest, mechanical thinning, hand treatments, aspen release, and underburning in a mosaic over approximately 763 acres. The main focus is to create conditions that would be safer for wildland fire fighters and the community of Elliston should a wildfire occur in the area. To create this condition requires actions that reduce the amount of, and arrangement of hazardous fuels. This project includes approximately 475 acres of intermediate harvest (mechanical treatment with product recovery), 144 acres of hand treatments (slashing with chainsaws and hand piling and burning), 29 acres of mechanical thinning (primarily cutting nonmerchantable material but with some potential product recovery) and 115 acres of aspen release treatment (conifer removal and burning).

The Elliston Face Hazardous Fuels Reduction Project has been in the planning process for five years. The treatment area is tiny, 763 acres. There will be no clearcutting. It is fuel treatment thinning with a wildlife habitat improvement component. More from the EA:

Because wildfires in this area are not managed for resource benefit due to adjacent private land and the Elliston community, and is an identified WUI, wildland fires will continue to be suppressed within the project area. Therefore, the primary purpose is to provide conditions conducive to all unplanned ignitions being attacked immediately to gain control (Forest Plan page R/4) resulting in greater fire fighter and public safety.

Reducing hazardous fuels in treatment areas should change potential fire behavior through reduced flame lengths, and reduced fire intensity. This would in turn improve firefighter and public safety. Stand-replacing fires pose safety threats to the town and surrounding areas of Elliston and its infrastructure, including power lines, as well as potential threats to forest resources. Therefore, there is a need to reduce hazardous fuel loadings in this area. The proposed action would reduce wildland fire risk to fire fighters and public resources; and help protect lives, communities, and ecosystems from the potential consequences of a high-intensity wildland fire. There is a need to reduce the potential for a large stand-replacing fire that could start on the National Forest and burn into the community of Elliston, including the homes east of the project area along the Little Blackfoot River Road (FDR 224).

The USFS cannot do Let It Burn in this area because of the high risk of burning down the town. Public safety and firefighter safety are primary concerns.

Do the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council give a shit about that risk? Hell no. Neither does the Helena IR. The residents do, however, as expressed by their local county government:

The area is a WUI adjacent to the community of Elliston. Due to the high stand densities there is a potential for an active crown fire to approach the Community. Powell County has identified the project area in their Community Wildfire Protection Plan of 2006 as a high priority for treatment (Zone 1 – highest WUI priority protection zone). The Powell County Resource Advisory Committee recognized the importance and significance of fuel treatment in the Elliston Face area with their approval and contribution of funding with Title II funds for the National Environmental Policy Act analysis of this project. This project would be in coordination with an overall protection strategy involving Federal, State, and County governments as well as adjacent private landowners.

Got that? It’s in the highest priority area for mitigating the risk of catastrophic fire. There has been extensive coordination and collaboration between Federal, State, and County governments as well as adjacent private landowners. We’re not talking about some remote wilderness here.

The Helena NF includes the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness area, the site of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire which claimed the lives of 13 firefighters. That area burned again in 2007 [here]. The Scapegoat Wilderness (240,000 acres) is also on the Helena NF. It occupies about one-fourth of the acres on that forest. No fire-safe thinning is done in wilderness areas.

Interestingly, the Helena NF surrounds Helena, Montana’s capital city. Should a big fire get going in untreated fuels when August winds are screaming down the Rocky Mountain Face at 70 or 80 miles per hour, the capital city and all that is in it could burn, including the offices of the Helena IR. You’d think those morons would have some clue about the danger they face, but apparently they don’t.

They are (you guessed it) a Lee Enterprises newspaper [here], famous for paying the lowest wages to journalists in the U.S., and they get what they pay for. Fortunately, not everybody is as completely stupid as the morons who work for slave wages at the Helena IR.

Anyway, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council claim that the 763 acres of the Elliston Face Hazardous Fuels Reduction Project is “critical elk winter range,” but the Helena NF coerced the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Dept. to rescind that designation. That’s what the secret emails are supposed to prove.

Now you must understand that the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council don’t give a shit about elk, anymore than they care about forests and towns at risk from holocaust. The rads hate elk and they hate elk hunting. They want unlimited wolves to completely extirpate the elk and for elk hunting to cease forever. They hate human beings, too, in general, even their own families. They are sick twitches.

The rads are not claiming that the Elliston Face Hazardous Fuels Reduction Project will harm elk. Their beef is that the process was somehow tainted by the change in designation from elk winter range to elk summer range. The bureaucratic maneuver was somehow improper.

The USFS and the MFWP both deny it, but the Helena IR has already hung them for bureaucratic perfidy. Some Federal judge will confirm the Helena IR’s piercing judicial acumen, and that will be that. No thinning, no fuel abatement, and a big fire will roast the area.

Hooray for radical arsonism!

It is interesting to note that the Helena IR is in the newspaper business. They sell pulverized trees. Some logger cuts down trees and some pulpmill processes those into newsprint. Then the Helena IR puts ink on the newsprint and sells it. They are in the wood products industry. But in their own backyard they would prefer that the trees be burned in giant holocausts that destroy towns and businesses, including their own.

Is that liberal madness or what?

So anyway, life goes on in Capital City, with the rads and the morons and giant holocausts in the offing. People walk into brick walls and bash their heads and stumble around some more on their way to the Welfare Office where they expect working adults to feed, clothe, and house them.

By the way, they all live in wood houses. You know, the kind made of lumber that comes from trees. God’s renewable green housing material. The kind of houses that burn readily in firestorm holocausts that blow in from unmanaged forests filled with fuels on windy days in August.

I get tired of these stories. I’d rather write about something else besides rads and morons and pending holocausts. Every week these stories come through the digital grapevine! I’m weary of them. What’s the point of trying to save human-hating rads and morons from their own suicidal insanity?

Actually, I don’t give a shit about them. I wish to save our forests and the non-crazy adults and children that are the huge majority of the residents. The rads and morons can go jump in a lake for all I care.