Wild for Holocaust

Another BINGO (big international non-governmental organization) that has “partnered” with the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC) is The Wilderness Society (TWS).

Just so you catch the irony, the WFLC is the governmental body that administers the National Fire Plan, and TWS is a non-governmental lobbyist organization. However, you the taxpayer are supporting TWS via the WFLC, which gives the BINGO your money to help promote the incineration of America’s forests.

The WFLC has gone underground, transforming itself into a terrorist sleeper cell holding clandestine meetings to plan raging holocausts. The light of day burns like acid, doesn’t it Nina? (Twisted sister Nina Hatfield of the Dept. of the Inferior is the current imam and capo di tuti capo of the WFLC.)

Neener (the Bostonian pronounciation) is evidently angling for a revolving-door, fat-salaried job with TWS, who share her core values: they all hate forests with a passion. TWS had this to say about the 2006 fire season, the worst in 50 years (see here, 43 KB):

According to the National Interagency Coordination Center, 86,976 fires burned in the United States this year as of October 31st. Those fires burned 9,445,153 acres, as compared to 8,261,437 last year. The acreage burned this year is 59% above the 5-year average - 5,926,499 acres - and the highest in recent decades. These statistics have prompted some to term this fire season “recordbreaking” or “worst in years,” but in order to understand this year’s fire season, and to best prepare for future wildfire management, we have to look not only at ‘how much”, but also “what, where, and when”. Acres alone do not tell the whole story; for example, fires that occur in grasslands must be managed differently than those occurring in timber.

Overall, the 2006 fire season has seen a high number of acres burned, but most of the largest fires did not occur in timber. The Wilderness Society identified 31 fires exceeding 50,000 acres as of the end of September1 using data from the Geographic Area Coordination Center. These 31 fires, comprise almost half of all the acres burned as of September 30th – over 4.2 million acres.

Hah! Note the quote, “These statistics have prompted some to term this fire season “recordbreaking” or “worst in years”. TWS is referencing SOS Forests. Who else made such a fuss about it? TWS fears SOS Forests, as do all the members and “partners” of the WFLC.

Notice that TWS uses the word “timber” instead of “forest”. The word “forest” chokes in their craws. This is the manner in which propaganda works. By discounting America’s priceless, heritage forests as mere “timber,” they spin the image of dirty, filty, capitalist logging. How much better it is to burn the “timber” down than to have welfare pig corporations chop them down for stinking capitalist profits.

The truth, of course, is that the millions of acres of so-called “timber” that burned down in 2006 was public forest, much of it multi-cohort with very old trees, home to dozens of threatened and endangered species, and sanctuary of our shared heritage as human beings living in this land.

The truth is those incinerated forests were not slated, planned, or managed as logging units. Clearcut logging has been virtually banned on Federal forests for decades. And, over the last ten years, thousands of selective thinning projects, designed to save and restore forests, have been enjoined by lawsuits promulgated by TWS and their fellow radical-left, eco-litigious, BINGO buddies.

The truth is America’s forests are slated, planned, and managed to be incinerated by whoofoos. TWS is part and parcel of the “Blackened, Dead Forests Are Beautiful” indoctrination campaign. From TWS’s e-guide to whoofoos (see here, 853 KB):

THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY
Wildland Fire Use: An Essential Fire Management Tool

Key Points:

• Federal land agencies’ ongoing fire suppression policy has created a situation in which a number of the nation’s forests have become dangerously overgrown, producing increasingly intense fires and escalating suppression costs.

• Wildland Fire Use (WFU) — using naturally-burning fires in designated, remote sections of forests — is widely accepted by scientists, policymakers and land managers as an important tool for helping to restore forest health and mitigating the escalating costs of fire suppression.

• Good fire management often involves a mix of approaches, from full suppression action to WFU; managers
must follow a complex series of steps when they make the choice to allow a fire to burn in a given area.

• Before WFU can be expanded, Congress must reform incentive structures and institutional pressures that
encourage unnecessary fire suppression; the public must also be educated about the ecological benefits of fire.

Here the TWS actually uses the word “forests.” We give them infinitesimal credit.

But notice that the TWS e-guide is not about forest management; it is expressly about fire management. The TWS asserts that whoofoos make forests healthy, whereas the truth is the opposite: lightning fires in overgrown forests kill all the trees and convert forests to tick brush. Dead, rotting, forests converted to tick brush are not “healthy forests” by any stretch of imagination.

Unnamed TWS experts might differ with our assessment, but who are they? This is another propaganda trick to make you think everybody already agrees that whoofoos are great, there is a consensus, and the debate is over. Odds are 99 percent of Americans have never heard of whoofoos, but we supposedly all agree about how wonderful and necessary they are.

This is a very old trick, by the way, one that Socrates logically kicked the stuffing out of over 2,400 years ago. The truth, according to Socrates, does not depend on how many people believe in it. The truth exists outside popular opinion. And in this case, the “popular opinion” about whoofoos presented by TWS is also a made-up lie.

Notice that TWS is actively engaged in lobbying Congress on whoofoos. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, TWS lobbyists are paid by the ripped-off American taxpayer to attend the now secret and long-illegal WFLC meetings. Their paid role in the anti-forest jihad is to “educate” the public (and Congress) about the whoofoos they are lobbying for.

Our “education” is firstly in regard to “resource benefits”. The TWS alleges in their e-guide to whoofoos that catastrophic mid-fire-season fires are good for forests:

Ecological Benefits

Ecologists and fire experts unanimously agree that fire has served an essential role in certain ecosystems for millennia. The ecological benefits of fire include: the creation of critical wildlife habitat in standing dead trees, increased nutrients and productivity in soil systems when burned material decomposes, improved conditions for surviving old growth trees when a surface fire moves through a system, and the regeneration of some fire dependent trees like lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta).

… Fire also increases availability of other fundamental building blocks of ecosystems such as moisture and sunshine by opening up the canopy and returning nutrients to the soil. Natural fire cycles maintain the diversity of habitats available to all the species in the ecosystem, from wildlife to wildflowers to fungi.

What ecologists and fire experts actually agree upon is far, far less and never unanimous, but propaganda is propaganda. Again we are asked to accept the policy without question because unnamed “authorities” tell us to.

Here are some real facts. Our forests are currently full of snags. There is no snag shortage in America’s public forests. The older cohort trees have been dying for decades from moisture competition from the thicket of younger cohort trees (see here). Huge, old-growth snags are already abundant. Burning our forests to 100 percent snagdom is NOT good for wildlife, which did not lack habitat before the whoofoos, but does so subsequently.

Here’s the truth about nutrients: they do not cycle but instead flow through forests. Nutrients, such as calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, are extracted from bedrock by tree micro-rootlets. It is usually the big plants, i.e. trees, that send their roots right into the bedrock to capture nutrients. Trees transport the nutrients to the surface, and deposit them there in leaf and needle litter. Decomposition happens, and then moisture from rain and snow carries the nutrients into the soil, which itself is often bedrock decomposed by tree roots.

Over time the groundwater, runoff, and smoke carry the nutrients right OUT of the forest. Soils can be leached of nutrients by precipitation. Fire gasifies nutrients, and the wind carries them away. Fire also concentrates nutrients in the form of ash, much of which can wash away in the first big rain afterwards.

In other words, there is always a reduction in total nutrients in a forest ecosystem from fires, especially catastrophic ones.

After forest fires, deep-penetrating tree roots are required to replenish the nutrient base. But whoofoos, like any wildfires in dense forests, kill all the trees and replace them with brush. Brush roots (and new tree roots if any new trees germinate and survive) do not go deep. The next fire will sweep through before the  few new trees develop deep roots, and the new fire will again deplete nutrients. The long-term effect of catastrophic forest fires is measurable nutrient depletion, because the sources of the nutrient flow, deep tree roots, are attached solely to charred, dead snags.

There are other nutrients in forests besides metallic oxides. The principal nutrient of forests, and of all plant life, and hence of all animal life, is carbon dioxide. But you knew that. You knew that all life depends on carbon dioxide, the main ingredient, along with water, in photosynthesis.

Nitrogen is another atmospheric nutrient captured temporarily by forests. Nitrogen and carbon dioxide do cycle in and out of forests from the air. The other nutrients do not cycle; they flow.

Where were we? Oh yes, lodgepole pine. LP is is sickliest, scrawniest, most pathetic excuse for a tree species in North America. Short and short-lived, LP thickets with trees a foot apart often do spring up after catastrophic forest fires. LP thickets choke out ponderosa pine and most other conifers or hardwoods that formerly occupied the site prior to the holocaust. LP thickets are hugely flammable, and never turn into old-growth forests.

Sunshine does indeed reach the forest floor in greater intensity after the trees are denuded and killed by fire. There the sun strikes blackened, burned humus and rotting charred snags, which glitter in the new light, giving eco-arsonists a thrill. Sparkling sun on dead, charred, standing and fallen snags is the principal esthetic element in the WFLC “Black Forests Are Beautiful” campaign.

Note also the blind and bigoted insistence by TWS that “natural fire cycles” were once part of our forests. They were not. Our North American Holocene forests were engendered and maintained, from their beginnings and for 10+ millennia, by anthropogenic fire, something quite different from whoofoos.

Anthropogenic fires were gentler because they were set in the fall, right before the rains, in open and park-like forests prepared to receive them. Whoofoos in dense forests in mid-summer have harsher outcomes, to say the least.

TWS racial bigotry is displayed in their call for “natural fire cycles” and in the “naturalness” they attach to lightning fires. Make no mistake, TWS would like any and all ignitions to be declared whoofoos, regardless of their “naturalness”. That is part of the conspiratorial work they are doing with the WFLC at the clandestine backroom confabs. But they also feel a need to discount Native Americans in any case, in support of de-humanization. They insist America was all wilderness before Columbus, and that de-humanized landscapes are best. The basic TWS philosophy has so much similarity to Nazism that it is accurate and justifiable to call it such.

TWS also want to “educate” you about how whoofoos “mitigate” fire suppression effects:

Environmental Costs Avoided

WFU can also mitigate the negative environmental impacts associated with fire suppression. A forest dense with an unnatural build-up of surface and ladder fuels may be at increased risk for unnaturally severe fire when suppression fails. The chemical retardants, bulldozed fire lines, and other heavy-handed tactics associated with unnecessary fire suppression can harm wildlife habitat, water quality and air quality.

Ladder fuels are low branches that carry fire into tree crowns. Fire climbs up trees using the low branches as ladders. That’s why low branches are called “ladder” fuels. You cannot burn ladder fuels without the fire crowning. Whoofoos climb up the ladders, too. Then the ensuing crown fire kills all the trees, including those with no low branches.

The very idea that whoofoos prevent fires from crowning by selectively burning only ladder fuels, and not the tree crowns they ladder to, is preposterous and absurd, and the phenomenon has never been recorded in a single instance in real life.

And if you think fire retardant harms wildlife, water quality, and air quality, you should see what forest fires do!

TWS is opposed to firefighting. They are doing and will continue to do whatever they can, legal and illegal, to hamper forest firefighting efforts, including suing the US Government to limit and/or ban the use of fire retardant. And they sit in on the secret meeting held by Wildland Fire Leadership Council. And that is akin to infiltration and sabotage of our national firefighting community by radical leftwing forest holocausters.

TWS is also working hand-in-hand with the USDA OIG to replace tried-and-true fire cost accounting methods with a bizarre new formula. Only cost-per-acre counts in Bizarro World, not total cost or total cost-plus-loss:

Suppression Costs Avoided

In 2003, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that WFU fires cost an average of just $43/acre to  manage, a fraction of the $150-250/acre average suppression cost. Managing some fires to improve forest health thus has the potential to save significant taxpayer money in the immediate future .

Unnecessary fire suppression, by fostering the development of higher fuel loads, can be expected to generate even higher firefighting costs in the long term. These costs are not only monetary ones: as firefighting becomes more difficult, it also becomes more dangerous; the loss of life is indeed the gravest cost of suppression.

The average taxpayer is not so stupid as to replace total cost with cost per unit. Or maybe she is. This is the warehouse-type-store marketing approach: get the consumer to buy something they don’t need or want in huge quantities because the cost per unit is low. Or using TWS’s financial logic, spend hundreds of millions on whoofoos because they are cheaper per acre than suppressed fires, which cost mere millions.

This kind of Enron-style fire cost accounting is also dependant on which fires are officially designated whoofoos. The Biscuit Fire of 2002 was a Let It Burn fire, though not an official whoofoo. After 50,000 acres had burned (cheaply) and the Biscuit Fire was growing leaps and bounds, the fire managers realized they might have to spend something to stop it. Eventually it got to 500,000 acres and cost $150 million to save the adjacent communities (which were 30 or more miles away from the ignition spots, so adjacency is a little bit of a stretch). That comes out to $300/acre. We might add, the Biscuit was the most expensive forest fire to suppress in US history.

And the TWS want to “educate” you that you are saving money in the long-run, too:

Treatment Costs Avoided

Using mechanical thinning and prescribed fire to treat fuels prior to fires is also extremely expensive. While funding for this work has increased, the cost of treating acres still far exceeds budgetary allocations. Costs for reducing fuels vary widely, depending on the method and location of the treatment, the type of forest, the size of the project, and the way costs are calculated; recent estimates go as high as $1,200/acre, and estimates of the amount of federal land in need of treatment have been as high as 90-200 million acres.

In addition to direct treatment costs, treated acres will need ongoing and indefinite maintenance to keep fuels low. Congressional appropriations for fuel treatment have already reached $400 million; treatment needs can be expected to increase with continued fire suppression. WFU can help prevent fuel build-up over large areas, reducing the need for expensive fuel treatments in the future.

The truth is initial restorative thinnings can and do pay for themselves, or would if the litigation costs didn’t eat up the entire budget.  Whoofoos never make money, while most proper thinnings do. Moreover, whoofoos do not “solve” the fire hazard problem.

TWS complains that restoration forestry is not a one-time treatment, and that is true. But neither are whoofoos. Whoofoos kill green trees, adding to the dead wood fuel load. And the brush grows back, rapidly replacing the fine fuels consumed. The fire hazard comes back quickly, sometimes immediately. A burned forest one year after a whoofoo can be just as flammable as the day before.

And brush fires are much more dangerous to fight than forest fires. It is more evil than simple sophistry on TWS’s part to claim whoofoos make the world safer for firefighters.

Restoration forestry (what TWS called “mechanical thinning”) is an art and a science, not a machine. In the practice of restoration forestry real humans make choices about what trees to save and how to save them. Whoofoos are brainless; fire does not have consciousness, much less discernment. Fires in dense forests kill all the trees, good and bad, worthwhile and worthless.

Human beings must tend valuable forests, because fire alone cannot.

And our public forests have value, and should not be destroyed by wackos with an anti-human agenda.