SOS Forests

The Genesis of Old-Growth Forests, Part 3

Part 3 — Restoring Old-Growth Forests

Most North American forests arose during millennia of frequent, human-set fires, i.e. anthropogenic fire. For millennia, anthropogenic fires were so frequent that they engendered open, park-like forests wherein individual trees grew to great ages.

During the last 150 years (more than that in eastern regions) anthropogenic fire has been eliminated (along with most of the humans who set them). The absence of anthropogenic fire has allowed our forests to accumulate an abundance of fuel in the form of young trees, duff, debris, litter, dead trees, etc.

When fires enter modern forests, they combust hugely and decimate the forests. Vast tracts formerly covered with trees are converted to brushfields because the intense heat, fueled by extreme fuel accumulations, kills everything–heritage old growth trees included.

Stand-replacement fire is not the historical development pathway that led to our old-growth forests. Old-growth forests of today are strongly multi-cohort, and the older trees arose under a different ecological pathway, one of regular, frequent, seasonal anthropogenic fire.

Formerly forests were open and park-like with widely spaced trees. Because frequent, light-burning fires in open, park-like forests did not kill all the trees, individual trees lived for incredibly long lifespans. Those conditions gave rise to ancient trees. Modern forest conditions preclude the opportunity for trees to attain great ages.

To save our old-growth, and to restore the development pathways that lead to old trees, we must also restore the appropriate forest conditions and disturbances.
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The Genesis of Old-Growth Forests, Part 2

Part 2 — Open, Park-like Forests

Throughout the Holocene human beings have significantly altered Western Hemisphere landscapes in purposeful ways; i.e., people burned the land to make it human-friendly, generally-speaking. Frequent, regular, seasonal, fire aided hunting, gathering, agriculture, and other human endeavors.

Evidence of frequent fire can be seen in fire scars and the structure and composition of old-growth forests of today. Most are dense thickets of mostly young trees with a a few emergent old-growth trees, but 150 years ago they were open and park-like forests. Forests stands can be backdated by counting rings and compiling age distributions. Extensive evidence indicates that 150 to 200 years ago in forests across the western US there were only 5 to 20 ancient and giant trees per acre, of different ages, widely-spaced, crowns not touching, except in occasional groupings, trees otherwise often singular and separated by 40 or 50 feet or more from their nearest neighbors. The understory was grassy, nearly devoid of shrubs, although small pockets of low-growing bushes and younger trees appeared here and there.

The old forests were not a continuous blanket across the landscape. Indeed, ancients forests occurred in widely dispersed pockets, more like islands of trees in an ocean of praire. Even in the cool, moist Pacific Northwest, forests were fragmented. Treed areas were found along streams in dendritic (finger-like) patterns. In between were grassy slopes, vast berry fields, and veldts with wild food crops, such as tarweed (Madia) tracts, bracken fern brakes, and camas meadows.

Early Euro-American explorers reported this same open, park-like condition in forests from Mexico to Canada, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. Western pioneers spoke of forests so clear of brush and thickets that they could drive wagons for miles through avenues of towering trees.

The structure of open, park-like forests (OPLF’s) was similar across much of western North America, but the species composition varied. That is, regardless of tree species, forests were open with tall, widely-spaced trees and grasses or prairie type-plants underneath. Pre-Columbian forests were more savanna-like, except in fire refugia.
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The Genesis of Old-Growth Forests, Part 1

Iain Murray, the author of the preceding post, is not a forester or forest scientist. Yet his understanding of the development of our American forests is remarkably cogent and perceptive:

With wildfires burning, it is useful to turn to the wisdom of the ancients. When the pioneers first entered the great forests of America, they found that the Native Americans had managed the forests for centuries. Their woodlands contained very few big trees—maybe fifty such trees per acre.

Apparently the Indians had set regular, low intensity fires which burned away accumulations of undergrowth, deadwood, dying trees and particularly small trees growing between the big trees. The larger trees were unharmed, because of their thick fire-resistant bark.

That in a nut shell is the way our old-growth forests developed. Frequent anthropogenic fire gave rise to open, park-like forests, largely uneven-aged at large-area scales. Forest scientists refer to such trees as “older cohort” because they are quite different than the even-aged thickets of trees (younger cohort) that arose following elimination of anthropogenic fire (aka “Indian burning”).

True old-growth forests contain older cohort trees. Those trees are remnants of the the former open, park-like forests that covered much of forested North America, and they may also be viewed as relics of our ancient culturally-modified landscapes.

In this 3-part series, I discuss in greater detail how our old-growth forests came to be here. The issue is important, because we must understand how old-growth forests arose in order to protect, maintain, and perpetuate them. If we value old-growth, and that seems to be a widely-shared value, then it is vital to understand their development.

Part 1 — Historical Forest Development Pathways

Fifteen thousand years ago the Wisconsin Glaciation reached its maximum extent. Continental ice sheets and tundra covered much of North America. The forests of today did not exist at that time, except in refugia in southern regions, coastal strips, and isolated mountain tops. Most of the acres covered by forest today were not forests 15,000 years ago.

Then, in accord with variations in the Earth’s orbit known as Milankovich Cycles, the planet warmed and the ice retreated. Over time, forests developed where they did not exist before (at least not for the previous 100,000 years or so). The progressions of vegetation change (from ice/tundra to forest) that actually occurred are called the historical forest development pathways.

Historical forest development pathways are not theoretical; they are the actual changes in vegetation types and species that actually occurred in actual landscapes. Since we have no time machines, we must reconstruct and deduce historical forest development pathways from empirical evidence of the past.
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Treehuggers against trees

by Iain Murray

This guest article is adapted from Chapter Four of “The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Won’t Tell You About - Because They Helped Cause Them,” published by Regnery [here]. Iain Murray also writes regularly at www.openmarket.org.

With wildfires burning, it is useful to turn to the wisdom of the ancients. When the pioneers first entered the great forests of America, they found that the Native Americans had managed the forests for centuries. Their woodlands contained very few big trees—maybe fifty such trees per acre.

Apparently the Indians had set regular, low intensity fires which burned away accumulations of undergrowth, deadwood, dying trees and particularly small trees growing between the big trees. The larger trees were unharmed, because of their thick fire-resistant bark. These fires kept the forest healthy by providing a barrier to disease.

The pioneers, however, used much more wood in their civilization than the Native Americans. They needed it for housing, for boats and river ships, for railroad sleepers, for carriages, and for town infrastructure.

To them, fire was an enemy. Quick growth of new trees was important. Policies were put in place that suppressed all fire. This culminated in the creation of Smokey Bear in 1945. Three years later, his catchphrase was born: “Remember — only you can prevent forest fires.”

The price was a degradation of the health of American forests. Private logging firms continued to keep forests healthy where they operated, by clearing out the underbrush and deadwood and harvesting trees to clear spaces between other trees. Where loggers did not operate, undergrowth and deadwood began to accumulate.

These are dangerous, because small trees, for example, provide ladders for the fire to climb to reach the crown of mature trees, where the fires can take hold instead of being shrugged off by the thick bark below.

Meanwhile, more and more land came to be controlled by the federal government, and therefore came under the control of an under-funded bureaucracy.

In the 1970s, the birth of the environmental movement made American forest policies worse. Environmentalists are dogmatically opposed to man’s interference with nature. They objected to the “unnatural” control of forest fires created by natural means—by lightning strike, for example.

A new policy replaced the previous one of suppression of all fires. Natural fires were to be allowed to burn until they burned themselves out - a return to a natural cycle of death and regrowth. One environmental activist put it succinctly: “Save a forest; let it burn.”

Environmental dogma combined with bureaucratic collectivism to create disaster.

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Collaborating With the Enemy

US Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell has been collaborating with the Wilderness Society in order to undermine and sabotage the USFS and to incinerate America’s public forests. Kimbell’s subversive actions are not secret but overt and arrogant, and the rank-and-file of the agency are well-aware of it.

While the field operations of the Outfit (as the USFS is fondly referred to by dedicated life-long employees) have been severely constrained by forced adherence to Byzantine environmental laws, NEPA processes, and endless planning, Gail Kimbell has ordered Let It Burn fires, at the behest of the Wilderness Society, with no planning, no NEPA, and no adherence to any environmental laws or regulations.

Case in point: after eight years of a planning exercise called the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment [here], one that involved thousands of people, hundreds of meeting, and tens of thousands of documents, studies, reviews, rehashes, monitoring, and re-monitoring, a Federal judge last week enjoined a fire-preventative thinning created under SNFPA guidance with the judgment that the planning was not “rigorous” enough to satisfy him [here].

That suit was brought by the Wilderness Society, and in effect destroyed eight years of effort by USFS employees to comply with the law.

Yet the Wilderness Society sits on the highest planning body of the USFS, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, and has ordered, via Gail Kimbell, the USFS to conduct Let It Burn fires (termed Wildland Fire Use fires of WFU’s) with no planning, no hearings, no studies, no NEPA process, and no adherence to any U.S. environmental law, such as the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, or the Clean Water Act.

The Wilderness Society had every opportunity to participate in the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan planning exercise. That was an open process with public hearings and public involvement every step of the way. Indeed, the Wilderness Society was invited and even begged to participate, to become part of the process, to meet with local residents, to resolve differences in an amicable and collaborative fashion.

Instead the Wilderness Society chose to shun that process and instead to sue to kill it, in concert with the Sierra Club, the Center For Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign (who recently changed their name to Sierra Forest Legacy in a marketing/branding move).

The Wilderness Society conspired to sabotage the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan, not only in cahoots with other so-called “environmental” groups, but with the blessing and assistance of USFS Chief Gail Kimbell.
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Half of All Oregon GHG Emissions Come From Forest Fires

Half of all Oregon greenhouse gas emissions in 2007 came from forest fires. This information was revealed Thursday, May 15, at a Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) meeting in Portland.

The meeting was a public hearing held to gather comments regarding Governor Kulongoski’s proposed Greenhouse Gas Mandatory Reporting Rules now under consideration by the Environmental Quality Commission (EQC), the board that oversees the DEQ.

The DEQ began the meeting by presenting a pie chart and a graph that indicated total GHG emissions in 2005 were 62 million tons (U.S.). The pie chart broke those emissions down by the following sectors: Transportation (34%), Waste (3%), Residential (17%), Commercial (14%), Industrial (25%), and Agriculture (14%). No forest sector was listed.

Then Mike Dubrasich, Executive Director of the Western Institute for Study of the Environment headquartered in Lebanon, OR, presented an analysis of GHG emissions from forest fires. According to Mr. Dubrasich (that’s me), in 2007 approximately 56 teragrams of GHG’s (principally CO2) were emitted by the 750,000 mostly forested acres burned last year in the state. One teragram equals 1.1023 millions tons (U.S.), so after conversion 61.7 million tons of GHGs are estimated to have been released by fires.

Mr. Dubrasich (me) told the DEQ, “You are missing an entire pie!”
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The Wilderness Society Wants to Incinerate Your Forests

Let us connect the dots. Pay attention now. I will do this carefully and slowly, because I don’t want your brain to explode.

The Wilderness Society lives in Washington DC. They are a corporation. They have assets: in 2006 they reported assets of $54,000,000. They have income: in 2006 they reported revenues of $37,000,000. They have a president. His name is William H. Meadows. They have members, because they are a kind of club. TWS (that’s their pet nickname for The Wilderness Society) claims 300,000 members.

TWS is what is generally known as a “special interest group.” They have special interests. They lobby Congress. They get involved in elections. They sue people, especially the Federal Government. They also sit on important boards and commissions.

We mentioned one of their lawsuits two posts ago. TWS sued the US Forest Service, specifically the Plumas national Forest, for an “improper” SEIS, which is the acronym for Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.

It seems the Plumas NF wanted to thin some forests, to make those forests less likely to burn up in catastrophic forest fires. They called that proposed thinning “creating Defensible Fuel Profile Zones” which are areas approximately 1/4 to 1/2 mile wide where fuel loadings are reduced, usually along roads. In order to do the thinnings properly and legally, the Plumas NF first did a plan and analysis, called an SEIS (see previous paragraph).

That involved making a plan, evaluating it, and presenting it to the public for the public’s input. It was all very “by the book.” The Plumas NF followed all the laws, such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Environmental Planning Act (NEPA), and even one you may not have heard of, the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act. In the HFQLGFRA the U.S. Congress directed the Plumas NF to do exactly the the kind of forest thinnings they laid out.

That’s how closely the Plumas NF followed the law; they were told by Congress (and President Bill Clinton, who signed the HFQLGFRA) that they MUST do these thinnings and so they did, or tried to anyway.

But the Wilderness Society (TWS, remember them? see the beginning of this essay) did not like all that. TWS is very stuffy about the law. They felt that, somehow, the laws was not being followed just right, so they sued. TWS sued in Federal Court, but they lost at the trial level, so they appealed. TWS’s appeal was accepted by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, and last week that court ruled in favor of TWS [here].
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Incinerating California Judiciously

The lamebrained leftwing arsonist judges on the 9th Circuit Court have done it again. This week they issued an “opinion” that enjoined the USFS Plumas National Forest from implementing pilot thinning projects called for in the 1998 Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act.

The Plumas proposed thinning thicket forests overloaded fuels and crowded trees to create DFPZ’s (Defensible Fuel Profile Zones: areas approximately 1/4 to 1/2 mile wide where fuel loadings are reduced, usually along roads) that would have saved hundreds of thousands of acres of Sierra forest from catastrophic fire  [here].

Last October, Judge Morrison C. England of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California issued a written judgment denying the injunctions demanded by a coalition of environmental groups led by Sierra Forest Legacy, formerly known as Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign. Others in the coalition are the Center For Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society.

The Plaintiffs sought a preliminary injunction on grounds that the Slapjack, Basin and Empire Projects risked irreparable harm to old forest habitat and imperiled wildlife including California spotted owls, Pacific fishers and American martens. However, no fishers or martens have been seen within 200 miles of any of the project areas during the last 40 years.

The Projects are forest thinnings in the Wildland-Urban Interface, that most dangerous of fire zones. The Empire Project will treat 2,500 acres immediately adjacent to five communities at risk: Quincy, Massack, Greenhorn, Keddie and Butterfly Valley. The 35,00 acre Slapjack Project is near the communities of Brownsville, Challenge, Clipper Mills, Dobbins, Feather Fall, Forbestown, and Strawberry Valley, which collectively are home to between 5,000 and 7,0000 people. The Basin Project is 1,300 acres of similar selective thinning.
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California Forests Are Being Converted to Tick Brush

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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Flawed Plan, Flawed Article, But We Clarify and Polish Our Apple

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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Incinerating the Bitterroot

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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News Droppings

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 …

The Forest Incineration Conspiracy

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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Ninth Circuit Rules Against Burned-Out Homeowners

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.

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The USFS Is Fundamentally Racist

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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