Guest Column
Wallow Fire Reporting Misleading
Lessons from the largest fire in recent Arizona historyBy George Wuerthner, 6-21-11
A mosaic typical of many fires. USFS Apache Sitgreaves National Forest.
The Wallow Fire is now the largest in recent Arizona history, encompassing more than 500,000 acres. The media discussion of the fire often leads to misinformation and misunderstanding of wildfires, and feeds the political agenda of politicians, and industries from developers to the timber industry.
One of the problems of media coverage is that most reporters have little or no training in ecology, much less in-depth understanding of wildfire ecology. Context for large blazes like the Wallow Fire are often missing from reportage. The emphasis on fuels makes for easy reportage, but misses some important nuances that lead to simplistic solutions—the common refrain that if we only logged more of the forest such fires would be prevented.
It also tends to reinforce the idea that thinning is needed in all forest ecosystems, when in fact, many fire regimes in higher elevations and more northern locations are more or less still within historic norms.
Furthermore, there is a tendency to focus on the most unfortunate losses which can exaggerate the perception that such fires have done a lot of “damage” to people, seldom holding people accountable for their own losses because they have chosen to build in a fire-prone landscape.
First, large wildfires do not just happen. Media attention on fuels as the driving force in large blazes like the Wallow Fire misses an important and critical factor—fire climate/weather conditions. You can have all the fuels in the world, but if the conditions are not right for fire spread, you won’t get a large blaze.
Climatic/weather conditions are driving the Wallow Fire. The Southwest is experiencing what is described as a 500 year drought. We have not seen such dry conditions in centuries. Is it not surprising that wildfires are larger than in the recent past—when the climatic conditions have no analogy in the recent past?
Contributing to the large blazes are extreme fire weather conditions. Humidity is often 10% or less. Even green trees in the region are drier than kiln-dried lumber. Such green trees still laden with flammable resins and fine fuels in the form of needles and small branches are actually more flammable than dead trees.
The other major ingredient in the Wallow Fire and all large blazes is wind. Every increase in wind is not linear but exponential. A 20 mph wind doesn’t just double fire spread over a 10 mph but it can quadruple spread or more by throwing fire brands and sparks far beyond the fire perimeter. Winds in the Wallow Fire area have gusted to 40-50 mph, fanning rapid fire spread.
Another common reporting problem is the focus on the outer perimeter of the fire. The Wallow Fire has burned an outer perimeter of more than 500,000 acres; however, a significant amount of the land has not burned at all. There are many areas with a nice mosaic of burned and unburned forests.
And fire-fighting efforts themselves also contribute to the large acreage of the fires. Fire fighters, especially under dangerous and severe fire weather, do not attack wildfires head-on. Rather they use fire to fight fire, purposely setting blazes far from the fire front to burn out the fuels, and thus slow fire spread or to keep fires from burning homes and towns.
I do not know how many acres of back fires were set in the Wallow Fire, but in other large blazes across the West, as much as one third of the forest area burned is a direct consequence of fire fighting efforts, thus adding to the large acreage reported. Without acknowledging the contribution of fire fighting to total acres, the public gets an exaggerated view of the fire’s severity.
Another factor contributing to the fire’s large size and cost is the presence of homes in the Wildlands Interface. Across the West, perhaps the biggest factor contributing to increasing fire-fighting costs and also risk to fire fighters is the irresponsible actions of county commissioners and others who regularly approve home construction in the “fire plain”. In far too many instances, rural county commissioners promote home construction in fire-prone landscapes.
The fire plain is like the flood plain of a river. Sooner or later there will be fire in such areas—permitting home construction in such fire-prone landscapes costs all taxpayers who shoulder the costs of fire protection. This is a huge subsidy to these home owners. Ironically, in many cases, those who are demanding that the public pay for fire protection and/or forest thinning projects are the same ones who oppose any reasonable limitations on home construction in fire prone landscapes and frequently complain about excess taxes and government regulation. But they are the first with their hands out when they demand compensation if their homes are burned and are most vocal in their criticism of fire fighters for not protecting their property.
Finally there is the fuel issue. Historically, frequent low intensity fires burned through grassy understory of ponderosa pine forests killing tree seedlings and created open, park-like stands in some areas. It’s important to note that even in the past, not all ponderosa pine stands were “park-like”, nor were all blazes necessarily low intensity. Under extreme climatic conditions, large blazes did occur. So whether a fire like the Wallow Fire is really out of the historic norm depends on the spatial and temporal scale one is considering. A 500 year drought is not the recent historic condition. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that human activities have exacerbated the present conditions that have led to a greater abundance of dense forest stands.
There is general agreement that many ponderosa pine forests in the Southwest exceed historic tree densities. However, the ponderosa pine forests burned by the Wallow Fire are not hugely out of historic range of viability compared to other parts of Arizona. Eastern Arizona contains the largest percentages of mature/old growth ponderosa pine.
Furthermore, some of the higher elevation areas are cloaked in spruce and fir forests which tend to burn in stand replacement blazes and are well within historic conditions.
Thinning forests to reduce forest density can sometimes work to reduce the intensity of blazes and slow the spread of fires. However, we should recognize that we are treating the symptoms, instead of the ultimate cause of changes in forest density and composition.
One of the most important factors has been livestock grazing. Grazing has eliminated the fine fuels or grass cover that once dominated the forest floor in many low elevation forest types across the Southwest. These grasses regularly burned killing tree seedlings.
Trampling by hooves has disrupted soil crusts which in the past helped to reduce soil erosion, the loss of moisture, added nutrients to the soils, and prevented germination of annual species like cheatgrass.
The loss of grass cover and soil crusts by livestock grazing has also reduced the competition for water by tree seedlings, creating more favorable germination and growth condition for trees.
Despite the well known effects of grazing on fire regimes in this landscape, federal and state agencies allow livestock grazing to continue, contributing to the exact same conditions that have led to the dense tree stands.
Adding to the problem has been past logging of old growth pine. Large pines with their thick bark and self pruning loss of lower branches were more resistant to fires and less likely to “crown” out as blazes running through the tree tops. Loss of the larger pines has permitted many smaller trees to survive on the sites, leading to denser forest stands. However, the forest area burned by the Wallow Fire is probably closer to historic conditions than areas nearer Flagstaff where large mills eliminated nearly all the old growth forests.
Compounding the effects that grazing and logging has had on forests, is the on-going policy of fire exclusion. Despite the well known influence of wildfire on thinning ponderosa pine forests, public agencies seldom permit wildfires to burn unimpeded. The good thing about the Wallow and other large blazes is that it is resetting the forest landscape, removing dense tree stands. However, if agencies like the Forest Service continue to suppress fires, and allow livestock grazing, it will ultimately lead to the same dense tree conditions again.
Livestock grazing along with logging and road building has allow exotic weeds to spread throughout these forests. Many of these exotic species are more flammable than the native species they have replaced.
Thinning forests as proposed as a “cure” to the present forest situation may contribute more flammable forests in the future, especially if the on-going activities including livestock grazing, fire suppression, ORV use, and logging continue.
Those who are looking for simplistic answers often support thinning of these forests as a panacea for large blazes. Thinning near towns can contribute to more effective protection of communities. By reducing fuels near towns, one can deflect, slow, and sometimes even stop blazes. But that assumes that you can focus a lot of fire fighting man-power on the fire lines near communities.
However, widespread thinning, especially if it involves removal of larger trees, is not benign and the consequences of logging may be worse for forest ecosystems than anything that results from a large blaze. For instance, if logging requires new roads, it greatly increases the negative effects. Roads create access for people for hunting, trapping, and reduce the security cover for wildlife. Logging roads are also a major source of sedimentation in streams. There is sedimentation after a fire as well, but in most areas, sedimentation levels return to pre-fire levels within a few years, while roads “leak” sediments for decades. Logging can remove biomass from the forest, reducing the future occurrence of rotten logs and snags that are important to many wildlife species. As previously mentioned, disturbance of soils by logging equipment and road building can spread exotic weeds. Unless all these negative impacts are considered in thinning plans, one can’t determine whether logging will have a positive overall influence upon forest ecosystems or perhaps negative.
George Wuerthner’s New West blog is ”On the Range.”
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When will the nightmare of "passive restoration" end?!?!? It seems that the eco-community is deathly afraid of actions to reduce wildfires ignitions, spread and intensities. They are also afraid of "traitors" who come to realize that preservation doesn't lead to "protection".
No matter how much you write, all it's going to take is one mortality map, or one picture, to blow your rhetoric away.
I'll ditto Foto on the bugs. Saw that happen on the East Fork as the bugs flew down from the burn area, turned the whole canyon red within two years, was it?
Never mind how the bugs from Diamond Park blowdown went nuts leading to conditions for that big burn across the Zirkels into the North Park.
I am not interested in protecting forests from bugs or fires. That's like trying to protect a river from floods or coastal areas from hurricanes.
That mindset is definitely rejected by most Americans today, preferring big green trees, rich wildlife inventories and undying landscapes. It has been proven that active forest management is better at restoration than doing nothing, especially in the case of crowded and unhealthy ponderosa pine forests. Sure, go ahead and "preserve" dead Wilderness forests of pure lodgepole.
<a >recuperacion de datos</a>
The mind set that humans know how to fix things is how we got into the current predicament.
The dense stands of ponderosa pine are a consequence of previous management activities including livestock grazing, logging, and fire suppression. All of these activities are on-going. We will never get out of this predicament by doing the same old things over and over.
The first step in intelligent tinkering is to stop doing what caused the problem. If you have a headache from hitting yourself with a hammer, a smart first step is to stop pounding yourself with the hammer. Then we can talk about where to go from there.
So, we should block the future because we blame the past? Just how much logging went on last year in the Wallow Firestorm area?!? How many lumber mills are even left in Arizona?!? I place my trust in Dr. Stephen Pyne, who advocates the right treatments for the right pieces of land. His enlightened comments on the Wallow Fire say that it didn't have to burn. The narrow-minded thought that doing nothing will fix our forests is ludicrous. I'm not saying that we should go back to the last millennium's mistakes but, I AM saying that we cannot preserve away these unnatural forests without massive impacts to our human existence. It's all too easy to blame the past without any valid solutions of your own.
Including an ACTUAL picture of thinned stands that survived the Wallow Firestorm. We can ignore the forest conditions you talk about, George, and let more Wallow Firestorms burn. Or, we can work to reduce the fuels that turn lightning strikes, arson fires and escaped campfires into the more than $200,000,000 disasters you seem to embrace. We have spent close to $500,000,000 according to NIFC this year. Fire totals are over 7 million acres this year, far ahead of the modern record pace. However, it is less about sheer acreage than it is about fire intensity.
There are three things wrong with your assumptions.
The first is that it would be impossible to thin the entire forest--or even a significant amount of it. The FS is doing the best it can do under the circumstances, which is to thin around communities so they can be defended.
Keep in mind that thinning is not a "one time" thing--especially as long as we continue to suppress fires, allow livestock grazing, etc. Trees grow back--and within 10-15 years in many areas--and the resulting forests will have a high stocking rate of young trees--providing the small fuels that allow fires to run through the woods. Long before you can thin an entire forest, you need to go back and thin the areas you first thinned. And the costs mount with each repetition. One has to be strategic about thinning since it's impossible to treat an entire forest.
Second, even with thinning, fires burn through the forest. In fact, there is no scientific agreement about the effectiveness of thinning. Of course, there are all kinds of prescriptions on thinning and differences in age since the last time a forest was thinned, etc. that makes comparisons difficult.
Nevertheless, in some places, under some circumstances, thinning does appear to do what proponents suggest--it appears to slow fires. However there are plenty of places where fires just blast right through thinned forests--and in some fires even seem to burn with greater intensity.
For instance, on the Biscuit Fire in Oregon (Oregon's biggest fire) thinned forest and previously logged forests had the highest mortality. Thinning can sometimes actually increase fire spread because it opens the forest to greater wind penetration, and drying of the fuels.
You are not thinking about the extraordinary weather/climate circumstances that are causing these large fires. While it's possible to defend a targeted area like the edge of a community with a lot of fire fighting equipment, etc. it is impossible to stop a fire when the wind, humidity and drought are combined. That's a fallacy. The best you can do is deflect the fire.
Third, as long as governments allow people to continue building in the fire plain, the situation will only get worse. The high costs of suppression are primarily due to the increasing costs of defending buildings in the hinterlands. Unless county commissioners, state agencies, etc. start to restrict construction in such areas and/or start to require insurance to pay for fire protection much as flood insurance is a requirement for those living in flood plains, than the rest of us are paying for the poor decisions of those who want to live out in the woods.
You want to talk about high costs of suppression, start complaining to county commissioners who are allowing people to build in the fire plain and expect the rest of us to pay for their fire protection costs, including thinning the forest.
In many areas, projects could, indeed, be a "one time thing". After an initial reduction of live and dead fuels, prescribed and "natural" fire can do the rest, both ecologically AND economically well. When we get to that sustainable state, yes we CAN treat significant areas of our forests.
With site-specific science, we can choose one of many tools in a forester's toolbox to reach the desired conditions. And, yes, one tool is to just let the land be, if that is what the science says. When there are too many trees per acre for the annual precipitation, densities MUST be reduced. Where species compositions are out of balance with the historical baseline, we can selectively thin to get more balance. Fuels reduction projects also reduce fire intensities, as you can see in the Wallow Firestorm picture released by the Forest Service.
I worked for 3 weeks on the Biscuit Fire salvage sales, and I saw some stands that were unlogged old growth with 99% mortality. Also contributing heavily to the extreme fire behavior on the Biscuit is the unsalvaged portion of the 1987 Silver Fire. Re-burns are significant dangers, causing longterm soils damage and accelerated erosion, due to heavy fuels close to the ground. Also impacting the Biscuit Fire is an increase in post-fire bark beetle mortality. They chose to cut only completely dead trees, and leaving the trees dying (but not dead yet) from bark beetles. I saw a photo of a cutting unit I worked in and was amazed at how many more trees died since I was there. The bark beetles didn't stop at the USFS property line, either. The fireline was very close to the property line, and the private land was riddled with bug trees.
Thinning stands back to historical densities and species compositions should offer no problem with increased fire behavior. Where I live, unthinned forests have structurally-weakened trees in them, due to less wind. This last heavy winter has resulted in a bumper crop of broken-topped trees over a very wide area.
The Biscuit Fire was "caused" by letting a lightning strike burn. With so many human-caused fires, why preserved overstocked and unhealthy forests? Do we select which kinds of fires get to burn unimpeded? There is a tiny window of decision, when a wildfire is small, to decide whether to let a fire burn, or to go with full suppression. The Feds have their "Let-Burn" program, which doesn't follow required NEPA. This program is turning $3000 lightning fires into $50,000,000 fire storms. In Utah, they let a fire burn for weeks, until the winds came up and the escaped fire covered 12 miles to the doorstep of New Harmony. Take a look at the fire costs for individual fires this year. Blaming people for where they live is ridiculous. Many people have lived in the woods for decades. I have Forest Service land right across the street from me, and it could use a prescribed fire. Sadly, from a liability point of view, the Forest Service would rather let fires burn during hot and dry conditions, rather than lighting a prescribed fire. Private landowners can sue if a prescribed fire gets away. If a Let-Burn fire gets away, landowners are screwed, and have no recourse in court.
I do agree with you that zoning has to be smarter. However, you cannot tell an existing resident to move. In the example of Lake Tahoe's Angora Fire, the Forest Service didn't do enough to protect a long-existing subdivision next to unhealthy Forest Service lands. The brushlands of the LA Basin are a good example of where not to allow homes, unless you want to provide your own fire protection.
It's all about appropriate action, and I feel that important parts of our existing forests are worth saving from catastrophic wildfires. You seem to believe differently.
Thinning if it is kept up and is used to buffer places like communities and other important areas can work--at least with a lot of fire fighting power behind them. That is strategic use of thinning.
But timing of thinning (when was the last time it was thinned and subsequent treatment--has there been follow up prescribed burns) greatly influences the effectiveness of these treatments as I suspect you know.
If you just finished thinning and burned the area just prior to the fire, you get a lot more effective results. But we are not going to ever have the money nor the resources to treat all the forests. And I am not trying to make a strawman here. Many do advocate treating millions of acres, and as I pointed out, by the time you finish treating one area of a forest, you need to go back and repeat the treatments, and the job multiples.
Plus there are a lot of negatives that come with logging. I might wager, for instance, that introduction of weeds by logging equipment may well have far greater repercussions for forest ecosystems than if they burn up in a fire. And weed introduction is only one of many typically ignored or downplayed costs often associated with thinning operations. Sure one can point to places that have burned and where there are weeds as well, especially if there are livestock in the area, but in general, the more human activity the greater the chance of weed invasion.
Weeds are only one of many negatives associated with thinning operations.
Furthermore, I think thinning advocates are exaggerating the effectiveness of such activities, especially under severe fire conditions.Sure thinning may stop or slow a fire under "normal" weather conditions. But under "normal" weather conditions, you don't get 500,000 acre fires.
I have seen many thinned forest stands, even clearcuts, that were cooked in fires under severe fire conditions. And since these large fires are the only fires we are typically worried about it, it is an important question. And it's a question that is difficult to study scientifically.
Thinning may also be dangerous in that it may foster even more construction in the rural landscape because it could give people a false sense of security.
By analogy thinning may be like the levees that burst in New Orleans. Those levees had held back floods for decades. So everyone assumed they worked. But there was never a direct hit by a category five hurricane until Katrina. Then we discovered that the levees didn't work. Many thinning operations are like that. They may work under "normal" conditions. But put the ecological equivalent of a category five hurricane (big wildfire) and many of these thinning projects fail.
Who is going to set a fire in controlled plots with a 500 year drought, 50 mph wind, and 10% humidity to see whether the thinned plots fared better than the unthinned stands. The best we can do is visit and look at fires that have occurred and see how they have burned through lands that for one reason or another were previously treated. Assuming that all other factors are equal like topography, wind, and so on. When you do that, you find many failures in thinning projects to stop or even slow fires.
The response one gets from thinning proponents is that we just need to thin more. But it's reasonable to ask whether there will ever be enough thinning to really be effective--under those severe fire conditions.
There is also a sense I get from many that somehow eliminating these large fires is desirable. I am not so sure we would want to do that. The vast majority of all acreage in any single year is a result of few large fires. If you remove the large fires, you get very little fire "work" being performed. Most fires do not burn very much land. It is the large fires--the ones that everyone wants to eliminate--that does all the work.
If as many agree that wildfires are critical to many ecosystems. Many things occur in the severe fires that does not occur in the moderate fires.
As for homes in the woods, sure we can try to protect some of those homes, but maybe it's time to say to folks, you build in the woods, you need to get insurance. And we surely should not allow them to rebuild in such places.
Will the Wallow Firestorm be a giant legacy to our offspring? How severe will the floods and erosion be, when the monsoon comes? When will evacuated communities be allowed to return home? Many, many more questions need answers and our government doesn't have many answers, right now. In the meantime, it is "Burn, Baby, Burn"!!!
Look, Steve is still very much alive, still has a very vigorous and active mind, and has computers, with web connections, in his office and at home. If you are so certain of your positions that you feel no hesitation about speaking for a living authority on his own topic of expertise, then why not contact Steve and see whether he might be willing to post his own comments endorsing you as his spokesman and supporting your positions? Please, contact Steve; we would all like to see Steve write a quick column here in which he speaks for himself, supporting you and the wisdom of your continuous, cyclical, industrial harvest mindset.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/2011/06/11/20110611pyne-wallow-fire-monster.html
Nowhere did I advocate continuous harvesting, and nowhere have I pushed for using thinning in every nook and cranny on every Forest. Over and over I keep saying that site-specific science and rural sociology (as in fire safety for towns) should decide what to do with a particular piece of Federal land. Once forests are restored to more natural conditions and fuels loadings, it might be a long time before there is another timber sale there. Nothing about "continuous, cyclical, industrial harvest".
Read the piece and tell me what you think. I am 100% behind Pyne's commentary.
But that's "good" because it makes the owl more endangered and longer to recovery, if ever.
Now we are looking at flooding come monsoon season. That should be a pretty time.
The Wallow is an environmental disaster of epic proportions, thanks in large part to lack of prescriptive management. Sure, the whole thing might not have been fireproofed, but forestry belts and routine management over time (which George opposes) would manage fuels and preserve the vegetative attributes that create habitat. Managing break belts with fiscally-self-supporting timber harvest and processing operations would without a doubt have broken up a 700,000 acre fire into what, 50,000 acres?
I don't know how many times I've seen the results of a crown fire running up into a managed unit and either stopping or at least hitting the ground for a beneficial underburn.
It's one of those he said, she said kinds of things, but as many crown fires that you have seen run into a managed unit and stop, I've seen many that failed to stop or slow fires--under extraordinary circumstances that spawn the big fires.
Again we have to qualify the circumstances. Were the conditions extreme? Was the wind blowing? What was the humidity? What were the dominate species and age of trees are we discussing? What was the topography? What was the previous history of the area--when was the last major fire?
All those things affect what we see.
I'm sure that you log enough forests, over enough area you can make a big difference in fire spread--but is this really the only concern? Or are we going to also determine how many acres are allowed to burn under prescribed conditions--which never burn enough because we never do them except under conditions when fires are not likely to spread.
If wildfires have a beneficial role to play, and many ecologists at least suggest they do, than we need to accept that sometimes there will be large blazes because that is the only way you are going to influence enough acres to be effectiveness in terms of ecological function.
It is not unlike flooding on rivers. If we control rivers so they don't flood, than we lose any benefits that are associated with flooding, including regeneration of riparian species like cottonwood, etc. And it is the occasional and very rare large floods that do the majority of work on rivers.
The Obama Admin is adversarial, and the private side has its hands full. Why the left deems it right to continue to regulate and rule is beyond me. Here we are, up to our collective ass in a piss poor economy, and 50 legislatures and one Congress are writing up new bills daily, and the Feds are shoving more regulations and administrative rules our way daily. Folks!!! You are not going to create jobs that way. Sorry. And fighting huge wildfires because you have not done one whit of fuels management in three decades is reality. Weather can't burn dick. E. Brush.......And drought does not stop vegetation from growing. Trees grow or die. There is no backsliding. It is death or more wood every year. Fuels build up, accumulate, grow, and that is what is burning. Not weather. Not wind. Fuels. Fuels are what burns. I have pictures of a red retardant line across a sage flat from road to rimrock..the fire stopped there. One side is black and the other sage green. A red line separates them. I have pictures of how a fire burned against the wind to find fuel to run before the wind once more. It ran into a 10 year old plantation of lodgepole pine and zigged to find the zag of fuels. I have somewhere, pictures of where a crown fire fell to ground when it entered a kind of leave tree deal where "thinning" left less than a dozen leave trees per acre. "Shelterwood" is what they called those. A clear cut in practical sense, but with a lot of leave trees for seeding and wildlife. Removing fuel by retardant use, fire line, water, cat trails, thinning, clear cuts, all works to stop fires. Not all fires. but most fires. You do something to mediate the potential for fire to take all that you have. Indians did just that for millennia. That brain finds a way to not have fire destroy all that you need for survival. Then and now. Unless, of course, you are working in public land management, in a country that is now over 95% urban, and every urban voter is an expert on land management: do nothing.
And "do nothing" appears to be the mantra of our society. We no longer do much. And the longer we don't do much, the less we can do. That is true for manufacturing, and it is true for land management. The USFS lost the institutional memory, the know how, and the people who had the "know how." So as we patiently wait for them to reinvent the wheel, and for the George's of the world to batter them with faux science, we get the American result: nothing. We do nothing, produce nothing, and according to the economists and financial wizards, we are in for at least another decade of job loss and no growth. We are Greece!!!! And where in Europe are the most wildland fires?? In Greece!!! More of that country has burned in the last decade than any other in Europe. Russia is not Europe. Or Yurp in South Dakota.
The fuel will burn. yesterday. now. tomorrow. But only a few days of the year, really. But weather is here 24/7/12/365. WE still have weather and no fires.
One could also say that cholera is "natural and beneficial", leading to less people and impacts upon the land. The idea that man is a cancer upon the earth should be applied to urban areas first, if that's the way you want to play it.
Of course, George, your ideas DO apply for some parts of our forests. When pure lodgepole forests burn, way up in Wilderness Areas, it's not worthwhile to bring in dozers, airtankers and handcrews. But you seem to advocate the end of "strategic" firefighting, to save human improvements and wildlife habitat, alike. Eco-groups feel that just a tree length is adequate for fire safety, regardless of forest type, density or condition. We've seen this recipe for disaster over and over and over. Sad that wildfire freedom trumps human safety.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110624/ap_on_sc/us_western_wildfires
Todd Shulke, of the radical enviro group Center for Biological diversity(CBD), has himself just endorsed and praised the postive effects on fire severity that "thinning" had on the fire behavior. The thinning was done under the "white mountain stewardship program", which his group has supported and endorsed. It has "thinned" 35,000 acres in the last 6 years. What do you think of his opinion George?
Unfortunately, the CBD shut down the timber industry in 1995. So that means Todd is responsible for 300,000 acres that DID NOT recieve the very thinning treatments he has just endorsed as effective(out of 800,000 acres of "conifer forest). I hope Todd baby is sitting alone in a dark room, late at night, big drink in hand, staring into the abyss, and has realized with horror that he is responsible for burning up 250,000 acres. We can't lie to ourselves for long. Big men leave big consequences behind them. Perhaps Todd will someday say "we were wrong, terribly wrong". That'll be the day.
So tell me George, Do you support the CBD's endorsement of thinning 50,000 acres/year in Arizona? Or are you more radical than the radical CBD. If it's good enough for Arizona, then why isn't it good enough for Montana?
Have you ever heard of the 1910 Woolsey inventory and how it compares to todays forest density? In 1910 there were only 13 trees/acre over 13". Today, after a hundred years of industrial logging, there is twice that many. There's also the same amount of "big trees". You did know that the "best available" science says that there were only 15-25 trees/acre (woolsey inventory-Covington et al). That's a tree every 50 feet. hell, that's called a "shelterwood seed cut" now. A shelterwood is slightly less than a clearcut. The Kootenai is full pof them after clearcutting was practically banned. Will you call for intensive logging to "restore" the forest to that density?? Can you handle the truth of the pre-settlement forest?
I always love the blah blah blah about "they logged all the big trees that were fireproof" (of course the woolsey inventory says there are still big trees). How can this be? You see, the 24" tree today was just a 12" tree a hundred years ago. And now there's tons of 12" trees that are a hundred years old.
I always love the blather about 100 years of fire suppresiion. As in "before white man come low intensity fires burned every ten years to this the forest". Which is true-but are you suggesting an alternative historical ending where man "wouldn't" have cut down those big trees and would have allowed fires to keep burning? Will you state here yes or no? I always love the utopian musings of enviro's where hate was just a legend and war was never known.
How would you support your lavish baby boomer lifestyle. Get the lumber from Canada. I would imagine most of the historic district in Flagstaff is built from "old growth" timber. The boomers use twice the per capita electricty and their homes have twice the sqaure foot as their fathers generation. I guess all the old hippies grew up to be Republicans.
It's gonna be a joy spending the next five years watching the radical enviro establishment crash and literally burn.
I feel you bro, but simmer down. You are going to burst something.
Blowing off steam is a good way to avoid a pop.
Nice riff, Logs.
The issue with public land management is that the Feds will manage it like their wars, their social welfare programs, their boondoggle public public works contracting, FEMA responses, K-12 education, and I could go on and on. We really should not expect anything out of their management, and therefore should not be disappointed or concerned with the outcomes.
I watched flooding, for the last year in these United States, raise hell with people all over the country. When you lose your home to a flood, no matter where or why, you lose your home and are devastated. Evidently, only in New Orleans or the Gulf Coast is worth hand wringing and national despair and indictment of Federal programs and interventions, and Republican flogging. Let it happen during a Democrat administration and nothing is reported about the poor people who lose it all. I don't see the outpouring of sympathy and concern for those hundreds of thousands of hard working residents of small rural towns and farms that have suffered in the floods this year, floods from too much winter snow and the responding snow melt with thunder storms on top of that water. Is it that middle class people not of color need to suffer damage to "make it right", or is it assumed middle class and poor white people have the means to build new lives without Federal assistance?? Whatever, the number and scope of disasters with weather this year have been biblical. And all a result of either a cold, wet winter, or the cold air from the Pacific coast colliding with the warm air of the Gulf. But it has been cold that has driven the process. Warmer and hotter mean little until colliding with cold and colder. And the monsoon will come to the desert Southwest, and the thunder storms will move north and west, and the fires will burn in other areas where the Feds have allowed fuels to build.
Today, the Feds announced their spotted owl plan to mitigate owl habitat losses caused by unfought fires destroying tens of millions of acres of owl habitat by declaring they will hold private land to higher standards of directed Federally mandated benign neglect. When the current path is not working out, just include more people and land in the equation and keep on doing the same thing. Best science. Oh, and a directed, intense, Federal extirpation of competing Barred Owls. Yep. Eugenics. Euthanasia. Holocaust for Barred Owls by official USFWS and US Govt decree. The Obama Government has become National Lampoon Liberal Administration and Animal House, all in one convenient package. The urbane version of Hee-Haw. Where is Mort Sahl when you need him?? Dennis Miller? Is the announced intent for barred owl genocide just a training session, as it were, for bigger and better things down the road?? Are Iowa Lutheran sunday school teachers on a list? People with the star and bars on the pickem up license holder going to be targeted? When a liberal Democrat elected and supported by people who don't want "under God" in the pledge of allegiance, signs off on killing one species of owl to protect another, all the while believing wolves should be able to eat cattle with impunity, you do wonder when they will round up for extirpation the Hells Angels or Dykes on Bikes. Liberals eliminate God from the lexicon, and then take on the role for themselves. Nice.
We live in interesting times. For a while longer, at least.
How's that urban arm chair preservation working for all you college library timber sale appealers?
George's "mosaic of unburned and burned" is good PR. Equate fire destruction with fine art, and Arabic tile work.
The reality is air quality is degraded, and is witnessed by satellite pictures on the evening news. The reality is that spotted owl habitat is destroyed, and there are concerns for the Mexican Grey Wolves and a plethora of species of concern. No concern can save them. Concern is vegetation management, robust fire prevention measures, and fast initial response unburdened by bureaucratic step up to top and then step down directives on what can and cannot happen on the ground. Pogoesque, at the least. We be da enemy!!! Unintended consequence. But NOT forecast long ago when the decision to morph the USFS and Interior into benign neglect monitors. Those agencies work in our forests like the U.N. works in bringing peace to the world. Show up, be seen, and the murder, rape and pillage goes on almost unabated, while disparate political forces wrangle over options and predicted or wished for results, all the while the damage mounts, and resources and people are destroyed. And the long ago naysayers were shouted down by the popular press, and their journalism school buddies at the NGOs.
America got what democracy and the tyranny of the urban majority wanted. So the forests burn. More and larger and the hand wringing is ongoing. Live with it, people. You got what the experts said would happen. You got what the people with lifetimes of experience said would happen. You got what history predicted. You are learning the lesson aboriginals learned 15,000 years ago, the hard way.
The government timeline for a career has past since forests were managed by educated foresters from university forestry school educational backgrounds, people with years of experience and expertise. There is no institutional memory, nor are there experienced personnel in Federal employment, to regain some sort of reasoned management of fuels, which is what a forest is about. Geology, water and vegetation, and the latter is fuels. Don't manage fuels and fire will do the work. Unfortunately, the time line for recovery is longer than human life times, and with climate changes and relic forests of age, what you get after the stand removal fires is not going to be what was there before the fire. Stand removal fires change micro climates, and most often not for the good or for the sustainability of what once was. Evidently, the armchair experts and poseurs of prose are not living with the results of fire, and don't have skin in the game. But the people with private assets destroyed by fire from public lands have all to lose, and tort limits on damage collection arising from negligent public land management decisions. On the other hand, if a fire from private land burns public resources, whose value is never assessed when the fire is on public land from a public land origin fire, then there are teams of US Attorneys assigned to prosecute in Federal Court damage claims against the private estate, with no limit on tort liability. In other words, there is little, if any, public financial responsibility when the public land fire burns your asset, and unlimited liability when your burn barrel fires public lands. It is in the private land owners best interests to NOT have public lands on fire. Only they can lose. Or at least that is how the system currently works. And it is even more critical that fire not start on private land near public lands, because the unlimited (unless there is no expansion of Federal borrowing) resources of the Feds will be unleashed on the private land owner, in Federal Court, with a politically appointed judge and Federally employed lawyers spending tax money to collect from you, represented by an attorney you are paying big bucks to.
So how is that Federal land management Change and Hope treating you today???
"Only WE can Preserve Wildfires!"
Fact is, there's an accepted definition for reporting the size of a fire, and that's what most journalists use. If you want to start a discussion about coming up with a new definition, I think that's a fine idea.
Ripping on journalists who report on fire as a public service is a different story.
There is a fire perimeter, which can be gps conjured by rolling a measuring device on a map, and then making a circle out of it and use pi and there you have the area of the fire. Sure, not everything inside the line is killed by the fire---yet. In some forest regimes, 90% of the burned through but still green needle trees will die in the next three years. And then the beetles will get the rest. That mosaic of "unburned" is fuel, and "mop up" will have "hot shots doing burn outs in fuel pockets inside the perimeter of the fire.." and who hasn't heard or read that fire report more than you ever want to???
Journalists, especially television, are into the nomex shirt and pants, and looking oh so helpful. Journalists are what they are, and come in a variety of grades and sizes, and truthfulness. The old adage about don't believe all you read is good advice.
The issue with journalists posting Govt press releases as news is that they are nothing more than a cog in the propaganda mill that our government has become. A politicized propaganda mill for the ruling party, and of the ruling party, for the ruling party members who are on the public payroll. Ugly deal, but just what we have become. The fire folks like fire, and fire is their business. As it now stands, the allies of fire and the fire budget are the crazies of the Green NGO lobby who WANT fire, and will take fire over logging any time and every time. But if there were to be a compiled account of economic loss, opportunity loss, species loss, and resource loss, and damage to the watersheds and atmosphere, it would not reflect on the ongoing project to burn our legacy and heritage forests as a "told you so" deal about how "bad man is" and "it is the greedy capitalists" who are at fault. The real issue is that vast economic dislocation and dire economic outcomes have become common and widespread, and there is a body of folks who want this fire crap stopped, yesterday. They know it is not about "climate change" and "global warming." It is about trees that grow every year, and seedlings that arise every year, and that drought does not stop trees from growing, but it does slow them down and it does kill the weakest, and that is all about fuel. Trees that are removed can't burn. Remove enough trees, and the remainder, the survivors, will have more water and do much better in droughty times, and be open crowned and spaced so that fire is not often apt to get into the crown and run. Instead, the fires moseys around on the forest floor, and does the house keeping, and the renewals, and life is great. Just like it was for 15,000 years under Native American management.
I read an ethnobotanical discussion of pinyon pine nut culture, and how it was incumbent upon nut gatherers to take a strong stick and whack off low lying dead limbs so that ground fire would be less able to climb into foliage and kill the trees, which, after all, were providing a significant food and key to survival as the nuts could be stored. You had to maintain your pinyon pines if you expected to get nuts every year. Concept!!! And at this time, not a part of USFS management and their lexicon of acronyms and words on speed dial. Managing your resource for use and dependable outputs on an annual basis. We have lost our way, these United States, and we really do have to find it in ourselves to reclaim our common sense and move ahead. Hard to do when so many are on the dole of public service, public retirement accounts, public distribution of collected taxes to others than who earned the money in the first place. I believe that is called socialism, and was not a part of what this country was supposed to end up like. The predicted end results of socialism are sloth, dependence, and failure, and what do really think the USFS and BLM have turned out to be??? Rudderless in a sea of destruction that Native Americans long ago lived with and learned to avoid by pro active decision making and actions. How flipping hard is that to understand?? We have screwed up the forests, and now they are being consumed and if you think that is good, don't bitch about the smoke, or the floods when the monsoon comes, and it will. The smoke is from the "plume", which is now known to be carrying away as much as an inch or more of top soil, and all the organic material in the top soil as well as several to many tons of nitrogen per acre. Hot fire is NOT a benign event. It is an earth changing event.
It would behoove some journalist somewhere to gain the knowledge to be able to responsibly and knowingly report on wildland fire. He or she would be the only one.
One of the biggest things that is forgotten in all of this is the amount of jobs that would be created in keeping these forests "thinned". Yea we would need to go back in every 10-15 years and rethin areas but that is the beauty of PROPER forest management.
A group wanted to build an OSB plant here in AZ, but it looks that will not happen since the USFS will not sign a 20 year contract to supply thin wood to feed the mill. Too bad for the people who would have had the jobs in one the worst recession we have ever seen, whether it was at the OSB plant or those who went out to thin the forest.
If all the liberal idiots would get out of the way, there would be no cost to thin the forests. A self sustaining business climate would be created whether it is thinned trees for the OSB plant. How about material for a the biomass power plant in Snowflake. What about material for the pellet mills here in AZ. You liberal eco's are always crying about sustainable carbon nuetral fuel sources. So what is the problem here? Or a small mill set up to process the small diameter logs for engineered glue laminate beams and pallet wood. And I can think of a whole host of other uses. But you liberal eco's loose sight of the big picture all to often and don't care about the repercussions of your actions
Cleaning up the forests like this would also reduce the need to log other areas and it would be an ongoing thing if managed right creating thousands of jobs in a very sustainable way.
The southern edge of the Wallow fire is 31.75 miles due north of my doorstep according to Google Earth. So I will be one of the ones dealing with the aftermath of way too many years of messed up forest management. So we are preparing for the Frisco River to run like a mudslide once the monsoons kick in. Too bad for the endangered spikedace and loach minnows on the river.
And on the subject of endangered species, if I do anything to harm or destroy habitat for them, I will go to jail. And considering that the endangered spotted owl likes open old growth forests and some eco groups have stopped thinning projects that would have helped out the owl, they need to be prosecuted for the purposeful destruction of endangered species.
After 14 years on a forest fire crew, I hung up my gear for the last time because I seen fires like this coming. These fires are only going to get worse and unfortunately many firefighters are going to die before this mess is straightened out. When fuel loads hit the levels they are now in the AZ forests, you will do NOTHING to stop the fires. Many areas are going to burn hard enough that the soil will be "sterilized" and they will take CENTURIES to recover. All because a few liberal idiots want to ignore the writing on the wall and claim there ideas didn't work because they were not done on a big enough scale.
http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/guest/article_56c98a40-bb54-556c-a459-cb88329c6ba2.html
The Republican State legislators politicized this fire horribly, blaming environmentalists and the feds, demanding that people were being denied the timber and grazing they deserved. " Why shouldn't we harvest it all ,if it is just going to burn anyway?" was the 'logic'. As you know ,that kind of illogical logic can only lead to wholesale denuding of the forest for fear it might burn. DOH! As to the ranching, as far as i know, cattle ranchers have always had pretty damn good, and pretty damn inexpensive access to our public lands. so why would they complain, they have had GREAT access for next to nothing. Everytime you find a headwaters, a spring a pond or a creek, it is already mucked up with cowpies a plenty. Cattle helped spread a lot of the weed seeds too. that, and overgrazing have changed the nature of the forest, which have made it more susceptible to these bad types of fire. unfortunately the regional Arizona Republican representatives used that fire, to try to score political points . There are a number of them down here that feel the state should be able to re-take federal lands. oh boy, would that be a disaster. the land would be squeezed of every last resource it could give, without a second thought for the most important resource WATER, or wildlife, or soil or regeneratrion of timber and other support species either.. they also forget that federal dollars fought that fire. the fact is , right when we needed sound science and sound management, these politicians played on the tragedy to score anti environment, anti government, anti conservation, and anti good management points. i get more ashamed of these representatives by the day.
Those Republican legislators were elected by the electoral majority. And probably because too many have had enough of the intrusive Democrat attempts to control every last facet of American life as the Nanny State that knows best. Knows best grew the fuels that the wind blew the fire through. Wind does not burn, and neither does drought. Fuels burn. For millennia, man has controlled fuels by prescriptive burning, long before the industrial revolution and conversion of wood to lumber and other products. Certainly European man used metal tools to create lumber for centuries. But they only got here 500 years ago to find this Edenic world of open space and copses of large trees, all the result of prescriptive fire. That we have worshipped at the idol of the "nobel savage and his wilderness" for so long, in a romantic and thoroughly unscientific manner, does not bring forgiveness for allowing gargantuan fuel build ups on Federal lands. Inexcusable, in brief, and due to changing majorities, never going to be addressed because the romantics pick and choose science to bless their romanticism, and then lobby the shit out of it, which means they present their case and their campaign contributions, their voting block, and the stalemate continues. So, we don't log now, and won't in the foreseeable future, and get used to megafires and mass dislocations of ESA listed species.
I live in Northern Spotted Owl territory, and owl numbers are half of what they were when they gained ESA protection. Nobody shoots them, traps them. They die because they are not able to fend off superior predators, who are protected as well. And they die because barred owls, just a little bit bigger and tougher, and of the same family, interbreeding and bullying the NSO out of territories. Of course, the USFWS answer is to begin to extirpate (shoot) barred owls. There will be no logging to thin forests and remove the fuels that vast (one the largest in state history) and recent forest fires feed on. Nothing but a future of further habitat ruination by fire, and then more Federal regulations to lock up private lands which could not possibly house one spotted owl if only due to their nature of being physically young, reproduction forests, in the varying seral stages of growth to an interrupted maturity. And if owls are living there, then prescribed habitat needs are not truthful or have not been examined correctly by a scientific process that had an answer and was looking for a process and proofs.
Sorry about the wind. That must have been irritating. We have had mostly overcast or overcast and rain for fall, winter, spring and now half of summer. But 60 feet of snow fell in the Sierras, and like amounts in the Cascades, so there is no drought in WA, OR, or CA. And lots of disappointed type 2 fire crews not working at all. Just more jobless looking for a way to pay the rent. And Congress, both parties, both bodies, not taking care of business, and the Soros enabler doing his best to raise taxes and kill more jobs. The fops in Washington DC are prancing around in their paper hats with their cardboard swords taking swings at each other during the day, and chasing skirts at night. One of ours is leaving due to his unwanted pursuit of an 18 year old girl. Which was not unexpected as the guy was a date raper at Stanford, but got the Asian pass card. He's been out raising money to run again from all the Chinese Americans who support him. But now will resign "as soon as we solve the debt ceiling problem" and so he can be with his children and help them. Are they lucky to have a philandering Dad who wants to help them!!! Just another Soros guy, above the law and reasonable behavior. Our Congress. Hard to love it. And they make it that way.