Free Republic

Forest Service official: Environmental groups delayed thinning. Damage from the Little Bear Fire could have been reduced if a proposed Forest Service thinning project had not been delayed by an appeal from two environmental groups, a Forest Service official said Tuesday. "Any type of treatment we could have done would have reduced the severity of the fire," said Chad Stewart, fire and timber officer for the Lincoln National Forest. While the fire as a whole could not have been stopped by thinning efforts, especially in the face of 40 mph wind gusts, damage to the Bonito watershed likely would have...

t may have taken the largest wildfire in Arizona history, but for the first time in decades, environmentalists and government officials agree on a key element of future forest management. The U.S. Forest Service said in a report this month that “intense thinning treatments” can ease future wildfires, by removing trees between six and 18 inches in diameter to allow for additional space between trees. “Everyone agrees that a lot of the dry forest types need to be treated in terms of removing the vegetation,” said Morris Johnson, a research ecologist with the Forest Service and co-author of the report....

<p>RIVERSIDE, Calif. (AP) - Sen. Dianne Feinstein urged Southern California county and city officials to unite to ensure the federal government continues providing funds for forest-thinning to reduce risk of wildfires like the ones that recently ravaged the region.</p> <p>"I'll do everything I can, but the squeaky wheel continues to get the grease," Feinstein, D-Calif., told over 500 people at a luncheon sponsored by the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce. "So squeak loudly."</p>

CAMP SHERMAN -- The trees with the blue ribbons will be cut. Everything decked in pink stays. Of the 50 or so ponderosa pines in a quarter-acre patch of the Deschutes National Forest, as few as 13 could be spared the chain saw. "There's going to be a huge difference. And I'm going to get hammered by some people," says Tim Lillebo, Eastern Oregon field representative for the Portland-based Oregon Natural Resources Council. When President Bush travels to Oregon this week, he is expected to call national attention to this sort of effort to thin the overgrown forests of the...