SOS Forests

The War on the West

There is a war going on right here in America, and I don’t mean the one at the border. Across the West certain powerful special interest groups want to incinerate America’s priceless, heritage forests, watersheds, towns, and cities in order to force the residents off the land.

Driving humanity like cattle is an old motivation, some of which is chronicled in the Bible. Ethnic-cleansing really got going, though, during the 20th Century when such lunatics as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Pol Pot took genocide to new levels. Those fellows murdered upwards of 100 million people for the purposes of personal political power tripping.

Here in North America we have not been immune to eruptions of genocide. For 500 years, Euro-centrics slaughtered the resident Native Americans, decimating their populations and stealing their land.

For roughly the last 100 years though, Native Americans have been pretty much wiped out and driven onto concentration camp reservations, while other non-Native folks have moved onto their former homelands.

The genocidal impulse is still alive however. The new target of the modern-day American Babylonians are the current, non-Native residents. If you live west of the Mississippi River, you are a target and victim of the new genociders.

No lessons were learned from the hemoclysms of the 20th Century. Forces out there still want to drive people like cattle.

War, by definition, is the takeover of territory by force or threat of force, usually by an armed militia.

Forces in America are currently waging war on the citizenry of the West (in some respects the same war that been going on for 500 years). One side is armed, organized, and as powerful as any empire that has ever existed. The other side are regular citizens, victimized by their own government.

It is an enormous tragedy and travesty. Genocide always is.

The genociders have dozens of excuses for their anti-human behaviors. One big one is the American Creation Myth, which falsely purports that God created the American Wilderness for the conquest of the Euros. It is therefore godly to re-purify the land by driving humanity off it. In fact, America was already occupied and not a wilderness when the Euros arrived, but facts get in the way of myths.

Another Big Lie proffered by the genociders is that wildlife will go extinct if they have to share the landscape with human beings. In fact, wildlife have been sharing the landscape with humanity for at least 13,500 years on this continent, and any extinctions that took place happened way back then. For millennia wildlife and people have co-existed just fine.

Another Big Lie is that human beings have altered the climates of the entire globe, and so we must go extinct to “save” the Earth. That Lie is waning, although the adherents have not given up on it yet. It is just too bizarre and irrational for sane people to swallow.

But the Big Lies are only window dressing. The real motivation is to inflict inhumane suffering on fellow human beings. Genocide is its own reward. The killers take their pleasures from the killing, not the authoritarian Utopia afterwards (which never takes place anyway).

Wilderness, roadlessness, wolf introductions, and the Wildlands Project [here] are all means to promote genocide (or ethnic cleansing, which is much the same thing). But the principal weapon of choice of the genociders is megafire. They love giant fires that destroy vegetation, wildlife, and homes. By scorching the Earth and leaving a moonscape behind, fires make the land uninhabitable (for all living things but especially people). There is no more efficient means of genocide than catastrophic holocaust.

Indeed, the word “holocaust” has come to mean both huge conflagration and genocide.

We have essayed the No Touch, Let It Burn, Watch It Rot policies of our imperial rulers on many occasions. I have attended meetings where the proponents of genocide extolled the virtues of holocaust, in and of itself, with no regard to the destruction and suffering inflicted. I don’t know how to be more frank about the situation than to report the insane babbling of the holocausters themselves.

The Eugene, Oregon-based, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) first sued the Forest Service (USFS) regarding environmental effects of air-dropped fire retardants in District Judge Donald Molloy’s Missoula courtroom, way back in October 2003. We have discussed that “case” numerously [here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here].

The issue has not gone away:

Judge orders tougher look at fire retardant drops

By JEFF BARNARD (AP), Yahoo News, July 28, 2010 [here]

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — A federal judge Wednesday ordered the U.S. Forest Service to take a tougher look at the possibility that routinely dropping toxic fire retardant on wildfires from airplanes will kill endangered fish and plants. U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy in Missoula, Mont., ruled that the current environmental assessment is inadequate in light of federal biologists’ findings that fire retardant that lands in creeks and on rare plants jeopardize the survival of endangered species and their habitat.

Molloy did not restrict the use of fire retardant this summer, but in a sternly written order gave the Forest Service until the end of 2011 to do a tougher environmental impact statement. He warned the agency could be found in contempt for failing to meet the deadline and refused to hear further arguments on the issue.

He also sent environmental analyses in support of the Forest Service assessment, known as biological opinions, back to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The judge wrote that they violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to put any real limits on firefighters from calling in retardant drops, despite finding that the mix of water and fertilizer could poison fish and their food and kill rare plants.

Andy Stahl of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, which brought the lawsuit, said half the 20 million gallons of fire retardant dropped by the Forest Service in 2008 was dropped in California, where it has become a public relations display for television cameras that is rarely effective because it is used in windy conditions that cause it to be widely dispersed.

“If a farmer took a 3,000-gallon truckload of liquefied fertilizer and dumped it in a creek, that farmer would be in jail in a heartbeat,” Stahl said. “But when the Forest Service does it, everybody looks the other way because it is a war on fire.”

Millions of dollars go to private contractors to dump fire retardant, Stahl added. “So there is developed a fire industrial complex between the government and these contractors that keeps the money flowing. And it’s led to a quintupling of Forest Service firefighting expenses in the last 10 years.” …

The FSEEE claims that fire retardant kills fish, even though that has never been demonstrated, and even though it has been amply demonstrated that the wildfires themselves kill fish, change the pH of streams, and promote erosion and siltation in streams, which degrade aquatic habitat, aquatic biota, spawning gravels, and fish populations for years.

The banning of fire retardant would certainly handicap the ability of the “fire industrial complex” to stop fires, to save fisheries, and to protect other wildlife, vegetation, soils, homes, towns, etc.

But perhaps the most telling quote in the article is the claim that the Forest Service is waging a “war on fire.” That phrase is regurgitation of the antiwar movement. Anything that can be construed as a “war” is perforce wrong, whether it is a “war” on poverty, illiteracy, drugs, fast food, or even fire.

The only type of war not decried by the genociders is real war, the takeover of territory by force and ethnic cleaning of whole human populations.

That is the goal of those who would ban fire retardant. It is not (merely) the joy and excitement they get from catastrophic firestorms that sweep across forested watersheds and into towns, leaving moonscapes in their wake. It is the effectiveness of fire as a weapon of war. It is the genocidal suffering that fire inflicts.

Make no mistake: there is a real war going on. The purpose is takeover of territory. The “enemies” (more precisely the victims) of that war are the residents of the American West. Just by virtue of their residency and their humanity, Westerners are the targets of the genociders.

War, real war, is not healthy for children or other living things. The war being waged on the West is a real war, and it is not healthy for anything. The most effective weapon is fire, and it is the genociders’ weapon of choice.

This is not the first time we have expressed these sentiments, nor will it be the last, because we seek to end this war before any more suffering is inflicted. The best strategy we can come up with is to educate people about what is happening. If you have a better strategy, let us know.