Bob Zybach

Smog the Golden! Mythical Pyrodactyl aka “Smokey Dragon” (Frank Carroll, PFMc)

The following interview by Jim Petersen with Frank Carroll is nearly 2800 words long — which is kind of excessive for this forum but well worth the read for anyone who hasn’t done so already and is concerned with USFS wildfire history, politics, and economics over the past 35 years.

The interview is nearly four years old, but has just been republished in the current issue of Smokejumper magazine by editor Chuck Sheley and is a slightly abbreviated version of Petersen’s April 2020 publication in Evergreen Magazine: https://www.evergreenmagazine.com/blowtorch-forestry/

Despite the interview’s age, it remains directly relevant to current discussions regarding the great cost, visual and air pollution, wildlife mortality, and damaged rural economies resulting from continuing practices of the modern US Forest Service — what Carroll refers to as the “New Wildfire Economy.”

In 2020, then-USFS Chief Vicki Christiansen’s directive was: “Using unplanned fire in the right place at the right time.” Today, current-USFS Chief Randy Moore says he is “pleased to report that we have made significant progress in implementing this daring and critical strategy,” and talks about “using” fire on a “record 1.9 million acres as a method of reducing hazardous fuels.” If that is the objective, then much safer and cheaper methods of reducing such fuels — and even showing a taxable income while doing so — were demonstrated over hundreds of millions of acres in the 20th century and continue to be effectively used on private, state, and Indian lands to this time. 

According to Carroll, the “New Wildfire Economy” has become “big business” for the USFS, “effectively replacing traditional forestry practices with unfettered wildfire tending.” This is presented as the difference between producing tax revenues for the government while creating needed local jobs, safe and beautiful environments, and maintaining abundant and diverse wildlife populations vs. using taxpayer dollars to economically bankrupt our rural forest economies, killing our wildlife, and replacing the once beautiful landscapes with a sea of ugly and dangerous snags. Not in those words exactly, but documented factual outcomes.

Sheley, Petersen, and Carroll are all experts regarding the responsible treatment of “unplanned fires” and the consequences for mismanaging them. Petersen’s book on the topic and Carroll’s qualifications are described in the interview and Sheley’s introduction:
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Chuck Sheley: I found Jim’s interview of Frank Carroll, a Colorado forester and wildfire expert, to be educational and informative and something the readers of “Smokejumper” magazine would find interesting. Jim’s book, “First Put Out the Fire,” leads off the discussion. This interview is from several years ago, and during COVID, but very relative to what is going on today. I’ve shortened the word count to make it fit in this issue. Reprinted with permission.

Jim Peterson: I’ve yet to hear from anyone who thought my book wasn’t “a good read,” but Frank Carroll, a colleague of 20 years, thought I stopped the wildfire discussion 20 years too soon.

Frank was Public Affairs Director for Potlatch Corporation’s Eastern Region when we met in 2000. Today, he is the Managing Partner in Professional Forest Management (PFM), a Pueblo, Colorado, firm that does trial work with clients whose private forests have been overrun by “managed fires” that began on adjacent Forest Service land.

Frank wrote: “I just finished your book and have to say I have high hopes for your book. I thought you would step above the old swamp and take on the biggest gorilla in the room, ‘using unplanned fire in the right time and the right place’ to ‘reintroduce fire to fire depleted ecosystems’ as Chief Christiansen put it in her directive to the troops last year.”

“Using unplanned fire in the right place at the right time” appears in a note Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen sent to her line officers last year. It is a thinly veiled reference to “managed fire,” or applying wildfire like prescribed fire, in a directive agency fire crews are expected to follow whenever the opportunity to let a wildfire run presents itself. There are few places outside of designated Wilderness areas where this can be done safely, but the practice is used widely across the Western National Forests as a matter of policy. Certainly, nowhere near communities, municipal watersheds, or fish or wildlife habitat critical to threatened or endangered species, and, yet, it is precisely these locations that are increasingly overrun by managed fire.

Some people rejected forestry long ago. State foresters, Interior agencies, and local governments have stayed the course where wildfires are concerned. Put them out as quickly as possible. Hence, the title of my book: First, Put Out the Fire. I write that if we don’t put these fires out, we won’t have anything else to talk about after the smoke clears. So, by all means, let’s talk about a proper role for wildfire in a post-industrial society that depends on its national forests for far more than timber.

Appropriately, timber production has become a by-product of federal policies that favor wildlife habitat conservation. In my opinion, “managed fire” is on a collision course with every forest value our society holds dear, which brings me to what’s bothering Frank Carroll.
I’ll let Frank speak for himself in the question-and-answer interview below, but his main complaint is one with which I am familiar— “managed fires” have a nasty habit of becoming unmanageable wildfires that overrun adjacent and well-managed private forest lands.
Petersen: Frank, tell us about your new business venture.

Carroll: Professional Forest Management, LLC, does wildfire impact analysis for law firms and private clients in federal tort claims and legal actions. From a forest perspective, this rather simple aspirational objective—using unplanned fire in the right place at the right time—is the absolute worst development in the history of forests and forest conservation.

Petersen: How so?

Carroll: We are burning our forests to ruin, and we’re doing it on purpose. We got out of the thinning and prescribed fire business on federal land, and now we are in the Age of Fire for Fire’s Sake. I call it “Fire-first” forestry. Federally-funded wildfire crews are burning big boxes around the West and are now responsible for 40 to 60 percent of the acreage burned by any given large fire.

Petersen: And this is managed fire?

Carroll: This is managed fire. National forest supervisors are expected to maximize the management role of wildfire, and they are doing it with a vengeance.

Petersen: This doesn’t sound like good forestry.

Carroll: It isn’t, but it is what’s happening. The 2018 Pole Creek and Bald Mountain Fires in Utah and the earlier Lolo Pass Fire are great examples of the madness of managed fire. We are working on $40 million in claims on Bald Mountain and Pole Creek alone, and there are many more that will go unchallenged because there is no internal or congressional oversight.

Petersen: What does that mean?

Carroll: It means the USFS is violating the National Environmental Policy Act. These fires are major federal actions with environmental consequences. Where are the Environmental Assessments or the Environmental Impact Statements? They don’t exist. There is no Record of Decision, no public process, no paper trail, no recourse for the public. The agency can operate in complete secrecy without disclosing specific or cumulative consequences. It’s all illegal. You cannot use Congressionally-appropriated fire suppression funds to do resource management except wildfire suppression. If you or I did this, we’d be in jail.

Petersen: Yet from what I’m hearing, “using unplanned fire in the right fire in the right place at the right time” is currently giving way to more timely and direct attack.

Carroll: Congressional delegations from the West forced Chief Christiansen’s hand because of concerns about the impact COVID-19 will have on firefighting this year. She is suddenly in full suppression mode because of the risks the virus poses to crews that work, eat, and sleep in close proximity.

Petersen: I understand that, but how does it undermine managed fire?

Carroll: The virus prevents the Forest Service from operating in complex strategic environments that feature big, intricate burnouts covering hundreds of thousands of acres because they can’t coalesce in one giant fire camp and coordinate all the moving parts. But you can be sure they’ll be back to “using unplanned fire” as soon as possible.

Petersen: Why?

Carroll: First, because they can. It’s a management prerogative they control completely and requires no public oversight or interference from cooperating agencies. Even when cooperators protest, as the State of Utah did in 2018, the Agency moves ahead anyway without consequences. Second, they are strongly pressed by environmental groups like FUSEE and the DiCaprio Foundation to let fires burn. And, finally, fighting forest fires has become big business for the USFS and their firefighting contractors—a hog’s paradise allowing them to spend money like drunken sailors. So, no one realizes what they are doing except the special interests who want them to do it, and an ignorant Congress is giving them limitless money to burn. So, they burn.

Petersen: How do you know all this?

Carroll: It’s our business nowadays. We do the intensive and comprehensive analysis of entire records from large fires. We spend years in deposition and preparing for court and trial. Our sources keep us abreast of new developments in policy and practice in real-time. In its reports to Congress, the USFS is counting wildfire acres burned as acres treated.

Petersen: We’ve heard that before and it has always seemed like a misappropriation of taxpayer dollars.

Carroll: It is. The USFS is using federally appropriated wildland fire management dollars to practice a new kind of wildfire-based resource management that holds that, since we can’t do real natural resource management projects on an ecologically significant scale, we’ll just use wildfire on everything everywhere and call it good enough. Managed fire is the only form of management no one questions. Environmentalists can’t stop them and don’t want to, they don’t need anyone’s permission, and there is no oversight.

Petersen: Real resource management being the thinning and prescribed fire regime that states, private landowners and Indian tribes use perennially?

Carroll: Correct

Petersen: This goes back to my belief that the fault here rests with Congress and its failure to allow the USFS to undertake forest restoration projects on physical scales that are environmentally significant.

Carroll: It’s worse than that. What we have here is a federal forest management agency that can spend whatever it wants in any way it wants with no public input or oversight.

Petersen: Aren’t there auditors who go through the firefighting bills?

Carroll: There are, but no fiscal officer in the USFS has firefighting experience. They won’t challenge or second guess fire commanders or forest supervisors because if things go to hell, they’ll be blamed. This is the new Wild West and Wildfire is the name of the game.

Petersen: Keep your head down and don’t mess up.

Carroll: Climate change, fuels equilibrium, growth, harvest and mortality, and reforestation are all yesterday’s news. What we have today is a rogue federal agency burning its way into a new bureaucratic empire that is publicly unaccountable.

Petersen: Reminds me of Eisenhower’s warning about the dangers posed by what he called the military-industrial complex.

Carroll: That’s a good analogy. What we have here is an Industrial Wildfire Complex that is answerable to no one. The Forest Service today is a much different agency than the one that all of us knew for decades. The transition from forestry to fire has rendered every forest plan objective effectively moot.

Petersen: That’s a big statement, especially when we consider that this transition occurred in plain view of anyone who was watching. And you worked for the Forest Service, didn’t you?

Carroll: In the National Park Service and the Forest Service from 1972 through 2012. I held primary fire, forest staff, and leadership roles in the USFS in Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, South Dakota and spent time in Washington, D.C. My time since my Forest Service years has been spent in wildland fire mitigation planning and implementation, remote sensing, wildfire impact, and suppression analysis.

Petersen: Based on all your experience, how do we reverse course?

Carroll: Not easily. The Forest Service today is a black box. It is immune to public scrutiny and led by fire officers who are not well-grounded in natural resource management. They have no interest in further fights with smoke regulators or anti-management environmentalists. Why would they when they can burn far and wide, accumulate political power, maintain their Smokey vibe, and enjoy vastly increased budgets in the New Wildfire Economy.

Petersen: New Wildfire Economy. I don’t even like the sound of those words.

Carroll: No one should, but it’s real and it’s here.

Petersen: Some of these big fires burn so hot that they cook the soil. It can take a century or more to rebuild the organic layer in which seeds germinate, so 200 to 300 years to grow a new forest where the old one stood.

Carroll: That’s true and the burners don’t care. They see big wildfires as a natural agent.

Petersen: Better than the thinning and prescribed fire combination I describe in my book.

Carroll: Yes, because the New Wildfire Economy makes it easy. No appeals or litigation. No nasty wild-eyed environmentalists. Just lumbermen who don’t seem to understand the problem or are under too much economic pressure to have any stomach for the fight.

Petersen: So, where is the good news?

Carroll: The good news is that the Forest Service will not go to public trial on these issues for fear of upending their new wildfire hegemony. They are doing their own version of stop, drop and roll so they can stay hidden in plain sight. They will settle every claim out of court, no matter how weak, rather than go to trial and have these issues openly reviewed. This is good for people harmed by these fires.

Petersen: The big issue is the transition from an agency that manages forests to one that favors applied wildfire to every natural resource management objective?

Carroll: That is precisely the biggest issue. It is the issue that has the USFS hiding behind things like 747s that dump fire retardant on fires. It makes great video on the evening news but does nothing to address the underlying causes of these enormous fires or the agency’s decision to favor fire over forestry.

Petersen: We’re told the public is very suspicious of thinning projects that are large enough to actually reduce the risk and size of these big wildfires.

Carroll: Some people don’t like logging of any kind. Others see its value. In our New Wildfire Economy, it doesn’t matter. Welcome to the world of blowtorch forestry.

Petersen: More than half the Forest Service’s annual budget is spent on wildfires. Most people think that’s what it takes to put these fires out. You’re saying the big expense occurs when the decision is made to “manage” the fire, meaning let the fire run rather than put it out quickly.

Carroll: That’s correct. I can show you one 1,600-acre managed fire that cost taxpayers $12.6 million. The whole idea of firefighting has been turned on its head. The USFS is using crews to light fires on an epic scale, not put fires out. They have no idea what they’re doing or what the implications of using unplanned fire are for the future.
Petersen: Maybe Congress needs to tell the USFS that for every blowtorched acre there will be an acre that is mechanically thinned in combination with prescribed fire. The way it was done for decades.

Carroll: Nice idea but it won’t happen.

Petersen: Why not?

Carroll: Two different worlds. In the blowtorch world, the USFS burns to its heart’s content with no oversight, no need to ask anyone for permission and no lawsuits. In the world of forest and range management, there are laws and regulations, there is oversight and there is litigation. Moreover, the Forest Service no longer has the skill sets needed to plan and execute large scale thinning projects.

Petersen: So, we’re stuck with blowtorch forestry?

Carroll: The Forest Service—and Congress by association—are rolling big dice. They are betting that blowtorch forestry will reset the biological clock in our forests and that they will be able to meaningfully manage the resulting brush fields for the greater good. That’s just a fantasy.

Petersen: Brush fields have overtaken much of the 500,000-acre Biscuit Fire that burned in 2002 on southern Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest.

Carroll: You haven’t seen anything yet. Blowtorch forestry is creating millions of acres of sorrel monocultures that will burn and reburn and revert to the lowest common denominator, cheat grass and wild oats, like we’re seeing in California. The only way they can manage these newly created brush ecosystems is to keep burning them and the only time they can burn them is in high fire season. So, the blowtorch will be applied relentlessly until the world changes.

Petersen: There are still some dedicated professionals working for the Forest Service. I’m surprised no one has blown the whistle on this racket.

Carroll: I know, but you must realize that the USFS has no intention of returning to its roots. It has embraced wildfire because it’s easier. My partner and I are doing very well in this environment, but it’s so sad to watch.

Petersen: So, if I have followed the bouncing ball to its destination, what you are telling me is that the Forest Service will work harder on initial attack this year because the virus and the western congressional delegation have forced their hand.

Carroll: That’s correct. And because of much better initial attack—and no managed fires—you will see smaller fires this year unless they just let them burn, which is likely because moving armies around will be harder in most cases. But as soon as the virus passes, the Forest Service will go right back to blowtorch forestry.

Petersen: Unless we can find a way to stop them from burning the nation’s federal forest legacy to the ground.

Carroll: I am not optimistic. The forces that gave us a five-fold increase in fire suppression spending will not abate. The current Forest Service Chief is deeply and personally invested in the ascendance of fire management in her agency. The Deputy Secretary of Agriculture over the Forest Service is likewise a fire-first leader and the current Chief’s mentor. There is a fire dragon walking the halls of the Forest Service in Washington, D.C. and it will not be easily dislodged.

OSU “scientists,” citing taxpayer-funded and peer-reviewed economic, forestry, and climate research, have determined that “climate change” has cost Northwest tree farmers a loss of $6 billion dollars over the past 20 years. This “finding” is being sensationalized in much of the press, but even the more sober and usually realistic Oregon Business is reporting that: “The increased prevalence of wildfires and droughts due to climate change did not account for all of the value depreciation, but it was a significant driver. The study suggests that recent climate change is responsible for lowering timberland values by $6.2 billion, or 55% of the total devaluation.”

Here is the link: https://oregonbusiness.com/osu-study-wildfires-drought-have-reduced-the-value-of-west-coast-timber-by-11-2-billion/

The assumption seems to be that increased wildfires are a direct result of drought caused by climate change, resulting in risks to landowners causing decreases in property values that are apt to reduce tax rolls if we don’t do something about it. Fortunately, there is a glimmer of hope:

“Our research results indicate that any policy that can successfully reduce the spread of wildfire could reduce risks for timberland owners and provide economic benefits in the form of higher land values,” writes David J. Lewis, a natural resource economist at Oregon State, who coauthored the study, in an email to Oregon Business. “The key question (not answered in our research) is whether the administration’s new wildfire strategy will actually be successful in reducing wildfire risks,” referring to the White House’s plans to develop a national strategy to estimate the impacts of climate change on the value of the nation’s natural capital, including forests, minerals, oceans and rivers.

An underlying problem is that no one has demonstrated that the climate is actually changing in this region, that droughts have resulted, or that the increase in regional wildfires is a result of those speculations. On the other hand, the regional increases in wildfire severity and extent have been clearly predicted using traditional scientific research methodology for more than 30 years because of radical changes in federal forest management policies and practices.

And these fires are occurring almost exclusively on public lands, and not private — even though the climate is remarkably similar for both ownerships. But don’t let facts get in the way of a good sales pitch. University professors need to eat, too.

[Note: This editorial was published last week in azcentral.com, a “Part of the USA Today Network.” Bruce Whiting’s account takes place in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, but the story is much the same for all federal forestlands in the western US, including Washington, Oregon, California, and Idaho. BZ]

Opinion: Four generations of my family helped responsibly thin the forests. Then came the lawsuits, and companies like mine simply could not survive.

Bruce Whiting
opinion contributor

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2023/10/26/logging-stop-forest-fires-industry-never-return/71306702007/

For the past 25 years, I have watched with great sadness as beautiful forest has burned, destroying homes, decimating communities and negatively impacting lives.

Even after all these years, I ask myself what else I could have done to prevent this tragedy.
My family spent four generations operating sawmills and working in the forests of Arizona, Utah and Colorado.

Today, our family-owned sawmills are all gone, and I only wish that there would be some way for the next generation to turn the tide and save our forests before they all burn.

Groups began fighting timber sales

Sixty-five years ago, my father moved our family to Fredonia to help operate the sawmill owned by my grandfather and his brothers.

Over the generations, we worked with thousands of wonderful employees, civic leaders and federal officials to care for the Kaibab, Coconino and Tonto National Forests, along with forests in other states.

We prided ourselves in working as responsible stewards.

Then, in the early 1990s, I started losing the battle on forest thinning and was forced to close our sawmill in Payson.

Why Arizona simply cannot let its pine forests burn

Groups like the Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Trust and Center for Biological Diversity had made it their mission to block every timber sale offered by the U.S. Forest Service through the utilization of the legal process.

These groups openly admitted to me that they wanted to force the closure of all lumber companies and return the forest back to Mother Nature.

I had no other option but to close in Fredonia, and the results were that hundreds of hard-working men and women lost their jobs.

With little timber, we couldn’t survive

No matter how many times we tried to tell these groups, they persisted with their ill-conceived notion that we could revert back to letting Mother Nature thin the forest.

Regulations protecting the northern goshawk and the Mexican spotted owl, plus a string of environmentalist lawsuits, had ended government timber sales in our areas.

The national news heard about the plight of so many small lumber communities, and in 1995 I was interviewed by Tom Brokaw and his staff for a segment in a series about government red tape.

During our visit, we talked about Fredonia and how it — like many other small communities that were once thriving sawmill towns — were experiencing closure after closure, and that there would not be anyone left to work with the U.S. Forest Service.

I told them that we were starting the slippery slope toward massive fires that would destroy entire forests, homes and lives.

Then in 1997, I lost the final battle in Panguitch, Utah, to keep our last remaining sawmill open.
More than 25 years later, nearly all of the sawmills are gone and devastating fires, like the Dude Fire, are the norm.

Forests are being allowed to grow and grow, building up fuel loads, until disaster strikes.

The logging we need will never return

Where are the Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Trust and Southwest Forest Alliance when fires continue to break out all over the West?

Mother Nature has indeed taken vicious control over the forest, after we humans failed to care for it.
And even though it’s needed desperately, the forest product industry and sawmills will never return.

You would have to be crazy to invest that kind of money, not knowing if the Forest Service will be permitted to sell timber on land that needs thinning and cleanup, because extremists are there, waiting in the wings, to shut it down again.

They like to blame global warming so that they do not have to face the results of their actions, but let’s face it: the Forest Service’s options for wise forest management are extremely limited now that they no longer have the sawmill industry as a partner.

Bruce Whiting is the former president of Kaibab Industries and Kaibab Lumber Co.

I participate in a wildfire discussion group that averages around 130 members, a significant number of whom are retired professionals. The focus of the group has been Michael T. Rain’s “Call to Action” — a systematic and organic strategy for ending the mismanagement of wildfire on our public forests that has characterized much of the past 35 years. One of the occasional contributors to this discussion is Royal Burnett. Here is his current perspective. BZ 

My name is Royal Burnett. I am retired CDF Battalion Chief with 31 years experience on California wildfires. At the time of my retirement in 1993 I was an ICS rated Type 1 Incident Commander, Type 1 Ops Section Chief and FBAN.

Since my retirement I have kept active in fire and fuels modeling and have worked with various committees to solve the wildfire/conflagration crisis that exists in California.

I’ve been on the mailing list for “Call to Action” early on and have commented occasionally.

It should be obvious to all by now that we have not only lost this round, but perhaps the entire fight.

I’ve watched and commented as the USFS burned millions of acres near my home in Redding, California. This summer we had one lightning storm in August here we are in late September and several of those fires are still burning… this in spite of two wetting rains and several nights of 90 percent humidty recovery. These fires would have gone out if the USFS crews had not re lit them.

There is no public out cry. There is no voiced protest from the timber industry. There is no protest from the Society of American Foresters.

What is more alarming is there is not protest from the Indigenous people whose ancestral homelands are routinely torched… the same people who have to live under choking clouds of smoke for months in Happy Camp and Hoopa.

As we speak the Blue and Copper fire are burning near Orleans in prime timber and the quote from the Forest Service Information says there “no values currently threatened”.

No Values ??? The environmentalists have won. Since the Spotted Owl was used to successfully shut down logging in Northern California an entire industry and culture was destroyed. Not only were the obvious logging jobs lost… the fallers, the skid operators the choker setters… the second tier jobs were lost.. the mechanics, the saw shops closed… and the third tier jobs in the cafes and other support services that fed the loggers and truckers and went away.

Several towns closed the sawmills that had provided employment for generations. That resulted in the loss of gas stations and grocery stores…all for an owl that was probably not threatened from the start.

We are now in the second generation of the collapse of the North Coast economy and the citizens and Tribal Leaders realize the only way to make living and remain in their homes is to kowtow to USFS. They now accept the annual huge wildfires…they sign on as truck drivers and timber fallers, the stores make sack lunches, the fuel trucks and porta potties get rented.. and our forests burn.

The USFS has completely reversed course. Fire used to be bad, now its good. I’ve seen the try to brand and sell their insane policy in many different ways…Let Burn… MIST…Light Hand on the Land…Burning for Resource Benfits…its all attempt to convince the public that they have not bungled the stewardship of our National Lands. Anyone with eyes can see that the miles of snags standing alongside the Highways leading in and out of Redding are not productive forest…not even as a Carbon Sink.

USFS Chief Randy Moore announced huge fuel management goals… going to treat millions of acres annually. Little did anyone realize that Moore was going to count acres burned in wildfire as treated acres. And, to go one step further… if a Forest Supervisor met the Fuel Management goals the that would count toward that individual getting an annual performance bonus.

A couple of the nearby Forests give lip service to aggressive initial attack on all fires… to going direct where possible… to working night shifts… this is all in response to public out cry to mismanagement of various incidents. In truth, when fires on those forest escape Initial Attack and USFS Team is called in and the Big Box is drawn on the map . There is no effort to keep that fire small…the objective is to burn as many acres as possible and count them as fuel treated acres…part of the fire resistant landscape .

When fires start in August and the first team in says estimated control date is December you’ve got to realize that something is dreadfully wrong.

The damage that’s been done to the forests and watershed in Northern California will take generations to recover…and there is no rehabilitation plan.

In the last 10 years I’ve watched on TV and live reports as thousands of Northern California homes and millions of acres burned. Many of those acres burned deliberately by the USFS under the guise of firefighter safety or creating fire resistant mosaics…that’s another lie. All they’ve done is create snag patches with and understory of mixed brush. They have increased, not decreased the fire hazard. I’ve watched while entire communities burned due to USFS Tactical and strategic mistakes and there was no review. I watched as hundreds of Giant Sequoias were killed in a backfire…and no one spoke up…not even Save the Redwoods League.

Recently the 10^th Circuit Court supported USFS Sovereignty…granting them immunity from lawsuits and repercussions for damages caused to public and private property when allowing a fire to burn for yet to be determined resource benefits. Citizens can file tort claims, but have no say if the USFS deliberately burns their property ?

The USFS has become a leader in the Fire/Industrial complex that has a vested interest in burning our forest land. Its a sad , sad day when this once proud Agency has degenerated into a gang of the most prolific, the most persistent serial arsonists ever to plague our wildlands.

For the past 11+ years I have been writing a series of article/editorials for Oregon Fish and Wildlife Journal, which has a circulation of 10,000 mostly rural Oregon businesses and residents and all Oregon elected officials. Several times I have used this forum to “peer review” the facts, analyses, and opinions that have comprised an occasional entry in the series. This is another one of those instances, and mostly focuses on two radio interviews I did with Lars Larson on his radio show this past summer.

The article draft is more than 3800 words and has six illustrations with captions, so I have only included a few of the illustrations and excerpted the mostly informative and provocative text in this post, angling for discussion. For those interested, I have posted the entire draft here — publication will probably be in a month or sooner: http://nwmapsco.com/ZybachB/Articles/Magazines/Oregon_Fish_&_Wildlife_Journal/20230923_Lars_Larson/Zybach_DRAFT_20230917.pdf

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[October 12, 2023 UPDATE: The article has now been published in the current issue of Oregon Fish & Wildlife Journal. Publisher and editor Cristy Rein has noted that the magazine’s 10,000 circulation includes: “free magazines to every US Senator, all of the US Congress, the entire Executive Cabinet and committees, every elected state rep in: Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, California, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.” Here is a link to the article, and including one-page editorials by Cristy and by Jim Petersen of Evergreen Magazine: http://nwmapsco.com/ZybachB/Articles/Magazines/Oregon_Fish_&_Wildlife_Journal/20230923_Lars_Larson/Zybach-Larson_20231010.pdf]

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Conversations with Lars: Summer of ’23 Smoke & Fire

I’ve never met Lars Larson in person, but my first radio interview with him was about 20 years ago as I was finishing my graduate degree at Oregon State University. The questions likely had something to do with the Biscuit Fire at that time, or the Donato Study, which was in the news.

Since then we have had many more conversations on air, with discussions mostly focused on spotted owls, wildfires, forestry, or the Elliott State Forest. These are subjects of particular interest to me, and it’s always a pleasure talking to Lars — usually in nine-minute increments between commercials — given his own knowledge of these topics.

Because of Lars’ close familiarity with forestry, Northwest history, wildfires, and wildlife, his interviews are more like discussions or conversations than typical interviews. For that reason I decided to use the transcript from our recorded July 28, 2014 talk as the basis for an article/editorial in this series. The topic was the ever-increasing severity, frequency, and extent of Oregon catastrophic wildfires — as I had been clearly predicting for many years — and “climate change” as a possible cause. The article appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of this magazine, titled “Global Warming and Oregon Wildfire History,” and was generally well received.

This summer I had wildfire-related conversations with Lars on two of his shows. In July we discussed the smoke from Canadian wildfires polluting US air, and in August the topic was the deadly fire in Hawaii. Audio recordings of both interviews were critically well received by several national and regional experts in wildfire management and mitigation, and I decided to resurrect the 2014 format for this article.

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July 7, 2023: SMOKE

Lars: Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show, it’s a pleasure to be with you, and I’m always glad to get to your phone calls and your emails. On this First Amendment Friday, we celebrate your first amendment rights of free speech, free expression, and the right to associate with anyone you want to associate with.

Now, I want to ask you about this. You’ve seen what happened when wildfire smoke got into New York City and all of a sudden, the elites were breathing that orange air, and you’ve seen the same kind of thing happen this year in Seattle, they’re breathing smoky air as well. And in recent history in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve seen plenty of occasions where the smoke went on for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Lars: I’m glad to have you here because I want you to prepare my audience. I know this summer we’re likely to get even more smoke in the Pacific Northwest. We’re going to have fires. We’ve gone from the 30-year period you talk about frequently from I think the mid-fifties to the mid-eighties where we had essentially no large fires in the forest. Thirty years of no large fires at all, and now routinely half a million acres burn in Oregon. Half a million acres I think, on an average year burn in Washington, and we’ll expect to have fires this year as well. And I know to a fair certainty, the people in charge are going to say, “Yep, it’s all evidence of global warming.” Help prepare them with some answers for those people who say those things to them.

Bob: Well, it’s all due to fuels and weather. Global warming hasn’t happened here, so it can’t be global warming. We’ve got the same weather we’ve had for centuries. Fire season is the problem. East winds are the danger. So with the Labor Day Fires three years ago, we had east winds in early September, so we had massive fires.

The real problem is managing the fuels. From ’52 to ’87 we had one major fire, on the Smith River in 1966. It was 40,000 acres. So that’s 30 some years with one major fire. It doesn’t even compare to the Labor Day Fires — on one day, where close to a million acres burned. The Coast Range doesn’t get lightning; Southwest Oregon gets lightning but doesn’t have a lot of people; and the Western Cascades gets lightning and has a lot of people. So once we get a heavy east wind, assuming we do, ignition can come from lightning or people and large fires are the result. And largely because of the massive fuel buildups on federal lands over the last 35 years.

Lars: Dr. Zybach, there’s one thing I hear the media do constantly and they say, “Wildfires get worse during hot times.” Is there anything about a day being either 80-degrees or 105-degrees that makes a difference in terms of fire?

Bob: It’s the east wind. You can have an 80-degree or 105-degree fire; maybe at 105 degrees, depending on fuel moisture, you could have a cleaner burn and easier to control by that measure, but it depends. The fire will create its own wind, will create its own weather. They can even create thunderstorms, the big fires. But an east wind is the constant element that goes with all the major fires in Western Oregon over the last few hundred years.

Lars: So when you see these fires, you’ve studied this subject, you studied 500 years of it, 1491 to 1951. Are there ways to get on top of this problem where we could prevent these fires instead of merely trying to put them out every year and usually succeeding only to the extent that we contain them to half a million acres; instead of maybe 10 or 20,000 acres a year on an average year in that period you documented from the fifties to the eighties?

Bob: Yes, and it would be the same thing. It would be active management. Right now, the Forest Service and BLM are planning to leave all the snags and large woody debris. Jerry Franklin says a sign of a healthy forest is a lot of dead trees. That’d be like saying a sign of a healthy city is a lot of dead people. It doesn’t make sense. That’s not healthy. It’s a fuel and it’s dangerous.

So we used to harvest snags, dead trees, focus on it. We used to maintain the roads and trails and keep them open. We used to have local employment where local people that knew the roads and the land and the animals were the ones that were doing the logging and the tree planting and so on. And so we didn’t have fires. So we know how to mitigate these fires and that’s why they’re so predictable.

Like myself and others in the early nineties said, “If we create these LSRs and other government acronyms, we’re going to have massive wildfires and they’re going to kill wildlife and some people, destroy homes, and it’s going to be at a cost to rural communities that lose the work associated with forest management.” So we know how to fix the problem. We just don’t.

Lars: I’m just curious, do you have any insights as to why the people who followed you in forest science, I mean you’ve been in forest science for decades, why the people who are now coming into it seem to think that forests that burn on a regular basis or forests with lots of dead fuel on the forest floor are a healthy forest? Why the change?

Bob: Well, indoctrination. Eisenhower warned us that the government will get big computers and put independent scientists out of business. And essentially, if you cut to the chase, it’s anti-logging activists. A lot of people in the eighties and nineties thought that clearcutting was an evil. And so they picked spotted owls and marbled murrelets and coho as animals that they claimed — erroneously, still erroneously — were harmed directly by clearcutting, and got the lawyers in Washington DC and the lawyers on the ground to pursue that. And they’ve been very, very successful. And wildfires are the predictable result.

August 14, 2023: FIRE

Lars:  Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. It’s a Tuesday. It’s the Radio Northwest Network, and it’s my pleasure to be with you. And now we have the deadliest fire in US history in Maui and northwest communities under evacuation orders from wildfires. What has put us in this spot and how do we get out of it?

Lars:  I want to get your take initially about what happened in Maui because we’re now starting to see not just where the blame may go to power lines or other conditions like that, but almost everybody on the left politically says, oh, this is all about climate change. This is something that’s come on us because human beings use too many fossil fuels. Any truth to that?

Bob: None. It has got nothing to do with climate change. Everything to do with housing, exotic weeds, in the case of Hawaii; which is similar to Paradise and similar to the Almeda Drive fire in that weeds and housing that were very close together formed the primary fuels and in all three cases were deadly. People died because of the speed in which the fire moved.

Lars:  Well, and weeds in the case — I know when people hear weeds, they say well, everybody has weeds, but is it worse in places like Maui? Because as I understand, that used to be a big area for growing sugar cane and then sugar cane has gone away to a large extent, and as a result, there’s a bunch of land that’s not very well tended but it could be, couldn’t it?

Bob: Yeah, and it’s the same thing. Almeda Drive was weeds. They created a “Greenway” and it grew up in blackberries, and those blackberries are real volatile when they die and form a canopy, and that’s what happened there; that and a lot of trailer houses and a lot of weeds. In Hawaii it was weeds that grew up in the agricultural areas that had been abandoned or converted to housing and then the housing is essentially dead trees. It’s dried lumber that’s built the houses, and if they’re close together, there’s no way to make them “Fire Safe.” Each house is fuel for the adjacent house.

Lars:  And is part of the problem that in Lahaina especially, they called the place historic. It had a lot of buildings that went back before modern building codes. If they had said, well, even without building codes, we have to do something to keep these houses if one catches fire from spreading to the next one. This was all foreseeable and preventable. Am I wrong?

Bob: No, that’s exactly right. When we find — a wind will whip up in different directions. Here in Western Oregon, it’s from the east, and in Hawaii, I’m guessing it might be from any direction — but when weeds and fuels, volatile fuels, are adjacent to flammable buildings where people live, it’s a risk and we’re seeing the results of that risk.

Lars: Now, what about the Northwest communities? We’ve got a bunch of communities that they’ve gone to evacuation, mandatory evacuation. Are those also evidence that we’re not managing the forest and the wildlands very well and we could be?

Bob: We’re doing a terrible job there. These fires were predictable for the last 30 years. If we look at the Flat Fire right now, the heat isn’t a real problem. It means fuels burn cleaner and faster. But if a wind comes up, if a Chetco Wind comes up, an east wind comes up, we’re asking for another Silver Complex or Chetco Bar Fire, just a real disaster. And the way we can tell that is the Flat Fire. It’s well contained at about 33,000 acres that used to be called a major fire 20 years ago. Now it’s got to be a hundred thousand acres to be a major fire, but you look at the photos and it’s completely surrounded by snags from earlier fires. So these fires are just fueling future fires just like the Tillamook Fires in the 1930s and ’40s did. And it wasn’t until we removed the snags, took out the fuels and actively managed that land that we were able to create Tillamook Forest, and we’ve got the same problem in Curry County. They’re just allowing the snags to remain in place and fuel the next fire, and it’s been going on since 1987.

Lars: I’m talking to Dr. Bob Zybach, who’s a forest scientist and the president of Northwest Maps. The other thing is they don’t just allow the snags to stay there. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the “Greeny Groups” say, “No, you will not go in and salvage log. No, you will not take down those snags. That’s part of Mother Nature. We have to leave it there.” And they insist on leaving it there and not clearing the fuel and not replanting. I’ve seen that demand a number of times. And they could actually do that, and maybe even make the money to pay the cost of doing the replanting, couldn’t they?

Bob: Sure. We did that for 30 or 40 years. When we studied the Tillamook, we figured out if we salvage this material, we’re making money, we’re paying taxes, we’re training people, we’re keeping access roads open. And so from ’52 until ’87, we had one major fire, one fire in excess of 10,000 acres in Western Oregon. Now we have a fire that big right now that we’re holding and calling contained, or 56% contained. So it’s a problem that’s become exacerbated through mismanagement of our federal lands specifically, but now that’s being transferred over to our private and state lands as well. The Elliott State Forest, they have no plan to harvest any snags, so it’s just asking for a disaster at some future point.

Earlier today (July 18) Oregon Representative Court Boice asked for insight regarding the current management actions taking place on the State’s largest active wildfire, the Flat Fire. It is now more than 8,000 acres in size in an area famed for its east winds and known for the past 35 years for some of the largest forest fires in Oregon history.

My fields are forest (and fire) history and reforestation, not wildfire management, and his request was for distribution to a 100+ email discussion group of actual wildfire management experts; which task was just completed. It will be interesting to see what the response will be, and that might largely depend on weather patterns over the next several days and weeks — and particularly the east wind.

Below I have copied this evening’s official report on the fire, and following that I have included the text of Rep. Boice’s letter of emergency to 30+ fellow politicians and USFS reps, including Supervisor Merv George. This fire has great potential for being an important learning experience for all involved, depending on how things develop. Here is the current report:

July 18, 2023 Evening Update

Size: 8,204
Start Date: July 15, 2023
Point of origin: 2 miles south east Agness, OR
Cause: Under Investigation
Total personnel: 378
Resources: 16 Engines
13 crews
2 bulldozers
2 water tenders
7 helicopters

Current Situation: Today the fire spread on the western flank. An infrared flight will be flown this evening to map accurate acreage. Firefighters have been successful in keeping the fire within control lines on the northwest section of the fire. They were also successful in completing small, targeted 10-15 acre burn outs reducing vegetation on the north flank, protecting communities in the Agness area.

Fire managers continued making use of aviation resources today, including helicopters and airtankers dropping water and retardant over the fire. Using water and retardant temporarily slows fire activity assisting crews on the ground.

Tonight’s activities: Nightshift firefighters will continue progress from the day shift, building fireline and laying hoseline.

Evacuations: Please monitor the Curry and Josephine County Sheriff’s Offices for official evacuation notices. https://www.co.curry.or.us/government/county sheriff/index.php
https://www.josephinecounty.gov/government/sheriff/index.php

Weather: Clear with low humidity on ridges.
Closures: The Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest has issued a closure order for the fire area including trails, roads, and a portion of the Illinois River. Please be careful when driving in the area due to increased fire traffic.
Restrictions: Fire Restrictions are in place https://www.fs.usda.gov/rogue-siskiyou

Information Line: 541-216-4579 8am-8pm
Media inquires: 541-237-6369 8am-8pm
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/flatfireoregon2023

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FlatFireOR2023
Inciweb: https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident-information/ xx1002-flat fire

Email: [email protected]
**************************
The Subject Line in Rep. Boice’s Email of Emergency was entirely in caps, as were several key words in the text:

CURRY COUNTY FLAT FIRE – IMMEDIATE AND BOLD ACTION NEEDED – URGENT…

Please give our Hero Fire Fighters Historically Proven Plans to Win – Stop another Curry Monster Wind Driven Fire!

Lessons Learned: The Afternoon Winds are upstream… generally towards the east on the Rogue and Illinois river drainages. As the sun sets offshore, the atmosphere becomes kinetic per the temperature change. The Chetco River has a weather anomaly. In the afternoons – the winds are toward the ocean, pushing west; This effect is why the town of Brookings has such nice warmer winter weather.

As and If the Flat Fire likely continues burning generally Southwest… upstream on the Illinois; it tops out into the Chetco drainage which is commonly known as the “Chetco Effect”… It will take the fire in the exact opposite direction… about due west to the town of Brookings. Already happened once – almost twice. This time it undoubtedly will happen faster. Communities of Pistol River and Gold Beach of course are also at risk and potentially even Smith River California.

The 2017 Chetco Bar took 191,000 and the 2018 Klondike likewise destroyed 176,000 acres. EACH cost a staggering $80 plus million dollars to fight! (Yes – Fact: combined $ 170 million in 18 months!) The fuels now are quicker and more volatile per brush regrowth due to multiple previous Mega Fires; Biscuit, (Still the largest Fire in Oregon History), the Collier, Chetco Bar, and repeatedly prove this.

ACTION NOW: Declare wise and legitimate emergency – Override Congressional Laws stopping designated wilderness areas – No Equipment Allowed. This mis-guided approach is brutally dangerous to our communities. Also we know without debate – millions and millions of our wildlife are incinerated – their instincts help them normally escape healthy fires, but they cannot survive our tragic Curry Nuclear Fires. History proves what follows will work and Save Lives, Property, Wilderness, Watersheds, Fish and Wildlife. ACTION NOW!

Immediately open and improve all relevant and advantageous roads

Seasoned Loggers and Fire Fighters (now in their 60’s and 70’s) – men on D-7 dozers…cutting lines on critical ridge tops

Hand crew ‘Back Burns’ can help off the ridges, but are very risky. That work must have unanimous consent between USFS, ODF and CFPA prior

Aviation work to cool both sides down

Hand crews catch the spots

Our Curry Fire History is invaluable. Our outlined steps either happen OR we know the fire will not be stopped… We cannot again wait for late October Rains – futile and unacceptable !

The risk of loss of property and life is immense. We could lose towns or worse.

Court Boice
State Representative – Oregon District 1
[email protected]
Phone (503) 986-1401

Apparently the USFS has been doing such a good job of creating forest wildfires in the name of “saving” targeted species that don’t like logging that they are now branching out. Tom Vilsack just created a new USDA Federal Advisory Committee “to provide advice and recommendations on modernizing landscape management across national forests within the Northwest Forest Plan area in Washington, Oregon and Northern California.” 

The purpose of the committee is to “update” the failed Northwest Forest Plan “so that national forests are managed sustainably, adapted to climate change, and resilient to wildfire, insects, disease, and other disturbances, while meeting the needs of local communities” and “also advise how these planning efforts can complement the Wildfire Crisis Strategy.” It will be interesting to see how they plan to “meet the needs local communities,” when even Norm Johnson says that have consistently failed to do so — and government handouts aren’t what’s needed or wanted by most. Jobs, safe forests, and aesthetics should be the focus, in my opinion, certainly not “climate change”; which forests have successfully adapted to for millions of years without government intervention.

The committee contains key members of the Northwest Forest Planning Committee and others who have helped to create this predictable “crisis” in the first place, or have directly profited by its implementation and results. Appointed members include Northwest Plan co-founder, Jerry Franklin, and environmental lawyer, Susan Jane Brown, among others. These are the very people many hold directly responsible for the massive increase in federal forest fire frequency, severity, and extent, and yet: “Establishing this committee is another way for us to embrace climate-smart science, ensure we hear from diverse voices and get a range of perspectives on how to best confront the wildfire crisis and climate change.”

So it appears that by embracing this new kind of “climate-smart science” they will be able to “complement the Wildfire Crisis Strategy?” This sounds like one more way of making things worse, not better! While a handful of people have directly profited by the implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan since Clinton created it in the 1990s, the cost has been tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, tens of millions of burned forestland acres and killed wildlife, widespread rural unemployment, thousands of burned homes, hundreds of dead people, and ruined families and communities. And for what? No evidence a single spotted owl, marbled murrelet, or coho has “survived” because of this gross misdirection. How did we start down this path, and why can’t we get off?

At some point this costly scam needs to end, and maybe this is a step in that direction. One can hope: https://northwestobserver.com/index.php?ArticleId=2856&fbclid=IwAR0xn2cyORelNDOgTyfimZUH8-E9uf0QJPHUe8BUdC3MkHzAX9S4su0ywtc

Here is an indexed 60-minute primer on how “Wild Science” led the way to the creation of the Northwest Forest Plan — basically by six people and three animals: the “Gang of Four,” Bill Clinton, and Judge Dwyer; spotted owls, marbled murrelets, and coho: 

This video is Norm Johnson and Jerry Franklin promoting their new book, The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan, at Oregon State University, mid-May 2023, during which they give a surprisingly honest assessment of how they did it, how it has turned out, and what needs to be done next. I’ve highlighted key words, phrases, and acronyms on the index, so you can just skip to any part you think might be interesting. This is the best 60-minute summary to the Northwest Forest Plan I’m aware of, and I’m guessing it also summarizes their new book fairly well.

They never say “HCP,” they just refer to federal streamside buffers being critical next creations on state, private, and tribal lands and the most important current political focal point — see Oregon’s State Board of Forestry, Private Land Accord, and former “First Oregon State Forest,” the Elliott, for definition and update. That, and systematically killing barred owls in the name of racial purity. I am in full agreement, though,  as to what happened to all of the “critical habitat” in the Labor Day Fires — and also the lasting economic damage to affected rural communities; both barely mentioned.

Biased summary follows Index.

3:30 Norm Johnson /spotted owls

5:40 Pinchot stable communities objective: “old-growth was the fuel for the sustained-yield engine”

6:40 ESA litigation

8:35 Jack Ward Thomas: “It’s not science. It’s scientists doing planning.” “Wild Science!”

10:40 Jerry Franklin: “A different kind of science . . . Who was going to get the money? . . . All kinds of dead wood = Healthy Forest”

17:00 Norm: “The Power of Scientific Authority . . . shocked the world . . . if the managers would just stay out of the way”

19:05 Gang of Four: Norm & Jerry talk old-growth and politics: Accepted by USFS Fall 1990

22:00 “We can map the old-growth in a week!” “Don’t forget about the damned fish!” (Congress)

24:40 Jerry: Yacolt Burn becomes artificial standard for 80-year-old trees (LS/OG!)
“That rule, which they dreamed up in an afternoon, is still there! It’s kind of amazing!”
“Only complete forest ecosystems in the Douglas Fir Region . . . the organisms . . . the processes.”

27:00 [Jim Sedell]/Gordie Reeves: “Gang of Four = Big Kahunas.” Gordon story: “People don’t care about spotted owls — you [fish biologists] just changed the game”

30:15 Norm: “Amazing change: 300-foot buffers on fish-bearing streams” “Fund restoration”

30:35 “Gang of Four Choices” Personal values in 3 or 4 days — “kind of amazing!” Congress approved! They understood owls and fish were incompatible with timber harvest

34:50 Gordie: USFS Planners Really Upset — “probably easiest conclusion I ever reached in my career”

35:55 Spotted Owls: Spring 1992 Judge Dwyer “really changed things” w/ESA invertebrate surveys

36:45 Clinton Plan: FEMAT LS/OG = 2x”Deeply Disappointed” = Option 9 LSRs Riparian Reserves Matrix

40:05 Jerry: Option 9 was “more efficient method of preservation” bringing aquatic-terrestrial together

41:05 Norm: President’s Plan “Released July 1, 1993 after a Furious Debate within the White House” 75% Decrease in Sales vs. spotted owls, marbled murrelets, salmon (Quotes Obama)

42:50 Public Criticism: massive drop in cut = negative employment/community impacts — no Tribes involved — Lawyers need more “protections”

43:40 Northwest Forest Plan: Dwyer “admires and approves” “greatly expanded (x 2) Riparian reserves”
“Moist and Dry” Forests and “the harvest level collapsed” — USFS timber had “near death experience”

47:50 30-Year Scorecard: “Moist Forest plantation thinning saved the federal timber program”
“Stabilized habitat” until the 2020 Labor Day Fires and barred owls . . .
fish need more buffers on lower tree farm and agricultural lands, too
difficult to provide economic assistance to displaced workers and damaged communities

50:20 Why the NWFP Matters: Implemented ecosystem planning: science & lawyers (Trump cite)

50:45 Recommendations: Kill barred owls, adopt “Moist Forest” planning, focus on private properties
Tribes were completely ignored, except for fish benefits — need to be included
started with one listed fish — now more than 30; needs to include private lands for buffers
Jerry: need to manage for future habitats based on current “science”

56:00 Questions: 1) “Survey and Manage?”: doesn’t apply to plantations; hasn’t been “court-tested”
2) BLM “storyline” regarding “conservation?”: “Most innovative . . . in adopting ecosystem management”
3) Wildfire and climate change: Jerry: “Obviously plantations most susceptible to change”
4) Eastern Oregon ladder fuels should be treated: no comment
5) “Newer goals” should include carbon sequestration: no comment

***********************

Bottom Line: Jack Ward Thomas said that “This isn’t science. This is planning done by scientists.” He was exactly right. In my opinion, we should have relied on experienced professionals from the beginning — this experiment of having nameless modelers construct our resource management plans — and our public employee hiring criteria — has been an obvious and costly failure. In 1990 the ESA-endorsed spotted owl allowed the “Gang of Four” and two fish biologists to impose “Ecological Forestry” on our public lands. In the Douglas Fir Region the result has been dozens of catastrophic wildfires, bankrupt counties, millions of dead wildlife, tens of thousands burned homes, thousands of failed businesses, and hundreds of deaths. The cost is in the tens of billions and continues to increase daily. When is it time to say “enough,” and return the active management of our public resources to local control, where the true experts live? Compare the 33 years of successful forest and wildlife management preceding 1990 to the 33 years that have followed. ESA bureaucrats have only been the silent tip of the iceberg in this mess. In my opinion.

My current article/editorial on Global Warming and Oregon Wildfires was just published: http://nwmapsco.com/ZybachB/Articles/Magazines/Oregon_Fish_&_Wildlife_Journal/20220401_Global_Warming/Zybach_20220401.pdf

This article documents predictions of western Oregon wildfires over the past 30 years, including newspaper and magazine articles, photos, maps, websites and radio interviews. I’ve posted the illustrations, table, cartoon, and captions below.

CONCLUSIONS: 1) From 1952 until 1987 there was only one (!) fire in excess of 10,000 acres in western Oregon — during the past nine years alone, there have been 33 (!) such fires;

2) Of these 33 wildfires, 30 began on, and were mostly confined to, federal forestlands;

3) These fires have been clearly predicted for more than 30 years, based entirely on changing federal land management practices, and have nothing (“zero”) to do with Global Warming — fire seasons (July and August) have remained about the same for more than 200 years;

4) These fires remain predictable into the foreseeable future and could be largely mitigated by a return to active management of our public forests, beginning with the salvage or treatment of millions of highly flammable snags remaining from these fires on federal lands.

Bottom Line: To fix this mess, in my opinion, we just need the legal ability to return to the active management of our public forests.

Figure 3. Fall 2003 cover to Oregon Fish & Wildlife Journal, references 1994 Highway 20 beetle-kill as background to current article on B&B Complex.

The following map and photos are from a research project I completed a little more than 10 years ago. Management of old-growth trees for their preservation begins with their definition and location. Competition and crown fires are among the greatest apparent threats: http://www.orww.org/Osbornes_Project/Rivers/Umpqua/South/Upper_Headwaters_Project/ca_1800_Forest_Zones/

The 2010 “Upper South Umpqua Headwaters Precontact Reference Conditions Study” was authorized by the Douglas County Board of Commissioners, in cooperation with the USDA Umpqua National Forest and the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. Research focus was to determine approximate forest conditions for the study area during the 1800 to 1825 time period. Primary sources of information included General Land Office original land survey notes and maps from 1857 to 1938, historical photos from 1899 to 1944, historical maps from 1900 to 1970, Osborne fire lookout panoramas from 1932 to 1938, aerial photos from 1939 to 1945, and nearly 3000 comprehensive documentary photographs in 2010. From these sources a series of GIS maps were constructed by the Douglas County Surveyors Office and developed into likely vegetation and trail maps for the ca. 1800 to 1825 time period.

Through this process it was determined that four basic types, or “zones,” of vegetation existed prior to white contact and decimation of local communities by introduced diseases. These four types can be delineated by elevation and corroborated by the existence of old-growth trees and other persistent vegetation patterns in excess of 200 years of age. In each of the following photographs, research assistant Nana Lapham serves as a human scale to an old-growth representative of an earlier forest condition. The Oak Zone photo features a lower elevation 200+ year old black oak in a former oak and pine savannah; the Pine Zone photo shows an old-growth sugar pine, likewise in a former savannah, at a higher elevation; the Douglas Fir Zone photo shows the transition from lower elevation pine to higher elevation Douglas fir, and indicates the much lower density of trees 200 years ago; and the Subalpine Zone photo shows old-growth cedar and young true fir saplings in the highest areas of the study area.

Oak Zone   This photo shows old-growth relict pine and oak with invasive Douglas fir on Pickett Butte in 2010. Relatively young white oak, black oak, and pine savannahs, extensive grassland meadows and prairies, and patches of similarly much younger Douglas fir, redcedar, and pine typified much of the western and lower elevation (below 2,400 feet) portions of the study area 200 years ago. The presence and arrangements of these plants, as well as widespread populations of camas, cat’s ears, fawn lilies, iris, tarweed, yampah, and hazel, indicate regular systematic use of the landscape by people – most likely mostly Takelman-speakers — at that time. The average number of trees larger than saplings per acre was probably ten or less. Human occupation of this zone was likely year-round, with relatively large seasonal villages and campgrounds near the mouth of Jackson Creek and at South Umpqua Falls: two locations that (according to historical reports) were heavily used during times of anadromous salmonid and lamprey eel runs.

Pine Zone This photo shows an old-growth sugar pine, with invasive Douglas fir, pine, and madrone, in a former savannah near Squaw Flat in 2010. The presence of ponderosa pine and sugar pine, with few understory or directly competitive trees, typified much of the mid-slope (2,400 to 3,800 foot elevation) forest in the study area 200 years ago. The pine zone was typically open and park-like with large — though much younger than present — widely spaced pines; patches of oak, chinquapin, serviceberry, and hazel; scattered stands of Douglas fir; and grassy meadows and berry patches. The average number of 8-inch diameter and larger trees per acre was likely less than 20. The location and age of remnant old-growth trees indicate regular seasonal use of the pine forestlands by Takelmans from lower elevations and southern Molalla from higher elevations. The harvesting of ponderosa pine cambium in the spring and sugar pine, hazel, and chinquapin nuts in the fall may have been times of most intensive occupation of this zone. Hunting for game animals with dogs by Molallans likely occurred on a year-round basis, depending on the daily and seasonal movements of deer, bear, and elk.

Douglas Fir Zone This photo shows an old-growth ponderosa pine and an old-growth Douglas fir, with invasive pine and Douglas fir, on the cusp between the Pine Zone and the Douglas Fir Zone above French Creek, in the Black Rock Fork subbasin in 2010. Although Douglas fir of a wide range of ages was present in almost every type of environment in the study area 200 years ago, it existed in nearly pure stands from 3,800 to 5,000 feet elevation, separating the lower elevation pine stands from the higher elevation subalpine vegetation types. Due to generally steep slopes, isolated location, seasonal snow, and relative lack of food plants, accessible water, and animals, this zone likely experienced the least amount of daily or seasonal use and occupation by people. Although the densest stands of trees in the study area occurred in this zone, they were still often open and park-like with only 20 to 30 trees per acre 200 years ago. Grassy meadows and fern brakes also existed throughout this zone, indicating likely human use and maintenance on a fairly regular basis. Established seasonal ridgeline and streamside trails were used by both game animals and people to reach lower and upper elevations, where food and freshwater were more available. Ridgeline trail networks that crisscrossed this zone were regularly burned to promote grassy meadows, bracken fern, beargrass, serviceberry and other useful food and fiber plants.

Subalpine Zone This photo shows old-growth cedar and an historical cabin at Mud Lake on the perimeter of French Junction prairie in 2010. The highest elevations of the study area (above 5,000 feet) formed an international network of foot trails in precontact time that connected Tribes of the South Umpqua with Indian nations in Rogue River, Klamath Falls, Deschutes River, Willamette Valley, Columbia River, and beyond. This seasonal “travel zone” was covered in snow much of the year, but contained extensive fields of shrubs, forbs, and grasses: huckleberries, manzanita, camas, beargrass, and other berries, fruits, nuts, bulbs, edible roots, fuels, and fibers that were readily available in the summer and early fall. The existence of numerous year-round springs, likely “vision quest” sites, flats, benches, and gently sloping ridgelines add further evidence of intensive year-round and seasonal use; more particularly by southern Molallan hunters, who used dogs and snowshoes to hunt elk and other prized game animals throughout the study area and had ready access to the extensive fields of huckleberries and international trade routes. Other Tribes undoubtedly visited these lands to hunt, harvest or trade for elk hides, huckleberries, and beargrass, and to move trade goods along the landscape. Latgawans and other Takelman speakers from lower elevations likely gathered at Huckleberry Lake, Quartz Mountain, and Pup Prairie areas as well. Klamaths likely moved slaves and other trade goods along the eastern ridgelines, following the Klamath Trail to campgrounds in the Black Rock and French Junction areas, before heading north along Camas Creek into the North Umpqua Basin, or south into the Rogue River basin. It is also possible that Paiutes from the east, southern Molallans from the north, and Kalapuyan-speaking Yoncallans from the northwest also entered this area at these times; also possibly for reasons of hunting, trade, harvesting of favored crops, spirit quests, or simply visiting friends and relatives. Much of this area could be characterized by the ridgeline trails and extensive fields of prized huckleberries, which also contained scattered trees: principally redcedar, Douglas fir, and Shasta red fir.