US Wildfires

With the recent inferno in SoCal, the fires in Florida and Georgia fresh on everyone's mind the very kooks that have caused it are now running around blaming it on global warming and not the real causes. The real reasons are the environuts and the insane mismanagement of our forests over the past 60 years or so. Bill Croke has written an excellent essay for The American Thinker that explains the situation out here, I agree with what he has written and it saves me alot of typing so go read his excellent summary.

In 1910 a three million acre firestorm roared through the borderland of Montana and Idaho, the legendary "Big Burn" of forest service lore. After that, it was the policy of the USFS to immediately suppress fires. You could call this the "Smoky the Bear" model, though that cute mascot dates from 1944. This prevailing orthodoxy has been questioned since the 1980s, with some fires in remote areas being allowed to burn in the interest of forest health.

The two schools of forestry clashed during the disastrous Yellowstone fires of 1988, when one third of the national park (1.2 million acres) burned, the conflagration almost taking the venerable Old Faithful Inn. The "let it burn" policy doesn't shine well in the media spotlight, especially in a national park.


Forest health also means logging, at least the thinning of crowded tracts that have too many trees per acre. In the last two decades attempts to log national forest lands has brought on much bad behavior from the Green Left and their -- surprise! -- attorneys. Thousands of harassing lawsuits filed over timber sales have produced in the USFS a self described "analysis paralysis", as environmentalists using litigation clog up an already slow bureaucratic process.

I am a lover of our National Forests and healthy forests are what clean our air and produce the oxygen we need, they are also a valuable, very renewable resource when managed properly. I have been in privately managed forests that were very pristene and logged properly and BLM land in bad need of thinning, some of those have recently burned and are burning as I type. I would rather put up with a few stumps and logging roads in a healthy forest than the dead blackness of a burned one. It takes a decade to begin to recover from that type of inferno, where as low level prescription or natural regular burns are healthy and promote growth. I am glad the Forest Service and Dept. of The Interior are finally waking up but that's government and we all know how that works.