The Forest Foundation of Auburn CA and the National Association of Forest Service Retirees have issued a joint review of California forests. Their finding is that the lack of reforestation following forest fires is responsible for converting an average of 30,000 acres per year of forest to brush.
Nearly 150,000 acres of forest has been converted to brush over the last seven fire seasons in CA, not including conversion that has occurred in wilderness areas.
Recent homilies about “renewing the forest” with wildfire as uttered by obsequious government functionaries and power-grasping eco-terrorist BINGOs are supercilious, pusillanimous, and specious. Wildfires do not “renew” forests, they decimate and destroy forests and convert them to tick brush. Blood-sucking, disease-carrying tick populations thrive, but forest creatures lose their habitat when wildfires ravage forests. Those vegetation changes are permanent without intervention, because fire-type tick brush generates yet more fires that exclude trees.
But why should we wax eloquent on the subject, again and again and again? Let others carry some water. Kudos to the Forest Foundation and the National Association of Forest Service Retirees for their honesty and integrity. Here is the full text of the joint pronouncement:
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May 5, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
Science Mag, that bastion of political bias with occasional glimpses of actual science, published a garbled article which reviewed the blue-ribbon panel review of the languishing USFWS Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted. We have reviewed their review of the review, and present some clarifications for your illumination.
The article in question is Spotted Owl Recovery Plan Flawed, Review Panel Finds by Erik Stokstad, Science, Vol. 320, dated May 2, 2008. A parsimonious summary, all of one sentence long, is available [here]. But we shall provide you a little bit more than that. The article begins:
A blue-ribbon panel of scientists has confirmed major flaws in the proposed recovery plan for the northern spotted owl, a threatened species that has driven forest policy in the northwestern United States for nearly 2 decades. As did earlier reviews, the final one, by the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute (SEI) in Portland, Oregon, concludes that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS’s) plan does not put enough emphasis on protecting the owl’s habitat.
It also says that massive thinning of dry forests is needed to prevent habitat from going up in smoke—a recommendation that makes some environmentalists nervous.
Explanation: in 2006, fully 16 years after listing the northern spotted owl as an endangered species, the US Fish and Wildlife Service finally got around to drafting a Recovery Plan, something they should have done in Year One. It took a series of lawsuits to force them to do it.
But the Recovery Plan was fatally flawed, in that if it had been approved and followed, it would have been fatal to spotted owls, barred owls, owl habitat, old-growth forests, forests in general, rural economies, and various other species, communities, and institutions.
The USFWS’s Recovery Plan was dead in the water from the get-go, and everybody knew it. They withdrew it after a few weeks of high-pitched whining from all sectors. A private consulting company was hired to review the fatally flawed Plan. That company, the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute, appointed a “blue ribbon” panel and held a series of meetings. Their conclusion: back to the drawing board!
Ah, but with one added instruction: Stop Incinerating Spotted Owl Forests!!
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May 3, 2008 | 4 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
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
Conspiracy theories abound in our day and age. There exists the general feeling that we are being scammed big time by some secret group, or not so secret group, for their benefit and to the detriment of the mostly powerless populace.
The list is lengthy: the Global Warming Hoax, the Communist Conspiracy, the AIDS epidemic, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the CIA, the Zionist Movement, Islamo-Fascism, the Ozone hole, Big Oil, the Salmon Hoax, spotted owls, etc, etc.
My “favorite” and the pet peeve of this blog is the conspiracy to incinerate America’s priceless heritage forests.
Many conspiracy theories border on the absurd, but some are blatantly evident. The Global Warming Hoax, for instance, is not secret but rather is trumpeted every day in the Media. We know the names of the conspirators; they are quite proud of their involvement and roles and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure everybody knows their names.
The Forest Incineration Conspiracy is less obvious regarding its chief manipulators, but like all the other blatant and non-absurd conspiracies, the root goal is the same: money.
How, you ask, can destroying forests possibly make anyone rich? There is some push to increase fire suppression outlays, and that leads to more profits for firefighters and firefighting equipment suppliers, but their increased income is minimal and widely distributed. Nobody is making enormous windfall profits by burning down forests, at least not within the fire community. Nor are the Federal land management agencies profiting by ruining natural resources. Nor are enviro groups expanding their memberships by advocating abandonment of responsible stewardship in favor of habitat destruction.
The case could be made that all these special interests are shooting themselves in the foot by promoting Let It Burn. Indeed, I have made that case again and again.
So who profits by burning down millions of acres of public forests every year?
Private commercial forest owners, that’s who.
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April 25, 2008 | 14 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
In the Summer of 2000, the USFS set a backfire that backfired in Ravalli County, Montana, in the Bitteroot Valley.
The year 2000 was a particularly bad year for fires in the Bitterroot region; 307,000 acres burned, nearly 20 percent of the Bitterroot National Forest. An additional 50,000 private acres burned in Ravalli Co., including 70 homes, 170 other buildings, and 95 vehicles. From a USFS report:
The fires blackened the western skies above the town of Hamilton, burned deep into the back country above West Fork’s Painted Rocks Lake, and stretched from the height of Lost Trail Pass down the Sapphire ridges, past Darby to four miles east of Hamilton (USDA Forest Service, 2000). Private property losses were high ranging in the millions of dollars.
Some of those losses were the result of a backfire set in Spade Creek on the Spade Fire, one of the Sula Complex of fires. The backfire, not the main fire, burned down a number of homes. Homeowners who lost their homes were upset, formed a group they called “Bacfire 2000,” and in 2002 sued the USFS for damages.
Last fall, five years later, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy rejected that lawsuit. Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Molloy’s ruling.
April 22, 2008 | 9 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
And so is most of modern forest science. The USFS administrators and most forest scientists today (as well as most “environmental” groups) fail to understand or even acknowledge that Native Americans have had profound influences on our landscapes for millennia.
Euro-Americans did not encounter a wilderness. They came to a continent that had been occupied and resided upon for ten thousand years or more by actual human beings. Except for the tops of mountain peaks accessible only with modern technical climbing gear, every single acre in the continental U.S. had been trod with moccasins.
Every single acre had been explored, walked upon, and utilized by the human beings who had lived here continuously since before the end of the Wisconsin Glaciation. Anthropogenic fire had been visited upon all landscapes a zillion times. The vegetation had been totally altered, and over 40 species of wildlife had been hunted to extinction, by the long-resident humanity.
Every landscape was criss-crossed with roads. Lewis and Clark did not bushwhack from the Mississippi to the Pacific; they traveled on ROADS, Indian roads, roads that had been in place and heavily used for thousands of years. The Corps of Discovery arranged for guides to show them the right roads to take. The word “road” appears in the journals of L&C hundreds of times.
The Corps of Discovery did not “live off the land.” Yes, they hunted some, but there was very little game. For the most part, they purchased food from the resident human beings.
The resident human beings had established fields and tracts where they gathered roots and berries, drove game, captured fish in weirs, and produced through agricultural techniques the necessities of their lives: food, clothing, and shelter. Native Americans did not flit from bush to bush like butterflies, leaving no mark. On the extreme contrary, they modified the environment to suit their needs virtually everywhere.
The modern USFS and forest science establishments are utterly clueless about that. They still think of America as a recent wilderness. That kind of thinking is racist as well as completely wrong. The “science” is rank with Euro-centric falsehoods stemming from deep-seated racist blindness. The managers of our National Forests are completely oblivious to the landscape uses and patterns established by resident human beings.
The current Let It Burn philosophy imposed on our landscapes by blind racism is destroying the ancient human heritage. The urge to declare Wilderness Areas and Roadless Areas is nazi-like racism at it’s worst. The denial of the American Holocaust whereby millions of people were slaughtered over a 500 year racist jihad and ethnic cleansing is as objectionable and ethically bankrupt as the denial of Hitler’s Holocaust (or even more so).
Our forests and landscapes are being destroyed by a sick and twisted bureaucracy that is fundamentally racist to its core.
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April 17, 2008 | 7 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
On April 2nd USFS Chief Abigail Kimbell decided that four Region 3 National Forests no longer needed Fire Management Plans (FMP’s) as part of their Land and Resource Management Plans (LCMP’s). As a result, the existing FMP’s on the Carson and Lincoln NF’s in New Mexico and the Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto NF’s in Arizona were thrown in the dumpster.
Kimbell axed the FMP’s because an environmental group, the WildEarth Guardians (formerly the Forest Guardians), had sued the Forest Service in December, claiming the agency’s FMP’s for the four forests were inadequate because they were produced without any NEPA process (i.e. no Environmental Analyses or Environmental Impact Statements were created).
From the WildEarth Guardians’ Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief [here]:
61. The Apache-Sitgreaves, Tonto, Carson, and Lincoln National Forests did not solicit public input and did not prepare an EA or EIS before preparing and approving their FMPs. Consequently, the public had no opportunity to comment on the fire management practices required by the FMPs, and the Forest Service did not analyze alternatives to the FMPs.
Rather than comply with NEPA, Kimbell junked the FMP’s, and the next week the USFS requested the lawsuit be dropped. From the Las Cruses Sun-News [here]:
Forest Service seeks dismissal of fire plan lawsuit
By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN, Las Cruses Sun-News, 04/10/2008
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The U.S. Forest Service is seeking dismissal of a federal lawsuit filed by environmentalists who had challenged the agency’s fire management plans for four Southwestern forests.
Forest Guardians, now called WildEarth Guardians, had sued the Forest Service in December, claiming the agency’s plans for the Carson and Lincoln forests in New Mexico and the Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto forests in Arizona were inadequate and produced without enough public involvement.
The Forest Service, in a motion filed Thursday, argued that the lawsuit should be declared moot since the agency withdrew the fire plans last week.
“As a result, the purported decisions that are the basis for plaintiff’s claims are no longer in effect, such that there is no continuing case or controversy to support jurisdiction,” the agency’s lawyers wrote in the two-page motion.
Court documents also show that Forest Service Chief Abigail Kimbell on Wednesday waived a requirement that the four forests have fire management plans. …
On March 5th the Rogue River-Siskiyou NF issued a notice that they were going to prepare an EA to include Let It Burn fires in their FMP [here]. The Western Institute for Study of the Environment prepared a 170 page complaint requesting that the RR-SNF prepare an EIS before they adopted Let It Burn into their FMP [here].
Now it seems that the Chief of the USFS can merely dump the RR-SNF FMP altogether, rather than obey the law. This type of criminal behavior on Kimbell’s part has also been pointed out and documented many times at SOS Forests [here, for instance].
The USFS has devolved into a lawless outfit that spurns NEPA, ESA, NFMA, NHPA and other laws of the United States in their quest to incinerate America’s priceless heritage forests. The level of abuse and dismissal of the rule of law by this federal agency is appalling and bodes catastrophic disaster. Something must be done and soon.
April 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: The 2008 Fire Season, Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
The Burn It Down contingent at Lake Tahoe are up to their old tricks again. Some authoritarian thugs never learn. The latest eco-nazi eruption at the Sierran lake was featured in the Sac Bee last week [here]:
Lake Tahoe resident could face prison over tree removal
By Todd Milbourn - Sack-a-tomatoes Bee, April 9, 2008
Environmental cops at Lake Tahoe say Patricia Vincent deserves a prison sentence and a huge fine.
Her alleged crime: chopping down three trees on federal land that improved her backyard view of the lake.
The enviro cops in question are functionaries of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, recently lambasted by the emergency California-Nevada Tahoe Basin Fire Commission [here] for creating the fire hazard that led to the Angora Fire (which incinerated 3,100 acres of public forest and 254 private homes, and caused an estimated $140 million in damages) last June.
Vincent says it was an honest mistake, but now she’s believed to be the first target of criminal charges of illegally cutting Tahoe trees.
It’s the clearest signal yet of how serious coniferous crime has become as regulators fight to preserve the Sierra Nevada jewel Mark Twain once deemed “the finest view the world affords.”
April 14, 2008 | 9 Comments | Topic: 2007 Fire Season, Saving Forests, Politics and politicians
A popular statement, usually attributed to George Box, is that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” The usefulness of models fall into two broad classes: theory and prediction. Theoretical models attempt to map known physical, chemical, and biological relationships. Predictive models (sometimes called “black box”) attempt to make accurate predictions.
There is a strong tendency to confuse or combine these utilities, and that is true in any modeling (my specialty is forest growth and yield models). Proponents of theoretical models are often adamant that their models are best (a value judgment) and insist that they be used in predictive situations. Predictive modelers, in contrast, may use crude rules of thumb that are unattractive to theoreticians, but predictive modelers emphasize that their goal is accurate prediction.
Hence Box’s assertion that models are wrong must also be bifurcated. Theoretical models are wrong if the theories behind them are invalid. Predictive models are wrong if they make poor predictions. It is easy (but not useful) to confuse these wrong-itudes.
Predictive models are generally empirical, that is, data-driven. Predictions are validated (or invalidated) by the data on actual outcomes. Theoretical models are validated (or invalidated) by tests of theory, which may or may not be empirical. Experiments (empiricism) are used to test theories, but theoretical models do not rest on predicted outcomes because theoretical models are not predictive by design.
The best weather prediction models are more empirical than theoretical. They look at current conditions (fronts, pressure gradients, jet streams, etc.) as they are cadastrally arrayed across the globe, and compare those to past dates when the same or very similar arrays occurred. Then the weather outcomes of the similar past conformations are examined, and used to predict the immediate future weather. Not much theory to that, more of a data mining of the past; hence the descriptor “empirical.”
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April 9, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Climate and Weather, Saving Forests
