FIERY, BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL
John Fremont once exclaimed in astonishment that one could ride a horse at full gallop in the Forests of the Sierras in California.
Well, one can do that again now — not among the towering conifers, but over the ashes.
This didn’t have to happen. Once upon a time, forests in California were logged, grazed, and competently managed. It wasn’t always perfect, but generally it worked.
Fires, which are a natural part of that ecosystem, were generally small — not just benign but beneficial. Land management focused on keeping the forest healthy for all involved, whether they were loggers, ranchers, fishermen, hunters, homeowners, or backpackers.
But then things started to change.
- Leftist groups such as the Sierra Club and National Resources Defense Council began to drive a myopic agenda of protecting environmental interests at all costs.
- Logging was shut down.
- Grazing was banned.
- Controlled burning and undergrowth clearance were challenged and subjected to draconian regulations.
- So the trees grew closer and closer together. Undergrowth, unchecked by grazing, cutting, or burning, grew thick and tall enough to reach the branches of mature trees.
- The forests became thick and overgrown, but man, they sure looked nice and green from a scenic overlook.
- Sawmills shut down and the cattle business went elsewhere.
- Thriving towns dried up and nearly went under.
We started importing lumber and beef from Brazil and other places with objectively horrible environmental track records.
And the vegetation kept growing.
Forests that once had less than a hundred healthy trees per acre suddenly had over a thousand.
Manzanita, dry grass, and other plants began to cover the forest floor so densely you couldn’t walk through it.
All of this vegetation is fighting over a water table that is stressed on an average year, let alone a drought year, and not a lot of the trees are healthy enough to be resilient.
Bark beetles and other pests came in, and you began to see entire mountainsides covered in dead and dying trees. We couldn’t have created better conditions for devastating fires if we’d tried.
Fire is a constant in the mountains of California.
There’s always plenty from dry summer thunderstorms. But now that spark, whatever caused it, catches on to a landscape overloaded with dead trees and dry ladder fuels.
So here we are in 2020, living in a year that can already be generously described as an unmitigated disaster.
Why?
- Because loggers weren’t allowed to thin overcrowded stands of trees.
- Because grazing animals weren’t there to thin out the undergrowth.
- Because anytime the Forest Service or large landowners tried to start a project to manage the land, they got tied up in court and buried under years of environmental impact ‘studies.’
All of those things happened because well-meaning morons at organizations such the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council managed to get a stranglehold on state politics and the courts.
It’s because of ‘concern for natural conditions’ that we’re in this mess; because of a myopic focus on certain species, entire ecosystems are being overtaken by flames.
But they’ll never accept responsibility.
They persist in blaming fire conditions in today’s West solely on climate change. Even if every single thing that they claim about climate change were to be true, it wouldn’t undo the consequences of decades of mismanagement driven by their ‘advocacy.’
https://spectator.us/how-environmentalists-destroyed-california-forests/
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