Townhall...
Catastrophic
Wildfires? Thank the Greenies and Forest Service
By Katie Pavlich
6/11/2011
Arizona is burning and the Forest Service, pressured by green
environmental groups are to blame for their massive, uncontrollable
devastation. The Wallow fire, raging in eastern Arizona near Alpine,
Nutrioso and Springerville has burned 408,887 acres, over 600 square
miles and is the second largest fire the state has ever seen. The
largest in Arizona history was the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire, which
burned 468,638 acres or 732 square miles of Ponderosa Pine forest. The
Wallow fire is only 6 percent contained with high winds on the way and
easily could pass the Rodeo-Chediski fire in size.
Gary Kiehne is a 5th generation cattle rancher and business owner in
Springerville, Ariz. His ranch, located near Reserve, New Mexico, sits
20 short miles away from the Wallow forest fire.
“The Wallow fire is a result of the U.S. Forest Service mismanagement,”
Kiehne says to Townhall.
His father, who will turn 90 in March of 2012, saw a fire like the
Wallow coming for years based on observations of the green movement’s
influence on how the U.S. National Forest Service (USFS) has managed,
or rather grossly mismanaged, the forests for years.
“I predicted years ago that when the weather conditions were right, the
Gila Wilderness, a waste of natural resources and the Gila National
Forest would go up in flames. Much to my sorrow that day has gone,”
Emil Kiehne wrote in a letter to his son. “All of this is a result of
overprotection of our natural resources, timber and grass that has
grown into a dog hair thicket that cannot be contained. The USFS must
go back to allowing multiple use of forest lands to prevent forest
fires.”
Under the disguise of non-profit organizations and saviors of the
environment and endangered species, groups like the Sierra Club,
Friends of the Forest Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity
have been strong advocates against logging, the burning of small
natural fires, and grazing on federally held forest land. Excessive
Forest Service regulation, Endangered Species Act regulations, clean
water regulations and more, prevent the salvaging of dead trees and
cleanup of excess dead vegetation. This has resulted in a dangerous and
large build up of extremely dry dead trees, excess brush and thick
vegetation undergrowth. A ticking time bomb waiting for a single
lightening strike to set it off.
“We can’t go in and do anything now because essentially the greens
control the USFS,” R.J. Smith, director of the Center for Private
Conservation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute tells Townhall.
“The environmental regulations and the philosophy prevents them from
doing anything to restore the forests to a healthy condition. You
literally can’t go in anymore.”
Before the U.S. Forest Service was founded in 1905, with a purpose of
managing public lands in national forests and grasslands, smaller,
natural fires would clear out excess fuels on a regular basis from the
forest floor. Private industry practices such as logging and cattle
grazing also kept excess fire fuel to a minimum. However, due to the
influence of green environmental groups in the past 30 years, logging
and cattle grazing have been essentially outlawed on public lands,
resulting in the overcrowding of trees. In some areas of our forests,
Ponderosa Pine trees grow at a rate of 300 to 700 trees per acre. The
natural amount of trees per acre in Ponderosa Pine forests is between
20 and 50 trees per acre and with an overcrowding of trees, comes more
competition for water, prolonging western droughts beyond normal time
periods, resulting in more dead trees and more excess fire fuel.
In the 1940’s when Emil Kiehne, a former Marine, came home from WWII,
there were over 40,000 head of sheep, 20,000 head of cattle and 30-50
sawmills operating in Catron Country New Mexico.
“Today there are no sheep, very little cattle and only two sawmills
that work part time, but there are hundreds of government employees
doing little or nothing waiting for a vacation or retirement,” Emil
Kiehne said in a letter.
On top of that, according to Smith, the majority of the people employed
by the Forest Service aren’t foresters at all and instead focus on
biology, zoology, among other specialties not related to the health and
maintenance of forests.
In October 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Healthy Forest
Initiative, which set aside funds for the Forest Service to go in and
begin to treat unhealthy National Forests through mechanical thinning,
cutting down trees, salvaging of dead and dying trees and through
prescribed burns. However, these efforts have been put on hold because
the Forest Service is constantly being dragged into court, using
taxpayer dollars by environmentalist groups through the Equal Access to
Justice Act, to prevent any management of the forests through the
Healthy Forest Initiative, citing violations of the Endangered Species
Act or other regulations, for trying to manage the forests properly,
which would prevent massive forest fires like the Wallow. The Forest
Service has moved away from multiple use, meaning private industry, on
public lands to policies focused strictly on recreational use dictated
by green environmentalist special interest groups.
“Every time these fires break out, because each passing year you get
more and more accumulation of fuels in the forests and so when the
fires inevitably come, they’re catastrophic. And the greens say, ‘Well
you know we can’t get into the forests, can’t to do this, can’t do that
because there is all this habitat we can’t disturb and there’s
endangered Spotted Owls in there’ and so on. But what happens when
fires of this level come through, they essentially destroy everything.
They burn down the whole forest and if they don’t kill the endangered
species and wildlife or threatened species that are in there, they do
destroy their habitat,” says Smith. “It’s having a devastating effect
on those species.”
We always hear about environmental groups protesting and screaming
about protecting the animals and plants in the forest, yet when there
is a massive forest fire, those same green activists aren’t the ones on
the front lines trying to put out the fire.
“What’s amazing is that none of them are here trying to fight the
fire,” Gary Kiehne says. “I haven’t seen Greenpeace, I haven’t seen
Friends of Forest Guardians. I haven’t seen the Center for Biological
Diversity. None of them.”
And big fires mean big government solutions and bigger bills being sent
to the taxpayer. The knee-jerk reaction to monster fires is to give
firefighters more resources and money to fight them, rather than taking
a proactive approach to preventing forest fires through the clearing of
excess fuels. In addition, the USFS will ask and get more money,
taxpayer dollars, to remove remaining livestock from forest lands and
to implement even more regulation to “protect” the remaining trees that
didn’t get burned.
“Instead of wasting the money on future appropriations of out tax
dollars to fight future fires, these funds should be appropriated in
the form of grants for low interest loans to ranchers and logging
companies for the purpose of constructing saw mills and purchasing
livestock and rebuilding the infrastructure including fences, water and
roads so that the private sector can harvest the timber and grass off
of our Forests. The lack of harvesting over the last 40 years is
the real cause of this fire and it could have easily been avoided had
proper management of the forests been allowed by the USFS,” Gary Kiehne
wrote in a letter to Congressional Legislators.
These massive fires have major impacts on local community economies in
addition to the environment.
“The short term impact to these communities first off, when a fire like
this happens like the Rodeo-Chediski fire for example, we had a
temporary boom because firefighters and are staying in our hotels and
restaurants but then, as soon as they got the fire out, the Forest
Service put a ban on anybody coming up here,” Gary Kiehne says. “Our
communities are effectively going to die on the vine because of this
fire.”
The area where the Wallow fire is burning could be turned into a
successful recreational for hunters, fishers and ranchers if natural
resources weren’t controlled by the green movement and the USFS.
Ironically, the slogan of the Forest Services’ Smokey the Bear is “only
you can prevent forest fires,” yet the green movement in partnership
with the USFS are doing exactly the opposite. Natural resources are
going to waste, economies are being stalled, homes are burning and the
environment is being destroyed thanks to the incompetence, as usual, of
the greenies and the USFS. The very thing environmentalists claim they
want to protect is being completely destroyed and devastated thanks to
their own big government, anti-private industry, nonsensical policies.
Environmentalists have fought for control of land in America and now
that they have it, they have trashed it, leaving to burn in an inferno
nearly impossible to contain which will leave the once beautiful land
charred, black and the eco-system changed for a very very long time.
“All public lands should become private lands because what belongs to
everyone belongs to no one.” -Emil Kiehne.
The USFS did not return my phone calls for comment.
Read it at Townhall
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