COUNTIES ON FIRE

As of this September 19 writing, the lightning-caused fire - which started September 10, is still burning out of control. Containment is not expected until October 10, which seems like an eternity to me given its small size in relation to the 963,000-acre Dixie Fire or the 219,000-acre Caldor Fire.

This is an article that Jim Petersen recently wrote for RANGE Magazine

There is nothing new, normal, natural, or inevitable about what we are witnessing... What we are witnessing is not “the new normal.” Nor is it a direct result of “climate change.” It is the downstream result of congressional/federal failure to control three decades of uninterrupted tree growth in national forests that hold too many trees for the natural carrying capacity of the land.

The western United States is on the leading edge of the worst wildfire season in a century. By any measure, a pandemic.

A call to action to create forest-to-community health within the WUI/Wildland Urban Interface - and an overview of the current state of the forest, wildfire risk, needed treatment, and landowner and community resources in Lincoln County.

PDFs, Links, and Contacts for Counties On Fire: Lincoln County

Now that Congress has resolved the fire funding mess – at least temporarily - Interim Forest Service Chief, Vicki Christiansen, has had much to say about how she intends to more aggressively attack these fires and their primary underlying cause.

The 2018 western wildfire season is already underway, and the news is not good in the Southwest or Utah. Dire predictions have also been issued for Colorado, where mortality in National Forests exceeds annual growth by a wide margin.

Because it took us more than 30 years to bridge our chasm, some 90 million National Forest acres – an area nearly as large as Montana – are dying or are already dead. We have no more than 30 years left in which to rescue what can be rescued.

The U.S. House of Representatives has belatedly fixed the fire borrowing mess that has for several years forced the Forest Service to borrow taxpayer money from its forest restoration budgets to pay its ever- increasing fire-fighting bills.

The salvage operation was not without controversy. The smoke had not yet cleared when environmentalists announced that “not one black stick would be harvested because salvaging burnt timber was like mugging a burn victim.”

Our colleague, Bruce Courtright, who chairs the National Wildfire Institute [NWI] at Fort Jones, California, has shared his organization's Vision 2025 document with us in hopes we will share it with you, which we are delighted to do.

Many environmentalists have long insisted that people living in rural areas should have no say in how neighboring National Forests are managed because [1] they have a “timber bias,” or [2] they lack the intellectual credentials needed to participate in the decision-making process. We all know this isn't true.

Does anyone know how many outdoor tourism activities were cancelled in August and September in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana? I don't, but it surely runs into the hundreds. This year will be worse.

The Forest Service's abysmal won-loss record at Silver, Biscuit and now Chetco Bar [0-3] is a detriment to every living creature struggling to right itself within our fire-scarred landscape. Is this the best you can do?

The bottom line here is that the War on the West will continue in the halls of Congress for as long as we allow it - and for as long as we allow it to fester, the West's publicly treasured National Forests will continue to die and burn to the ground.

We who own this damned wildfire mess need to start asking Congress some tough questions. I can think of no better place to start than the Forest Service's draft plan for picking up the pieces at Rice Ridge. Of 160,000 acres burned, the agency proposes to salvage some standing dead timber from 5,947 acres.

The American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association both have lots to say about cigarettes and air pollution. And they should. It's their job. Shouldn’t they also be waving red flags about wildfire smoke? They don’t seem to think so.

Do I think the U.S. Senate has declared war on the citizens of the 11 western states? A friend asked me this very question earlier today. After some hesitation, I replied, “Yes, I do, in a manner of speaking.”

Musk's “flamethrower,” which sells for $500 and looks a lot like an assault rifle [probably intentionally] has already attracted the unwanted attention of U.S. Customs officials, prompting Musk to Twitter that a “rebranding” effort may be needed. No kidding.

This must be a bitter pill for Seeley Lake residents who last summer endured weeks of smoke so thick that air quality meters could not accurately measure carcinogenic pollutants generated by the fire. The “new normal” we're told.

Horrible air quality, deadly health risks, cancelled cultural and sporting events, highway blockades, and millions of dollars lost in every industry. What else can we afford to lose from wildfire?

Just when I thought I'd said all that need be said for now about the cancerous risks of wildfire smoke, a friend sent me a copy of the “Montana/Idaho Wildfire Carbon Emissions Inventory for 2013-2017."

I've been trying for more than 20 years to interest the nation’s health care industry - including the American Lung Association - in this story. “Too controversial,” I was told, again and again. Such is the murderous influence of the “Don’t worry, it’s natural” crowd.

Retired Nevada State Forester, Bob Roper, has written a brutally honest assessment of the underlying and still unresolved problems associated with the West's wildfire crisis.

Evergreen Magazine's Editor-in-Chief shares his thoughts on the work Tony Tooke has ahead of him this coming year repairing the fire ravaged western states.

We can learn much from our nation's forest priorities, policies and practices, which have always tracked with our country’s ever-shifting felt necessities. But the blame game is a useless and unhelpful exercise. What would be helpful is a more constructive rural-urban dialogue about the losses we are all suffering, and what we can do collectively [politically] to mitigate them.

We are the stewards of our public lands and we have a responsibility to look at the entire picture; the science. It is time for proactive stewardship.

When we leave forests to Nature, as so many people today seem to want to do, we get whatever Nature serves up, which can be pretty devastating at times. But with forestry we have options, and a degree of predictability not found in Nature.

A sea change in how federal judges view collaborative forest restoration is underway. The transformation is revealed in the anatomy of two recent rulings.

The 1967 Sundance Fire will be remembered in four ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the tragic northern Idaho conflagration.

If we choose wisely, relying on the mechanical thinning, prescribed fire and managed fire, we can still protect most of our remaining forest assets, including the soil and water. But over much of the Intermountain West, the forests in our future are not going to look much like the forests we've been enjoying for the last 60 or 70 years.

In this interview, Rodney Smoldon discusses the use of innovative management tools to reduce the risk of wildfire in Northeast Washington.

Working to reduce the amount of understory vegetation can enhance the natural fire resistance of large-diameter trees.

Costs related to the suppression of wildfires are soaring to over one billion tax dollars per year, causing a fiscal crisis in the Forest Service.

A multitude of reports over the last 15 years have attempted to understand why the size of wildfires and number of acres burned continues to increase.

An explanation of the socioenvironmental cost factors associated with wildfires including fuels, homes, and climate change.

The public expects that wildfires will be suppressed, firefighters effective in their actions, and that no expense will be spared in their efforts.

Should state or federal government pay for multi-jurisdictional wildfires?

It is the largest 2% of all wildfires that consume 94% of total federal suppression expenditures.

Next to a nuclear explosion, there is no more lethal killing force on earth than a big forest fire.

Two seemingly unrelated congressional decisions combined to alter the character of western forests more than any other single event.

The claim that ailing forests can heal themselves seems based on the false belief that pre-European forests and prairies were uninfluenced by humans.

Rather than allow catastrophic fires to destroy our national forests, techniques should be used to reduce the density of diseased and dying forests.

Rather than allow catastrophic fires to destroy our national forests, techniques should be used to reduce the density of diseased and dying forests.

Counties on Fire is an initiative to save our national forests from the destruction of fires brought on by mismanagement and lack of education.