I truly hope this idiotic, anti-business line of drivel is spread far and wide across the country to unmask the intent and agenda behind these people.
Dozens of homes lost, lives lost, habitat burned, timber destroyed and huge watersheds exposed to erosion. Before the fires are even out questions are being raised about blame, cause and cost. I will raise another question-Why are almost all of these catastrophes occurring on federal parks and forests? But you say that it is all happening in the west-similar fires can't happen in the eastern national forests. While I don't like to be the bearer of bad news, the risk of catastrophic fires in the eastern national forests is increasing. Hopefully, we will never see a fire run out of control from Atlanta, Ga. to Morgantown, W.Va., but every year conditions on public parks and forests increase the likelihood of such a fire.When forests become overmature, overstocked and overburdened with fuels they become serious candidates for insect attack and disease infestation and then they become an even more likely location for a catastrophic wildfire. Today millions of acres of the mountain forests of the Blue Ridge Province approach this overmature, overstocked condition.
Ground zero in the Blue Ridge area might be Smokey Mountain National Park. When the park was formed the 550,000-acre park included some abandoned farmland but most of the area was either cutover forest or 50-year-old immature forest. Today the abandoned farmland supports 70-year-old even aged and overstocked stands of pine, yellow poplar and mixed hardwoods. The cutover forest stands in the park are now 110-115-years old and are experiencing mortality and species change.
Since the formation of the park there has been no timber harvesting and very little prescribed fire used on the area. So the park today is a tinder box of aging and dying trees with massive undestories of fuel waiting for the right combination of drought, wind and a match. Surrounding the park are several million acres of national forest land, including the Pisgah and Nantahela in North Carolina, the Cherokee in Tennessee, the Chatahootchie in Georgia, the Daniel Boone in Kentucky and the Jefferson and George Washington in Virginia.
Following WWII these mountain forests were managed rather intensively as working forests where extraction of timber on a sustained basis was a primary objective but wildlife habitat, watershed management and recreation received considerable attention through multiple use programs. During this period of active harvest and overall intensive management, overmature trees were cut and young forests were started and overstocking was controlled by thinning. Prescribed fire was used on some of the forests to reduce the threat of wildfire. Thus, the likelihood of a catastrophic wildfire was reduced on these managed forests and they in a way provided a buffer for the unmanaged trees in the Smokey Park.
But in the late 1980's the mission of the National Forests in the mountains began to change. Many thousands of acres of forestland was put off limits for timber harvest by designation as wilderness or wild area or designated as an old growth area. Then in the 1990's the allowable timber harvest on the remaining national forest land available for harvest was greatly reduced. For example, in 1986 the Cherokee National Forest offered for sale over 60 million board feet of timber. Recently the Cherokee National Forest offered less than 12 million board feet for sale. So, today the volume of tree growth on all the national forests greatly exceeds the tree harvest and many stands are already dangerously overstocked. And as time passes, more and more stands become overmature.
Decimated? More like obliterated.