Fire and Fuels

Fact Checking Roady, Daines and Hubbard

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Last week I had to shake my head and literally laugh at some of the predictable statements of supposed fact being made during a hearing of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation.  Since one of the articles about the hearing has just been posted here, I figured I’d put together a fact-checking post of sorts.

“We need to invest more resources up front to keep our forests green and healthy, rather than wait until they are dead and dying, or on fire,” -Chuck Roady of F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber

That’s a good example of a pollyannish statement that has no basis in actual forest ecology and science.

“Rep. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said another problem hampering the federal government’s ability to manage forests is an onslaught of frivolous lawsuits filed by environmental groups against the Forest Service.”

Filing of “frivolous lawsuits” is illegal, Congressman, and any attorney that files an actual “frivolous lawsuit” would be punished by the Courts and possibly even dis-barred.  There has never been one single “frivolous” lawsuit filed in Montana, or elsewhere, concerning Forest Service timber management. I’d challenge my Congressman Daines, or anyone else, to provide one concrete example.

Also,

“onslaught of frivolous lawsuits?” Or Daines claim that: “He said about 40 percent of the 124 management projects in Region 1, which includes Forest Service land in Montana and Idaho, have been appealed or litigated.”

Fact is, according to the most-recent GAO report, of 132 total “fuel reduction” decisions in the Forest Service’s Northern Region only 11, or 8% were litigated.  And those “fuel reduction” projects that were litigated includes issues such as logging in old-growth forests miles from homes or communities, logging within habitat for threatened or endangered species, logging is areas that are already heavily logged, roaded and fragmented, etc.

Also, the truth is that the public appeal process is part of the official public review process established by the US Congress. A member of the US Congress complaining that some people or groups filed used the public appeal process set up by Congress is the same as complaining that people participate in the process at all.  What’s next Congressman Daines? Bitching that citizens actually vote?

According to the actual actual GAO report the US Forest Service Northern Region had 132 total fuel reduction decisions during FY 2006 to FY 2008. Of those 132 total fuel reduction projects 11 were litigated. That comes to about 8%.

Jim Hubbard, deputy chief of state and private forestry for the Forest Service, said “such suits have ‘virtually shut things down’ on national forest land in Montana, ‘and so environmental clearance there … has been difficult.’”

Hmmmm….”Virtually shut things down” Hubbard? Really?

Here’s a link to the Forest Service’s Timber Sale Program Cut and Sold Reports for Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 in the U.S. Forest Service Region One.

Please note that over the past five years the Forest Service in Region One (which includes 12 National Forests located within the perimeter of northeastern Washington, northern Idaho, and Montana; and the National Grasslands in North Dakota and northwestern South Dakota. the Black Hills in SD) has sold enough timber to fill 239,000 log trucks, which if lined up end-to-end, would stretch 2,048 miles, or nearly from Missoula, Montana to New York City.

According to the Forest Service’s Cut and Sold report, here are the numbers over the past five years for the Forest Service’s Region One:

• FY 2012 Region One sold 208.3 MMBF, cut 219.4 MMBF (“Virtually shut things down?”)

• FY 2011 Region One sold 211.9 MMBF, cut 202.0 MMBF. (“Virtually shut things down?”)

• FY 2010 Region One sold 253.4 MMBF, cut 188.7 MMBF. (“Virtually shut things down?”)

• FY 2009 Region One sold 292.9 MMBF, cut 186.0 MMBF. (“Virtually shut things down?”)

• FY 2008 Region One sold 229.2 MMBF, cut 167.4 MMBF. (“Virtually shut things down?”)

NOTE: MMBF = million board feet. There are approximately 5,000 board feet per logging truck.

As you notice, the volume of timber sold by the US Forest Service in our Region has stayed pretty steady, while the volume of timber cut per year has actually gone up slightly during the past five years.  But, hey, the Forest Service timber sale program in the Northern Region is “Virtually shut down,” right Hubbard?

So, consider these actual numbers and this image of log trucks lined up end-to-end across the country in the context of those calling for more logging of our national forests and spreading false, misleading and self-serving lies about “Virtually shut things down.”

Kudos For West Fork Fire Information

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When I was hunting for a photo for a post.. I decided to look at the West Fork fire (I was thinking of a map that would illustrate the interstices of wildland and development in the area).

Well, I went to Inciweb and found this link. Then I went to their blog here, and found this:

West Fork Fire Complex

Note: Due to high demand, our email account and Inciweb have become intermittently unresponsive. This blog is provided as an official alternate source of fire information.

I particularly liked the link to fire photos here.
Maybe that’s standard for a fire nowadays, but I hadn’t seen it. Maybe this will be news for other retirees. When I retired, blogs were a no-no. Good to see.

I did try to leave a nice “thank you” for the photos..but find doing so on Blogger way challenging. First you have to pick an identity, sign in and then pass a test that you are human which I usually fail a couple of times. Anyway, thank you!

Stand down from Western wildfires – John Maclean

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West Fork Run by Pike IHC
West Fork Run by Pike IHC

Here is a link to an High Country News piece by John Maclean.

The headline is a bit overwrought in my opinion. But perhaps that’s the job of headline writers. In recent phone calls around the country, I’m also hearing about forest fires and homes elsewhere than in the west..

Here are some excerpts:

We need to encourage firefighters to exercise more caution, even when homes are at stake. Let the fires that are riskiest for firefighters burn. And assure the firefighters that the nation will have their backs when the inevitable complaints pour in.

Before I retired, there was a massive effort led by Chief Tidwell called the Safety Journey. Part of it was directed specifically at exactly that.. helping people become comfortable with saying “no” to unsafe conditions. Perhaps these efforts did not work and are not working. But it doesn’t sound like a policy question. The policy is not to endanger yourself.
Later, Maclean says:

Every firefighter like her who just says “No” needs support from the fire community and the public.

That was the point of the Safety Journey. If that’s not happening, I bet someone is studying why not. It would be good to hear from them.

Even with everything we hurl at the flames, Western states keep setting new records for homes lost and acreage burned. The federal government alone, not counting the state governments and other entities, has spent more than $3 billion per year on this war, on average since 2002, according to the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. Forest Service has tilted its budget toward preparedness and suppression, and the president’s 2014 budget calls for a 27 percent increase in the firefighting funding.

Meanwhile, budgets for fuels reduction — fire prevention — are cut, robbing the future to pay for the present. In the 2014 budget, for instance, fuels-reduction programs take a 37 percent hit, down to $201 million. The funding shift also reduces support for campground services, research projects, trail maintenance and other worthy — and popular — endeavors.

The prescribed burning and forest-thinning projects that fit within the budget are often stymied by environmental activists and locals complaining about smoke. Or severe fire risk interferes, as the prescribed-burning season grows ever shorter. Government agencies cannot catch up to the problem: There isn’t enough money or political will.

Even though safety practices have improved, each year between eight and 30 wildland firefighters are killed in the war (download one report here and another here covering a longer period.) It might not sound like a large number, but it takes a terrible toll in the families and the close-knit firefighting community. No one would be surprised if the toll rises. And regardless of the numbers, there’s a principle of homeowners taking responsibility.

It’s great that many homeowners are trying to make their homes more fire-resistant, but we need to tell them, we can no longer commit to saving their homes if their efforts fall short. They chose to live out there, and they — and their insurance companies — must accept the consequences.

I just read this piece in the Denver Post the Black Forest Fire this morning.
“Black Forest fire insurance claims nearing $300 million.” So at least in Colorado, folks are pretty aware of the consequences of fires burning.

At the end, he talks about letting his cabin burn. Once again, a cabin is not a subdivision. It seems like in many of these stories that are in the press, and op-eds, places like the Black Forest or Waldo Canyon are conflated with cabins or parcels deep in the woods.

If you are curious about the firefighter deaths statistics, here’s the paragraph in the report Macclean cites that describes the reasons for the fatalities:

Deaths on the Fire Ground
The breakdown of causes of fatal injuries on the fire ground is shown in Figure C. Thirty firefighters were killed in 20 fire department vehicle crashes during fire suppression activities, including 24 in 16 aircraft crashes. Nineteen of those 24 victims were contractors (mostly pilots) working for state and federal land management agencies. The others were employees of state and federal land management agencies.
Overexertion, stress and related medical issues accounted for the next largest proportion of deaths. Sudden cardiac death accounted for 25 of these 26 fatalities; one firefighter died of heat troke.
The third largest proportion of deaths during fire suppression activities occurred when firefighters were caught or trapped by fire progress (25 deaths). Seventeen of them died as a result of burns; eight died of asphyxiation.
Eleven firefighters were struck by objects — five by a tree or snag, three by vehicles, one by a rock, one by a section of an exploding storage tank and one by a rope that snapped while he was trying to tow a stuck apparatus at a wildfire.
Seven firefighters were electrocuted – five came into contact with downed power lines and two were struck by lightning.
Two firefighters fell from cliffs and two fell from apparatus during fire ground operations.

Managing wildfire risk in fire-prone landscapes: how are private landowners contributing?

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A timely paper from the PNW Research Station:

Click to access scifi154.pdf

IN SUMMARY

The fire-prone landscapes of the West include both public and private lands. Wildfire burns indiscriminately across property boundaries, which means that the way potential fuels are managed on one piece of property can affect wildfire risk on neighboring lands.

Paige Fischer and Susan Charnley, social scientists with the Pacific Northwest Research Station, surveyed private landowners in eastern Oregon to learn how they perceive fire risk on their land and what they do, if anything, to reduce that risk. The scientists found that owners who live on a forested parcel are much more likely to reduce fuels than are those who live elsewhere. Private forest owners are aware of fire risk and knowledgeable about methods for reducing fuels, but are constrained by the costs and technical challenges of protecting large acreages of forested land. Despite the collective benefits of working cooperatively, most of these owners reduce hazardous fuels on their land independently, primarily because of their distrust about working with others, and because of social norms associated with private property ownership.

These results provide guidance for developing more effective fuel reduction programs that accommodate the needs and preferences of private forest landowners. The findings also indicate the potential benefits of bringing landowners into collective units to work cooperatively, raising awareness about landscape-scale fire risk, and promoting strategies for an “all lands” approach to reducing wildfire risk.

Everyone, rural or urban, has stake in forests

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Burn on Silas Little Experimental Forest
Burn on Silas Little Experimental Forest

Bob Williams’ comment below reminded me of this piece from April, by him and Dan Botkin. I thought I had posted it before, but couldn’t find it when I searched.

Here is the link and below is an excerpt:

Forest fires in the drought-stricken West and Southwest received a lot of attention last year, and scenes of several large, destructive fires were widely shown on television. Could this happen elsewhere in the United States?

In early March, columns of smoke rose from the Pine Barrens, visible from the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas. One might think these fires are dangerous and should be suppressed, but they were intentionally lit by the Forest Fire Service of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, with more to be lit this spring.

Given the inherent dangers of fire to homes, and remembering Smokey the Bear telling us, “Only you can prevent forest fires,” lighting fires near big cities might seem like the last thing a government agency should be doing.

However, light forest fires are a necessity for the Pine Barrens, needed to sustain the natural forests and their biological diversity, and to prevent the kind of devastating, intense wildfires that can damage towns and cities.

In fact, most forests of America evolved with fires. They were originally started by random, periodic lightning strikes, but perpetuated for thousands of years by Native Americans prior to European settlement. Only in the last few centuries have people changed how fire is used in forests. The fire suppression of the recent past has created a growing fuel load and conditions that are ripe for a really large fire that will result in significant loss of life and property.

Suppression has led to high-intensity, hard-to-control wildfires that are devastating to forest ecosystems and more likely to burn through houses, towns, and cities. Modern prescribed burns in the Pine Barrens by the state Forest Fire Service reduce the fuel load. They demonstrate the way forests should be and need to be managed across our nation.

That rising smoke near the big Eastern metropolitan areas signals both a burgeoning acceptance that some change in the environment is natural, and a spreading recognition that to sustain our resources and to live successfully and symbiotically with our environment, we must accept and even promote these natural changes.

For centuries, people have lived, worked, and played in the Pinelands, all of which is part of the fabric that makes this forest so environmentally, ecologically, and economically unique. Iron has been mined out of the sandy soils. Berries, pine cones, and sphagnum moss have been harvested from the forests. The Barrens have been farmed, fished, and charcoaled for centuries. They supplied lumber for one of America’s earliest industries, ship building. New York City and Philadelphia were originally built with wood from the Pine Barrens.

After much analysis and debate, in 2005, the Pinelands Commission’s Forestry Advisory Committee stated, “Forestry, if practiced in accordance with sound management practices, can provide wood and wood products and ensure the protection of water quality and critical habitat for wildlife, as well as a way of life and culture that will otherwise soon vanish.” Surprising as it may seem, the Pine Barrens are, as they have been since the late 1600s, a place of active and valuable commercial forestry.

Today, in the 21st century, not much is heard about commercial forestry and its role in our lives and our forests in the public or the media. Although the history and products of the Pine Barrens demonstrate that we are a forest-dependent species, our growing urban culture has moved further and further away from a basic understanding of the land and the forests. However, if you breathe air and drink water, you need forests.

We are all part of forest ecosystems, not intruders – even those of us who live in metropolitan areas.

This raises a couple of thoughts:

1. For some SAF work, I have been doing phone calls with folks across the country asking them about fire; seems like the southerners (and folks in New Jersey) are more accepting of prescribed burning. Is it cultural? Less likely to escape because not so dry? Better procedures for control? Better relations with state air quality folks? I bet someone has studied at least some aspects of this question.

2. While looking for a photo, I found this piece which said

In addition, scientists expect that continued wildfire suppression, and the use of only very low-temperature, cold-season controlled fires, will over time change the composition of Pine Barrens forests by favoring oaks in their competition with pines for dominance of the forest. This potential fundamental alteration of the ecosystem will be gradual and will only be visible over a period of several decades or more.

So it sounds like the dominant species will change if only prescribed fires occur, because the fire effects are different. Will that be a change that’s good? or bad? or simply is?

3. Here’s a link to the Silas Little Experimental Forest.

The Misplaced War Against Western Wildfires

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watching smoke

Here’s an op-ed by Stephen Pyne in today’s Denver Post. It’s beautifully written.

What to do about it depends on how we characterize the problem. The paradox of fire stems from its role as the great shape-shifter of natural processes. The reason is simple: Fire is not a creature or a substance or a geophysical event like a hurricane or an earthquake. It is a biochemical reaction. It synthesizes its surroundings. It takes its character from its context.

Fire integrates everything around it — sun, wind, rain, plants, terrain, roofing, fields, and everything people do, and don’t do. In this way, it indexes the state of an ecosystem. It is also our signature act as a species, the one thing we do that no other creature does. While we did not invent fire (it has been integral to Earth for more than 400 million years), we exercise a monopoly over its controlled use.

All of this makes fire universal, difficult to grasp, and tricky to wrestle into manageable shape. There is no solution to fire, because there are many kinds of fires, and they change with their context. Some fire problems do have technical fixes. We can build machines that reduce combustion to its essence and contain it.

We cannot survive without fire; we just need it in the right ways. It is certainly a problem when it burns freely through cities. But it is also a problem when it is removed from wildlands that have adapted to it, because its absence can be as ecologically significant as its presence. The point is, urban fire is not a model for wildland fire.

Our prevailing templates for describing fire are similarly misdirected. They portray the burn as a disaster and the fight against it as a war story. The battlefield allusion leads observers to reason that there must be more sophisticated technologies than shovels and rakes with which to suppress the flames. We must meet force with greater force. Such metaphors matter, because they mis-define the problem.

Here are a couple of my thoughts:

1. I don’t think the “war” is the prevailing template (let alone “our” prevailing template). I think the last 30 years or so “we’ve” (the fire/ecology/natural resource community) been fairly successful at promoting the concept that fire can have good effects and fire can have bad effects. So who is “we” in this case (the unspecific use of “we” is one of my pet peeves, as regular readers know)?.

2. I agree with Pyne’s point that “urban fire is not a model for wildland fire.” But I think we need to look more closely at his statement:

But it is also a problem when it is removed from wildlands that have adapted to it, because its absence can be as ecologically significant as its presence.

The adaptation of “ecosystems” has always been an interesting concept. For one thing, it depends on “ecosystems” being a real thing instead of a human construct. There have been two schools of thought about this.. one that mixes of plants and animals develop and change through time.. the other that there is something called an “ecosystem”, with a greater or lesser subtext of “balance” or focus on what is currently there (or there in the past) rather than the fact that individual components are always changing.

Species evolve.. that’s what you learn in courses, through the traditional forms of genetic adaptation. What is an “ecosystem” and how does it “evolve”? Through what mechanism? Now backing off from the reification to the reality, if cones open only in fire or hot weather, it does seem that the species might do better with fire (or hot weather), or certain species regenerate better with fire, that is a reality. Without intervention, you won’t get those plants back without fire.

So I think it’s important to look at each impact or lack thereof separately. Say, sedimentation..how much do you get? What organisms is it good for? Which is it bad for, etc.?

So this reminded me of this story in the Atlantic, “SW Forests May Never Recover From Megafires.”

Much of the Los Alamos burn resembles today a lunar landscapes — vast slopes of denuded gray soil where little vegetation has come back. Hillsides, once covered with ponderosa pine and squat, drought tolerant pinon and juniper trees, now grow only clumps of cheatgrass, an invasive species, and occasional bush-like shrub oaks. Biologist Craig Allen of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has has spent years studying the Southwest forest ecosystem, says that areas like these won’t be forested again in our lifetime, and possibly they never will be. The reason that Allen and others are pessimistic is that climate change is hitting the Southwest harder and faster than most other areas in the U.S. The region has warmed on average between 2 and 5 degrees during the past century, and this trend is expected to accelerate in the years ahead.

Add to this the danger from what scientists call a possible “mega-drought.” The Southwest has always been prone to extended dry periods, like the one which archeologists believe drove the Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon in the Four Corner’s area to the wetter Rio Grande Valley in the late 13th century. But a study published last year in the journal Nature Climate says that, by 2050, the region will be even drier than in previous mega-droughts. Moreover, hot summer temperatures in the southwest will literally suck the water our of leaves and needles killing trees in unprecedented numbers. “The majority of forests in the Southwest probably cannot survive in the temperatures that are projected,” one of the study’s co-authors, Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory told Environment 360.

As a person who spent the early part of her career helping figure out how to reforest dry areas, I think it’s worthy of experimentation to try planting some species in these areas. I think we have gone way past “natural” and now simply have to consider what we want and what we can afford.

House Resources Committee Hearing July 11, 2013

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I like this quote by Chris Topik in the press release here:

“We must collectively and immediately dedicate ourselves to finding a way to effectively support both essential emergency wildfire preparedness and response AND the proactive fuels reduction and forest restoration that are needed to reduce the demand for emergency expenditures in the future. Our current approach to wildland fire and forest management creates a false choice, pitting the viability of one against the other. In reality, we cannot afford to short-change either.” – Christopher Topik, Ph.D, Director, Resorting America’s Forests, The Nature Conservancy

People I know who watched it, said that there was general agreement and a relative lack of partisan demagoguery.

Here’s the site with the testimony.

From the Big Blowup to Yarnell Hill: A Cautionary History of Wildand Fire by Char Miller

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Found this on the SAF LinkedIn site:

It’s always hard to excerpt one of Char’s pieces, but here goes:

That conviction was woven into the determination to take on the Mann Gulch fire of 1949. Fifteen smokejumpers parachuted near a wind-whipped inferno in the mountains above Helena, Montana, where they joined a ranger who had hiked in to battle the rapidly moving blaze. Trapped near a ridgeline, thirteen died. In its post-fire investigation, the Forest Service exonerated the fire boss’s decision to jump in the first place and his management decisions during the increasingly ferocious and unpredictable burn.

“I really think that the fire we saw when we flew over there was a typical smokejumper fire,” a survivor confirmed. “And if they didn’t jump on that fire they wouldn’t have jumped on half the fires they jumped on that year. So I don’t think it was a mistake to jump. After we got on the ground I think it was a freak of nature that caused the wind to do what it did and to pick those coals up and drop them in the canyon below us.” Because smokejumping had been invented, the agency needed to use this tool notwithstanding any such “freak of nature.”

Unfortunately, those freakish moments have piled up. Between 1949 and 2012, burnovers have killed an estimated 221 of the 769 wildland firefighters who have died on the job.

The 1950s and ’60s were especially harrowing on the California national forests. In 1953, fifteen died in a burnover on the Mendocino NF; the next year, three more were lost on the Tahoe NF and then in 1956 another eleven fell on the Cleveland NF. Ten years later, a dozen firefighters were killed on the Angeles NF, also the site of a 1968 incident in which four perished.

Following the 1994 fire season, in which 14 firefighters were killed in the South Canyon fire on Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the Forest Service and other federal and state agencies embraced a more rigorous safety-first strategy, hoping to limit the number of fatalities.

This year’s tragedy in Arizona suggests that we may not have fully absorbed this painful, century-long history. The problem does not appear to be one of policy but of memory. We don’t seem to know how to recall this deadly past, to keep it front and center, so as to abide by the rules and regulations already in place.

The public moreover must deliberately integrate these deaths into our ongoing education about fire’s essential place in the landscape, whether grassland, chaparral, or alpine. They must also be a required discussion item before every zoning commission or city council vote to permit yet another subdivision in the wildland-urban interface. For make no mistake, we are undeniably complicit in this mounting toll — we sent these firefighters out to do the work that led to their demise even as we have contributed to the increased frequency and intensity of the fires they have battled on our behalf. They die where we live.

To insure that their numbers do not grow, perhaps this time we’ll remember what happened during the Big Blowup and in Griffith Park, at Mann Gulch, South Canyon, and now Yarnell Hill. Perhaps this time we won’t forget what we have always known.

Here are some of my reflections on Char’s piece:

1) From Storm King to now was 19 years; you could argue that, given the kind of work that these folks are doing, and the judgements that need to be made, the track record is actually darn impressive.

2) There is a difference between “not living there in the woods” and “not using certain potentially dangerous tactics when fighting fires around houses in the woods.” I’m not a suppression expert, but they seem to have a variety of tactics. That’s what Kathy Voth questioned in the piece here that The Optimist posted.

3) Even if we stopped any more building, there are plenty of built places left to potentially burn- including Southern California.

4) Flooding of rivers has been a part of the landscape for millennia as well, but we don’t “educate people about the essential role of flooding in the landscape.” In fact, where I grew up, within the KCET listening area, La Ballona Creek was concrete lined for flood control (people are working to restore it, which I think is a good thing).

Democrats Comment Against Forest Thinning

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Here is an early July LA Times article that, apparently, says that only Republicans are seeking to thin our forests, as we watch our forests burn. Clearly, this is a tactic to rile up their mostly Democratic readers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-gop-fire-hearings-20130703,0,2185679.story

Cole-creek-logs-web

Yes, it did rile them up, as evidenced by the wild comments. Here are a few examples:

As a logger in Susanville, California said at a Forest Service public comment session (1997), “But Trees are Dying in the Fiorest”!!!! (and therefore NOT making a profit for him).

My response, People are dying in the streets, so what is YOUR point.

The aLand Raping Logger coundn’t answer, because the only thing he cared about was turning a PUBLIC RESOURCE into his own private profit.

Dead trees in a dorest serve as nesting sites for birds and other animals and eventually fall to rot, providing food foe grub eating bears, light spaces for juvenile trees to start and replenishing the forest soil, for the next generation of trees.

When a person dies, what good do they do the Planet?

This commenter doesn’t realize that clearcuts have been banned in the Sierra Nevada for over 20 years.

The logging companies will only clear cut…not select cut, making for the ugliest scars and worse…ecological destruction of forest habitats.  This is not a good idea.  The problem is not the density of trees…it’s the residential areas built near thick forests.  Bad planning is a result of homes destroyed in forest fires.

Ummm, I think it is the wildfires that are causing “deforestation”, bud!

Is that what the GOP is calling deforestation for profit these days, as they bend over for their lumbering lobbyists?

Was this supposed excessive harvesting done in THIS millennium??!?

They have a point, but the GOP has a history of letting “thinning” evolve into excessive “harvesting” by lumber companies.

This person is in denial about current forest management practices that have eliminated high-grading AND clearcutting, while reducing fuels in the form of trees in the 10″-18″ dbh size class. The last 20 years of active management has not resulted in adverse effects. On the other hand, wildfires lead to MORE insects, as they kill the fire-adapted pines, through a combination of cambium kill and bark beetle blooms.

Much of the GOP have forest management/preservation for the past 40 years. While some may see forests as natural resources to be preserved and cherished, others see them as purely economic resources to be exploited. Timber interests in California have utilized the same pretext to no avail. Note that thinning the forests would have little effect in preventing or curtailing wild fires. Let nature take its course becasue fires are a natural occurance; and are necessary for killing insects, spreading new seeds and burning away dead wood.

Really, though, THIS is a big part of what we are up against. Loud-mouthed partisan politics, not based in fact, is harming our ability to do what is right for the “greatest good”. Shouldn’t we be “thinking globally and acting locally”, regarding forests? Is this mindset fitting into “If you are not part of the solution, then you are a part of the problem”?? It looks like commenters will say ANYTHING to bash the GOP, even if it is hyperbole and rhetoric. Sadly, this ignorance of forest facts continues to have a harmful and hazardous effect on our forests.