I'm for forest fire fighting safety, but Udall has always been a Sierra Club toady. The Sierra Club reflexively opposes forest thinning, forest road building, and preparing clear cut fire breaks. As a result, where 10 years ago, a 300 square mile fire was unusually large, we had two 800 square mile fires and one 1000 square mile fire this year.
The homeowners around Lake Tahoe who got burned out this summer publicly blamed the Sierra Club for going to court to slow and stop road building which would have allowed thinning.
These big fires are leaving a huge carbon footprint both by dumping monsterous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and by burning so hot that they make it difficult to reforest the land. Trees grow by taking Carbon Dioxide from the air and converting it to wood.
It is estimated that it will take 700 years to reforest the Hayman fire area. One Hayman area that had been thinned as a forest service experiment didn't burn so hot that the forest died. This suggests that common sense thinning will make the forests more healthy.
Mark Udall has proposed some small scale thinning around ski resorts to avoid a repeat of the Tahoe complaints, but opposes anything that would prevent a large scale hot fire in Colorado. No road building was to be allowed. Even that small compromise appears to be opposed by the Sierra Club types.
The Sierra Club might have once had lofty goals, but they no longer allow common sense to interfere with their agenda. Unfortunately, Mark Udall is taking so much money from the Sierra Club that he doesn't use common sense, either.
by Anon
Alan Salazar...