Posted on 06/21/2002 5:06:37 AM PDT by brityank
A Glimpse of Hell Over the Horizon
Arizona Fire Report By Tina Terry
Sierra Times Ranch Hand
Published 06. 20. 02 at 23:52 Sierra Time
As I send this out, Show Low, Heber and Overgaard, Arizona - to the north of me, and not that far away, are burning out of control. Flames are leaping through the giant Ponderosa pines, destroying everything.
Thousands of wild animals are being killed, injured and being displaced. Thousands of people are evacuating, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homes are being destroyed. My family is preparing in case we need to evacuate from Payson.
And it's not even July yet. Three months of fire season to go here.
The federal government has so grossly mismanaged the national forests by permitting them to be overgrown and clogged with tinder that it's like we're sitting on a keg of gasoline - one that covers many hundreds of square miles.
Today one of our local firemen told me that the condition of the forests a hundred years ago was healthy - big trees didn't burn, and there were many many fewer trees per acre - fire thinned out the underbrush but didn't incinerate the total forest as it is doing today, and will probably do for weeks to come. The fires are burning so hot that they are burning everything, so hot that they are turning the ground to a glaze, through which water cannot penetrate - setting the stage for massive floods when we finally get rain. Right now we are praying for rain, but there's none in sight.
The way the forest was a hundred years ago was, the fireman explained, before the feds took over the national forests and "managed" them into the present state of tinder according to the insane enviro-Nazi policy of "We can't cut even one twig or let anything graze there." Dorks in D.C. making policy for forests they may never visit or understand. Moscow-on-the-Potomac policy - with the same disastrous results as the original Moscow produced when it micromanaged everything from the Kremlin.
Our solution, once these infernal fires have finally burned out - which may be weeks, months - is this:
Let all the governors of the Western states in which these federal goons ranging from incompetent dithering idiots to malicious sociopaths have created this horrific UNNATURAL situation band together and firmly declare to D.C. the following:
"You have mismanaged these federal lands, which lie within our state boundaries, so grossly and unethically that it has cost millions, maybe billions of dollars, destroyed human life and property and killed and displaced countless wildlife (where are PETA and their ilk while these poor animals are being slaughtered by these conflagrations caused by environmentalist insanity?)
"You have, by your insane policies, created a virtual Armageddon of unnatural havoc within our state borders. We shall therefore take over these lands and manage them ourselves by appointing local management to so do. To pay for this, we shall have our state residents refrain from sending their federal income taxes to Washington; these taxes will instead be placed in an escrow account, and will be used to repair the incalculable damage you have done to these lands within our borders, and to properly manage them so that they can be restored to health and to a safer condition.
"We'll hold local officials accountable for implementing sane policies. We won't redact their names if they are responsible for killing or injuring people, or for causing damage. We'll prosecute them if they do so.
"If there's anything left after doing this, we'll send the balance to D.C. so you can spend it on one of your countless other insane, bloated, administration-larded, unconstitutional programs - maybe the inept managing of our national borders..."
And just in case anyone has forgotten - remember Los Alamos, and the Forest Service's "controlled burn." These people cannot be trusted to act in our best interests. They are permitted to commit acts which, if committed in the private sector, would result in prosecution and jail time.
Please pray for us here in Arizona, and for all those in Colorado, who are suffering so mightily.
Pray for the poor critters, too. These innocents are suffering because of the inequities of humankind. It breaks my heart beyond description.
Tina Terry
Payson, ArizonaEditor's Note: Yesterday, the author of this article called the ranch office and asked, "Why is God doing this?" Well, Tina - there's your answer. God's not doing this. Government has done this, and we've got our work cut out for us. Terry Barton, the woman accused of starting the Colorado Fire, was released on bail yesterday. Just thought you folks would like to know that.
Yes, Tina: We'll keep you and others in our prayers.
© 2002 SierraTimes.com (unless otherwise noted)
"You (the federal government) have mismanaged these federal lands, which lie within our state boundaries,"
Then Destructor, you state:
"Under Clinton the government engaged in one of the biggest land grabs in U.S. History"
Article I, Section 8, Section 17, U.S. Constitution states:
"To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever,...over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state..."
It seems to me the ultimate blame for federal "land grabs" and mismanagement of "federal lands" falls squarely on the shoulders of the citizens of the states that elected legislators who consented to the purchase of sovereign state land by our federal government.
Thank you my friends, I'm flattered, but PLEASE no more emails, celcall, wirephone, about 4x4 vigilante.
"It was, we are going to make the forest environment safe for people. We are going to do our best to eliminate fire from the forest. Because fire isn't needed, so we will be better off if we just do our best to get rid of it.""They didn't think it through," Arno said. "They didn't understand these beautiful wildland forests."
They did not know that in a forest, as in an heirloom clock, you cannot remove even one gear, he said. "Because you take that one gear out and funny thing is, the clock doesn't work anymore."
"Fire was the rejuvenating force in our forests, and we took it away," he said. "But the choice was not ours to make. Fire will return to this landscape."
The actions taken that have shut down forestry and logging, the 'Roadless Initiative', the 'Wildlands Projects', and the other watermelon actions placing nature over man have exacerbated the damage and range these wildfires cover.
As I understand it as settlers moved in to the South in the late 1700's and early 1800's the the forests were largely burned over, not like the hills of green we see to day. So it looks like the woods of the west are returning to their natural state.
TR inherited a problem. FDR brought us massive national programmes to fix it. Then it was a problem from the Program for America's Forests of the 1950s. Now it's a problem because of AlGore/Clinton/Babbit. All I hear on these threads is whining about Federal mismanagement. It's symptomatic of a systemic problem, intrinsic to socialism: the managing agent has no motive, means, or accountability to provide detailed, productive, and diverse methods of habitat management to the limits of technology. It's a product the public wants and a government monopoly can't seem to deliver. In fact, as government ownership fails, funding increases; witness the two billion dollars Babbit got from Clinton after the seven million acres they burned in 2000. Wait until they learn about the scope of their weed problem!
So why aren't we talking about doing something about it? A free market system is ready for trials, there is an implementation strategy. Free citizens should not be asking for permission to fix this mess; we should be taking the contract because the managing agent is blowing it. So, how do we organize that? Isn't anybody interested?
You don't understand it. What happens after a stand replacing fire is a blast of even aged juveniles and (here's the part most people don't get) WEEDS. The problem is, that aggressive exotics, once established, are PERMANENT. They completely alter the habitat. Consider knapweed (now infesting large areas of Montana and Idaho). The plant dries out the surface and dries up streams over summer. It puts out a pre-emergent that prevents natives from re-establishing. That loss of groundcover accelerates erosion over 130%. Those plants requiring regular regeneration can eventually go extinct. Each knapweed plant produces thousands of seeds that spread on the wind and remain viable for ten years. It is resistive to low doses of herbicides and those that are available (such as Transline) cost $500 a gallon. Exotics are very expensive to eradicate, often requiring efforts that extend across huge areas and detailed management for as much as a century. A fire creates an open growing medium for weed transmission and little vegetation in the way of wind propagation over large distances. There is no "recovery" as you "understand it."
Amazon.com, or www.tuspco.com/
Or perhaps the other way around. Thank you.
I think the interest is there; the problem is we all have teaspoons -- 'they' have all the huge bucket-loaders.
Natural ecosystems are competitive. At any given point, some solutions are going to be more successful than others. The reason biodiversity is so important is that the conditions under which species compete are based upon selection under variable conditions. If the circumstances change, the strong may fail and the weak may suddenly prosper.I don't think the strong have failed - yet - but the current actions of our elected officials in pandering to the false God of democracy is undermining this Republic and its precepts. Until we can revere those precepts, and reverse the Marxist socialism that is the mainstay of democracy, our teaspoons on the outside will only make us tired. We need to find a way to undermine the underpinnings that Agenda 21 is foisting across the land. JMHO.
That is what I am doing. To implement the system doesn't require any action by government at all.
Goodbye, again.
http://www.ext.nodak.edu/extpubs/plantsci/weeds/w842w.htm
Spotted knapweed is an aggressive, introduced weed species that rapidly invades pasture, rangeland and fallow land and causes a serious decline in forage and crop production. The weed is a prolific seed producer with 1000 or more seeds per plant. Seed remains viable in the soil five years or more, so infestations may occur a number of years after vegetative plants have been eliminated. Spotted knapweed has few natural enemies and is consumed by livestock only when other vegetation is unavailable. The plant releases a toxin that reduces growth of forage species. Areas heavily infested with spotted knapweed often must be reseeded once the plant is controlled. Historical records indicate that spotted knapweed was introduced from Eastern Europe into North America in the early 1900s as a contaminant in crop seed. It now infests several million acres of grazing land in the northwestern United States and Canada.
Ignore my sarcasm.
We have Kudzo, but it dosn't burn like a furnace.
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