Wildfires out West

[Orange Dust]

Len, You can delete this if it is over the line, but I'm putting it out there because it is important to me. Being from flyover country I just don't understand or get it. Woke up this morning with poor visibility, and stinking air that chokes me. Why does the Federal Government and Western States refuse to manage their forests? Every year they burn millions of acres, kill millions of game and non game species, a few humans, and cause Billions in damage. Here we work so hard to manage our Forests that is we lose 100 acres to a fire we all cry. Conservationists have the political clout to change this. Why don't we have the will to go along with it? It should be pretty easy to twist some arms. Liberals are claiming they are willing to die on the Global Warming hill. Should be pretty easy to convince them the carbon they are releasing into the atmosphere will kill us all.
Should be able to get the Preservationists on board, it is destroying what they claim to protect. Animal Rights Activists should be all in too, with all the animals that are being killed. Taxpayers should be in too. Lumber sales can pay for Forest Management. Everyone who wants a home would be in too because it would lower lumber prices. So why can't we get this done? The only reasons I can think of is the above groups either don't believe in what they claim, or aren't nearly as smart as they claim to be. Or, maybe I'm just a peasant in flyover country that should just shut his mouth and move along, and let smarter folks than me figure it out.

 

[idcwby]

Idaho manages everything they can. Anything that is National Forest is out of the state's control. For a long time the forest service has wanted the forest to natural and that means fires. The problem with that is we had already logged it and changed it from natural, so now it needed maintained and that didn't happen so you get the big fires we have now. I could expand more, but I'm just in my lunch break and don't have time.

 

[LkeAF]

"Managing" the forest by thinning is a good solution and appropriate in many places, but far from a "fix all" solution for the problem. One of the challenges that the public land managers have with more logging on public land is that it necessitates a network of logging roads and the USFS doesn't have the money or resources to maintain them after the logging is done. Then you get erosion issues, sediment in streams killing fish, etc. Not to mention, the vastness of the forests in the west almost seems like it would make much of it economically unfeasible to log. On top of that, in Idaho alone, there are nearly 5 million acres that are Wilderness, which means nothing mechanical is allowed on the ground and lightning strike caused fires are "supposed" to be allowed to burn and play their natural role, although I've seen that not be the case several times due to the tourism value those places have.
Coming from a firefighter, the fire behavior has become significantly more volatile in the last 20 years and personally I don't believe it's only because there happens to be so much more vegetation than there used to be. In some places, there certainly is. But in most places, that's a small part of the issue. The record low moisture content of the fuels that are burning is equally to blame and is directly caused by climate factors.
What to do about western forest fires is a hard topic to thoroughly and intelligently discuss because people want to blame it on the things they want to blame it on and never blame it on the things they don't want to blame it on. So, just like the USA these days, it's just people on opposite sides pointing fingers. And you can see how productive that is.....
I wish I thought there was an easy/feasible solution, but I don't. I'm with you though, I'm tired of choking on the dang smoke this season!

 

[Orange Dust]

The government has plenty of money. They squander it on more important things like votes. Constitutionally they should give it to the states, and don't have the authority to hold on to it anyway. Look at the resource being wasted by them. Sickening.

 

[LkeAF]

I will agree with you that the government (and any organization of a certain size, whether private or public) is not as efficient as I would like for it to be. There are lots of reasons for that, I suppose. I would hope that it is everyone's goal to be a more efficient spoke in whatever wheel we occupy, but I guess I can't speak for everyone.

 

[Orange Dust]

There are enough of us to do something about this if we really wanted to.