Group Wants National Forest Fire Management Plans to Allow More Fire
By Bryan Bird, New West Unfiltered 12-06-07
http://www.fguardians.org/library/paper.asp?nMode=2&nLibraryID=560
Fire Management Challenged In Federal Court
Tucson, AZ – The U.S. Forest Service is endangering forests and people with its policy of suppressing fire instead of allowing it to be a partner in forest management, a conservation group said today as it filed suit against the U.S. Forest Service in federal district court.
“Forest Guardians is seeking to compel the Forest Service in Arizona and New Mexico to stop treating fire like a foe to be vanquished at every opportunity,” said Bryan Bird, public lands director of Forest Guardians. “Allowing fires to burn where it is safe to do so, will lead to safer communities, healthier forests and significant savings to the states and taxpayers,” Bird said.
The suit demands that the Forest Service open its fire management plans to scientific review and consultation with federal wildlife agencies. Despite agency rhetoric acknowledging widespread scientific support for more managed fire, the fire plans still call for suppression even where fires are both ecologically and financially justified.
“Smokey Bear was wrong and the Forest Service continues to suppress most natural fire, even where that worsens the situation,” said Bird. “It’s time for a continental shift in fire policy.”
At issue are fire management plans that zone each national forest into areas for fire use or for total fire suppression and which require review under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. The lawsuit claims the fire management plans on the Apache-Sitgreaves, Tonto, Carson and Lincoln national forests, which cover 7.6 million acres, do not comply with environmental laws.
“Instead of making fire our enemy, we need to make it an ally, just as Native Americans did for thousands of years. Our forest management plans must use fire – not just suppress it – in order to clean up our forested lands and better protect wildlife and humans,” said McCrystie Adams, attorney for Earthjustice, a non-profit environmental law firm that filed the suit on behalf of Guardians.
Forest Service fire fighting budgets have grown into the billions annually as ex-urban growth in the West’s fire-prone forests has led to a dramatic increase in fire-fighting. The majority of these taxpayer funds are used to protect private property in the “fire-plain,” areas of the western landscape that regularly and naturally experience fire. Not only is this expensive, but firefighters are routinely put in harm’s way.
“A far greater area of our national forests could be zoned for managed natural fire, but the fire plans in the Southwest limit its use only to the most remote areas,” said Bird. “If these fire plans were developed in the light of day and not behind closed doors, the public as well as state and county governments could influence them. We’re not asking the Forest Service to throw out the current plans, but to open them up to scientific and public scrutiny as the law requires.”
The recent fires in California have ignited public discourse on the subject and some are calling for zoning to prevent development in fire-prone areas or calling on homeowners to take measures to “firewise” their properties. At the same time, scientists recognize the need for fire to resume its normal, cleansing role or risk unrelenting severe fire behavior.
“Forest Service policy recognizes that natural fire is essential to western landscapes and it must be restored safely, but on the ground it’s just lip service,” said Bird. “Despite the best science, the Forest Service is still suppresses ninety-eight percent of fires. If these same fires were allowed to burn, they could control fuel build-up economically, leading to greater safety for communities and firefighters as well as healthier forests as a whole.”
In a letter last month to the Forest Service, more than a dozen scientists with expertise in biodiversity and fire recommend a scientific review of the agency’s fire management plans in Arizona and New Mexico. Because of changing climatic conditions and spiraling fire fighting costs, the scientists called for the new Southwestern Regional Forester to use the best available science and consultation with state and federal wildlife agencies.
“California’s fires this fall demonstrated that the priority for federal and state funds should be protecting lives and communities while allowing natural fires to control fuel buildup in fire-prone environments. We must learn to live with fire,” Bird said.
For a copy of the complaint contact bbird@fguardians.org [End of article]
Fire is natural, and naturally dangerous to all things in its path. That was recognized by the First Peoples thousands of years ago, and they practiced cultural fire for thousands of years. What Europeans found here was a cultural fire maintained landscape. And they then went about a very methodical jihad of Christian genocide against the cultural fire land management experts. We now live with the results.
Cultural fire is a very neccessary and needed addition to forest management. Unfought wildfire is just the needless destruction of life and habitats because it is not burning through landscapes maintained by cultural fire. This lawsuit is a path to insanity, but I expect that from the ignorant urban protectors of the forests.
The shame of all this is that greedy enviro NGOs look everyday for something to have the troops rally around and make themselves available to be shook down for tax deductible funds to launch a protection aimed lawsuit. The issue is protect them from what? Piss poor USFS and BLM land management and the resulting too many trees, no cultural fire (clean air acts, clean water acts, all used to forbid cultural fire or set preventative fire), no logging of excess fuel? This lawsuit is bad management results driven, and the drivers are the very same people who have tied the hands of the land managers. This is Alice in Wonderland forest management by the Mad Hatter. Litigate for three decades to stop fuels management, and then litigate to let wildfire burn itself out. The blueprint to disaster. Lucky for me that is not happening in my area. If it were, the counter suits would fly. This is a bad, bad deal. Too bad to even be understood by the layman, but still a bad, bad deal.
Of course, the other side of my bipolarity says okey dokey. Let 'er rip. Burn the whole sumbitch. Burn baby burn. Because once a fire has its head, neither you nor I can stop it and it will burn rich man as well as poor, enviros and their opposites. It will anything flammable, and some stuff that was not. And it will burn until there is no more fuel, or the weather stops it. Behind it is a clean up project. And then you can wait for another three or four centuries until you have another old growth forestl, many fires later. Or maybe no forest at all. Climate change, and repeated fire, and you might not get a forest on that land ever again. But then again, who cares? Evidently not the forest protectors and their lawyers.
Bearbait () seems to have an ax to grind. Why are you so upset Mr. Thomas? Were you this upset when the logging corporations cut down most of the old-growth forests in your home state of Oregon?
Comment By bearbait, 12-09-07Wilderness Hunter...I have no axe to grind. I keep mine sharp.
If a person has a dissenting view in this country, idiots try to pin some emotional status to the dissent. I dissent because I see things from an entirely different point of view than many others. I feel the many others get their information from controlled sources, and have been hand fed pap and pablum for all too long. The "enviros" are pros at playing at emotions, and not facts or public good or long term national interests.
First, it is not the trees, but the land that determines how ecosystems or habitats work. Georgraphy, latitudes and longitudes in concert with geology and its height, age, and composition drive the whole process. Forests are groups of trees that move around, and have for eons, searching for their ideal habitat. I would suspect there is some forest movement onging at all times. They move north or south, up hill and down, all depending upon their needs.
The primary pre-European determinite of forest composition and make up was aboriginal cultural burning. There are a multitude of reasons to burn vegetation to secure your life, and your progeny, the first probably being defense. Burning to not have fuels close at hand. Fire was their friend, and it was their enemy. They kept them both close to survive. I had always assumed that the headlands at the river mouths on our coast were a wind response, as they most all were grass uplands when I was a kid. Now many are aforesting at a fast rate. Then I read early conversations with First People who said that those grasslands were fired annually to be a beacon to ensure that salmon knew where to return to. That silver spot butterflies and their host vegetation was favored by annual burning and habitat maintenance by First People is no more than serendipity for the insects and plants. Today, the butterfly is an ESA species of concern and the trees that are usurping its habitat are protected from removal. Cross purpose law is an ass. And so are its supporters.
So populations change, and technologies advance, and here we are leveling Canadian forests so that housing is available to Americans, all the while keeping US forests out of bounds for dubious ecological reasons. I am not an apologist for prior human actions, nor do I advocate the wholesale logging of forests just because the trees are there. I do, however, find great fault with a system that allows, nay mandates, that wildfire consume raw material needed to maintain or improve the human condition all the while ranting against logging, air quality concerns with controlled burning, and the lockstep oppostion to any and all logging, even that needed to prevent holocaust from being the norm instead of the exception, or species extinctions. I am vehemently opposed to dry season, untrammeled wildfire going unfought. That kind of non-husbandry is insane. Especially from an America still seething from what they have perceived as shortfalls in US GOVT responses to tornados and hurricanes. I cannot fathom loosing uncontrolled fire on the populace as a "good thing." It is no different than me firing up a D-8 and driving through the ghetto because it is the public good to displace those dependent upon public welfare and assistance, and the damage their lifestyle presents to the ecosystem. There is, and will always be, unintended consequences to letting fire have its way with the fuel supply. Those fires always, always, make their way to private property and damage real people and their dreams. I will always be dissenting when I see policy driven by the urban majority that has damaging impacts on the rural population. Count on it. Unreasonable actions should always be met with dissent.
I am very aware that Big Time Environmentalism is now and has been, an economic engine of its own. That The Nature Conservancy is the largest private land holder in the world, a billion dollar revenue company, maintaining a status of tax exempt NGO, that is an abuse of US tax law. Either that or it is a left handed "out of our hands" method of financing green goals by a Congress to timid and gutless and mindless to know that we know what they are doing. I have seen way too many land purchases by NGO's where the land was flipped, to an agency of the US Govt for 50% to double their purchase cost. Just a sneaky way to fund outside the purview of Congress or maybe just the American people. It was a Cliinton deal, and I can have a foul taste in my mouth for that whole outfit for the rest of my life, thank you.
There was a wildfire that might have been arson, on Willamette Pass, called the Warner Creek Fire. The Willamette NF put up a salvage sale, mostly whitewoods, and it was sold and awarded to an operator who had been previously censured legally for log scaling irregularities, and had paid a million dollar plus fine. The Clinton Admin got heat from the sale, and when Bill was running for re-election, he set up a direct phone line from the Executive Office Bldg to the purchaser's office to negotiate the buyout of that sale. And it was done in August of 1996, and the purchaser got paid an enormous amount of money for a sale of now worthless hemlock and silver fir riddled with bugs and sap rot. He got his fine back and a handy profit, and nary a log went to market. Coincidence? A good business move? Or just plain the Clintons using US taxpayer money to make a very visible, environmentally (in terms of making environmentalists happy---and if any benefit came to the landscape, it was accidental) correct high profile campaign move not available to opponents, two months before the Presidential election. It was the move of a political whore, sanctioned by NGOs. Just another seedy story from the Clintons and here we are with the creep's wife running for President. Who will she sell out for a couple of votes? You? You damned betcha!!!
There is no end to that kind of inhouse crap ongoing in the US Federal Forests and Public Lands administration as we talk. There are any number of political whores, including the likes of Mark Rey, who will sell you and I out in a New York minute to further their political goals. Rey proposed politically impossible forest revenue and management goals that never had a chance to pass if only because they were not right or honorable or just. He knew that, and his Big Private Timber minders knew that, and it was the best straw man to knock over and then say we tried I have seen. Egregious, rotten, crappy political moves from the right are no worse nor better than the same from the Enviro left.
Right or wrong is not in the equation: it is about yea or nay on the ballot. The propaganda leading up to elections is about saying ANYTHING to gain a vote. I have no faith in the current system that has NGOs sitting at the table on all USFS/BLM decision making, because that does not allow political opposition in the forming of decisions to be at the table. It is bad government at its worst. If I am "grinding my axe" because I cannot stand the allowable corruption of governance in this county, at this time, then I guess you will just have to live with it. I will take my chances.
Since you have released my private email to the public, are going to release yours? Or is this another part of the chicken poop enviro war against dissent? I await your reply, MT Wilderness Hunter....bear bait....
Forest Fire Jihad Being Threatened On Terrorist Websites
Tuesday January 15, 2008
U.S. officials monitoring terrorist web sites have discovered a call for using forest fires as weapons against “crusader” nations, in what may explain some recent wildfires in places like southern California and Greece.
A terrorist website was discovered recently that carried a posting that called for “Forest Jihad.” The posting was listed on the Internet on Nov. 26 2007 and reported in U.S. intelligence channels last week.
The statement, in Arabic, said that “summer has begun so do not forget the Forest Jihad.”
The writer called on all Muslims in the United States, Europe, Russia and Australia to “start forest fires.”
The posting quoted imprisoned Al Qaida terrorist Abu Musab Al-Suri, as saying “Jihad is an art just like poetry, music, and the fine arts. There are people that draw and there are others that are jihadists. They both act upon inspiration.”
Al-Suri is a senior Al Qaida leader captured in Pakistan in 2005 who is believed to be in U.S. custody.
“The idea of forest fires is attributed to him, may God set him free, as is in this short clip,” the writer stated.
The posting said that setting forest fires were legal under extremist Islamic law as part of a “eye for an eye” and that can produce “amazing results.”
Wildfires in California burned more than 500,000 acres beginning in October and authorities said arson was to blame for some of the fires. In August, wildfires broke out in Greece that authorities say were deliberately set.
The writer stated that it was permissible to burn trees in carrying out jihad.
“Scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels’ forests when they do the same to our lands,” the writer said.
The writer stated that “targeted forests” are in the nations that “are at war with Muslims,” including the United States, Europe, Russia, and Australia.
Other nations, including Brazil are “off limits” because Brazil has not joined the “armies of the crusade.”
On damage caused by wildfires, the report said that the fires typically take months to put out which means that “this terror will haunt them for an extended period of time.”
The fires also will cause economic damage because it will limit exports of timber used to make furniture and also will cause losses to pharmaceutical companies that use trees for ingredients for drugs, the posting said.
Smoke caused by the fires will create pollution and military forces could be tied up fighting fires. The report noted that U.S. military forces in Iraq or Afghanistan “could even be recalled” as occurred following hurricane Katrina, which did not occur.
“Imagine if, after all the losses caused by such an event, a jihadist organization were to claim responsibility for (starting) the forest fires,” the writer said. “You can hardly begin to imagine the level of the fear that would take hold of people in the United States, in Europe, in Russia, and in Australia.”
The report said that Abu Musab Al-Suri, urges terrorists to use sulphuric acid to start a forest fire, as well as gasoline.
The article was signed by Abu Thar Al-Kuwaiti, on behalf of a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network.