Systemic Catastrophe
Fire Season
Managing the Resource
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
The
illustration is not crystal clear. Rather, it is brought to us in living colors
that range from dirty yellows and opaque grays on the skylines to weird pink
suns at daybreak. For three full weeks, the mountains on our horizons have been
silhouettes. Absent are the mornings that demand your attention and accompany
the first days of fall in our corner of the world.
A hint of
the problem smells just like smoke.
Indeed, the
satellite imagery shows the plume of particulates blowing out of the Northwest
and California and sweeping south before it comes right back through southern
Arizona and the Bootheel of New Mexico. It reminds us we no longer have four
seasons out here in the West. There are now five.
In order, there is … spring,
summer, fire season, fall and winter.
Fire Season
For an expanded venture into
frustration, the session of satellite imagery should be followed by a visit to
any of the federal land management websites. There is going to be a series of
near mission statements as to the importance of their respective efforts.
Cutting to the chase, they pledge their intent to manage for the public, manage
for landscape scale projects, manage for climate change, and, above all, manage
the resource.
Try as you might, there is
absolutely no overview of the things that should be considerations for
addressing how to limit the new fifth season of our year, fire season. Similarly,
there is no mention of any efforts to reduce the impact of the fires on local
economic conditions or the pursuit of efforts that add to the viability of historical
industries.
Certainly, sustainability is scattered
in the bureaucratic wordsmithing, but reality is proving that the only thing
sustainable in the results of federal land management is the promise of expanding
fire along with the theoretical science of applied political environmentalism.
Fire and the expansion of
catastrophic burns is proving to be the only outcome.
Systemic Catastrophe
Real
stewardship of these lands is a pipedream.
In the case of the Forest Service,
the last 40 years has been an extended defense of litigation and the annual
passage of fighting fire. There is nothing in place to enhance or encourage
real stewardship of these lands. Planning is done in the public arena with a
glaring bias toward commitments orchestrated by special interests. There is
more effort directed toward such matters as road closures and wilderness
experiences than healthy forest initiatives. For example, the evolution of land
planning has moved toward confounding alternatives. Four alternatives have
become the standard format. In all cases, only one of the standards calls for expansion
of productive goals.
In the case of grazing, only one of
the alternatives allows production levels to remain at par. Three call for
reduced or eliminated grazing.
How does that equate to managing
fire?
Somebody in
the halls of congress and the annexes of management offices should be reminded
that fire is conditional on the factors of heat, fuel, and oxygen. Even if
global warming is real and recognized as true it only influences one of the
factors. Fuel and oxygen remain. Heat, other than initiation heat, merely makes
the conditions more untenable.
It’s that
simple. The pragmatic and real tools of fire control have been largely
eliminated.
The
management of the forested West has forced up to 65% of the 1964 numbers of
cattle from federal lands. The decline of numbers of sheep and goats is even
more dramatic. That fact may prompt legions of environmentalists to cheer, but,
in the wake, the fuel loads in forests have exploded. Thousands of unit train
equivalents of unconverted fuel is being added to western forests annually.
The
reduction of grazing is a hallmark error, but it isn’t the only gross error.
It is
matched with equivalent reductions in logging. Public planning, activist
judges, and complicit federal managers have combined to sell the fallacy that logging
is not a necessary tool in the modern age.
If you can’t log and you can’t
graze, how about chemical thinning?
Heaven forbid trying to get
environmental assessments allowing to thin chemically. Mechanical thinning on
the scale necessary to affect fuel reductions is similar. The protocol for
controlled burns has also become so onerous that few want to even try (and fuel
loads are so dangerously high that all burns are conditionally disastrous).
A systemic and catastrophic impasse
has been reached across the West. Every fuel reduction tool has been so
maligned and denigrated that necessary and large-scale applications are grounded
to a halt in the scope of what the agencies like to refer to as landscape scale
impact.
So, what is the answer?
Managing
the Resource
By acclimation, the answer is to
burn nine million acres a year, close forests to visitors, create horrific air
quality, reverse millions of tons of historic carbon sequestration, add layers
of mediocrity to the agencies, decimate rural economies, and blame it all on
global warming.
There is no
plan for mitigation of fire.
The
manifestation of the immensity of this problem has few historical equivalents. The
fact is America has been so misinformed and swayed by the socialistic mobs that
change is unlikely. What we need are Americans at risk and allowed to tame this
new age wilderness. We need the complexity of browsers, grazers, and forbs
foragers in abundance. We need to log in incremental, private advances. We need
to control our boundaries and determine on a stepwise basis what free and
individual
Americans can discover when their domain becomes their home. The government
needs to get out of the land ownership business and adhere to the tenets of
originality.
Free and
independent men (yes, and women!) are the only answer.
Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New
Mexico. “It should occur to us that free and independent Americans are both despised
and feared by progressives.”
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