Posted on 05/17/2012 1:44:53 PM PDT by OddLane
As four separate wildfires devour the state of Arizona-burning more than 17,500 acres at last count-it’s instructive to look at how our government has handled its investigation into the two enormous ones which blazed a path of destruction across the state in 2011. According to the Arizona Daily Star, both the Horseshoe 2 and the Monument Fire were caused by humans, which in the case of national forests invariably means illegal aliens and/or Mexican narco-traffickers nesting within wilderness cordoned off from American citizens. The tragedy, which should elicit anger and frustration in anyone concerned about the environment and the lives of law-abiding Arizonans, is that the Forest Service-the ostensible guardian of this land-has now recommended that investigations into both of these horrific fires be closed for lack of evidence.
This recommendation comes in spite of the fact that the Government Accountability Office has implicated illegal aliens in the willful destruction of forest land-often for the purpose of protecting lucrative human and drug smuggling routes into the United States. Attempting to contain fires caused by our government’s neglect of border enforcement is bad enough, but as Jon Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies reports, these responses are inevitably hampered-if not halted altogether-because of the presence of thousands of illegal trespassers. The only reactive measure taken by federal officials, unfortunately, is too put up signs warning American citizens to beware of their presence.
Our good friend Cindy Kolb traveled back to Cochise County to document the scene of the crimes. To appreciate the scale of this tragedy, simply look over the Facebook gallery she’s created in order to show the rest of us-who don’t live along the most heavily used rat line for human smuggling and narcotics trafficking in the country-just what has been lost because of the federal government’s neglect and indifference to the concerns of those who live in border states. The picture that you see at the top of this entry is of the Horseshoe 2 fire, courtesy of NASA, but you need not be a rocket science in order to understand that our government’s border security policy of benign neglect has real-world consequences.
It has resulted in irreparable destruction to our natural environment, incalculable damage to the property of thousands of Arizonans, and threatened the lives and security of scores of Americans. It’s long past time that we reasserted control of American territory, regardless of the damage such an action might do to the sensitivities of Mexican consular officials or people who should never have stepped foot into this country in the first place.
More government won’t help. Clearing pines far enough from the house will. Besides, much of Arizona was not intended to be forest.
“Besides, much of Arizona was not intended to be forest.”
So, you’re suggesting that southern Arizonans should be uprooting the junipers, pinon pines, madrones, oak trees, and ponderosa pines that grow naturally there above 5000 feet?
By the way, if anyone is interested in reading more about how the federal government handles reporting of illegal border crosser started fires, check out the work of Leo Banks for the Tucson independent weekly paper the Tucson Weekly.
The term “forest” gets used here loosely because it the term used to any kind of federal level wild territory management. It’s the forestry service even if there isn’t a single tree over 10 feet tall on the whole thing.
Really? These are not planted forests for your information. You need to check into things a little more, quite a lot of the burned areas is mountain area- yes Arizona has mountains- even near the border. No we don’t need more government- we do need the government we have to do their job and defend our borders.
Big government spending to protect trees from lumber interests and put out forest fires is socialist waste. It won’t be an issue before long anyway, because the debt regime brought by political regulators is running on vapor and propaganda.
Thing is you have points on that...but this discussion is about illegals/smugglers starting fires, some on forest, some on deeded ground.
If citizens start fires there are serious consequences- if illegals are doing it we are supposed to look the other way.
You made two good points.
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