- Joined
- Dec 2, 2015
- Messages
- 16,568
- Reaction score
- 7,253
- Location
- California Caliphate
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
California is On Fire Again and it was Preventable - California Globe
When the Save the Environment movement took hold in California, forest management ended. The Forest Service used to actually turn a profit letting companies come in and harvest (marked) trees. You would go in with a Forest Service guy and mark the types of trees he pointed out - dying, diseased, cramped and thin, “no future”, too cramped, etc.
Part of the process included the lumber harvesters creating burn piles to light in the winter*. As the environment lobby took hold, every fire was immediately extinguished**. Slash was piled but not burned. Fire was bad because it killed trees and scared Bambi. Logging on public land mostly ceased.
*You would start your burn pile and cover it with plastic to keep it dry, then like triple the size of the pile with the rest of the slash. Then shove a lit signal flare in it December and run! The plastic was the first thing outlawed, effectively ending burn piles. Sadly, I was back in school when they lit those pyres! Damn.
** the Indians routinely lit the forest on fire to bring game back in to feed on the new growth and make hunting easier. You can’t hunt in a thicket.
So today, the forests and particularly the people who live in them are paying the price for misdirected forest management. If it were up to me most of the destroyed properties should not be rebuilt, but be bought by the state and returned to uninhabited forest. For the most part, they are putting out fires to save homes that were built in the wrong place. These fires are going to continue until it rains.
For decades, traditional forest management was scientific and successful, until ideological, preservationist zealots wormed their way into government and began the 40-year overhaul of sound federal forest management through abuse of the Endangered Species Act and the no-use movement.
California Globe has talked with Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) numerous times about this very issue. McClintock has warned, “Our forests are now catastrophically overgrown, often carrying four times the number of trees the land can support. In this stressed and weakened condition, our forests are easy prey for drought, disease, pestilence and fire.”
Traditional forest management had simple guidelines: thin the forest when it becomes too difficult to walk through; too many trees in the woods will compete with one another, because the best trees will grow at a slower rate.
Today, only privately managed forests are maintained through the traditional forest management practices: thinning, cutting, clearing, prescribed burns, and the disposal of the resulting woody waste.
And private lands do not suffer the wildfires the rest of the state does.
When the Save the Environment movement took hold in California, forest management ended. The Forest Service used to actually turn a profit letting companies come in and harvest (marked) trees. You would go in with a Forest Service guy and mark the types of trees he pointed out - dying, diseased, cramped and thin, “no future”, too cramped, etc.
Part of the process included the lumber harvesters creating burn piles to light in the winter*. As the environment lobby took hold, every fire was immediately extinguished**. Slash was piled but not burned. Fire was bad because it killed trees and scared Bambi. Logging on public land mostly ceased.
*You would start your burn pile and cover it with plastic to keep it dry, then like triple the size of the pile with the rest of the slash. Then shove a lit signal flare in it December and run! The plastic was the first thing outlawed, effectively ending burn piles. Sadly, I was back in school when they lit those pyres! Damn.
** the Indians routinely lit the forest on fire to bring game back in to feed on the new growth and make hunting easier. You can’t hunt in a thicket.
So today, the forests and particularly the people who live in them are paying the price for misdirected forest management. If it were up to me most of the destroyed properties should not be rebuilt, but be bought by the state and returned to uninhabited forest. For the most part, they are putting out fires to save homes that were built in the wrong place. These fires are going to continue until it rains.