SOS Forests

Ninth Circuit Court Thumbs Nose At the Supremes

Wednesday the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, in the persons of William A. Fletcher and Johnnie B. Rawlinson, Circuit Judges, and Michael W. Mosman, District Judge sitting in, enjoined the Rat Creek Salvage Project.

In August and September of 2007, the Rat Creek Wildfire burned about 27,000 acres in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in Montana. On July 1, 2009, almost two years later, the Chief Forester of the Forest Service made an Emergency Situation Determination for the Rat Creek Salvage Project (”the Project”).

The Project permits salvage logging of trees on approximately 1,652 of the 27,000 acres that were burned on thirty-five units of land ranging from 3 to 320 acres in size.

Appeals court halts logging in Rat Creek Salvage project

By MATT VOLZ, Helena IR, June 26, 2010 [here]

A federal appeals court has blocked the U.S. Forest Service from logging trees on more than 1,600 acres of burned forest in southwestern Montana, but the agency says most of the timber already has been harvested.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday ordered a preliminary injunction against the Rat Creek Salvage Project in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The injunction halts the project until a final decision is made in the case.

The project, about 15 miles west of Wisdom, calls for logging trees that have died or are likely to die as a result of a 2007 fire or due to insect attacks. It also calls for building seven miles of temporary roads that would be destroyed after the project, and reconditioning three miles of existing roads.

In a lawsuit filed last July, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council said forest managers underestimated the environmental damage that could result from the logging project. …

Forest Service spokeswoman Leona Rodreik said spring weather had halted the project, and it was unclear when it had been planned to start up again.

She said her agency is disappointed in the appeals court’s decision but that 85 percent of the 1,652 acres have been logged already.

“Until an opinion is issued, there’s really not much we can say or do,” she said. …

The Opinion was issued July 28th [here]. The 9th Court ruled:

Alliance for the Wild Rockies (”AWR”) appeals the district court’s denial of its motion for a preliminary injunction. AWR seeks to enjoin a timber salvage sale proposed by the United States Forest Service. Citing Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 129 S. Ct. 365 (2008), the district court held that AWR had not shown the requisite likelihood of irreparable injury and success on the merits. After hearing oral argument, we issued an order reversing the district court and directing it to issue the preliminary injunction. Alliance for Wild Rockies v. Cottrell, No. 09-35756, 2010 WL 2640287 (9th Cir. June 24, 2010).

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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.

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Destroying Forests in NE Washington

by Ken Schlichte

An article in the Seattle Times this week begins:

Environmentalists, Loggers Push New Wilderness Deal in Northeast Washington

By Craig Welch, Seattle Times, July 27, 2010 [here]

The rolling highlands of Northeast Washington are home to grape ferns, lady slipper orchids, burnt-orange flameflowers - and scratch-dry ponderosa pine that timber companies really want to log.

The wild country from the Kettle Range to the Selkirk Mountains offers a corridor linking Washington’s elusive lynx with other carnivores in Montana. But it also offers uber-popular spots for riding dirt bikes, jeeps and all-terrain vehicles.

So after decades of lawsuits and arguments about this corner of the state, environmentalists and logging companies tried a different approach: They talked. And talked some more.

Eight years later they’re putting forward something new: proposals to set aside tens of thousands of acres as wilderness.

Conservation Northwest, a Bellingham-based environmental group run by former EarthFirst! tree-sitter Mitch Friedman, will unveil an initiative Wednesday to add more than 180,000 acres of wilderness to Colville National Forest. The plan also calls for designating areas of the forest for recreation - from mountain bikes to dirt bikes - and raising up to $2 million from donors to put 2,200 acres of private land east of Republic, Ferry County, into a forest-conservation program. And it largely has timber-industry support.

The efforts still are being massaged, and all sides concede they’re just getting started. But few dispute something remarkable has happened. Former enemies are working so well together that they’re jointly trying to bring others along.

“The environmentalists here aren’t just in it for themselves,” said Russ Vaagen, of Vaagen Brothers Lumber in Colville, Stevens County. “They’re not trying to lock us out of the woods. They want us back in. But they’ve got things they want to achieve, too.”

Friedman, who helped raise $16.5 million from private donors to set aside the 25,000-acre Loomis Forest in 1999, said this “Columbia Highlands Initiative” is part of an effort to maintain lasting wildlife corridors that could link the Cascades to the Rockies.

Ranches are being subdivided and sold for housing, and climate change already is altering the ecology of this landscape. “We need these corridors for climate adaptation,” Friedman said. …

Environmentalist Mitch Friedman’s suggestion that climate change is altering the ecology of Northeast Washington forests is questionable because we have seen that annual temperatures in the Northwest have actually been trending downward for over 20 years.

The ecology of Northeast Washington forest stands is being significantly altered, however, by the lack of Native American landscape burning activities and the effectiveness of modern wildfire control activities that have allowed many of these forest stands to become overstocked and over-aged. These overstocked and over-aged forest stand conditions have increased the wildfire potential as well as decreasing forest vigor and increasing the potential for mountain pine beetle outbreaks and other forest health problems.

Mitch Friedman led the effort to set aside the 25,000-acre Loomis Natural Resource Conservation Areas in the Loomis State Forest managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources in 1999. The forests on this 25,000-acre set aside are primarily overstocked and over-aged stands with increasing mountain pine beetle outbreaks and increasing wildfire potential. As consequence, those forests will eventually be destroyed by the increasing mountain pine beetle outbreaks and/or wildfire because all forest management activities, including thinning and prescribed burning, have been prohibited.

Without forest management activities like thinning and prescribed burning, the forests on the more than 180,000 acres of wilderness now being added to the Colville National Forest will also eventually be destroyed by mountain pine beetle outbreaks and/or wildfire.

This Seattle Times article included the photo below that illustrates the general appearance of most Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon ponderosa pine stands until the late 1800’s while Native American landscape burning activities regularly eliminated the natural regeneration and minimized overstocked forest stand conditions.

Without forest management activities, future photos of this Ferry County forest stand that are taken from the same location will illustrate the increasing natural regeneration that will eventually result in the overstocking, the increases in ladder fuels and the total fuel loading that will eventually destroy this stand with a mountain pine beetle outbreak and/or a wildfire.

To the Oregonian: Thanks For Nothing

The following Editorial appeared in the Oregonian “news” paper last Friday:

On timber, thanks for nothing

by the Oregonian Editorial Board, July 23, 2010 [here]

After a year of study, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s crackerjack task force on western Oregon timber management has concluded that, gee, lots of people are frustrated and things are pretty tough out there.

We can’t wait for next year’s sequel in which the Obama task force is invited back to take another yearlong look and rediscovers that, believe it or not, lots of people remain frustrated and things are pretty tough out there.

This could go on forever. It would be laughable if the unemployment rate across much of rural Oregon wasn’t running at 12 to 15 percent, if timber towns weren’t trying desperately to hold together their basic public services such as police and libraries, if huge swaths of public forests weren’t overstocked with small trees one lightning strike or tossed cigarette away from going up in flames late this summer.

We made the mistake of taking the interior secretary at his word last year when the Obama administration abandoned the Western Oregon Plan Revision, or WOPR, which sought to increase logging on more than 2 million acres of public forests. Salazar promised that the task force would come up with a plan that would increase logging and thinning while complying with the Endangered Species Act.

Instead, the task force issued a report Thursday that calls for a three- to five-year planning process and concludes what everybody already knows: Major obstacles such as distrust among competing interest groups and conflicting federal policies stand in the way of increasing logging on western Oregon’s public forests and creating more economic activity in rural communities.

Given all that rural Oregon is struggling with, this “plan to have a plan,” as Oregon’s Rep. Peter DeFazio described it Thursday, is inexcusable. There’s no urgency in the task force report, no acknowledgement of the economic emergency, no commitment to provide any leadership to help resolve the conflicts over management of the public forests. As Rep. Greg Walden said, “It’s doubly frustrating that while this report was being put together, timber sales dropped to historic lows. The sick forests and the economy in southern Oregon can’t wait any longer.” …

Let’s clear the air here. The Oregonian Editorial Board supported and endorsed Barky Obama for president, knowing full well that Barky expressed zero forest policy or agricultural policy during his campaign, and knowing full well that the most extreme anti-forest elements were affiliated with Barky.

Now the Oregonian Editorial Board claims they “made the mistake of taking the interior secretary at his word.” What about taking Barky at his word, or lack of words?

The Western Oregon Plan Revision was the result of years of planning, public meetings, and public involvement with an open, transparent process. Why did the Oregonian Editorial Board sit in mute dumbfoundedness when Salazar, acting on behalf of Barky and his radical minions, jerked the WOPR away illegally?

You see, it was an illegal act on Salazar’s part to TAMPER with a public process. Salazar also jerked the Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Plan, twenty years in the making, because, as Salazar claimed, the plans were potentially jeopardized by improper political influence.

So Salazar, acting on Barky’s orders, undertook the biggest political tampering action possible: he unilaterally and illegally threw both plans in the dumpster.

And the Oregonian Editorial Board was just fine with all that. They approved. Now, all of a sudden, they claim that they were somehow deceived.

It won’t wash, gentlemen. You were never deceived — you were the deceivers, then and now.

The Oregonian Editorial Board claims to be concerned about unemployment in rural Oregon, tinder box forests, and an unresponsive Federal Government.

Well guess what? That’s been the situation for SIXTEEN YEARS!!!!!

The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan had (has) four fundamental goals. It has failed spectacularly to meet any of them.

1. The NWFP has failed to protect northern spotted owls

By most estimations, the northern spotted owl population has fallen 40 to 60 percent since inception of the NWFP.

2. The NWFP has failed to protect spotted owl habitat

Since inception, millions of acres of spotted owl habitat have been catastrophically incinerated. Millions more acres are poised to burn.

3. The NWFP has failed to preserve habitat continuity throughout the range of the northern spotted owl

The dozens of huge and catastrophic forest fires have left giant gaps in the range. The Biscuit Burn alone is 50 miles long and 20 miles wide.

4. The NWFP has failed to protect the regional economy

Since inception of the NWFP, Oregon has experienced 16 long years of the worst economy in the U.S., with the highest rates of unemployment, bankruptcy, home foreclosure, and hunger of any state. These are not just statistics, but indicators of real human suffering. Over 40,000 workers lost their jobs, and the rural economy has been crippled ever since.

The plan to save the owls has not saved anything; not owls, not old-growth, not the economy. The cost for nothing? $100,000 per job per year x 40,000 jobs x 16 years = $64 billion. That’s what Northwesterners have paid, for nothing. And the bills continue to mount.

Sixteen years of gross Federal forest stupidity and the Oregonian Editorial Board hasn’t noticed until now?

But let’s not cast all the blame on those pathetic schmucks. Let’s look at the politicians they mentioned. Rep. Peter DeFazio has been in that office for 24 years, Sen. Ron Wyden has been in Congress for 20 years, 12 as senator, and Rep. Greg Walden has been in Congress for 12 years.

They all have done exactly nothing in all that time to address or amend the Northwest Forest Plan.

Now that is truly inexcusable.

We have re-elected and re-elected mendacious jingoists who every election season stand up on their hind legs and rail against the atrocious un-management of Oregon’s Federal forests, and then when re-elected go back their D.C. party life while doing jack s**t about Oregon’s perpetual forest crisis.

They all claim to “have a plan”. They all claim that they have a bill in their pants that will solve everything. But the bills somehow never get past first base, and any careful examination explains why: the proposed bills are poorly written, completely unworkable, and wouldn’t solve anything if they were passed, which they never will be because the sponsors are frauds and just jerking the electorate around.

They all pretend to be shocked and aghast at the condition of Federal forests in Oregon, and the ongoing misery in rural Oregon, as if it just occurred to them last week.

None of them spoke up in 1994 when the supremely crappy NWFP was jammed down our throats. None of them has done one damn thing about it since.

So blank you, Oregonian Editorial Board, and blank you, Oregon Congressoafs and Senaturds.

You all ARE the problem. You all have perpetuated and exacerbated Oregon’s forest crisis. Nobody is fooled when you cry crocodile tears and blame Barky and Ken. You wanted those guys, just like you want Oregon’s forests to burn in megafires and rural Oregonians to suffer deprivations and poverty.

Your feigned outrage doesn’t cut it anymore. You are all cads and bounders. A pox on all of you.

Regarding the Logic of Cause and Effect

The rad, bad pseudos are having another illogical cow.

Study: Yellowstone-area whitebark toll 1M acres

By MEAD GRUVER, AP, Washington Post, July 21st, 2010 [here]

A researcher says aerial photographs and maps document 1 million acres of whitebark forest dead or dying from mountain pine beetles and an invasive fungus in the Yellowstone area, with another 1 million acres considered at risk.

The Natural Resources Defense Council released a report Wednesday on the dead and dying high-elevation forests in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Report author Wally Macfarlane says the toll is approaching and could far exceed the acreage of all trees that burned in the region’s infamous 1988 wildfires.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to decide next year on the group’s petition to list the pine as endangered. The group says climate change is primarily responsible by causing the beetle outbreak.

That’s interesting because the National Climate Data Center [here] reports that Wyoming winter temperatures have been trending downward at negative 2.00 degF per decade for the last fifteen years.

Climate At A Glance: Winter (Dec-Feb) Temperature, Wyoming, 1995 - 2010 Trend = -2.00 degF / Decade

and Wyoming summer temperatures have been trending downward at negative 1.09 degF per decade for the last ten years.

Climate At A Glance: Summer (Jun-Aug) Temperature, Wyoming, 1999 - 2009 Trend = -1.09 degF / Decade

Here’s some logic. See if you can follow the argument. If you propose that Cause A results in Outcome B, but Cause A does not exist in the real world, then Outcome B cannot have been caused by Cause A, since Cause A is a BIG HONKING LIE.

An example: let’s say you have a bad case of toe fungus, and you say the toe fungus is due to your frequent abductions by space aliens and the experiments they have performed on you. Any competent doctor or other logical person will doubt you. They will say, “First prove you have been abducted by aliens.” And since you cannot do so, they will assume that your toe fungus has a different causal agent.

Similarly, if radical nutzoid sue-happy pro-holocaust anti-human groups claim that glooobal waaarming has caused bark beetle outbreaks, then it is incumbent on them to demonstrate with solid evidence that glooobal waaaarming has indeed occurred. But since the people who measure temperatures say that temperatures have declined, there is no such evidence.

Logically, the radical nutzoid sue-happy pro-holocaust anti-human groups have their collective head up their collective…

I know, I know. You have been pepper-sprayed by a propaganda onslaught to where you are now convinced that the globe has warmed, with all sorts of repercussions like bark beetle outbreaks. But the globe has not warmed. The bark beetle outbreaks have a different causal agent.

Logic is painful, especially when $billions have been spent to convince you of an illogical proposition. It’s easier just to go along with the radical nutzoid sue-happy pro-holocaust anti-human groups than to question their veracity or other moral characteristics.

You could ask a forester instead, somebody with some actual expertise in trees, bark beetles, etc. The forester will tell you that bark beetle outbreaks are common in dense, thicket forests where trees are stressed by competition. The forester will tell you that bark beetle outbreaks are nothing new, that bark beetle outbreaks have been quelled by judicious thinning, and that there is a 100-year history of such thinnings averting bark beetle infestations.

But that would be too much truth, and we all know that truth causes toe fungus. Maybe if the space aliens stopped abducting the radical nutzoids and experimenting on them, we could all sleep easier at night.

Karl Marx Despised Private Property

As does our very own U.S. Congress. No matter what those silly Founders thought, the new “progressive” notion is that private property is bad for America.

Witness HR 3534 [here] now wending it’s way through the “process” (in quotes because the Congressional process has been perverted almost beyond recognition by our esteemed Senators and Representatives).

HR 3534 is the Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act of 2009. The ostensible purpose of the Bill is to transfer the Minerals Management Service and the Oil and Gas Management program to a brand new sub-secretariat in the Department of the Interior: the new and progressive Office of Federal Energy and Minerals Leasing.

As if shuffling the bureaucracy will prevent oil well blow-outs.

But tacked onto HR 3534 is an amendment to the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act which would make $900 million available from the Fund each fiscal year without further appropriation for the next 30 years!

For those who don’t wish to do the math themselves, that’s $27 billion for federal bureaucracies to purchase private properties and absorb them into the bloated Federal Estate.

How bloated is it, you ask? Here are some stats:

* Total acres owned by the federal government in the United States: 653,299,090 acres

* Total land base of United States: 2.27 billion acres

* 29% of all U.S. land is owned by the federal government

Where federal land is located, by region:

West: 54.1%
Alaska & Hawaii: 38.8%
North Central: 2.8%
South Central: 2.4%
South Atlantic & DC: 1.7%
Northeast: 0.24%

In five states the federal government owns the majority of land within the state border. In these states, the federal government has control over more land than the Governor or the legislature of the state. These “non-sovereign” states are:

Nevada: 84.5%
Alaska: 69.1%
Utah: 57.5%
Oregon: 53.1%
Idaho: 50.2%

In seven states the federal government owns more than one-fourth of all land within the state border. These “semi-sovereign” states are:

Arizona: 48.1%
California: 45.3%
Wyoming: 42.3%
New Mexico: 41.8%
Colorado: 36.6%
Washington: 30.3%
Montana: 29.9%

Of course, once the Fed’s take control of the private property, their practice is to burn it to ashes in catastrophic megafires, converting forests, watersheds, etc. to scorched earth wastelands.

Isn’t Marxism great?

For more on this subject, please see:

The CLEAR Act of Another Federal Land Grab

By Cassandra Anderson, MORPHcity, July 21, 2010 [here]

U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) addressed Congress on July 15th to report the Natural Resources Committee’s passage of HR 3534, the Consolidated Land, Energy and Aquatic Resources Act (CLEAR Act) of 2009. Congressman Gohmert said that the bill was to “deal with the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico” but it contains plans for the federal government to acquire land and was introduced in 2009. …

Congressman Gohmert pointed out that a portion of the CLEAR Act contains a provision for the federal government to spend $900 million a year to purchase private land over the next 30 years, for a grand total of $27 billion dollars over 3 decades. …

Gohmert was incredulous that the federal government intends to raise its purchasing allocations to $900 million a year for the next 30 years and questioned “how in the world does that make sense”? …

Schultz Fire Aftermath: Placing Blame

The sue-happy Center for Biological Disaster has attempted (unsuccessfully) to deflect criticism after the Schultz Fire [here, here]. The community is well-aware, however, that the the multi-million dollar, super-litigious, anti-forest, pro-holocaust “activist” group headquartered in Tucson has thrown legal monkey wrench after legal monkey wrench into any and all stewardship efforts in and around Flagstaff.

The CBD does it for the money. The Feds pay CBD tens of $millions every year to sue the USFS, USFWS, and other agencies via something called the Equal Access to Justice Act [here]. The EAJA is an endless gravy train of our money that is poured into the coffers of radical (Maoist) pro-holocaust groups whose original goal was violent Communist revolution but now is corrupt scam and profit.

It is abundantly clear that the CBD has zero ecological goals. That myth is a cruel joke, but nobody is laughing.

The Arizona Daily Sun ran this guest column Wednesday by Jim Wheeler, Deputy Fire Chief and Fire Marshal of the Flagstaff Fire Department:

Coconino Voices: Use collaboration, not obstructionism,on forest thinning

by Jim Wheeler, Guest Column, Arizona Daily Sun, July 21, 2010 [here]

I take issue with the recent op-ed piece by the Center for Biological Diversity (”Schultz fire: Setting the record straight,” July 11) that seeks to divert personal responsibility for wildfire damage because of “the market” and “untested practices.” As a founding member of the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership, I can attest that this smokescreen could not be further from reality.

The federal government does not have the money to thin forests to the level necessary to protect communities and forests and taxpayers do not have to bear the burden to fund projects. Thinning is done by contractors, who either get paid by tax dollars or make a small amount of money on the wood they remove. When controversy arises, contractors go elsewhere.

Appeals by the Center for Biological Diversity that attempt to force arbitrary diameter limits on thinning projects affects the market.” Contractors cannot make money here in Flagstaff when arbitrary diameter limits are placed on projects because the small-diameter utilization industry is not here at this time. While we are all working to bring sufficient industry to our area, we cannot wait to thin the forests. We must work with what we have now! Waiting invites disaster — just like the recent Schultz Fire.

The market is also affected by the fact that an appeal has been filed. Why would any contractor pursue a project that is engrossed in an appeal? The fact than an appeal is in place affects the viability of any project, which in turn tells contractors that there is no guarantee of a supply; thus again affecting “the market.”

The CBD affected the market of the Jack Smith/Schultz Project and then attempts to hide behind “the market” in order to deflect accountability. The Center for Biological Diversity is an outside gunslinger from Tucson negatively affecting the local Flagstaff condition. Just take a look at the east side of the Peaks to see the results of their actions.

On the subject of “untried practices,” the public should know that the Jack Smith/ Schultz project was the last of 10 or so projects fostered by the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership (GFFP).

GFFP is one of the most highly successful collaborative ecological restoration and wildfire reduction initiatives in the United States. Having the CBD contend in their appeal that the Forest Service is using “untried practices” flies in the face of the broad collaborative of the GFFP Partners that have worked so hard with the Forest Service since 1997 to thin from Freidlein Prairie Road northwest of town, Woody Mountain, Kachina Village, Mountainaire and East Flagstaff, using the same or similar thinning treatments that were proposed on Schultz Pass.

How sad that other local conservation groups such as the Grand Canyon Trust and the Nature Conservancy, who have collaborated on this initiative, have now been trumped by those who prefer to obstruct rather than collaborate.

Our local practices have used the best available science from the NAU Ecological Restoration Institute and the collective efforts of other professionals and conservation groups who were willing to collaborate instead of obstruct local fire risk reduction efforts. Adaptive management has also “tweaked” projects to improve them based on past projects.

Our “practices” are some of the leading practices of restoration and wildfire reduction in the nation and we have been using them since 1997. To say they are “untried” is ludicrous and untrue. Forest treatments work to allow firefighters to be effective and to protect values such as homes and the surrounding forest itself.

How sad that the GFFP’s efforts have now been usurped by a catastrophic wildfire that will continue to wreak havoc on our community and landscape for years to come. Arguments over thinning around communities must stop! No one is going to cut old-growth trees. No one is going to clearcut anything. Wildfire reduction and forest restoration efforts go hand-in-hand in maintaining and improving the ecosystem and our collective quality of life. Obstructionism does the exact opposite.

A Goldman Sachs Let It Burn Fire

One thing we do here is track wildfires. W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking [here] provides daily-updated narratives of fires from ignition to containment. We don’t have access to minute-to-minute information but instead rely on daily reports from the National Geographic Area Coordination Centers [here].

Those reports are called 209’s, and they come from the incident management teams (IMT’s) on each fire. Often they are written in a sort of sparse code which requires decoding and interpretation. But we have tracked over 400 wildfires during the last two years and have gained some experience in sussing out the facts from the 209 bureaucratese.

Few things surprise us anymore. We have tracked Let It Burn fires on every type of federal land and parsed out some pretty egregious malfeasance. But today a new wrinkle caught us off guard.

The Bureau of Land Management has assigned management of a Let It Burn fire (the Twin Buttes WFU [here]) in western Colorado to The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

TNC is a quango (quasi-govermental non-governmental organization). They are a multi-billion-dollar quango, the largest in the world, and are intimately tied to the Goldman Sachs investment banking concern.

Before Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson destroyed the U.S. economy, he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of The Nature Conservancy. Before that, Paulson was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs — initiating the firm’s initial public offering in 1999.

The current president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy is Mark Tercek, also currently a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

TNC is a big business. They hold nearly $6 billion in assets, primarily real estate, and enjoyed a half billion dollars in income last year, including $130 million in government grants [here].

Evidently, TNC now contracts WFU’s (wildland fire “use”, aka Let It Burn fires) using their own “module”, a quasi-private fire monitoring team (everything TNC does is “quasi-private, quasi-government”). TNC’s WFU Module “is trained to assist federal agencies to allow natural wildland fires to burn…” [here]

The Twin Buttes Fire has thus become a Goldman Sachs Let It Burn While We Rob the U.S. Treasury fire.

TNC (and by extension Goldman Sachs) has their sticky fingers in much of what our federal land management agencies do. TNC is deeply involved in the Great Montana Land Swindel [here]. They are bagmen agents in the Pinon Canyon/Fort Carson fiasco and indeed are involved in real estate deals on every U.S. Military Base [here]. They were instigators of Gail Kimbell’s “Open Space Conservation Strategy,” the largest land grab since the Louisiana Purchase [here].

Scorched earth is part of the TNC’s strategy. They have subverted the Wildland Fire Leadership Council [here], pushing Let It Burn down the throat of America. They want the entire Federal Estate to be incinerated. They burn their own lands, too. For example, last year the TNC incinerated 14,874 acres on and off their Silver Creek Nature Preserve in Blaine County Idaho [here]. At taxpayers’ expense, of course. Everything TNC does (or is) is at taxpayers’ expense.

Goldman Sachs has a sweet deal in TNC. They buy land cheap (usually just purchase an option) and then resell the land to the Feds at inflated prices for enormous windfall profits — and pay no taxes on the deals. Goldman Sachs buys and sells Congresspersons and government officials, too. They have an unlimited backdoor to the U.S. Treasury.

And now they contract Let It Burn fires from the BLM. The amount of money changing hands will never be revealed. Sweet.

USFS District Headquarters Burns

The building housing district offices of the Wallow-Whitman National Forest burned to the ground Sunday. From the local paper:

Fire destroys Forest Service headquarters

By Chuck Anderson, Wallowa County Chieftain, 7/12/2010 [here]

The district headquarters of the U.S. Forest Service in Enterprise was destroyed in a spectacular fire Sunday, July 11.

The leased building built of logs was a total loss, according to Forest Service spokeswoman Judy Wing. No one was in the building when the fire broke out after 4 p.m., she said.

“It was devastating,” said Mary DeAguero, district ranger for the Eagle Cap Ranger District, whose office was in the building. Also burned were offices of the Wallowa Valley Ranger District, Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, an extensive visitor center, the Farmers Service Agency, National Resource Conservation Service and Wallowa Soil and Water Conservation District.

Officials of the state fire marshal’s office were expected to arrive today to begin an investigation into the cause of the blaze. The approximately 70 Forest Service employees who worked in the building were told to meet with Wallowa-Whitman National Forest Supervisor Steve Ellis at Cloverleaf Hall at the county fairgrounds.

The agency recently negotiated a two-year extension of its 20-year lease. One Joseph firefighter was taken to Wallowa Memorial Hospital with symptoms of heatstroke and released at midnight. No one else was reported injured. …

From the photographs it appears the building totally incinerated. The documents, maps, and records within were probably more or less completely destroyed.

The absurdist and soon-to-be-bankrupt Oregonian newspaper immediately pointed an accusatory finger at the “timber industry”, hinting that disgruntled unemployed woodsworkers (and/or ranchers) burned the building in an act of arson [here].

The author of that spurious accusation is the aptly named Richard Cockle, soon to be unemployed himself when his Dead Tree newspaper goes belly up. We wonder if Richard Cockle will then become disgruntled and go on an arson spree himself.

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Monument plan will hurt landscape, local economy

By Danielle Lindler, Guest Editorial, Medford Mail Tribune, July 04, 2010 [here]

In the June 28 article on the proposed Siskiyou Crest National Monument, proponents state that opposition groups are having a knee-jerk reaction to something we don’t understand. We beg to differ.

Our opposition is based on the history of other monument designations and on professional expertise in natural resources.

The proponents of the monument state on their website that the monument needs to be designated in order to protect the environment from the perceived threats from public land sales, road building, private logging, cattle grazing and off-road vehicle use. They have, in a sense, stated that any human influence on the landscape is detrimental to the environment and thus they need to restrict activities that are historical to Siskiyou County and the foundation of our rural economy.

The proponents claim jobs will be created by thinning forests and decommissioning roads. However, look at what has happened since the designation of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument just over the Siskiyou County border in Oregon.

This national monument encompasses approximately 53,000 acres. The management plan proposes thinning 5,000 acres (none done to date), eliminates grazing, does not allow Christmas tree or firewood cutting and will close or decommission 74 miles of road. This would equal 800 miles of road if the same percentage of roads were closed in the proposed national monument.

When one looks to other national monuments in the state, we can see that thinning projects, as were proposed in the Giant Sequoia National Monument, were vehemently opposed by the Sierra Club and these projects are still held up in court to this day. Don’t be misled to think that projects would go forth without additional controversy if these lands were given monument status.

KS Wild says thinning will be part of a more flexible management strategy, yet the group opposes thinning on federal timber sales and will not allow the Klamath National Forest to manage lands in a way that meets Northwest Forest Plan objectives. They do not understand that trees of all sizes need to be thinned to reduce wildfire and that openings in the forest are important habitat components. It seems they want a blanket of trees from east to west, and this is not a management scenario that will benefit the largest number of species.

Since most federal lands within Siskiyou County over the past 20 years have had large areas limited to management, the economy has significantly declined. Unemployment and welfare rates are at all-time highs, currently exceeding 19 percent. Mills have closed. Working families have left the area and schools are suffering steep declines in enrollment and quality of education. The economy of this county certainly is not robust or diversified, and creating the monument will only continue the financial decline.

Imagine if local forestry were actually supported. Maybe California wouldn’t import 75 percent of its lumber. We could sequester more carbon in healthy forests and tap tremendous potential to produce bio-energy and replace fossil fuels. We could enhance biodiversity and put communities back to work taking care of the forests that have sustained many livelihoods for generations.

While we agree that the monument designation will be only on federal land, future management on private lands can be curtailed within a monument if the proposed use or activity is deemed incompatible with the monument’s purpose.

This is especially true in California, where the state Environmental Quality Act requires that an environmental impact report or timber harvest plan include a cumulative effects analysis where the entire watershed is evaluated. If your neighbor is a national monument, rest assured there will be visual buffers at a minimum imposed on your project. This means for all landowners within the monument boundary that there will be an additional layer of bureaucracy telling you what you can and can’t do with your land.

Preservation ignores the fact that it is literally impossible to preserve dynamic forest ecosystems in a static state. It fails to consider that people have been a natural part of forested landscapes for thousands of years or that we have a responsibility to manage natural resources for the benefit of current and future generations.

I am also perplexed as to why this group, which is always using its due process to comment on federal and private timber sales, is circumventing this process by seeking the monument designation under the Antiquities Act, which does not allow public comment or congressional approval. One would think open debate would be encouraged, not circumvented.

Danielle Lindler, a California registered professional forester, is executive director of the Klamath Alliance for Resources & Environment.

Sabotaging Flagstaff’s Forests

The Schultz Fire [here] is winding down. Today the Southwest Type 1 Incident Management Team will be transferring fire management to the Coconino National Forest. To date 15,075 acres have burned north of Flagstaff, AZ. No homes were destroyed. The fire is trailed on 65 percent of the perimeter and is no longer growing. To date $7 million has been spent on fire suppression.

We have discussed the Schultz Fire previously [here, here]. We noted:

The Schultz Fire outside of Flagstaff has been predicted for 30 years. Dr. Wally Covington, his Ecological Restoration Institute at NAU, the City of Flagstaff, and community groups like the Greater Flagstaff Forest Partnership have all pushed and pushed for fuel treatments and restoration. Everyone with half a brain recognized that a-historical fuel loadings have accumulated in a wind tunnel/venturi between the mountain peaks, and the accelerated winds are aimed directly at Flagstaff. The ongoing efforts and pleadings by ERI, GFFP, foresters and others to reduce the hazards through restoration have been thwarted again and again by radical anti-stewardship groups…

The Flagstaff paper, the Arizona Daily Sun, published an interesting article yesterday that lays the blame at the feet of the Center for Biological Diversity [here], the multi-million dollar, super-litigious, anti-forest, pro-holocaust “activist” group headquartered in Tucson.

Why wasn’t Schultz Pass thinned?

by CYNDY COLE, AZ Daily Sun, June 27, 2010 [here]

… The same area where the Schultz fire ignited and began burning heavily was due to be thinned three years ago, from Schultz Pass to the forest west of Timberline.

But after an appeal from an environmental group delayed the project, the economy went into a tailspin, closing the window on starting the project.

A similar project on the west side of the Peaks on Hart Prairie also has been appealed and will be delayed.

The idea at Schultz Pass was to protect residents living near the Coconino National Forest from wildfires by thinning and starting low-intensity prescribed burns across a total of 9,660 acres.

The Center for Biological Diversity appealed the project planned for Schultz Pass in 2007.

“It would have left fewer large trees and less canopy for wildlife than is called for in the forest plan,” wrote Taylor McKinnon, who works on public lands for the Center for Biological Diversity. …

This past week, the Coconino National Forest proposed another thinning and logging project on 9,800 acres of Hart Prairie to reduce fire danger, among a couple others to come.

More complex than any other project on the forest so far, the Hart Prairie project is also aimed at keeping dying aspen alive by a variety of sometimes experimental activities, including falling logs crosswise, fencing off ponds that elk drink from, and reducing the number of aspen-munching elk by asking Game and Fish to allow more hunting.

The Center for Biological Diversity appealed the project…

President Clueless About Wildfires

Obama is clueless about a lot of stuff, so it is no surprise that he is in the dark about wildfires.

Obama and his Admin have proved themselves useless in a crisis many, many times. Now as we enter the 2010 fire season, the White House is proving that wildfires — like oil spills, financial meltdowns, and other disasters — are completely beyond their ken.

Note the Presidential utterances of yesterday:

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release, June 22, 2010 [here]

President Obama Receives Update on Arizona Wildfires and Calls Governor Brewer
Earlier today President Obama was updated by senior staff on the ongoing response to the wildfires in Arizona and the Administration’s continued work with state and local officials to fight it. Under the President’s direction, both the U.S. Forest Service and FEMA have been in close contact with state and local emergency management officials and continue to monitor the fire activity. The U.S. Forest Service is actively working to support state and local forest fighting efforts and is managing the fires through high level, inter-agency management teams. The Governor of Arizona has made two requests for Fire Management Assistance Grants for the Hardy fire and the Shultz fire; both grants were awarded on the day the requests were made at the direction of the President.

The President also called Arizona Governor Jan Brewer to express his concerns about the wildfires threatening homes and businesses across the state and to assure her of the continued support of the federal government in helping state and local officials protect people’s lives and property. The President indicated that the U.S. Forest Service, under his direction, is actively engaged and working with state and local teams to manage the immediate response to the fires and reinforced that FEMA will continue to closely monitor the fires and remains in close contact with state and local officials. The President offered praise for the tireless efforts of the local and state emergency management officials working around the clock to fight and contain the fires, mobilize resources, carry out evacuations and coordinate shelters, and asked the Governor to keep him updated on additional support the State needs as the response continues.

Note that the press release states “the U.S. Forest Service and FEMA have been in close contact with state and local emergency management officials and continue to monitor the fire activity” and “the U.S. Forest Service, under his direction, is actively engaged and working with state and local teams to manage the immediate response to the fires.”

Those are just plain clueless misstatements. Federal IMT’s are fighting the fire, not monitoring it. The Schultz Fire [here, here] is not a local or state suppression operation, per se, although a variety of crews from a variety of locales across the Nation are involved. The fire began on unkempt Federal land, and the Coconino NF requested the Southwest Type 1 Incident Management Team, Dugger Hughes Incident Commander. Eight federally contracted air tankers are making the most significant impact and have saved North Flagstaff from incineration.

It is the Federal disaster response apparatus that is fighting the fire. The IMT’s are directed by the National Interagency Fire Center [here] headquartered in Boise, ID. The IMT’s also respond to disasters other than fires, such as floods, hurricanes, etc. They are not FEMA, nor are they the US Forest Service.

NIFC Mission [here]

The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), located in Boise, Idaho, is the nation’s support center for wildland firefighting. Eight different agencies and organizations are part of NIFC. Decisions are made using the interagency cooperation concept because NIFC has no single director or manager.

“The President offered praise for the tireless efforts of the local and state emergency management officials working around the clock to fight and contain the fires…” Well hey, everybody likes praise, but the actual job of fighting and containing the fire is being done by the Southwest Type 1 Incident Management Team, not local and state emergency management officials.

But the incompetence of the White House regarding forest fires goes deeper than mere cluelessness.

The fact is the Obama Admin has promoted Let It Burn by appointing anti-forest, pro-fire political operatives to the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, by expanding roadlessness and wilderness, and through backroom secret deals for more National Monuments.

The stacking of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program Advisory Committee [here] with anti-restoration, Let It Burn types is the latest affront, but the push for more Fed land to be put off-limits to fire suppression has shown up in the Cohesive Strategy, global warming alarmism, National Park Service policy, National Forest policy, Federal “conservation” easements, roadless rule redux, transportation plan road decommissioning, wilderness expansion, etc.

Obama, our grad student President from Chicago or Kenya or somewhere, is himself clueless about natural resource and land management issues, but true to predictions he has opened the White House and his Administration to the kookiest people on the Left. The Executive Branch is crawling with fire bugs right now, and this summer we will suffer disaster after disaster if those bugs get in the way of fire suppression (as is their stated political mission).

The Schultz Fire outside of Flagstaff has been predicted for 30 years. Dr. Wally Covington, his Ecological Restoration Institute at NAU [here], the City of Flagstaff, and community groups like the Greater Flagstaff Forest Partnership [here] have all pushed and pushed for fuel treatments and restoration. Everyone with half a brain recognized that a-historical fuel loadings have accumulated in a wind tunnel/venturi between the mountain peaks, and the accelerated winds are aimed directly at Flagstaff. The ongoing efforts and pleadings by ERI, GFFP, foresters and others to reduce the hazards through restoration have been thwarted again and again by radical anti-stewardship groups, the very same groups that have been given high-ranking positions within the Obama Admin.

Obama operatives are opposed to the use of fire retardant, opposed to aerial firefighting, opposed to direct attack, opposed to dozers and other machinery on fires, and opposed to fuel reduction projects. Those kooks are in the inside now, not just kibitzing from the outside.

This summer the IMT’s are going to be caught between doing real fire suppression and political arm-twisting to Let It Burn. We have already seen that arm twisting in numerous fires this Spring [here] including the Medano Fire, South Fork Fire, Aspen Fire, Paradise Fire, and many fires in Alaska.

And fire season has just started!

It is clear that Obama and his spin doctors do not know who fights wildfires in America. They are not aware of the NIFC, or the Fed IMT system, or how wildfire disasters are dealt with. They think it’s a local operation monitored by the USFS. They are ignorant beyond belief. Even worse, the riff-raff Obama gave the keys to the Executive Branch to are pro-holocaust.

That is very dangerous. Obama and his Admin pose a threat to America. The Left has long been at war with the residents of the West. That war continues unabated, in fact exacerbated, on multiple fronts, from border to border.

Duck and cover. The worst is yet to come.

Sidenote: does anyone know where we can contribute to the Stan McChrystal for President in 2012 Campaign?

Return Fire in Flagstaff

The Schultz Fire was reported this morning to be 10,000 acres [here]. Approximately 1,000 residences in North Flagstaff are threatened. Evacuations are occurring. Over 800 firefighting personnel are engaged along with eight airtankers.

Schultz Fire as of 06/22/2010 at 4 a.m. Map courtesy GEOMAC Wildfire Viewer [here].

The fire was ignited two days ago by a campfire in the Schultz Pass vicinity. It quickly burned to the top of of Schultz Peak and then headed northeast toward subdivisions north of the city.

It is not the first fire to burn through the area. In 1977 the Radio Fire burned 5,000 acres on Mt Elden, the legacy of which is still visible [here]. In 1996 the Hochderffer and Horseshoe Fires north of the San Francisco Peaks burned a total of 25,000 acres.

The extreme fuel conditions directly upwind from Flagstaff have not gone unnoticed:

Fire heads toward Peaks; Inner Basin threatened

by CYNDY COLE, AZ Daily Sun, June 21, 2010 [here]

The wildfire now burning northeast of Pass is larger in area than the whole base of Mount Elden. And it could overrun Lockett Meadow at the foot of the Inner Basin of the San Francisco Peaks, say fire officials, who plan to spend at least a week fighting it.

If it goes there, fighting it will likely be tough going, with dense trees, little physical access for heavy equipment and steep terrain, said the individual in charge of firefighting operations.

This fire, when finished burning, will very likely be among the five largest in Flagstaff’s recorded history. It sits partially in an area where forest thinning was planned but had not yet commenced.

The fire had charred 10,000 acres by Monday evening and forced the evacuation of hundreds of residences along the western side of the Highway 89 corridor. …

The topography of Schultz Pass tends to exacerbate these winds, acting like a chimney, and making it a past priority for thinning.

Firefighters and some people living in Timberline have long seen the pass as a problem area, and it received some renewed attention during the 1996 fire season, when the Hochderffer and Horseshoe fires north of the San Francisco Peaks burned a total of 25,000 acres.

“This is a fire that we’ve talked about for 30 years,” Summit Fire Chief Don Howard told an audience of the public gathered at Coconino High School on Monday night. “We knew it would happen — we always hoped it wouldn’t happen — due to this pass’ ability to push wind.”

After 25 years of constant pressure from Dr. W. Wallace Covington of Northern Arizona University, his Ecological Restoration Institute [here], and a community group [here], a total of 193 acres were thinned in the area.

The Schultz Fire could easily burn 50,000 acres before it is controlled.

Who’s fault is that? Certainly not Dr. Covington’s. He could not have done more to warn the city and to provide solutions.

The fault lies with the people who have fought against fuel treatments and restoration for decades, groups such as the Sierra Club, Earth First!, the Grand Canyon Trust, Arizona Wildlife Federation, Earthjustice, Environmental Fund for Arizona, The Conservation System Alliance and other organizations with various shifting names and websites.

Will the anti-restoration groups be held accountable? Not likely.

A wise and knowledgeable friend writes, “We’ve been here before. Learn nothing, forget nothing. … It may be news, but it’s nothing new.”

And so it goes. Fire returns to Flagstaff, as it does so often in so many locales. Panic fills hearts. People evacuate. Umpteen $millions are spent on dangerous and expensive measures to save homes and lives. Damages exceed the fire suppression outlays by 10, 20, even 50 to 1.

We could do better. We could use sensitive and scientific restoration forestry to save homes, lives, watersheds, and landscapes. Unfortunately there is a (largely political) movement that fights against and sabotages restoration efforts, that promotes catastrophic holocaust, that wishes to Burn Baby Burn no matter how tragic and destructive the outcomes.

If responsible people with common sense do not insist on appropriate land stewardship, the crazies will prevail, and disasters will continue to visit our communities.

Idaho RINOs Back to the Drawing Board

Idaho Governor Butch Otter has put the kibosh on The Blueprint For Destroying Idaho [here]. Pro-holocaust Republicans-in-name-only Rep. Mike Simpson and Sen. Mike Crapo have been sent back to the drawing board.

Boulder-White Clouds bill still needs work, Idaho lawmakers tell Senate panel

Even the wilderness legislation’s architect, Mike Simpson, agrees there’s room for improvement.

BY LAUREN FRENCH, Idaho Statesman, 06/17/10 [here]

WASHINGTON - While it’s a compromise, the latest version of the Boulder-White Clouds wilderness bill can still use refinement, some members of Idaho’s congressional delegation say.

Rep. Mike Simpson and Sen. Mike Crapo, Idaho Republicans who back the measure, acknowledged during a hearing Wednesday that it is far from perfect. And Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, who sits on the Senate subcommittee now considering the bill, said “there are still some pending issues that are going to need, perhaps, some more of that collaborative process to reach this consensus.”

The bill would designate 332,775 acres in the Boulder-White Cloud mountain ranges as three wildernesses, separated in part by motorized trails.

Advocates for recreation say much of the land is already under federal protection, and they don’t like the curbs the bill would place on other trails. Gov. Butch Otter opposes the bill, saying Idaho doesn’t need more wilderness. …

So Simpson’s grand scheme to Burn Baby Burn Idaho (and Montana) is in limbo now, hanging in abeyance like a side of beef in a meat locker waiting for the mad cow test.

Holocausters like to layer on “protection” like ugly wallpaper. Except the “protections” they offer don’t protect, they endanger.

The land in question has already been stolen from the rightful owners by imperialists. Now, instead of practicing good stewardship, the imperialists want to torch the land they seized in a gesture of bullheaded Mussoliniism.
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The Wildlands Project Bill

It was hidden in Kerry-Lieberman 1,000-page Cap-and-Tax Bill introduced in May [here], but now the Wildlands Project has it’s own special bill, HR 5101, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act of 2010.

The Wildlands Project is the brainchild of the radical monkeywrencher group Earth First!. Their burning desire is to “set aside” 90% of the land area of the West in “core reserves” and “wildlife corridors” where human activities such as land stewardship and firefighting would be banned. The Wildland Project also calls for pan-ethnic cleansing, since much of the targeted lands are privately owned and currently inhabited by human residents, aka American citizens.

For a thorough examination of the Wildlands Project see The Wildlands Project, A Country Girl’s Musin’ by Judy Keeler [here]. Another good source of info is Montanans For Multiple Use [here].

The Wildlands Project has nothing to do with Global Warming, and Kerry-Lieberman Cap-and-Taxilla doesn’t either. It’s a power grab; hence the name “The American Power Act” [here]. But Cap-and-Taxilla is unlikely to pass, so the holocauster anti-humanists extracted the Wildlands Project language and set up their own bill.

The sponsors are Rep Rush D. Holt, (D-NJ), Rep Maurice D. Hinchey, (D-NY), Rep George Miller, (D-CA) and Rep Jared Polis, (D-CO). Polis is a mass of contradictions that I don’t even want to get into, see [here]. The rest don’t live within 1,000 miles of the affected landscape and are well-known radical leftists.

The text of HR 5101 is [here].

Norm M. writes:

This bill is intended to lead to the formal creation of several continental-scale wildlife corridor systems that include core habitat, connectivity, and buffer systems. Please read it carefully and spend some time considering what its passage would mean to your livelihood and interests.

If you hate the Human Race and love regional holocausts, this bill is for you. Please send us your name and address so we can add you to our list.