A Yawning Chasm of Ignorance

[We have one more essay, after this one, to post in this inaugural year of SOS Forests. Our second year will begin shortly thereafter with some subtle yet pleasing improvements in product and presentation.]

We began our Back to the Rim series with an essay about the Grand Canyon entitled Echoes in the Void. We return now to that vacuous locale to examine the National Park Service and their treatment of forests.

Last July, while the Warm Fire was raging out of control, eventually burning 58,000 acres of the Kaibab National Forest, the AP Wire carried this story:

Warm Fire Traps Hundreds of People at Grand Canyon

From the KOLD Newsroom & AP wires, July 8, 2006

Some 750 tourists and employees are trapped at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

The Warm Fire had been monitored as a natural fire until Sunday night, when it jumped Highway 67. The highway is the area’s only developed road.

A caravan escorted approximately 200 people from the North Rim Monday night, traveling two hours on a dirt forest road to get out.

Fire crews are removing downed and burned trees along the highway to make it safe for travel. They are hoping to use the road to evacuate the remaining people on Tuesday.

If Highway 67 remains to be unsafe for evacuation, the people will be escorted out by the dirt road detour.

A few days later, a tourist bureau associated with Grand Canyon National Park issued this statement:

The Warm Fire was illustrative of the process of a “natural” fire. It began with a lightning strike on June 8th, and in keeping with National Park Service policy of letting Nature take its course, was allowed to burn in a “managed” fashion, under the scrutiny of Forest Service, Park Service, etc. Then, the winds kicked up - another “fact of life” in this neck of the woods - and the fire grew 17,000 in the course of a night.

Hyuck, hyuck. Golly shazam. We was a-scrutinizering da fire when da wind come up. Boom, thar she blows up. Who da thunk? We’re morons here. It’s just a fact of life.

In truth, the statement is a passel of lies. The Warm Fire was on USFS land, not NPS land. National Park fire policies, whatever they might be, do not apply to National Forests. The NPS did not manage the Warm Fire, nor did they oversee or scrutinize it. The fire was under management of the Kaibab N.F. until it blew up, whereupon management was passed to the Northern Arizona Type 2 IMT under the supervision of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Neither the NPS nor Grand Canyon NP had any role in the Warm Fire at all, other than to evacuate the North Rim.

As badly as the Warm Fire was managed, if the NPS had been in charge, it would have been ten times bigger. The NPS has the very worst overall fire control capability or expertise of any land management agency in this country.

In 1988 the NPS burned up nearly half of Yellowstone N.P., the original and most treasured of all our national parks. In 2000 the NPS deliberately set fire to Bandelier National Monument, and their fire escaped. The Cerro Grande Fire burned up half of Los Alamos and left a bill of over a billion dollars in the taxpayer’s lap.

Also in 2000 the NPS deliberately set fire to the Grand Canyon NP North Rim forest in a mistake called the Outlet Fire. That fire also forced evacuation of the Park.

This summer the nearly 8,000 acre Flick Creek Fire burned the last unburned forests east of Lake Chelan in North Cascades N.P. And another vast chunk of Crater Lake N.P. was incinerated.

Flick Creek Fire map showing juxtapositions with the Boulder Fire of 1994 and the Rex Creek Fire of 2001. Click here for larger image (284 KB). Map courtesy the USDA Forest Service and InciWeb.

The NPS record with fire is atrocious, abysmal, and hugely destructive. The NPS kills firefighters, too. In 2004 the NPS set an unprepared prescribed fire in Sequoia-Kings Canyon N.P. It blew up out-of-control almost immediately, the Arrowhead Hotshots were requested, and a much-loved crew member, Daniel Holmes, was killed falling a burning snag.

No one at the NPS received so much as a reprimand in their file. SKCNP Park Superintendent Richard H. Martin white-washed the incident and management dodged all responsibility, a practice so typical as to be called business-as-usual for the NPS.

Grand Canyon N.P. has no Fire Plan to speak of. They have an old (1992) document that is exceedingly worthless. They were going to write a new one, and held public scoping meetings in the Fall of 2003, three years ago. That’s the last we heard. Maybe a Fire Plan was actually written, but if it was, it’s a big secret.

They gush all over wilderness though. The GCNP thinks their property is wild and free, untrammeled and virgin pure. However, the GCNP locale is not wilderness because it has been occupied and home to human beings for millennia. The ruins of some of the homes are still there! And the Park knows it!

The people who lived in those houses grew corn, beans, and squash in irrigated fields. They routinely set fire to the landscape for myriad reasons, including to clear and weed farm land, to improve game habitat, to drive game in hunts, and to prevent catastrophic fires that could drive the people to starvation.

The forests on the Rim are entirely anthropogenic. Without anthropogenic fire, the vegetation on the plateaus would be completely different and principally brush. The forests of the GCNP are historic, cultural landscapes, not wilderness!!!!!!!!

But whatever. After 100 years of NPS mismanagement, the priceless heritage forests within GCNP have been largely destroyed and converted to brush or bare ground with charred snags. So ugly and devastated is the South Rim forest that the NPS is proposing to build a choo-choo train (excuse us, light rail) system that will hug the Rim and direct visitor attention to the Canyon and away from the fried former forest.

“Please do not look out the windows on the other side. It is too depressing. It looks like Hell. It really looks like Hell.”

The underestimated cost: $100 million. Your tax dollars incinerated in yet another destructive NPS boondoggle.

When rookie Sec Int Dork Kempthorne entouraged through here last summer on his imperious Snub-and-Sneer Tour, he was only demonstrating his allegiance to Big Parks.

David Quammen wrote in the Oct 2006 issue of National Geographic. “… creating National Parks is only another elitist form of cultural imperialism.” He could not be more correct, except that it’s worse than that. The imperial cultural elite have dedicated America’s National Parks to the UN. People in Surinam and Syria have more say-so about our parks than US citizens and taxpayers. In truth, BINGO’s rule.

The US National Park System was founded upon and remains true to a 19th Century, Victorian, imperialist vision that is approximately 100 years out-of-date philosophically, intellectually, culturally, and scientifically.

The chief “science” arm of the NPS is an obscure government agency, the Biological Research Division of the US Geological Survey. The BRD (pronounced “bird-brained’) closets the most egregious pseudo-scientific frauds extant. The quacks at BRD have actually driven species to extinction: extirpation by government research. (We will blog more about this next year).

The NPS itself is inbred, nepotistic, elitist, and paranoid. The NPS hears what it wants to hear, and disregards the rest. They are a cult, and a wacko cult at that.

Teddy Roosevelt’s promise has not only gone unfulfilled; it has been honored solely in the breach. The NPS has been systematically destroying our National Parks for over 100 years and the destruction continues unabated today.

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Afterword

Is this post riddled with overstatements? Not hardly. The details of NPS mismanagement, incompetence, and environmental destruction would fill a thousand blogs. Yet there is no voice, no blogvoice that is, that dares or bothers to examine the gory details (except this one, and we will examine only a few NPS egregiosities in the upcoming year).

Mark these words: the intellectual, scientific, cultural, and yes, even political potentials of the Blogosphere, indeed of the entire Internet, vastly exceed their current manifestations.

Next: The New Canyon