Liberals have had their way for many decades in the retreat from managing forests, no thinning brush or removal of dead trees. The idea is that humans are bad for the earth and need to be restrained and relocated in stack and pack housing, leaving the “wild” to creatures and a nature utopia.
The problem is that is contrary to what God instructed (Gen 1:26 and 2:15). The job description was to manage the flora and fauna not let it manage us. Everyone and everything loses. Violating divine instructions has consequences regardless of your party or pocketbook.
Historically, the forest and rangelands of America had been managed by foresters and ranchers who loved and benefitted from the environment flourishing until extremists took control of agencies beginning in the late 1960s. Timber companies and foresters once worked together removing dead and dense stands of trees and brush while fire crews were able to access maintained logging roads to knock-down fires. Now, with abandoned forests, fires are allowed to burn.
That has led to horrific disasters destroying people, millions of acres and creatures, costing billions of dollars. The only winners have been agencies getting bigger budgets to clean-up the mess that government created.
After devastating fire seasons in 2017-2018 with infernos wiping out parts of Santa Rosa, Lake County and all of Paradise liberals were like dogs avoiding eye contact after soiling the carpet. Their policies were destroying the state community by community.
At a recent Lake Tahoe Summit Congressman Tom McClintock told a room of democrats that “A generation ago, we actively managed our forests to assure that tree density matched the ability of the land to support it. Every year, US Forest Service foresters marked off excess timber and then sold it to the timber companies that removed it. Today, well-intentioned environmental laws passed in the 1970’s make that process endlessly time consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive.”
“Those who tell us we just need more money forget that before these laws, harvesting excess federal timber didn’t cost us anything. On the contrary, it brought in over a billion dollars a year – 25 percent went directly to local governments like Tahoe and the other 75 percent funded the entire U.S. Forest Service and paid for forest programs. Today, forest management costs us $2 for every dollar it generates.”
“Those who blame global warming should consider this: before the U.S. Forest Service was created, California lost between 4 ½ and 12 million acres to wildfire every year. When the Forest Service actively managed the land, that figure dropped to a steady quarter million acres. Last year, we lost 1.9 million acres. That’s not a new normal. That’s the old normal reasserting itself because we abandoned our forests to neglect.”
McClintock reminded attendees that burned and decaying forests have made a mockery of their environmental laws intended to curb carbon emissions. “Wildfires in the United States pump an estimated 290 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year. Healthy, growing forests absorb it. Milling surplus trees sequesters their carbon indefinitely and renews the forest’s ability to store still more.”
Forests and rangelands are like a business, car, human body, or farm, if poorly managed or neglected, disaster awaits. It takes generations before a destroyed forest will return to a mature stand of trees. Must the entire state burn for arrogant anti-people re-wilders to back down?
Fire insurance companies will soon refuse to underwrite rural properties or will make insurance unaffordable which will thrill enviro-extremists who detest freedom, liberty and in fact celebrate when people that love the land, leave it. The enviro-fascists have joined the modern eugenics movement intending to thin out the undesirables called people.
Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) it takes an average of 4 ½ years and costs millions of dollars to produce an Environmental Impact Statement in excess of 500 pages in order to thin or manage the forest. Liberals get their crazy way by bullying people and regulating them off the lands that they love and maintain.
Entire towns and industries have been closed by these lunatics in government.
(Get Lou’s podcast at “No Hostages Radio” and his articles at nohostagesradio.com)
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