Free Republic

County Commissioner Steve Champion says the Withlacoochee State Forest would make a good home. BROOKSVILLE — Hernando County commissioners are thinking about adding a new adventure to their Adventure Coast tourism campaign — a public gun range possibly in the Withlacoochee State Forest. Commissioners on Tuesday gave their unanimous support for their staff to begin investigating how to secure state approval and federal dollars through the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act. The idea came from Commissioner Steve Champion, who pointed out that Hernando County has no public gun ranges where enthusiasts can shoot their guns and experts can provide...

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...

And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served Baalim Judges 2:11 When your political party is actually a Marxist Cult you do not have to have any new ideas of results you simply have to spout religious commandments. A simple statement like the other party is destroying the earth or they are racist, sexist, homophobes and if you believe in us you have absolution from those names. You can claim it is good to live under poverty as long as you worship the earth even if your earth worship is killing the planet,...

Ashdown Forest - the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood - went up in flames overnight as a fire swept across six acres of land | @GD10 Ashdown Forest fire: Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood ablaze

The Camp Fire ripped through 153,336 acres of Northern California over 17 days in November, demolishing more than 13,000 single-family homes and killing 88 people as of Monday. ...Newly-released photography and drone footage brings the devastation of what’s now known as the deadliest and most damaging wildfire in California’s history into sharp, visceral focus. Drone engineer Greg Crutsinger, alongside 16 teams of Northern California law and fire departments and task forces of public safety drone operators, captured the destruction in aerial shots and 360-degree panoramas of what’s left of Paradise, California. The teams performed 518 drone flights in smoky conditions,...

The size and swiftness of this weekend's deadly Valley Fire in California was startling. But could it (and the other fires currently raging out west) have been smaller if fires in previous years had been allowed to burn? The authors of a new paper published today in Science certainly think so. In looking at forest fires in the United States, the researchers found that the vast majority of wildfires were kept extremely small, with 98 percent limited to less than 300 acres. Keeping fires small has been a goal for decades, as firefighters tried to preserve the forest the best...

FYI, .@realDonaldTrump! “...guess who owns much of the forest land in CA? Your federal agencies. CA only owns 2%. Guess who cut funding to forest management in the budget? YOU DID.” ~@tedlieu https://t.co/aXRArq6Tu8— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) November 10, 2018

Officials say a firefighter from Utah was injured while assisting with the Ranch Fire, the bigger of the two in the Mendocino complex. An emergency crew airlifted him to the hospital where he died.

A team of researchers from the University of Maryland, the State University of New York and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has found that new global tree growth over the past 35 years has more than offset global tree cover losses. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes using satellite data to track forest growth and loss over the past 35 years and what they found by doing so. There has been a growing consensus in recent years that because humans cut down so many trees (most particularly in the rainforests) that global tree cover is...

Calling all farmers, land owners, and gardeners... yours truly recently took ownership of 4 acres of property in central Florida and has some questions. I'm far from a greenhorn, but I'm learning new things and don't know what I don't know. Please bear with me and correct any misuse of terms herein. Approximately 3 acres of my land is heavily wooded and was poorly maintained. My last 2 weekends were spent with a rented brush hog clearing the front acre of my property of undergrowth. Vines were everywhere, some as thick as 2 inches (diameter), and it made for very...

Sam Krop’s characterization of catastrophic wildfire on public and privately owned forest lands (guest viewpoint, Oct. 4) doesn’t match the reality of what Oregon experienced this summer. But I can see why Cascadia Wildlands and other special interest groups oppose solutions such as the Resilient Federal Forests Act. These bills untie the hands of our federal land managers, and provide them with more tools and resources to restore the health of our public forests, before and after a fire. Has “hands-off” forest management reduced the size and severity of forest fires? Are we choking on less wildfire smoke every summer?...

Continuing from my previous article on the Democrat's war on free markets and unfair anti-capitalist regulations targeting indie software makers, I said that the best way to stick it to these big companies that back the socialist agenda of the DNC was to buy indie and boycott the big bolshevik businesses. I mean they got to where they were because of capitalism and now they want to ruin it for all of us just so they can avoid competition! SO! We here present our top 10 list of indie games you gotta play! Along with Top 10 Flash games online!...

A forestry company filed a civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) lawsuit against Greenpeace Tuesday for misrepresenting the company’s environmental record to raise funds and promote its agenda. Greenpeace knowingly and deliberately made false claims about the company while fundraising, and fabricated evidence of Resolute’s alleged environmental malfeasance, according to the forestry and paper company Resolute Forest Products. RICO is an anti-mafia law designed to combat organized crime. Greenpeace’ is a global fraud,” states the 124-page legal complaint. “For years, this international network of environmental groups collectively calling themselves ‘Greenpeace’ has fraudulently induced people throughout the United States and...

Europe’s last primeval forest is facing what campaigners call its last stand as loggers prepare to start clear-cutting trees, following the dismissal of dozens of scientists and conservation experts opposed to the plan. Poland’s new far right government says logging is needed because more than 10% of spruce trees in the Unesco world heritage site of Białowieża are suffering from a bark beetle outbreak. But nearly half the logging will be of other species, according to its only published inventory. Oak trees as high as 150 feet that have grown for 450 years could be reduced to stumps under the...

The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well...

Every so often you will see articles warning that some species is going extinct. And usually it's not really a species -- you never hear about "leopards" going extinct, usually it's "purple dotted left handed bisexual Nepalese leopards" or some subvariety.  We are assured they are going extinct because fewer have been seen recently. But the Earth is so big, how can we really be sure that some subspecies is going extinct just because we see fewer of them? After all, only three percent of the land mass of the Earth is urbanized. Animals could easily be hidden in...

It seems that scientists were a little off in calculating the number of trees on the planet. You remember trees: they turn CO2 into oxygen and water. In fact, if you buy a “carbon credit,” you are paying to plant trees to buy an indulgence for your private jet travel -- just like Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposedly do. Well, all those calculations of doom over purported CO2-caused global warming may be a little more unsettled. The Wall Street Journal reports:

There are just over three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation. Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was around 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees...

The global map of tree density at the square-kilometer pixel scale. Credit: Crowther, et al A new Yale-led study estimates that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than some previous estimates. But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46 percent since the start of human civilization, the study estimates. Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level. Their results, published in the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive...