Environmentalists Burn Millions of Acres of National Forest

By Jerry Smith

9/11/2012

According to the National Climatic Data Center, between January and July of this year, 4,088,349 acres burned in the US in wildfires.

Wildfires claimed 2.01 million acres in July 2012 alone, the 4th most on record.

Don’t Blame the Beetles!

While most of these fires have been blamed on drought and beetle kill, there is a much deeper reason for all this costly devastation.  Drought and beetles are only a symptom of the underlying reason.

The substantive reason we are witnessing increasing numbers of extreme wildfires goes back to 1964.  Forty-eight years ago Congress passed the Wilderness Act and unleashed the “Environmental” ("Preservationist") movement.

With the advent of the Wilderness Act, the “Environmentalists” ("Preservationist") began a systematic closing of more and more areas, roads and trails of public land under the guise of “Preserving” these areas for future generations.

Because the “"Preservationist"” were unsatisfied with the total number of acres included in the first “Roadless Area” study (RARE I), they insisted that the study be done again under new, relaxed rules more favorable to their agenda, (RARE II).

The two Roadless Area studies identified all areas of 5000 acres or greater with supposedly little or no evidence of man.  The primary focus was whether there were roads within the area as they represent the “easiest to distinguish” evidence of man’s having “trammeled” the land.

Congress Failed

One of the Congresses failings (which exists to this day) is that they pass a wide sweeping law and leave the details for others to hammer out.  Before you send someone out to determine whether roads exist wouldn’t it make sense to define what a road is?  Even to this day, there is no firm "definition of a road" that is used by the USFS and BLM.  The most used definition identifies what a "Roadless" is.  How lame is that?

 While designated Wilderness seems innocent and innocuous on the surface, there are some unexpected consequences beginning to show.  

Preservation Consequences

The first of these consequences is that a whole new culture of public land management has evolved.  The foremost focus of present day public land management is to promote, support, and advance any effort that will increase “Preservation” of public lands.

“Preservation” equates to disallowing any and all motorized or mechanized use of public lands.  “Multiple Use” is a term that hasn’t been used in over 25-years even though there is a law that USFS Land Management must adhere to if they are doing their job correctly.

Over the last 48-years “Preservationists” have come up with many names for “preserving” large tracts of public land.  They call them “Administrative Designations”.  They include:

• Wilderness Study Areas
• Roadless Areas
• ACEC (area of critical environmental concern)
• National Monuments
• Wildlife Refuges 
• National Conservation Areas (NCAs)
• And other lesser known names

Every once in a while they adopt a new designation.  The last one was Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar’s “Wild Lands” designation, which was temporarily squelched after his attempt to implement it surreptitiously.

Relating to Wildfire

How does this relate to wildfires you might be wondering?  Here is how.

Much of the Federal public land resides in western states.  Forests in the west require approximately 50 to 70 years to mature. 

As a tree matures, it becomes easily stressed.  Droughts are especially significant as they stress the tree allowing diseases and beetles to invade them much easier.

When you have an entire forest mature at the same time, the entire forest is at risk for disease and beetle kill, not just small areas of forest that have not been thinned by proper management methods.

The result is many more intensive extreme wildfires that cannot be controlled, wildfires that burn much larger areas because the entire area is ripe for such wildfires.  There are no healthy areas of growth within the forest to resist disease, beetles, and wildfire so the entire area is affected in one extreme incident.

Wildfires are More Intense

The wildfires of today are much more intense and destructive than the majority of wildfires only 20 years ago.  Wildfires now burn EVERYTHING where 20 years ago, they would burn primarily in the mature areas leaving islands still green and growing.

The Waldo Canyon fire near Colorado Springs is a prime example of what we are experiencing in present days.  Total devastation is the result of the "Preservationist" way of forest management.

 These islands are a major source of seeds from the remaining brush and trees that seed the blackened areas much quicker than can happen in thousands of acres blackened from today's types of wildfires.

This leaves the watershed barren and exposed to a greater rate of erosion for a longer period of time (years).  With the wrong circumstances of a spring thaw, moisture that would otherwise soak into the ground rushes down the mountainside carrying anything in its path into the streams below.

The erosion done from this level of devastation is multiplied by a much higher factor than all the motorized use done for many years could ever do.

A Plea to “Preservationists”

For these reasons, we of the motorized recreational communities ask the Preservationist community to consider their position of “saving it for future generations” as not the proper way of managing our public lands.

With “Preservation” as the primary focus of Public Land Management, we ALL lose. 

With a “Balanced” management of our RENEWABLE RESOURCES, we ALL win.

Trees are a renewable resource if properly used.

Recreation is also a renewable resource.  The still open existing roads and trails provide much of the specific place that recreation takes place.  When the USFS takes roads and trails out of use by closing them to motorized use, they discourage recreation of the entire forest.

We all support true "Conservation".  But "Conservation" of roads and trails should definitely be on the list and of equal value.  Roads and Trails in most National Forests are less than 3% of the land area.  If a "Quiet User" can't find solitude in the remaining 97%, they aren't a "Quiet User"... they are a "Whiner".