Governors to tackle wildfire issues

Missoulian ^ | 6-16-2003 | SHERRY DEVLIN

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

The Sierra Club's fear is that the Governors' Association summit will be used as a platform by the Bush administration to push a forest management agenda that goes too far, Bader said. "The administration's emphasis is on waiving environmental safeguards and ramping up what is really just logging - simple, old-fashioned logging."

One can only hope. As long as they replace the trees...

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

"Our field trip will clearly show that logging on the Bitterroot is systematically targeting the largest, most commercially valuable trees, while leaving the smallest trees and logging slash scattered on the forest floor," said the Native Forest Network's Matthew Koehler. "They are actually increasing the fire risk."

Uh-oh. That doesn't sound too good. Why can't they clear out the other stuff and sell it to paper manufacturers?

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Fire isn't the devil and does serve a purpose but the kinds of fires we are getting are no where near natural.

Oh, they're natural, all right. All-too-natural. My guess is that they're what occurred before man settled the area...

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

The concept of "management" in the National Parks is to let nature take its course. I kind of like that concept.

And what will you do when one of the resulting wildfires leaves a national park and burns part of a city?

[My2Cents]

What city? I've visited about a dozen national parks, and I don't recall any cities even close to them. I suppose West Yellowtone, Montana, is the closest I've seen.

The 1988 wildfires in Yellowstone burned about half the acreage. Interestingly, they started outside the park. The combination of drought and some 49 small fires started by lightening strikes that merged into major fires, made fighting them virtually impossible. The main heroic fire-fighting efforts were in the attempts to save the Old Faithful Inn, but it was a shift in wind that actually saved the structure. And then it was more the return of rain and an unusually early snowfall in September that finally put the fires out.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

If not a city, then the danger always exists that some public place (such as the Old Faithful Inn) or somebody's home could ultimately be burned down by a "natural" fire that started in a forest in which environmental policies have allowed too much dead wood (firewood, for want of a more accurate word) to accumulate. My point is, the country is simply too settled to allow forests to go wild.

[EBUCK]

Years of suppresion have resulted in fuel levels that would never happen in nature, hence, not natural. Either we allow irregular "natural" fires to sweep over the land or we take it upon ourselves to reduce fuel by other means.

[EBUCK]

Here is some info on my perspective...

http://www.ashevilletribune.com/hage1.htm

[GladesGuru]

That is not a "friggin dolt" ... it is a crawfishin', Greenie-Weenie.

Punctuated evolution is real! Watch for lots of new species of enviro-socialists, 'cruddy 'crats, and other assorted intellectual abortions to be stalking the airwaves and pages of media. All will be spinnin the fires like a top.

Since it looks like America will have lots of fire wood in the future, I wonder if we will have enough heart pine to make 'fat lighter' kindling to start all the wood fires in all those BBQ's and wood stoves?

To avoid the tragedy of a national shortage of kindling, I hereby offer "A Modest Proposal":

To avoid the coming shortage of 'fat lighter' wood for kindling, it is suggested that we split fat 'crats as a substitute. An EPA exemption for the resulting air pollution may be necessary.

[GladesGuru]

Logically, you make a good point. Consider that such a time was at least before the Quaternary Extinctions which occured some 11,000 years ago.

All of North America was fire managed by the indigenous peoples by that time. The horizon of anthropogenic fire and fire management imposition seems to receed as more research is done.

The Wilderness Act, the root cause of "wilderness management", "natural fire", ad nauseam, is a myth. The damage from such myth-management is probably going to "myth off' a lot of citizens this year. Perhaps enough will re-examine their faulty premises to make a difference. One must hope.