1. I hope someone can look into this.. Phil Hardy on X claims that the USDA and USFWS interpret FITARA differently:
USDA has basically shut down fire tech due to an extremely restricted interpretation of what IT and software is, versus supplying a professional service.
So I looked at FITARA on Google AI and it was clearly above my knowledge capacity. Anyone who knows about this or could look into it more.
2. Thanks to Nick Smith for this one. If you look at the retardant being used in Europe in Phil’s X posts, it might remind you of the FSEEE retardant court case, which came back to federal court Tuesday. Of course, long-time TSW associate Andy Stahl has retired, but the case goes on, and now I have no one to ask about the details. I remember asking “why just the FS and not other agencies?” And I got a good answer but can’t remember. Maybe others do?
Remember when Andy was quoted as saying..
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3. OK, if we circle around, if retardant is bad, water is good, right? Except Bridger, which uses water primarily in its Scoopers, was run by Senator Sheehy (who has got to be bad, in some circles, because he’s a Republican, plus in the Senate). So water must be bad too (as well as private aviation, on the whole, being questionable). Back to the silly AP news story.. suppression is bad compared to monitoring and confine and contain, suppression with water is bad, suppression with retardant is bad, and so on. The wildfire agencies seem to be between a political rock and a judicial hard place. This combo of suppression is bad, suppression tools are bad (and don’t work) doesn’t really fit with our lived experience. Plus “the whole world is burning up” and “we shouldn’t be using water, retardant nor private aviation” seem a bit contradictory to me.
4. Zeke Lunder on The Lookout brings us up- to-date (with maps) reporting on some western wildfires and various carbon projects, plus these comments.
The costs of purchasing these offsets have been passed on to anybody who uses services from these gas, utility and manufacturing companies. And now the supposed climate benefits of this tax have been turned to ash and CO2. The real winners in the whole process are the consultants who have billed millions of staff hours devising the sketchy math and inventory methods that justify paying someone to let nature run its course and grow vegetation – something that is going to happen whether Chevron pays a forest landowner to do something or not. And the tribes have made a lot of money, too, but that can’t replace the forests that have burnt up.
16,000 years into the present “interglacial warming period” of an ongoing Ice Age, and no written record of how warm it gets (Arctic Ocean has fossils indicating 70 + degrees F) or how and what ends the warming and returns to the polar glaciation, perpetual snow fields, and mega fauna with size enough to not freeze during winter when solar energy is almost not present. Digestion of food creates heat which the animal of size stores in itself as “thermal inertia.” Others merely hibernate.
Man evolved at the equator. Adaptation and brains developed by killing mega fauna that the cold somewhat preserved to be consumed by man successfully driving off predators and carrion consumers.
Future generations of hominids will be compressed onto less land. The oceans will drop in depth by 100 meters. Or, at the least, that is the scientific record in the rocks and artifacts. It has taken 16,000 or more years of “interglacial warming”. to get to where the earth is today. No idea of how long it will warm. No idea of the trigger to the return to the current Ice Age cold. A lot of critters will have to adapt. And have before, and evolved before. Man is not the driver claimed by political activists who are all about ridiculous claims, and for processes to gain power over fellow man and the environment. Green Ponzi schemes. Like carbon credits. Give those to urban real estate owners, REITs to plant and husband urban tree cover. Create another scheme to enrich ingrate immigrants.
The whole of climate is about the angle of the sun and cloud cover heating the earth during day time and losing heat to the universe at night. Perhaps vegetation is the insulation for heating and fire the process to return to the barren landscape with the albedo of snow sending energy, heat, to the universe. And the moderator is the equatorial band with equal sun and night, stability, in an unstable environment. Whatever, I would proffer neither man nor any other life drives the processes. The mantle moving; the marine plates going under the land above oceans; volcanism; weather and erosion; the whole is based on instability and change. Survivors adapt and flourish. The whole of it is too great to control. So adaptation is the key. Isn’t that what the Galapagos Islands are an example of? And why designated “Wilderness” fails in its purpose to preserve that what it cannot, due to overlapping conditions, controlled by uplifting growing mountains and rain shadows, and eroding mountains lowering and changing life forms and weather to wetter and faster erosion as we see west of the Atlantic shores.
The Boreal forests of Canada burning now annually, and in Alaska the same, creates a larger reflective surface of snow to send solar energy to the universe, and not being retained on earth. All above the human pay grade. Adapt and mutations will provide needed assistance. Humans are a relatively new species and look at the iterations that were incapable of continuation of their sport in the mutation milieu of traits that advance or defeat survival, from the Arctic to the Equator.
Grass Fire in SW Idaho and SE Oregon has destroyed the vegetation to sustain sage hens over 300,000 acres. The control effort was under 200 persons. Sacrificial environment. All the green effort is to save sage hens in an effort to deny drilling and mining, for oil and rare earths, lithium. Plus there has been , and is , ongoing fire in the basin and range of another million acres of sage hen habitats. The leks will remain. The “mosaic” of burning will concentrate the available habitats for nesting and feeding. Ravens will be the agents of extinction started by lightning. And so it will be with burnt mountain mahogany and bitterbrush along with mature sagebrush, chicken sage, and the vast flyover West. Meanwhile, only fire in the Bordeaux region of France qualified as news in East Coast media. We are 80 years post WWII Europe and Japan. Reconstruction had an element of planting trees, and we are in a world of more softwood conifer construction lumber trees than in hundreds, if not in thousands of years.
We have the ability to grow food enough to feed a human population that is maybe four times in numbers than a century ago. Plus energy, shelter and employment. That, alone, is a force for change in environments. Conserving land for farming and urban areas growing shelter upward at the expense of trees being replaced by concrete and asphalt. The ambient temperature under a tree in Oregon is 5 degrees F lower than on the street or sidewalk. A/C is mandatory. That competes with energy to drive AI and data centers. The State is 53% federal land, with decisions made by the Congressional majority from Midwest and Eastern urban areas. They decide to preserve and grow fuel for wildland fire. And this year, so far, it is basin and range in the under 12″ of annual precipitation 3000′-5000′ elevation areas of Oregon, public and private lands. 1.5 million acres to date this season have burned. It is now August, still hot and dry from the Pacific littoral west to the Atlantic littoral. AK days are seasonally getting shorter. Early pre equinox Arctic highs, cold and heavy, will begin to drift south, and the warm Pacific low pressure area is still expanding. Thunder storms are still possible for another two to three weeks. That will be higher elevation Cascades federal timberland fires in a plethora of Wilderness areas created in the last 40 years with no road access, uncleared trails, unlogged prior stand killing fire now with dry standing dead trees to send embers are mile ahead on the wind due to the steep aspect of ridges and deep canyons. Nothing benign about those fires, and the areas of past fire now with more dry fuel as a burn scar. Always, the burn scar fire moves to green timber, increasing the fuels for future fires.
Old growth was low elevation timber, below the 1500 ft elevation zones in the mountain ranges. Deflation plains. Savannah’s and Missoula Flood fed soils on flat lands. No aspect to drive heat as there were few steep upslopes. So ground fire and better, with wind to drive the fire fast through the flat land. Lots of streams to rivers from the adjacent mountains. When the westward expansion grew, the old growth was felled and floated to the mills downstream. The land then cleared for farming. That is where the old growth went. The monster trees. Many were felled and burned. Holes drilled and black powder set off to split them to burn better. Powder and fresh horse manure under a stump to blow it to bits. “Stump ranchers” who became productive agriculturists. The easiest to log and mill were on the flat ground that favored ground fire over crown fire of the steeper aspects. Skid roads using ox power, then steam powered drums and Roebling’s wire rope. Finally, temporary railroads with geared steam engines. Shay, Climax, Heisler. Later favorable grade lines that used the more common road engines like Baldwins to post WWII onto the current logging railroad on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada.
The one that fed the railroad running by my home was a common carrier, serving sawmills, logging camps, farms bringing logs, lumber, mail, livestock, cream and milk, eggs, and passengers with its gas powered “Skunk.” It ceased operations in 1983.
Much of the early ag land from old growth forests is now housing on flat land, the easiest to develop and provide sewage, water, power to and create streets and access to. That is where the “low elevation old growth conifers once grew.” And trees are still being replaced by shelter, while farm land grows data centers, high tech manufacturing campuses. All where old growth you see in the photos was logged. Examine the old photos of men and women standing on logs, men in the face chopped in the bole of a large tree: flat ground. Always on gentle ground. River grade. Railroad accessed gentle ground. Preserving forests at elevation is folly. Gravity is energy. Rolling burning chunks go to the canyon bottom. Then fire races up the same slope. Heat rises. Crowns killed by heat, but unburned, to stand and be fuel for the inevitable reburn. Those storms arrive in the next four weeks as summer wanes and cooler and drier air heralds the last of summer.
My immigrant grandfather told me he got a whipping from his father in Denmark. He had sold pigeons. For food. And if they didn’t get fed on time by the new owner, they would fly back to grandpa’s home and his father caught him selling them again. That is the same mode of operation preservation of forests at elevation on steep ground. Selling carbon credits with the forests most likely to burn, and burn again. Oregon’s Governor appointed State Bored of Foresty has sold carbon credits for its State forests. They bring in less than the property taxes on private forest lands, which only tax the land value, and not the timber on it. Better, the counties that surrendered foreclosed timberlands to the State, get 65% of the stumpage revenue when the state sells timber. Today, they get bumpcus. Of course, the fops and urban liberals who get appointed in Indigo Blue Oregon care not a whit about the counties and revenue to run them. Never forget that the county is who searches for, rescues people or recovers bodies, not the State or Federal land managers. Sheriff has dispatched Crag Rats to find, if possible, a climber who fell from the summit of Mt Jefferson, the perennial fire Wilderness peak. His fall was witnessed and unsurvivable. No body has been spotted the last I read. USFS had no public aid responsibility. Only full auto assault rifle armed USFS cops to arrest speeders on federal highways. Trespassers who enter a closed for recovery burn. Primarily there to protect the SO and ranger station(s) from environmental protestors.