GUEST COMMENTARY

Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Are you thankful for the now missing topsoil? Are you thankful for the millions of tons of greenhouse gases released in the fire? Are you thankful for the soil losing 10 to 30 tons of carbon per acre? Are you thankful that some of the forest has yet to burn?

Deep ecology and fire is wonderful theory, and we find its political expression in directed arson by the zealots of forest protection. The most strident are now in jail, as society has little truck with folks who set fires.

My Dad told me not telling the whole story was as bad as lying. I am always amazed that after fires in California, where there is so much of it intermingled with humans and living, rain events seem to bring flooding and debris torrents. And in other places, that is not the case, or so we are told. Humans can cause mud slides, and accelerated erosion, but "natural" fire does not. You ain't telling the truth. Thunderstorms last summer filled the Salmon River with mud, and buried important salmon holding areas and spawning beds in mud and silt. They are lost until years of spring freshets and vegetative recovery on a million acres or more of watershed allows some to once again form. If a farmer or a logger did something that resulted in a hint of mud in the creek, lawsuits are filed. When our government decides that conflagration is best for the forest, and watersheds are changed, streams boiled, dry ravel and storm event soil and debris slides go to the creek, that is just dandy.

Fire is wonderful tool, when it occurs at provident times of the year. Wildfire in high summer, when the air is hot, the fuels dry, is a disaster, and not a wonderful thing. Nature is about disaster, but when so much of the landscape is human occupied, focusing disaster on a more limited landscape is poor public policy as a result of public land management agencies losing control and vision of the very landscape they are managing. NGOs have no place in U.S. Government policy making or decision making. Their place is in court, or testifying in front of Congress. If it OK for them to make policy, we are now on the same slippery slope that was a campaign focus in the energy side of our economy. You can't have private side energy folks making public policy, and you now might have figured out leaving the private side of banking to its devices is piss poor governance. Federal fire policy and direction is no different. The USFS used to do a good job of land management, and now they are no more than poor housekeepers and witnesses. The mission has devolved to a social engineering experiment and a black hole budget item. One would hope, in time, that some of that might change. It would be a lot nicer to see the Parthenon as a whole building, in its finests, rather than looking at a wreck with the skeleton of what once was. Converting our forests to wrecks of what once was is not why they have been preserved. Roosevelt and Pinchot were not in the game of benign neglect, nor was Leopold. All recognized humans as important to the landscape, and the new all fire, no people, USFS is an aberration allowed by an increasingly urban Congress with no clue as to workings of land outside the Capitol Mall or Central Park.

Burns are great elk habitat, but you do know that all that is happening is that forest removal by fire is creating a prairie environment for a while in a place far removed from traditional elk habitat.

Thank you for an excellent article. It reminds us that NATURAL fire is an important part of the landscape. The problem with humans is that we tend to look at the short term detriments of these events rather than the long term benefits. Remember how many people mourned the loss of Yellowstone National Park after the 1988 fires? It would take generations for the park to even begin to recover, they said. Today most of the remaining evidence of those fires are the benefits. Increased diversity in plant and animal communities. Some areas permanently changed to willow, aspen or prairie. Some temporarily. Thousands of young, healthy trees six, ten, twelve feet high and more.
Funny, even if man did not exist, these forests would be here. Living, thriving and occasionally burning. It is natures way of renewal.

Barebate as usual was right there with the rightwingcrazy's point of view, Matthew.
As for me, I enjoyed your article.
I am of course a part of the choir; (but who in hell is your editor?)

Sorry, Bearbreath, fire adapted, and fire dependent plants don't lie. Some brush species in the west exude pitch which reaches peak flammability during the few weeks that lightning is most likely to strike. Many plants like the Lodge Pole Pine have seeds that won't open without the heat created by a fire. The history or Wild Fire is also written by charcoal traces in the soil. That plants throughout the west have evolved with the regular presence of fire as part of the ecosystem is beyond dispute. If you prevent nature from burning sooner she will wait and burn later without pity unless you can find enough money to repeatedly and continually thin all western forest, range and brush lands. Good luck with your misconceptions.

Mr. Garcia...How much of that charcoal was from anthropogenic fire? How much from lightening fires? Or volcanic eruptions? If you think ALL or even most lodgepole seeds are fire released, it is time for you to go to school. There are few fire DEPENDENT plants. They show up and take root and are gone shortly. Take a moment and think about what it means to be dependent upon fire to live. What you really are talking about is pioneer species. There are pioneer species that occupy sites following destruction or disruption of sites. And then there are species that crowd out the pioneers, and on and on as seral stage progression runs to climax unless there is disruption. Stasis is not in the cards, but Wilderness is sold as preservation of a static relationship of plants and animals (does redwoods ring a bell?). But the one thing I will tell you is that when you burn the special place, the designated Wilderness, especially those low elevation ones with significant vegetation, you won't replace the pre-Columbian tree with another 600 year old tree in your lifetime or for another at least 600 or more years. And maybe never. When the fire kills it, there is a good chance that is the last of that age tree of that species forever. That is not good value protection. That is a stupid loss of a priceless thing. You haven't been around long enough to begin to feel loss as much as us old guys. We have lost so much already. To have a public policy that is an acceptance, an encouragement, a desired management goal of loss is just as smart as the Wall Street bankers who have/had perhaps a $400 TRILLION liability insuring market losses without any idea that they could lose a hundredth of that and destroy the whole of the US financial system. Burning down heritage forests is no different. It is NEVER a good idea to burn down heritage forests, and we have burned a couple million acres of them in this century already. We have burned more old growth than would have been logged if the USFS logging rates had stayed the same, by almost double. Unfought fire is not a good public policy. A vocal minority in the Environmental Movement can lavish like minded politicians with money, and get their vote, but you are just proving that Congress is nothing more than a sophisticated group of whores tarted up and trolling the same streets you travel for your money.

When wildland fire is not considered air pollution, and is not a component of green house gas production, you know the political fix is in. You know that science is trolling the same street as Congress. Everyone who does not produce a good, create a job, is out to get their sustenance from someone else. Science appears to have enough tarts to garner grants and funding to stay alive by taking political positions. This fire deal is no more than Congressional tarts, academic street walkers, and trust puppies searching for a purpose in life, all looking for a cause to rally funding around. Letting fires burn is a Mark Rey answer to the Auditor General of the USFS whining about fire fighting costs. Duh! Allow fires to grow to conflagration, and then attempt to control them does cost a lot of money. Penny wise and pound foolish has not grown stale over the centuries. The US Congress and their Budget is the proof in that pudding. When you have a political hack from West Virginia chairing the committee that has oversight on public lands in the West, you have the absentee landlord with interests elsewhere looking out for your welfare. He could give a hoot whether or not the whole of public lands burn. They don't have any voters in his district. And, he and the senile Senator Byrd have some more pork to garner for West Virginia. That is where the fire fighting money is going.

The fire deal is about sloth and laziness in the management of a public resource. The fire deal is about no regular indigenous folks burning their commons (one of the consequences of genocide, the elimination of a culture as well as a race or ethnic group). The fire deal is about the idiocy of not fighting fires while they are one tree or small acreage, in the heat of summer, coupled to no directed prescribed burning across the landscape in moderate times of the year. There is a whole body of law about clean air and clean water that precludes prescribed burning, burn days, smoke direction, all obfuscations to forest management by the very same people who dance a jig when the same area goes up in a conflagration. Go figure.

You state that only nature burns, and in doing so deny the directed prescribed burning by natives for 10,000 years or more. Take the time, sir, to read up on terra preta so that your ignorance of aboriginal burning in the Americas can be diminished. This animist religion of nature being the be all and end all of all things on public lands is the denial that those very same lands were the source of life for hundreds of generations of people that were here before Europeans came to "the Wilderness" to "conquer" it, which in fact was the tended commons for thousands of tribal communities. The European invasion was little else but a resource grab by a growing population looking for cheap land and materials to fuel the growth of Europe royalty and their fortunes.

You can sell the Mother Nature story, and that is what you are doing, to raise money to preserve landscapes to burn, but at least tell the people you are shaking down for the dough, that your intent is for that landscape to burn and burn and burn, because your animist religion prevents you from using it like the original peoples did. They somehow managed to tend it, to use it for their survival, for ten millennia or longer. There were no rangers keeping people out. What you consider "wilderness" is in fact the neglected, unused, unmaintained commons from pre-European conquest days. Most of it would not be recognizable to those people as it lays today. It is the wreck of a tended landscape allowed to degenerate into a pile of fuel. But you clean a great painting from the Dark Ages, not burn it. You repair a tapestry and restore it like the great work of art it is. The same should be the fate of our wildlands. We need to repair them, tend them, not incinerate them. And incinerate is what is happening, and for every great tale of environmental success, there are ten fold disasters you are not being told of.

The other grand joke and great lie is "un-roaded." Yep. No macadam roads here in the wilderness. No, there are not and I agree to that. However, there were great well worn trails, now unused for a century or more, that were every bit as much a road to those people and those inhabitants as the interstate is to us today. Actually, interstates do follow some of them in some places. And those trails had ruts, and all the berries picked along them, and little easy firewood. Those roads led to resource use areas, and seasonal use areas. You can call the area "roadless" but it is really not, nor has it been for millennia. The hand of man was there for thousands of years.

A farmer friend showed me where the Indians used to seasonally live on his farm. There are some obsidian chips, some mortar and pestle fragments, a trade bead has been found, but it is the black soil of the midden and latrine areas that he pointed out that show how hundreds of years of use created that soil and colored it. There are acres of it, and it must have taken hundreds of years of continual use to produce that soil. Some of it you find under feet of flood accretions, layered like Grandma's chocolate cake. Riparian zones were used by people, too, seasonally.

His farm has 500 year old oak trees here and there, and you needed water nearby to soak acorns before you could cook and eat them or preserve them for winter food. The history is of tended oak groves that produced acorns as grain. Evidently, eating a gruel made of crushed, cooked acorns leaves you not wanting more food for the better part of a day. You can't get that at McDonalds, and you can't get a permit to underburn your oak stand, either. But the oaks were underburned annually to remove the leaves and litter to reveal the acorns for gathering. And the same went for some pine trees, and other nut and fruit trees across the breadth of the continent. A tended wild. People set fires by accident, and most often set them on purpose to manage their livelihood, to regrow the grasses and to renew shrubs. Waiting for lightening and conflagration was only to ensure your starvation. To proactively survive, setting fires was necessary to life itself. And in so doing, the plants that man needed were plants regenerated by fire. Shoots for basketry, new grass for prey animals, fire to sanitize an area, and fire to make a spot fire proof for a plant generation. Survivors in a much wilder world used fire like the survivors of Mann Gulch: they set them to make safe areas. Anthropologists, students of our predecessors, all have myriad findings about how fire has been used by man to manipulate and control the wild, from time immemorial. They fought fire with fire in a preventive way. And they set fires that would produce required results in a benign way. They tended the wild. No fusees, no drip torches, no radios, no helicopter water drops, no pulaskis. But burn they did, and the very essence of their success is that they were living here in this Eden when the Europeans showed up with superior weapons and technology to take it from them. We are the proof that they burned, and burned extensively and sometimes intensively.

So Mr. Garcia, go learn enough to talk about this subject with more knowledge and less propaganda to assist you. Nature does not determine plants that are dependent upon fire. Man did a very long time ago, and the environment was manipulated to favor those plants by set fires. Our problem today is introduced exotic plants like cheat grass, which out competes the native grasses if the newly burned wild is not immediately planted with desirable seed that will produce native plants. Or, you can seed bred annual plants that will cover the area and crowd out the cheat, but will die off in time as the natives recover. Wheat works, annual rye grass will work. But you don't just let "nature take its course." And you fight fire with vigor and a robust effort, if only to keep the acres low and the exotic invasion possibility lower. That ain't "natural", but really now, what exactly is natural? What was here before man? We do man arrived here in concurrence with the end of the last Ice Age, before forests and plains, when ice and perpetual snow fields covered most of North America. Do you wonder if those people had some concerns that "global warming" was too slow in coming? Did they have an Al Gore running around saying the world was coming to an end because the snow field was retreating? Or were they drumming up a storm to the sun gods because they were so damned glad to see his work? And when trees began to invade the prairie that supported the mega fauna the existed on, did they burn the trees? And who first planted seeds or moved a plant to a convenient spot? In which Wilderness did that take place? If you allow it all to burn, or encourage the managers to allow it all to burn, what purpose was that Big W wilderness protection really for?

O.K. Bearbreath. Nice stream of consciousness. Very bad logic. Maybe you could start a religion or a cult.

You "let 'er burn" folks are the cult. You drink the Kool-Aid, and the sooner the better. Why would you want to live in a world of unburned vegetation with us heathens? I think the proper advice to me from a cult person like you would be for me to quit trying to be a de-programmer. Or is that a new term to you history buffs?

Years ago I worked with a guy whose contribution to a conversation was that his life experience was really smart guys had the answers and theories to about anything, but common sense would trump most high flying, popular ideas, and I would see that as I lived my life. And he was right.

Loggers were made to remove every stick of wood from every draw that ran water at any time of the year. "Crick cleanin'." I stood up a public meeting on forest policy and said I had been in a lot of creek bottoms, and my eyes tell me that a creek is water running over and through as much wood as rock, and are we removing this wood to save bridges built too low or to save aquatic species? I got the smarty-pants answer that wood had a biological oxygen demand as it decomposed, which kills aquatic species by taking all their oxygen away. Science was right, and common sense was wrong.......for about 20 years. So for the last 15 years, millions of dollars have been spent using helicopters and high lines to put root wads, logs with root wads attached, and logs into and along streams to create "diversity" and coarse woody "structure" in the streams to provide habitat for aquatic species. Some streams have to be treated twice because high water in winter washes the wood away. Concept!!! And now the worry is that not enough wood is washing down streams to float in the ocean where it contributes to oceanic habitat. Gee. Where were the creek cleaning advocates on that one?

We won't have to worry about that on the millions of acres we are allowing to now burn instead of manage. The vegetation gone to greenhouse gas or charcoal no longer protects the soils, and runoff will dramatically increase the incidences of debris torrents, headwall failures, and all the other mass soil and dead tree movements to the streams. Not only will they get pre-cooked wood, but soil as well, and fish smothering, temperature raising, and the beauty of forest ruins, the indicators of what once was. And once all that carbon is lost from the vegetation burned, and soils burned, the area can become a new national carbon sequestering treasure when and if it grows a new forest. The USFS can auction off carbon credits to businesses who will in turn charge the public. The forests will once again support themselves!!! And the public will be able to rent the commons from themselves.

The day our public lands became Al Gore's global warming cure was the day that public arson became the defining management act. My common senses tell me US national wildland fire policy is wrong. And if it is not, then why all the constant alarm about losing forests in all parts of the world to fires and land clearing for agriculture, and all the burning exacerbating the greenhouse gas load in the atmosphere holding the heat in, and the accompanying habitat loss for endangered species? Half of the spotted owl old growth habitat has been burned in the last 20 years, and the rest is vulnerable if only because of management insanity right here on lands public and private in the New West. That is my opinion, from more than 40 years of actual experience with forests and fire, based on common sense.

Nice going, Bearbrain. Your emotional thesis seems to be that the government is all wrong and you have all the common sense, all the time. While wandering in the woods, communing with the birds and bees, have you ever noticed that Giant Sequoia, and Ponderosa Pine and a some other pines develop thicker and more fire resistant bark as they age? Now why do you suppose that is? Plants and animals don't evolve useless anatomical or phyisiological characteristics that are not essential to their survival over time. You don't speak highly of Al Gore but he's got you snookered. Know what the most powerful greenhouse gas responsible for 95 percent of the of the greenhouse effect is? Its not co2. Its good old water vapor or relative humidity.

Mr. Garcia. If you got your head out to where you could see sunlight, I would illuminate your understanding of what is happening to those 500 year old Ponderosa, Jeffery, and Sugar pines, old growth true firs, hemlocks, cedars and redwoods. They do grow thick bark, some of which sloughs every year. Over time a many feet deep pile of bark accumulates around the bole of the tree on the ground. Absent aboriginal burning for the last 300 years, at least, there is a two hundred year old pile of bark at the base of all too many old yellow bellies, and under them have now grown ladder fuel trees a hundred years old or more. So when this benign fire you cultists believe in comes along, and the Piss Fir Willies elect to not make any attempt to do anything other than look at it until it goes to town or winter comes, the fire goes up the ladder trees and burns the crowns and kills the old yellow belly. Or, ground fire ignites the bark skirt feet deep on the ground, and the heat from that fire burns deep into the ground and kills the roots of the old yellow belly pine tree, or the old growth doug fir, or the Sequoia. Early blacksmiths lacking coal, burned old growth bark in their forges. So what we get from this criminal public policy, never having been vetted by NEPA, is stand replacement fires. All the trees, for statistical purposes, die. I do not believe in any way that was the intent of Congress when they designated Wilderness, nor do I believe in any way that was the intent of Pres. Bill Clinton when he designated wilderness study areas, or roadless areas. Nor do I believe the voting public supports in any way the purposeful incineration of our heritage forests. You can call me names, Buckwheat, but it does not hide your ignorance of fire and its effects. And I think your views are in a decidedly minority if there were a national referendum.

Obviously your software is scrambled, Bearbrain. Maybe you've been inhaling to much co2. You're describing what happens to a mature forest in decline building up for the big burn. You completely ignored the key question that I asked you and that is, "Why would a tree or any plant for that matter develop a fire resistant coating?"

Garcia: And the answer is: More than 10,000 years of regular aboriginal burning selected the trees that survive until today. Limbless for the first 60-80 feet, spatially separated from other trees, no co-mingled tops, and only 2, 3, maybe as many as 10 trees per acre maximum. And under those trees, in a thermally protected environment, was early agriculture, fiber gathering, grains, seeds and nut gathering, and plants moved to more convenient locations, and in some areas rudimentary irrigation. Streams were blocked with weirs to allow consumptive use of fish, and those weirs left with winter flooding and spring freshets. But it was the provident burning in a fire driven ecosystem that sustained their lives for 5 times longer that written history or longer. And they set the fires, determined when to set the fires, and where to set the fires. Conflagration was not a frequent event as there were few ladder fuels, and little ground fuel. Enough to carry a cleansing fire, but not so much as to destroy their very living. They were experts, and they proved that by their being here after all that time. Lightening fires were not a danger to their survival, or the survival of the forests.

There is NOTHING about that type of fire, that kind of fire use, in current USFS/BLM planning or operations. Armchair urban forestry with a big dose of press releases, and PR hacks selling a load of BS to the folks in town is not forest management. And there will not be that benign kind of fire because the protectionists won't allow physical removal of fuels because that is logging, even if the trees only make tipi poles and jack leg fence material. So the now overloaded with combustibles forest is going to be incinerated, and then nothing done, and the problem will back in spades all too soon because once it is burned, you have to set it afire on a regular basis to maintain a fire safe forest. The next and newest dog hair patch will once again burn, and once again your cult members can oooh! and ahhh! at their idea of beauty, the skeleton of another young forest.

The global climate change, greenhouse gas restrictions will have the courts not allowing set fires. And that is just dandy with the Greenies in town being spoon fed pap on a daily basis. Some kind of fuel will grow back and that, too, will burn in time. The lost forest will never be there again. I am not in favor of that option, and I want an expansive public process by the agencies to ask the public why they want their forests burned.

My cause is to at least not let the crazies burn the very forests they hung in trees to save. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, their rural communities and public infrastructure, to save the forests from logging. The public was convinced by liberals that it was the right thing to do, and only by not logging could these forests be saved, and it was necessary to kill those thousands of jobs that would easily be replaced by ecotourism, minor forest products harvests like 'shrooming, and not to worry. But you folks never told the gullible public of your intention to burn those forests. To not fight fire in those forests. To now let them burn them is criminal. The cavalier attitude about fire being a wonderful and beautiful thing is pap from someone who never had a dog in the fight, has yet to lose something dear to fire. There are people that would take umbrage at being told a fire that made them homeless was a good deal. And frankly, the deep, cutting insults, the personal demeaning of persons, from the likes of you is the kind of class warfare you will not win. Not win at the ballot box, nor win in a fist fight at the local leaf and bean. The issue is whether to allow precious national resources burn because some history challenged dolts have decided for America that to burn their public forests is in the best interest of all. I call bullshit. Some of the people some of the time. But not all of the people all of the time.

I guess now is as good of time as any to point out that BearBait is really a man named John Thomas Jr. who lives in Independence, Oregon. One of my pet peeves in the modern web-based world is people who don't have the courage to use their real names when tearing apart the work, ideas and efforts of others. We're all adults here and I assume we can debate issues without hiding who we really are. Besides, having a debate with someone who hides behind a made up name is kinda like having a conversation with a sock puppet.

Ah, now I get the picture. Poor old Bearbrain is actually a grumpy old logger with moss growing on the north side of his brain, pissed off at the Government for reducing logging opportunities and fantasizing about aboriginal tree farming and a selective breeding program creating the Trees and other plants that we see today. Nice fantasy! Actually the evidence suggests that some aboriginal people living in the west did set fires to improve the hunting. They correctly observed that burning the understory created new grass and brush sprouts that attracted game animals. Just what nature had been doing for thousands of years before they arrived.

Hold it folks. You ain't gonna get there from here changing the subject. The subject is the Feds purposefully allowing vast acreages of designated Wilderness, proposed wilderness, National Parkland, and roadless areas to burn at will due to what I believe is criminal neglect and a determined attempt to selectively use environmental laws with the help and compliant assistance of the very NGOs that litigate every attempt at selling timber to reduce forest fuels. That the NGOs have not sued for environmental review is proof that they are assisting in the mass incineration of public lands in some sort of cleansing holocaust experiment. It is an inhumane act of government.

That said, you might consider telling the readers why a burned forest is a better forest than a Wilderness protected unburned forest, which was given that protection because of unique plant communities, attendant animals, and the comfort, spiritual values that the combination of vegetation and land forms presented to the visitor. You can't call it a "special place" and then allow it all to burn. Would we let the Whitehouse burn because it had rats, old wood, and we could build a newer, better Residence for POTUS? Wilderness designation comes with a responsibility to protect it. Rampant burning is not protection. The land was maintained since vegetation once more grew on it following the last Ice Age. Man has been here since the beginning, burning and managing, and making it work for his survival, selecting plants and communities that supported his needs. That should not change, because that change is denial of who were are and what we are. Humans are genetic agents of change and protection. We, and this is not a religious statement in any way, have a collective history of dominion over the landscape no matter where we live in the world, not matter our race or ethnic background, how we structure our societies. It is who we are.

Atomic warfare is morally repugnant, and so is allowing special places to burn with no effort to suppress or extinguish fire. And what is atomic warfare but mass incineration? If we morally start down that path, allowing government to manage by destruction, we make a mistake. We tell them what to do, not them telling us what they are going to do. WFU and AMR are them telling us, and until that process goes through an extensive environmental review under all the pertinent laws, with impartial inputs by citizens and scientists, I will speak out against it with vigor.

Your time line is wrong. The People arrived before the trees, when most of North America was ice and snow. They adapted to living here with the trees and other vegetation, held in reserve south of the ice and snow. They all marched north together. Bonnicksen at Texas A&M;has written much on how forests move north and south, east and west and up and down, as temperatures and moisture change. Kat Anderson at UCal-Davis has written about tending the wild. Zybach at Oregon State has written on fire frequency and patterns, all in association with native American land use. PhDs all.

Now if the moss back is just reciting science when it comes to those people and when they were here, and what they did here, why would that science not have validity and the arson science does? Or is the arson really science based? I don't think so. You will find that it is a contrived management direction in response to an Auditor General's decision to demand management lower fire fighting costs. Rather than go to a lean management team, all the USFS has done is put more people in the Washington DC Chief's office, short the forests, and not put up money to remove fuels. The NGOs won't let fuels projects be proposed without their tying every proposal in court in some sort of environmental lawsuit. That they don't challenge the free association burning agenda is very, very suspect. My deal is that I don't think you can use your left brain to allow free-for-all burning, and the right side of your brain to disallow fuel reduction by physical means because it will "damage" the forest resource. So how does a forest fire NOT damage the resource?

You're hopeless and confused, Bearbrain. First of all the Feds are spending Billions of our tax dollars fighting fires every year,and will continue to do so into the indefinite future. Secondly, human beings weren't living on top of Glaciers during the last ice age waiting for the forests to return. Forests follow the retreating glaciers after each ice age during the inter glacial warming periods and human beings repopulate later.

Baitster has more clue in his armpit hair than your entire body, Mickey G.
The facts are that historical fire on this landscape was INDUCED by humans over tens of thousands of years. Lightning fires started a comparative few, usually also restricted to certain topographies.
The inducement of fire at times of year when lighting ignitions were not likely also influenced the intensity of the fires, and therefore determined which vegetation types remained after the fire(s).
As for Matt's basic premise here that fire is to be thankful for...that's his feeling because doing so is a permanent denial of the fiber asset to evil corporate America and its minions that work in the woods and the mills, as well as those who would put that fiber to use nationwide. That's what is really driving this discussion of the "wonders" of fire. All the voodoo about natural and regeneration is just a cloak.

Yo! Dave Skinhead! You're hopelessly confused too. If its fiber you're worried about, you get much more fiber per acre per year than a forest produces by growing industrial Hemp. You can use Hemp fiber to make everything for clothing to fiberboard. Just ask the Canadians who are allowed to grow it.

It always comes down to growing dope. You have to know that stand removal fires are about creating more dope growing habitat. So black and burned is beautiful if you are stoned.

Beads, rope soled shoes, a leather headband, and you too, can be the expert forester...what a waste!!! Trading in heritage forests for hemp farming.

bearbait's last comment reminds me of the encounter i had in a rest room with a double breasted $5,000.00 suit (lobbyist for Georgia Pacific) during the congressional field hearings for the last wilderness bill i testified at in 1983. while i am minding my own business this idiot comes up to me and says- "how come all you wilderness guys have all the pretty women testifying for you?"

jealous of something bearbait?

and as to matthew's aversion to people who use cover names i totally disagree. bearbait's name is his to reveal if he desires. you have no right to do so, matthew. not all of us can fall back on trust funds. some of us have to work in the real world. i agree with certain wilderness aspirations that we share, but i am embarrassed that someone who believes in wilderness as i do would not grant bearbait his freedom to rant (however incoherently) in anonymity if he so chooses.

and don't even think about lecturing me back about this matthew. i was saving wilderness areas while you were watching sesame street and eating captain crunch.

don't pretend to honor the very bedrock of freedom in this country when you pull stunts like that one.

There's no trade off at all. Industrial Hemp is grown on farms and has no dope in it. I would say that a "Heritage Forest" is a forest where natural processes predominate. Which is different than a multiple use, sustained yield forest. Neither type of forest should be confused with a farm.

Mr. Garcia: The most un-natural thing that is happening to forests is that there is no human set fire management on a landscape basis. It has only been since white man enforced his will on the native peoples, and removed them from the land. It was just another conquer and take deal which is what politics has been about forever. The stronger prevail over the weaker. There is no issue about the morality of all that in this discussion. The reality is that the land has been without the native land managers setting frequent fires for the first time in more than 10,000 years. This current little short period of history that is less than two centuries old has seen a condition that is new to forests, and that is understory growth without humans torching it on a regular basis. And because of that, and then the advent of huge fires at the end of the 19th century due to a fuel build up of less than a century (again due to the demise of native burners), political will demanded that the Presidency do something to end this megafire deal. The "Forests" were created from unclaimed public domain by fiat and placed in the care of the US Dept of Agriculture. Teddy R. expanded them, and put Gifford Pinchot in charge. His first duty was to stop large fires, and gain some sort of US Govt dominion over USFS lands. The result was what was once considered the finest agency of government most had ever witnessed: the USFS. And it stayed that way until the advent of the Viet Nam war when powerful people in Washington DC sought and got private funding to create an environmental protection movement to divert young people's attention from the Viet Nam war. The tax sheltering for trusts and foundations that provide the Green movement with money was contrived in that time for that purpose. It just got out of hand for them, and has come back to bite them on the butt.

No one thought that logging would be almost completely shut off on USFS lands. Nobody thought industry would bankrupt itself trying to replace natural resources offshore. But here we are. No wood being removed from the forests, with millions of acres of CCC planted burns and open lands growing trees, all the logged lands growing new trees, and most of those trees were planted on 10x10 to 18x18 spacing, which is many, many times the number of trees that were on the land when it was cut. This dog hair reprod is the new fuel, and it is the tinder, the kindling, that fires the forests when careless humans or lightening start a fire. The forests today in NO WAY resemble the forests that were tended with set fires for millennia by whoever was here before my Danish grandparents. This forest we all talk about saving with big W wilderness or WFU fires is the first of its kind in human history. Protecting a forest by not allowing set fires was not even a consideration for thousands of years, and that was because those people knew that it would not work to let the forests lands be. Protecting them was to keep them burned over frequently. Protecting the forest was making it more or less fire proof. I also imagine that such a strategy also kept your enemy from burning you out. To protect yourself, you had to keep the fuel levels low. Concept!!! The political question is how to get there from here, and still have the forest. Unmanaged burning is NOT the answer. It might be the policy, but it is BAD POLICY. There is a better way. We have to find it.

Problembear:

I'm glad you were working on wilderness issues when I was a child growing up in rural Wisconsin. Thanks for your work .

However, onto your ridiculous claim that I somehow "can fall back on trust funds." My dad is a former factory worker who has been a house painter for the past 35 years of his life. At nearly 65 years old he's still painting houses to make ends meet. Mom is a registered nurse at the local hospital back in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin...Aint no trust fund in our family, buddy.

It reminds me of some anonymous poster up in Flathead County that was repeatedly telling everyone I own a big log cabin up in the Swan Valley...also completely ridiculous and untrue. But your anonymous accusation of my supposed big trust fund is exactly the reason why, like I said above, "One of my pet peeves in the modern web-based world is people who don't have the courage to use their real names when tearing apart the work, ideas and efforts of others."

Mighty problembear or Bearbait (must be something with the bears?) can just throw all kinds of ridiculous, untrue stuff out there and not have to take responsibility for it. Meanwhile, people like me have to deal with threats of violence because of the work we do on public lands issues in the public sphere. Sorry, but I have little sympathy for anonymous posters who tear people down and incite hatred, all while hiding their true identify.

And you want to know how I "outted" John Thomas Jr anyway? It comes right through in the "You have just received a response to your post" emails I get from New West.

i was talking about funds that non profits rely on matthew- not personal finances. think, then write.

there was no hatred in my rebuke. the fact that you are arrogant in your reply to me speaks volumes about maturity levels and does not help to save any wild land. what you did is considered poor manners in any version of blogocracy that i know of.

by the way- i also faced death threats and lost jobs and endured hatred by ignorant people in my work years ago. i never took it personally and it only made me stronger. you didn't invent activism, matthew. it comes with the territory. not fair but there it is. all i did was call you out on outing bearbait. i consider that lack of blog courtesy and losing control of your temper. i never did that as group leader because i knew that having a temper tantrum because someone disagrees with me would reflect badly on the cause that i espouse. in other words, i learned early on to put my ego last and saving wildlands first. it worked. i did.

you do good work but your attitude sometimes makes me wince as a fellow wilderness defender.

problembear: I'm sorry that you found my reply "arrogant." I certainly didn't mean a response talking about my hard-working, house-painting dad to come across as "arrogant" to you. It's funny that you claim that this supposed "arrogance" doesn't protect any wildlands when we are, after all, having this discussion at the bottom of an article I wrote educating the public about fire ecology and about a recent experience we had protecting actual wildlands! It's also interesting to be lectured about maturity from an anonymous poster who describes himself thusly on another website:

"about problembear: male past its prime. beginning to stink a little. unable to forage in the wild and must rely on unlocked dumpsters, garbage cans and rotting fruit. enjoys salmon, berries and cinnamon rolls. does not get along well with other male bears but has befriended a mouse."

I guess I'm just one of those other male bears that you admit to not getting along with well. I can live with that, but why you need to try and tear me down in the process or claim to know what drives my activism is what I can't figure out? If you don't like me, fine...I have plenty of friends who appreciate and respect my work...and heck, I don't like everyone either. That's life and I stopped trying to be popular in high school. I'd suggest we get together for a brew of your choice to talk about any of this, but I'm not sure you'd be into that, problembear.

Like I said earlier, I'm thankful for your work on wilderness issues, although, come to think of it, not knowing who you are makes it a little hard to say that for certain. Your notion that I think I invented activism or that for me protecting wildlands is a secondary issue to the stroking of my ego is also interesting. Again, I'm sorry that you think that.

The fact is that I honor and respect the elders in the environmental movement that have come before me. I have a strong interest in the history of the environmental movement and whenever I speak to younger activists or students I encourage them to get to know our movement's history in order to honor and respect those past efforts as well as build upon that success and learn from any failures.

The truth is that I'm in nearly daily contact with some of the elders in the wilderness/forest/environmental movement...not that you would know that. The truth is that I have selflessly ghost written close to a hundred articles, press releases, etc for grassroots activists and organizations...not that you would know that. The truth is that for year's I've done free media work for grassroots activists and organizations. I have a well know reputation among those who truly know me and my activism for getting money and resources to grassroots activists and organizations to help them be successful. Talk to any of the elder's at Friends of the Bitterroot about my efforts in this regard.

I've forgone paying myself in order to get money into the pockets of deserving activists who needed the boost. I've went without paying myself in order to put money and resources towards younger activists who were starting out and just needed to be given an opportunity. Sorry, but I'll put more stock in the thanks and sincere appreciation I still get from these folks (all of whom are still fighting everyday for wilderness and public lands because they were given an opportunity and because someone believed in them) than from an anonymous poster who claims to know who I am and what drives me.

Well, I'm sure all of this just comes across as "arrogant" to you problembear. I suppose I should just let you and Bearbait define me, since you apparently know me sooooo well, and not stand up for myself and my activism. Good day and good luck.

methinks thou dost protest too much. but ok. enjoy the soapbox, matthew. what you did to bearbait still constitutes a greivous breech of blogger etiquette in my view. your view on that particular matter does not interest me much.

Bear Bait is a nick name in real life. It comes from a time when I was cajoled into getting up close and personal with a big cinnamon bear that was intent on digging grubs. He was named Buddy Bear because he was seen almost every year in spring and fall on this ranch I visit in Montana. I was too close, and hence the name. Stupid deal, maybe. But that BB has other incantations. Big Belly might be one. Bountiful Blather another.

My writings do not contain any knowing or purposeful falsehoods. I only use my words to tell you what science has revealed to me. Science is being used as a street walker by advocates, and science is a willing participant. It is sad that "best science" is just that: best at that point in time. If better science comes along, and does not fit the political goals of advocates, then it is either ignored, or the messenger stoned. Matt is attempting to stone me as a messenger. Good luck. I am not alone in reading the newest, most interesting science. And I am not the only one who can see that some emperors have no clothes, and is willing to say that.

That said, the readers need to know that science runs on money, and that money is either public or private. In some sort of arcane process of academics as unionized workers, and union solidarity, public money science is pure and private side science is corrupted by private money and direction. I only have to think about Nazi Germany to find a black hole in that argument. Since government controlled both sides, all their science had evil social engineering goals. Another view might be that if not for private side science, government funded science might have corrupted the process forever as it only followed paths that had political support. Science explored to create profits is not bad, and it is essential. No matter how, it does take money to research. Money can corrupt the process on either the private or public side, can tilt the conclusions, or ignore paths that might lead to new conclusions.

I know what I propose is a selected view and statement of facts. That is only because I have no need to be an underliner of popular and widely appreciated views from science. They do have plenty to trumpet that slice of life. And, much of it is just that, a small slice of a larger picture. Way too much economic and public use has been restricted by the conclusions found in papers written by masters candidates, and further queries into the conclusions reveal incomplete answers, and many further questions. That masters papers are directed by the academic staff in search of answers desired by the people in charge, who are superiors and not peers, the papers are written by subservient candidates doing the necessary jig to higher degrees. Best not cross the learned ones who hold your fate in their hands.

So my conclusion is that those who don't think people were here as the ice melted have either not read enough current information or they hold some sort of creationist religious views, which is their right. All the physical evidence, the tools found covered with great sloth dung, the carbon dating of cave sites used for millennia, the physical patterns of tree placement and age, the type of vegetation found and not found, all conclusively point to humans being here during the ending of the last Ice Age, and eating the great mammals as those animals slowly were driven to extinction by climate change and atlatl darts and spears bleeding them to death. Just the idea that spawned that atlatl, the idea that you needed space to keep away from the animal, and the need to cover distance because animals were wary of humans, is that Descartes kind of thing that because you doubt, you prove your existence. Up close with a spear might have become an untenable situation. Nevertheless, the animals are long gone, and so are those people. All we have left is indicators and relics of their being here, and old growth forests are both indicators and relics. Lightening incidence and locality, frequency, could not have provided the ignition to burn what was burned many, many times, in high frequency low impact fires. And people who hunted and gathered were observed early on setting fires to alter the vegetative response, among myriad reasons to burn. The one that makes great sense to me is setting up your tipi or shelter on a burned out spot , which goes a long ways in keeping fire from taking all you have. In my area, it was to burn the fall leaves off the ground and the spent grass. The leaves covered acorns, and the grass grew green and lush by the time the migrating waterfowl showed up to winter in the marine affected climate.

In pinon pine country, where the trees provided essential nuts for survival, observations showed that indigenous people kept the dead limbs knocked off the trees to keep fire out of them, and under burned on a regular basis when monsoonal rains would quench the fires. It was people who maintained wildland, and to do no preparation, no fuel removal, and allow it to burn in its current state of fuel loading is irresponsible, wrong, and bad public policy. Money is not an issue. Unless, of course, you and your congressional representation believe that banks and insurance companies have greater value than your wildlands. I say that because right now, the wildlands have a greater chance of not being here as we now know them is greater than the chance of our financial system not being here. Profit and barter are not going away. 700 year old trees are being lost, and all younger than them as well. I cannot imagine that a couple of billion here and there to reduce fuels is a budget breaker in Congress, unless of course, the Democrat majority, mostly urban, seeks to have the forests burned to black rocks and white snags because Congress is funding academics to tell them that. Or Auditors General, with business degrees, are making forest policy based on bean counting. Change has been promised, and that will either be a whole lot more forests lost, or a change to site prep and fuel reductions, and putting out fires at the one tree, or low acres level, unless winter it is due to arrive in a day or so.

Wow, Bearbrain, I was reading down through your paranoid stew of facts, fiction and fantasy and it made me realize you've concocted your own little fictional creation story and you're sticking to it regardless of the evidence.

Mr. Garcia,
Refute his facts please, I have been reading this comment section and bearbait has placed out the facts as he reads them, You on the other hand have done nothing but insult while offering nothing to dissuade me that while you may be passionate for the forest you have nothing to back you up. The gist of what I gather from bearbait is that the use of fire along with the necessary prep work is natural management. And has been practised since long before our people came to these shores. This jives with what I was taught in school The argument that catastophic wildfire is healthy for a forest seems ludicrious to me. Where I work in southeastern Montana the results of large scale fire has not been as a good as the results that we can show using low intensity prescribed fire. For the life of me I do not understand this hands off approach to managing land. If I am misunderstanding you or have mistaken your position I apologize.

The internet is a rough and tumble place, full of a lot of bullshit and fantasy passed off as facts by borderline nut cases. In an any case, Its basic, well understood wildfire science and forest ecology that fire is a basic component of wildland forest and range ecosystems in most of the West. And further that if humans don't let smaller fires burn then nature will build up fuels to the point that catastropic fires become more likely. I don't advocate catastropic fire as a management tool. This is basic text book stuff. Prescribed fire is just what is needed because it mimics what nature has been doing with lightning for hundreds of thousands of years. I understand that it is fundamentally useless to argue with guys like Bearbrain or Bearbreath or Bearbait or Beardung or whatever. But if they can dish out criticism and insults and bullshit then they should be able to take the same in return.