“I live in central Idaho. We have millions of acres of federal forest land in central Idaho that looks like it’s been used for a nuclear weapons test site. Millions of acres of bare, quartz lined rocks and bleached white snags.”
I was curious as to just where those millions of acres are. I’ve flown over most of central Idaho and can’t place where much of that kind of ground is. There are some fair size burns back in the wilderness but nothing that would meet that description. What many people forget or don’t realize, or ignore is that most of that ground is wilderness for a reason - it’s not commercially useful for anything else. You would spend many times more than what the trees are worth trying to get them out.
The problems that have arisen from federal management of that ground are the result of decades of “every fire is bad and must be put out”. This has resulted in huge fuel loading that results in a catastrophic fire instead of a light under burn. This policy wasn’t the result of some bureaucratic whim, but was put in place after the devastating fires of 1910. People perceived that putting out fires was a great thing, little realizing the problems it would cause future generations.
The upper Selway and most of the Salmon River drainage have been devasted by insane bureaucracy (wilderness designation) and obscene litigation. What doesn’t look like a nuclear weapons test site has been reduced to a massive weed patch because of ignorance and corruption. Allowing Forest Service management of semi-arid evergreen forests is a death nell for the nutrients in the soil of those forests. We should kick the Forest Service crooks out of Idaho and place our forests under the management of county conservation corps with the direction of the Natural Resource Conservation Service. The soil in privately owned and tribal owned forests is in good condition as a result of forest management policies taught by the NRCS. The same can’t be said for forests managed by Forest Service crooks and ignorant federal judges. The Forest Service crooks and greedy lawyers are more interested in making a lot of money from burning trees and vaporizing soil than protecting habitat for animals and fish.