Save our Forests With Good Science & Management

The forest-fire prevention plan of President Bush’s that the environmental organizations label as nothing more than an invitation to the evil loggers may care which politicians get elected to office, but their effort to stop reasonable logging in our national forests shows they don’t care if the forests burn down, how much lumber and wood products we import from countries without good environmental protections, or if your kids and grand kids will be able to afford their own houses.

Please, please, please—consider the forests when voting Tuesday. Please make sure that whomever you vote for will not obstruct the cleaning of our forests that must take place in order to save them from massive fires.

All the President is asking for in his plan is the same curb on lawsuits, regulations, and other delaying tactics (which are designed to stop all logging, not just “bad” logging) that the Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate, Tom Daschle succeeded in getting for his home state.

Tom Daschle snuck the exemption for forests in his state into a defense bill that only a few dared to vote against, to make sure that it would pass without having to stand on its own merits. H.R. 4775 reads, in part:

“Due to the extraordinary circumstances present here, actions authorized by this section shall proceed immediately and to completion notwithstanding any other provision of law, including, but not limited to, NEPA [National Environmental Protection Act] and the National Forest Management Act (16 USC 1601 et seq.). Such actions shall also not be subject to the notice, comment, and appeal requirements of the Appeals Reform Act, (916 USC 1612 (note), Public Law No. 102-381 sec. 322). Any action authorized by this Section shall not be subject to judicial review by any court of the United States. Except as provided by this Section the Settlement remains in full force and effect.”

Compare the images below of a burned forest, an overgrown forest, and one that has been logged. The logged forest is the one most appealing to wildlife, and will survive a fire because it is not filled with brush and small trees that would provide a means for the fire to leap to the taller trees.

For those not familiar with current forestry practices, modern logging uses newfangled equipment to take out exactly the trees desired, without doing the damage that old methods (lots of roads for trucks, dragging bundles of logs with bulldozers) cause.

This is made possible by the new types of logging equipment now in common use (see below for details and pictures). Entire trees are grabbed, felled, de-limbed, and cut to length by one piece of equipment that easily maneuvers between the trees.

Our forests are dying, and the environmental frauds—the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and parts of the U.S. Government—are the ones doing the damage.

The remains of the forest after the Storrie Fire. Notice that all of these trees are destroyed, because the fire was hot and high enough to reach the very tops of the trees, rather than just the brush and smaller trees at the ground level.Some of the best examples of the damage being done to the public forests can
be found in Northern California. Over the past several years, large, unnaturally large fires have wiped out vast stretches of forest in Plumas and Lassen Counties. Just four of these fires have damaged or destroyed over 130,000 acres, leaving over 100 million board feed of dead timber that could be logged and used to build homes and other essentials—instead of cutting green trees that are supporting wildlife.

This simple, intelligent act is the “salvage logging” that the eco-fraud organizations have (wrongly) criticized and prevented from occurring.

Please visit these areas and see for yourself how great the damage is, and then contact your government representatives and ask that they stop hurting the forests. Ask them to make sure that the Herger–Feinstein law created by the Quincy Library Group, is actually started before the bugs have a chance to spread from these dead trees and infect the surrounding healthy forests. This must start before June, 2002!. The full name of the act is The Herger–Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act (click on the link for the full text of the law.), and there is an official site for the implementation plan.

See the Evidence of Dying Forests Yourself

• Storrie fire
• Stream fire [3D topo map of fire area] [Photo Gallery]
• Bucks fire
• Lookout fire

Further Reading

Now They Have Burned Los Alamos

The huge fire in Los Alamos during May of 2000 prompted Bill to post this entire article, portions of which were published earlier in the journal Science, describing the idiotic policies that allowed and even encouraged this disaster to occur.

The Real Danger to the California Spotted Owl

This article notes that while forest thinning is not allowed in many areas to protect the Spotted Owl, large forest fires completely destroy areas of its habitat, yet the U.S. Forest Service ignores the impact of these fires on its habitat.

Who’s Responsible

These are the people that Bill Wattenburg believes are responsible for the harm done to the forests you see here.

Chad Hanson, Executive Director of the John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute

Mr. Hanson is also a national director of the Sierra Club. Here is the contact information listed on the Web site:

John Muir Project
P.O. Box 697
Cedar Ridge, CA 95924
Phone: (530)273-9290
Fax: (530)273-9260

Call To Action

You must write, call, or e-mail your representatives in Congress and the President immediately and tell them in your own words what is suggested below:

Subject: Save our burned-over forests immediately

If you want my vote in the next election, and votes from my friends, you must quickly sponsor and approve an emergency bill in Congress that orders the removal and salvaging of the millions of dead and dying trees in burned-over areas of our national forests. This work must start before June 2002 or the dead trees will rot and the bugs and beetles will infest millions more green trees. I will never again vote for you if you do not make this absolutely minimal effort to protect our greatest natural resource.

You must pass the same law for all the states that Senator Daschle pushed through Congress in 2002 for South Dakota. His federal law cancels all the federal environmental and forestry laws that allow so-called environmentalists to file lawsuits and legal action to stop all work by the U.S. Forest Service, or anyone other entity that wants to clean up and save our forests.

All environmental laws and restrictions that we supported in good faith must be waived for this purpose. For decades, Congress directed that the U.S. Forest Service remover all dead and dying trees immediately. But lately, the environmental laws that we supported to protect our green forests are being exploited by greedy lawyers to delay and subvert the rescue of our burned-over forests. This is not what our honest and sincere representatives in Congress intended.

Meaningless technicalities in our environmental laws and our federal courts are being exploited by radical religious cult members who believe that all human activity in our forests is “against God’s will”. What they really want are enormous attorney’s fees for bringing frivolous, but vicious legal actions. They want to take over total control of our forests from Congress and government agencies designated to manage our forests. And they have done it.

You must prove to me and the public that you have personally walked over and inspected our burned-over forests and seen first hand the destruction of delay that is taking place. If you do not stop this crime against our forests immediately, I will personally contact at least ten friends and associates before the next election and tell them that you have failed your responsibility to protect our national resources.

I ask you to sponsor an emergency act of Congress that includes at least the following provisions:

1. Removal of the dead and dying trees must be put up for sale to the highest bidder within 60 days after a fire. The successful bidder must begin removal of the dead and dying trees within 90 days and all dead and dying trees designated by local federal officials responsible for the burned area must be removed within one year.
2. All proceeds from the sale of dead and dying trees must first be applied to the replanting and rehabilitation of the burned-over forest areas by qualified contractors before these funds may be used for any other governmental purposes.
3. All existing environmental laws and regulations must be waived and cannot by used by any government agency or third party to impede or delay the removal of dead and dying trees from burned over areas.

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Modern Logging Practices Are Far Less Damaging

With the severe fire storms that have endangered our forests once again bringing the question of thinning our forests to the forefront in politics, I think it is important to make sure the average citizen is aware of how far logging technology has come in recent years.

One of the important components of this new method of logging is the cut-to-length system of logging, which uses highly maneuverable equipment—harvesters and forwarders—to handle the trees and logs with far less damage to the forest than is done by older logging methods.

This cut-to-length head (the business end of a harvester) grabs onto a tree, cuts it off at the base, lays it on its side and then automatically delimbs the tree, cutting it into marketable-length sections, ready for transport.

The limbs are left where they fall, to make sure there is enough material left on the ground to decompose. This carpet of limbs also minimizes soil compaction and gouging that might otherwise occur.

The cutting head can be attached to many different types of harvesters, including both caterpillar-based and rubber-tired models.

The manufacturer offers a Quicktime movie of the head in action. This will give you a good picture of how the technology works.

First, most of the logs being taken are new-growth logs of smaller diameter than was typical years ago. Logging smaller trees also enables a new breed of equipment to be used.

And no longer is it necessary to build lots of roads so that highway-going logging trucks can access the middle of the forests—instead specialized transporters called “forwarders” travel into the forest as it is thinned, picking up the lumber felled by the cut-to-length machinery. These vehicles are smaller and lighter than logging trucks, and thus do far less damage to the forest.

As you can see, these forwarders can easily maneuver through forests that have been thinned properly. In fact, if you have seen the 2-hour special episode of PBS’s NOVA science show this past spring, you know that before man came along, the natural density of most forests was much lower than it is today—40 trees per acre instead of 2,000, in the case of the Ponderosa pine.

These images of logging equipment are used with the permission of Tigercat Industries, which is one of the leading providers of cut-to-length logging equipment.

Modern Logging Practices Don’t Damage the Land

PBS’s NOVA science series recently ran a 2-hour special, Fire Wars, that presented a far more balanced and comprehensive expose on forest fire policy than I would have expected from PBS. The show makes abundantly clear nearly everything that Dr. Wattenburg has been saying for years.

If you missed Fire Wars, then you can read the transcript and visit the official show site, where you can view a 2-minute video that will show you a little of what the show covered.

Why destroy our forests and wildlife? In the Oregonian, Michael Fahey of Columbia Helicopters, asks why 70 million of the 192 million acres of federal forests are threatened by massive fires because not enough logging has been allowed.

Our forests are dying, and the environmental frauds—the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and parts of the U.S. Government—
are the ones doing the damage.

See the Evidence of Dying Forests Yourself

• Storrie fire
• Stream fire
  [3D topo map of fire area]
  [Photo Gallery]
• Bucks fire
• Lookout fire

Further Reading

Now They Have Burned Los Alamos

The huge fire in Los Alamos during May of 2000 prompted Bill to post this entire article, portions of which were published earlier in the journal Science, describing the idiotic policies that allowed and even encouraged this disaster to occur.

The Real Danger to the California Spotted Owl

This article notes that while forest thinning is not allowed in many areas to protect the Spotted Owl, large forest fires completely destroy areas of its habitat, yet the U.S. Forest Service ignores the impact of these fires on its habitat.

Good Forestry Web Sites

Greenspirit.com

This organization is run by Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, who left when the lawyers took it over and turned a good thing into something filled with fraud.

National Fire Plan (site deleted)

The federal government’s national plan for fighting wildland fires.

Wildfire News

The online fire news source.