Roadmap to Oblivion
The Words
Have It
SMOKE!
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
The
luxury of stepwise planning is a lovely potion.
On
Friday, most of my day was spent alone setting up the installation of two water
projects that will conclude our current environmental improvement project
contract with the federal government. One of the practices is the installation
of a water storage unit. The other is the placement of a new trough. Both will
add water storage and availability where there are none.
The installation of the storage
will be done with something we have advocated for some time. Rather than
sitting it out somewhere on vacant land, we are opting to place the storage in
the middle of an existing trough. The trough has not been used for several years
due to the loss of the well that served it. It is a relatively big trough being
18’ in diameter. I must admit that I don’t care for big troughs especially if
there is no barrier around them. Desert cattle learn from an early age that
standing in them is a pleasant experience, but the outcome becomes a nasty
mess. A full fledge sewer is the result, and, if it is not disagreeable to the
cattle, it remains disagreeable to me.
Our cattle will be offered clean
water to the extent we can provide it.
The poly storage tanks that are
now available can serve two purposes. Of course, the first is storage, but the
second is an effective barrier to keep cattle from crawling into the open
troughs. Since they don’t rust, they can be placed right in the middle of the
water. If you can size them properly, a drinking area that allows unencumbered drinking
access without the ability to crawl into the water is created.
Voila, an externality exists!
The second benefit is not just a
subtle one. It is the avoidance of the need for an arts clearance by the
federal officer to allow or disallow the placement of the tank due to discovery
of a broken arrowhead or a pottery shard.
That is the life we live.
SMOKE!
California continues to burn.
Along the banks of the Kings
River in Fresno County, our friends and church family in Kingsburg are telling
us they are sick to death of the air quality. The dirty haze created by the
annual festival of mega-carbon releases orchestrated by the good folks
protecting and managing our precious natural resources has made it unbearable.
To add misery to despair, cumulative daily 100° readings is now reaching delirium.
It was with that backdrop that
the announcement of the annual budget for fighting fires on federal lands was reviewed.
A whopping $3.9B annual line item is the new reward for the absence of any real
management of federal forest lands.
That is no token outlay.
That represents about $650 per
burned acre on the basis of the annual burn rate represented by the federal
government. That is what it is now costing on an annualized basis to fight
these mega-carbon releases.
Of course, the hope is for rain
to suppress the fires, but, what about next year? What about ten years from
now? Is there a solution or shall we consider wearing a respirator 300 miles
from any ongoing inferno a natural right?
The hypocrisy is stifling … the
robbery of the American citizenry and the squandering of the national treasury is
worse.
Roadmap to Oblivion
The question must be asked. Is
there anybody out there at the helm of this thing?
The answer has to be “no”. There
is not a thing in place other than the new budget reward for malfeasance and
neglect of substantive duty and management.
The plan is to spend money on smoke.
Yes, our congressman can say he
tried or defer to the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017 (RFFA), but neither
of those actions mean anything. The House passed it, but the Senate didn’t. It
doesn’t exist other than in the archives of failed attempts.
There is no strategy, folks, and
the Forest Service and the BLM have absolutely no plan of attack to counter
this now century old debacle of utter federal failure.
If you don’t have a headache and
need one, read the RFFA. It is truly an exercise in the interpretation of Swamp
Talk. If it was passed in its current form, the federal land management
agencies are guaranteed to grow and prosper while bowing to the alter of the
National Environmental Policy Act. Rather than seeking some semblance of a plan
to convert fuel in place and return sunlight to the forest floors, all such
actions excluded from the throttling of any action by NEPA evaluations will be
confined to 10,000 acre replicates or 30,000 acre replicates if privileged NGO
partners are subscribed.
On the Gila, the Lincoln, and
the Cibola Forests in New Mexico, respectively, “test” pilot demonstrations are
going to be staged to see if thinning and watershed projects actually work!
Arbitrators are going to be
employed to identify projects. Their requirements are to evaluate such things
as forest health, habitat diversity, wildfire potential, insect/disease
potential and timber production. Of course, this has to be studied and major
universities are going to be contracted on the basis of shared work with the
federal Forest Lab as if real conclusions will be found outside of the obvious.
Perhaps the real answer is being
manifested as we watch. At the current burn rate, the entire USFS standing
forest will be burned in 21 years. That will take care of the problem as it now
exists, and, then … we can start over.
God Help Us!
Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Payment in lieu of taxes
(PILT) payments are sprinkled across the landscape at a current rate of about
$.78 per federal acre to keep the natives from uprising. Compare that to the
$650 per burn acre given to the agencies to deal with their ineptness.”
It just so happens I had prepared a status report and summary of the Resilient Federal Forests Act for the Linebery Policy Center for Natural Resource Management. It is one of 25 different bills I'm tracking for the Linebery Legislative Lineup.
Linebery Legislative Lineup
Number: H.R. 2936
Title: Resilient
Federal Forests Act of 2017
Sponsor: Bruce
Westerman (R-AR)
Status:
Introduced on 06/20/17 and referred to House Natural Resources and two other Committees.
Reported out of the Natural Resources Committee on 6/27/2017 (House Rept.
115-370, Part 1 https://www.congress.gov/115/crpt/hrpt370/CRPT-115hrpt370-pt1.pdf)
Passed the House on 11/01/2017.
CRS Summary
This bill shall apply whenever the Department concerned,
either the Department of Agriculture for National Forest System (NFS) lands or
the Department of the Interior for public lands, prepares an environmental
assessment or an environmental impact statement pursuant to the National
Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) for specified forest management
activities, including those that:
- will occur on lands identified as suitable for timber production; or
- will occur on a landscape-scale area designated by the Department concerned as part of an insect and disease treatment program on NSF land pursuant to the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, notwithstanding whether such activity is initiated before September 30, 2018.
In such an environmental assessment or environmental impact
statement, the Department concerned shall study, develop, and describe only
these two alternatives:
- the forest management activity, and
- the alternative of no action.
In the case of the alternative of no action, the Department
concerned shall evaluate:
- the effect of no action on forest health, habitat diversity, wildfire potential, insect and disease potential, and timber production; and
- the implications of a resulting decline in forest health, loss of habitat diversity, wildfire, or insect or disease infestation on domestic water supply in the project area, wildlife habitat loss, and other economic and social factors.
The bill establishes categorical exclusions regarding
certain other forest management actions
.
.
A process is established for declaration of a major disaster
for wildfire on federal lands managed by specified federal land management
agencies
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