Free Republic

At last report, there were three confirmed fatalities in the landslide, one known survivor and three people still missing. A massive landslide took out three homes on a highway outside of Wrangell late Monday. Three people had been found dead as of Tuesday night, and search and rescue efforts continue, along with an outpouring of community aid. KTOO’s Anna Canny is in Wrangell and says the most recent update from authorities is that three people are still missing. Anna Canny: So right now, we still don’t know any of those names that have been released publicly. But we do know...

Everything Is “Woke” Now. Even The U.S. Forestry Service. (Kellogg, Idaho) — After a student was banned from graduation in Kellogg Idaho for making some off-the-cuff remarks about how “Boys are boys. Girls are Girls. There is no in between,” the young student named Travis Lohr has now had his job offer rescinded. According to the Blaze Media: Lohr told Campos-Duffy he was slated to start work Sunday, but when he went in to complete the final paperwork, his boss informed him he was rescinding the offer. He described the job as "fighting wildland forest fires." "That's part of life,...

The new BLM rule introducing so-called conservation leasing will likely become the administration’s vehicle for locking up federal property. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is preparing to fundamentally reshape how public lands are managed without congressional approval. In March, the agency unveiled a sweeping proposal to establish a framework for “conservation leases” that places a newfound priority on preservation. The new Public Lands Rule presents a radical departure from the “multiple use mandate” Congress outlined for the agency in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA). New Rules Are a ‘Game Changer’.. FLPMA requires federal lands...

Forest Service Chief Randy Moore appeared this week before a U.S. Senate committee where he was pressured by lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to speed up thinning work on federal forests. The Biden administration identified over 175,000 square miles of old growth and mature forests on government lands. The administration plans to craft a rule to protect forests from fires, insects, and other effects of climate change. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File) Moore faced pointed questioning from U.S. Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a Republican who warned the administration's conservation efforts could "lock Americans out of the public...

BIDEN ORDERS EARTAGGED COWS KILLED IN NEW MEXICO TO PLEASE ENVIRO WACKOS! Less than 24 hours before bullets are set to fly, a group of animal activists including the Humane Farming Association hopes an 11th-hour lawsuit stops the planned aerial slaughter of 150 cattle in New Mexico. During a federally-approved, three day-event set to start Thursday, the U.S. Forest Service plans to shoot feral cattle from a helicopter roaming a southwestern area of the state. The federal agency announced its decision on Feb. 16, explaining feral cattle on the 560,000-acre Gila Wilderness Area “pose a significant threat to public safety...

TIERRA MONTE – The air smells of ash and the landscape is leached of color. Spots of green punctuate the valley floor in places. But along the ridges, the powdery residue of charred trees has fallen like snow, accumulating up to 4 inches deep. These are the slices of forest where the fire burned the hottest, scorching ponderosa pines from crown to root. Once titans, they are now matchsticks. Pola Lopez gestures their way, southward toward Hermits Peak. Before a tsunami of flames ripped through this canyon in Tierra Monte, the canopy was so thick it was impossible to see...

The Calf Canyon Fire was caused by a “pile burn holdover from January” that was started by the Santa Fe National Forest Service, officials said on Friday. The blaze later merged with the Hermits Peak Fire – also started by a federal prescribed burn – to become the largest fire in New Mexico history. The Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire has burned more than 312,000 acres as of Friday morning and is 47% contained. More than 3,000 personnel are battling the blaze that has destroyed 761 structures, including hundreds of homes. “The Santa Fe National Forest is 100 percent focused on...

There is a federal court ruling late today regarding mail-in ballots here in Pennsylvania but first... The US Forest Service announcing a temporary halt to controlled burns. The move comes after the service ignited New Mexico's largest wildfire ever during a controlled burn... Joe Biden's approval rating hits a new rock bottom... The Democrat controlled January 6th Committee met with former lawyer for President Trump former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani... Syria Says Three Dead In Israeli Strike Near Damascus... A federal judge ruling against the Biden Administration on its controversial plan to roll back Title 42 designed to control...

908 Devices, manufacturer of purpose-built handheld and desktop devices for chemical and biomolecular analysis, and the United States Forest Service (USFS) are collaborating on a research effort to extend the capabilities of the MX908 handheld device for rapid detection of toxic pesticides used in illegal marijuana grows on federal lands. Drug traffickers plant marijuana in remote areas on U.S. federal lands, mainly in the Pacific Southwest, and use toxic and illegal pesticides to accelerate crop growth. USFS personnel currently have no safe and reliable method to conduct pesticide testing at the site of these illegal marijuana grows. They often must...

Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management, Tracy Stone-Manning, testified in federal court in 1993 that she sent a threatening letter to the Forest Service warning that a local forest had been sabotaged with tree spikes. Stone-Manning told a local news outlet in 1993 that she could have faced conspiracy charges had she not struck an immunity deal with a federal prosecutor in return for her testimony. Court documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show that Stone-Manning testified that her friend and former roommate John Blount, who was found guilty and sentenced to 17 months...

Early this week, Oregon governor Kate Brown went on national television to call the Pacific Coast fires a “bellwether for climate change.” As UC Berkeley professor of sustainable development Maximilian Auffhammer writes, “It’s the climate change, stupid.”This is one of four responses to the Pacific Coast fires. Brown and Auffhammer are warmers, people who believe the earth’s climate is changing and the fires must be due to that change. In the warmers’ minds, the fires themselves then become evidence that we need to change our lifestyles to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.A second group are the burners, people who...

Bill Clinton’s land management rules and other liberal policies paved the way for future debilitating wildfires ... Zybach warned of potential disastrous wildfires shortly after Clinton signed a slate of rules in the mid-1990s that drastically reduced logging and road creation on federal lands. ... Shortly before leaving office in 2001, Clinton limited the ability of the United States Forest Service to thin out a dense thicket of foliage and downed trees on federal land... created a ticking time bomb ... “If you don’t start managing these forests, then they are going to start burning up. Thirty years later, they...

Law enforcement capers and Forest Service job corps forever Unlawful law enforcement Marjorie Haun at Free Range Report broke the story that on June 13, William Woody, director of BLM’s Office of Law Enforcement Services (OLES), had his gun and badge stripped from him and that he was escorted out of the Department of the Interior headquarters in Washington D.C. Woody had previously worked for BLM, was then transferred to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and then transferred back to the BLM in 2017. According to Haun’s source, Woody was pushed out of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife...

Federal land managers on Wednesday proposed sweeping rule changes to a landmark environmental law that would allow them to fast-track certain forest management projects, including logging and prescribed burning. The U.S. Forest Service, under Chief Vicki Christiansen, is proposing revisions to its National Environmental Policy Act regulations that could limit environmental review and public input on projects ranging from forest health and wildfire mitigation to infrastructure upgrades to commercial logging on federal land. "We do more analysis than we need, we take more time than we need and we slow down important work to protect communities," Christiansen told NPR. The...

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Galatians 5:1 Oregon is used to two to five hundred square mile forest fires with their blast furnace heat, but it has never had one race through a community like the Paradise CA fire. Oregon is the American Outback where there are only four million people living in over a hundred thousand square miles. Most of the state except the western one third is barely populated so forest fires only destroy forests not people and houses. When the...

Dan Love .. led Operation Cerberus ... Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, wants to rein in the law enforcement authority of the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service and is crafting legislation he says will either restrict or abolish their authority. Lee said Monday he aims to hem in powers he says were never envisioned under the Federal Land Management Policy Act of 1976. "Our federal land management agencies have drifted far from their intended purposes.. The BLM has expanded its operations far from public lands." ... The senator added federal land agencies exercise police powers on private land...

In the last 30 years, the amount of federal timber available for sale in most of America’s national forests has been reduced between 70 and 99 percent. A University of Idaho study suggests that forest and wood product production jobs in this state have diminished from nearly 20,000 in 1991 to 12,479 in 2016. An unreliable and constricted supply of logs has been the largest factor forcing mill closures in Idaho towns like Kamiah, Orofino, Coeur d’Alene and Elk City. Over that quarter of a century, some 7,500 Idaho forest-dependent families have lost the employment, homes and lifestyle they once...

The United States Forest Service severely damaged a forest road and trail in Northwestern Idaho earlier this month, raising serious questions about the agency’s ability to care for federally-managed lands. During the first weekend in June, several members of Northwestern Gold Prospectors Association (NWGPA) planned to attend a gathering to prospect private claims in the Bedrock Gulch and Eagle Creek areas. When the prospectors arrived, Forest Road 152 was blocked with cement barricades and hundreds of felled trees. ... Photographs from that day show large logs laid crosswise and laterally on the trail, covered with hundreds of large pine branches...

On June 5, 1967, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes – which translates to Federal Land Grant Alliance – led by Reies Lopez Tijerina stormed the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla with the intention of freeing nearly a dozen members of their group who had been arrested two days earlier and to make a citizens’ arrest of prosecuting District Attorney Alfonso Sanchez. The two-hour confrontation resulted in a prison guard being shot through the cheek and a sheriff’s deputy severely beaten. It ended when the 20 or so raiders escaped with two hostages. The famous raid was inspired in part by ill...

Peruvian natural resource managers have questions about how to protect their country’s forests, and they came to Summit County for answers. A U.S. Forest Service division called International Programs, which promotes sustainable forest management and biodiversity conservation in foreign countries, brought top-level Peruvian officials for an educational tour that started Monday in Washington D.C. and ends Friday in Denver. ... In 2009, a U.S-Peru free trade agreement stipulated that Peru must curtail illegal logging, which undercuts the U.S. timber sector, and sustainably manage natural resources, said Erin Carey, who worked with the Forest Service International Programs for the last five...