The following article appeared in the Missoulian today. Rather than comment on their site, I am commenting on mine.
State fire panel discusses solutions in Hamilton
By JOHN CRAMER of the Missoulian [here]
HAMILTON - Montana’s Fire Suppression Interim Committee kicked off its statewide road tour Monday at ground zero in the West’s growing dilemma on how to reduce large-scale wildfires at a time when more people are building homes in fire-prone forests.
No homes are built in National Forests. No one is allowed to construct residences on public land.
The Bitterroot National Forest, which the U.S. Forest Service considers America’s most threatened national forest because of the population explosion in the Bitterroot Valley’s “wildland-urban interface,” served as a backdrop for the state legislative committee’s first public forum.
Good for John Cramer for putting Wildland-Urban Interface in quotes. The WUI (pronounced Whooie) is a figment of the government’s imagination. The Bitterroot NF is not “wildland,” it is public forest. There are few urban areas in the Bitterroot Valley. Outside of those areas, the rest of land is rural private property. It is not “interface.” It is where all the farms, all the ranches, and all the homes are. People have the right to live on their land and more power to us.
We also have the right not be incinerated by wildfires emanating from the Federal Estate. If the USFS cannot contain fires on their acres, then they are remiss, not doing their jobs, and that land should be removed from public ownership.
We also have the right not to be incinerated by backfires set by remiss government employees, or we should have that right. Recently the Ninth Circuit Court held that private citizens do not possess any defense against firebrand USFS employees who burn our homes down [here]. I say take the land away from the recalcitrant, legally immune, incompetent USFS if they cannot forebear from burning down the homes of private citizens.
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April 29, 2008 | 5 Comments | Topic: Private land policies, Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
It has been a busy week for news already. Some of the highlights (or lowlights):
USFS Chief Gail Kimbell proffered an excuse for soaring fire costs and her agency’s failure to do a Congressionally ordered analysis of the nation’s aerial firefighting program following fatal crashes of planes working on wildfires: “We are a nation at war, and we’re a nation with a huge budget deficit.” [here].
Pretty cheesy. We can’t do our job because the nation is at war. It could be the war that Kimbell is talking about is the one the USFS is waging on forests and landowners throughout the West. Her agency did find $54 million to spend on conservation easements to stop homebuilding on private land. It “saved” the taxpayers money by curtailing private property rights and resident stewardship of the land in favor of holocaust megafires.
Weyerhaeuser was busted in another anti-trust case. A Portland jury on Monday ordered Weyerhaeuser to pay almost $28 million for unlawfully monopolizing the market for finished alder lumber [here].
U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey was in Missoula on Monday to answer questions about controversial secret meetings between the U.S. Forest Service and the Plum Creek Timber Company. Plum Creek is the country’s largest private landowner, with 8 million acres nationwide and 1.2 million acres in Montana [here].
More gravy for the Big Potato. Maybe Mark doesn’t realize that we’re a nation at war.
In wildlife news, a rabies outbreak is plaguing the Southwest. A rabid bobcat attacked two hikers, who had to kill it with a hammer [here]. Lesson: never go hiking without a hammer. For more rabies news see Wolf Crossing [here].
Speaking of disease-carrying animals, twelve “environmental” groups have sued to halt wolf delisting [here]. Nuff said.
On the climate front, the founder of the National Hurricane Center is being forced out for his failure to buy into Algore’s Inconvenient Lie [here]. Naughty, naughty. Here come the PC police.
And finally Friends of the Earth have been blamed for starving millions of poor to death after spreading ugly rumors about American food aid to Africa [here]. Guess that’s one way to deal with the overpopulation problem. Pin a medal on FOE.
Lovely news. Going outside now. Had my fill of it. If there were some way to dig the news into my garden, I’m sure I could grow pumpkins the size of Volkswagens. For big punkins, it’s all about the bull …
April 29, 2008 | 2 Comments | Topic: The 2008 Fire Season, Private land policies, Climate and Weather, Saving Forests, Politics and politicians, Federal forest policy
by Bear Bait
The Land and Water Conservation Fund. The money to buy land from willing sellers to provide for resource, water, air and ecosystem conservation. And it comes from taxes on motor boat fuel, Federal surplus land sales, and offshore oil and gas fees and royalties. The slush fund for NGO preservation. They buy a piece of ground, and the Govt gives them twice what they paid for it. Back door tacit funding by Big Govt for Big NGOs.
Softwood lumber and timber is in worldwide surplus. Pinchot would be proud of his efforts at forestry education, and those who followed his lead. Great reforestation and aforestation efforts, worldwide, have grown the softwood timber supply in a mathematical progression to where that resource is a glut on the market.
However, it is a young forest, worldwide, with post WWII forest repairs in Europe and Asia, and international land management providing species travel worldwide. The long cutover ponderosa pine of the new West is now produced in Chile and Argentina, Douglas-fir is grown in New Zealand, Ireland, England, France; the list is long.
My friend who imported pine from South America to serve the US market now sells the very same wood, all of it, to China. And he is not sure how long that market can last. The East Coast of the US gets wide dimension softwood from Europe for home construction, cheaper than they can get it from the West Coast.
To use the new forest, at the earliest possible entry, the whole of home building was changed to use engineered wood products in lumber, truss, beam, and panel constructs. Your grandparents house in no way resembles today’s methods, quality of materials, or durability. But neither do your shoes. Large logs are still cut in a handful of mills to make special products for historical reconstruction, remodeling, and export. There is only a vestigial milling capacity and market for those products. It is a small log economy we now live in now, and wood fiber is the one commodity the world is over-supplied with, other than human beings.
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April 28, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Private land policies, Federal forest policy
I presented the Forest Incineration Conspiracy last post. The bottom line is that multi-national forest landowners are engaged in territorial hegemony, taking over as much land as they can for reasons of money and power. That takeover will not serve our economy, will not create jobs, will not increase general community wealth, will nor benefit “nature”; in fact, just the opposite of those things are occurring.
Need more evidence? As Bear Bait pointed out [here]:
We are exporting the value added jobs. The profits are made offshore and not subject to US taxes. That is a real model in Seattle that Weyco and their ilk have to see with some pain. Look for it to happen to logs and lumber.
And then this just in over the insider wire:
2007 Softwood log exports from the West Coast increase [here]
PORTLAND, Ore. April 24, 2008. A total of 879.9 million board feet of softwood logs was exported from Washington, Oregon, northern California, and Alaska in 2007. The 2007 volume was up 11.6 percent from the 2006 total of 788.4 million board feet, according to Debra Warren, an economist at the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station.
“ Some 546.8 million board feet or 62.1 percent of the west coast softwood log exports in 2007 went to Japan, 264.8 or 30.1 percent went to South Korea, 42.4 million board feet or 4.8 percent went to China, and 7.2 million board feet or 0.8 percent was exported to Taiwan,” says Warren. …
Other statistics included in the report are:
Log exports for 2007 from Washington and Oregon totaled 673.0 million board feet, up 26.0 percent from the 2006 volume of 534.3 million board feet.
A total of 457,000 board feet of logs was exported from northern California, up from
75, 000 board feet in 2006.Alaska exported a total of 206.5 million board feet in 2007 compared with 254.1 in 2006.
Douglas-fir accounted for 53.7 percent of the 2007 log exports; western hemlock, 13.6 percent; Sitka spruce (out of Alaska), 17.3 percent; and other softwoods made up the remaining 15.4 percent.
The total value of 2007 log shipments was $544.1 million at port of exportation, and the average value was $618.40 per thousand board feet. Douglas-fir averaged $780.17 per thousand board feet; western hemlock, $521.92; and other softwoods, $460.77.
Those are NOT logs off USFS lands; they are from private lands, and from the Big Baron’s lands in particular. There is next to no cut from USFS lands. Roughly a quarter of the log harvest from the PNW got exported. No mill jobs for you! You will be allowed to purchase the imported wood products, however, if you can afford them!
That’s what happens when multi-nationals own the land base in the U.S.A., land of the slaves, home of the saps.
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April 26, 2008 | 3 Comments | Topic: Private land policies, Federal forest policy
Last week the Weyerhaeuser Company announced that Daniel S. Fulton has replaced Steven R. Rogel as president and CEO. From the Weyerhaeuser press release [here]:
FEDERAL WAY, Wash., April 17, 2008 — Weyerhaeuser Company (NYSE: WY) today announced that the board of directors has elected Daniel S. Fulton, 59, president and chief executive officer and a member of the board effective immediately. Fulton has served as president since Jan. 1.
Fulton assumes the role of CEO from Steven R. Rogel, 65, who remains chairman in a non-executive role.
The change is more than a customary replacement of one executive for another. It marks a major shift in the corporate strategy at the largest timber company on the West Coast. Since incorporation in 1900, Weyerhaeuser has been a vertically integrated forest product company (VIFPC). That means they owned timberland and sawmills, as well as a product distribution chain. VIFPC’s were the classical standard model in the U.S. timber industry for nearly a century.
But that has changed. The trend recently has been toward dis-integration into separate land-owning companies and milling/manufacturing companies. The new arrangement has been driven by high capital gains taxes on the integrated sister companies. Real estate investment trusts (REIT’s) that own only land receive much more favorable tax treatment than manufacturing plants. Very often REIT’s are acquired (or invested in) by pension and insurance funds for exactly that reason: low tax rates.
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April 23, 2008 | 5 Comments | Topic: Private land policies
