Zinke Proponent of BALANCED, Not Extremist Leadership.

SSDD. I'm all for managing forests more, and AWR and Wild Earth Guardians have been nothing but harmful to wildlife and habitat IMO. I'm also all for delisting the griz.

But once again, nothing in terms of forest management will save us from fire, or make a landscape-scale meaningful difference. The biggest bang for our buck would be to limit development in the WUI, which is where firefighting gets incredibly expensive. Ask Canada how resistant to fire their managed forests are. I'll answer for you - They aren't. Despite the rhetoric from politicians and anti-public land recreation folks like Terry Anderson, the implication that we will log our way out of fire just doesn't pass the smell test.

So sure, Zinke has done a few things that are favorable, but color me unimpressed.
 
Um I'm pretty sure thinning and logging reduces the fuel load so yes, logging does significantly reduce the severity, size, and increase manageability of fires. At least according to my dad who has been a silviculturist for almost 40 years. Maybe your smelling ability out ranks his degrees and real world experience. Not to mention that it generates revenue instead of spending it which in turn puts the public land transfer debate away.
 
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375H&H, I agree with your first sentence, but I question the use of the word "significantly". I think it is complicated. (1) (2)

Again, I'm not anti management, but am irked by the promises of politicians who oversimplify with platitudes, and imply promises that will never come to fruition. "Log it or watch it burn", "We manage forests or they manage us..." etc. For example, prescribed fire could be a big part of our management plans, and an effective one, but that doesn't sound as sexy or profitable. In fact, it can be expensive in the short term.

When it's dry and the wind blows, which I witnessed last summer, all it takes is grass on the ground.
 
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Go walk the Roaring Lion fire where it went from unmanaged forest to managed. Extreme conditions to the max and the fire went from the canopy to the ground almost instantly. Reality on the ground......not rhetoric.
 
The binary approach of "log it" or "catastrophic wildfire" is disingenuous at best.

I agree with finding and implementing solutions. I disagree with using historic environmental conditions for political gain.
 
BigHornRam said:
Go walk the Roaring Lion fire where it went from unmanaged forest to managed. Extreme conditions to the max and the fire went from the canopy to the ground almost instantly. Reality on the ground......not rhetoric.
Click to expand...

Is it realistic to expect we can apply the same management techniques to the billions of acres of USFS ground?
 
... logging on 2,113 acres and prescribed burning on 2,755 acres in Montana’s Lewis and Clark National Forest. In August, a wildfire burned 30,000 acres near the thwarted treatment project.
Click to expand...
BHR, are you and Terry Anderson concluding that if that L&C National Forest project had been completed, then the nearby forest fire would have been averted? Although I agree that more projects such as that should be completed, especially in the WUI areas, it is difficult to link such examples of relatively small areas of forest management to prevention of wildfires across the vast landscape of millions of acres of the Northwest.

Terry Anderson is a highly educated and articulate advocate of private property rights, privatization of lands, and applying capitalistic principles to every land management issue, but much of which he writes and speaks is derived from ideology rather than pragmatism and the reality of public land ownership and management challenges.
 
375H&H said:
Um I'm pretty sure thinning and logging reduces the fuel load so yes, logging does significantly reduce the severity, size, and increase manageability of fires. At least according to my dad who has been a silviculturist for almost 40 years. Maybe your smelling ability out ranks his degrees and real world experience. Not to mention that it generates revenue instead of spending it which in turn puts the public land transfer debate away.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure you're painting with a mighty broad brush...Managing a forest isn't free and I'd argue that realizing a profit from intensive management might work in some places, but there's a lot of acres where the margin is well past paper thin.

Lets just cut to the chase, road building alone on a lot of federal ground would make a profit unachievable. That's before we even start talking about weed control, thinning, applying periodic low intensity fire, etc. etc. etc.

Fair to mention that forest type/species, rotation ages, fuel prices, distance to mills, softwood markets, BMP's,...just to name a few, all impact profitability.

Throw in some severe fire weather, probably more severe than 1910...and I don't give a chit if its managed or not, its going to burn. In those conditions I've seen fires rip through clearcuts and not even slow down...and that was from my personal experience as a wildland fire fighter from 1987-1995.
 
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JLS said:
Is it realistic to expect we can apply the same management techniques to the billions of acres of USFS ground?
Click to expand...

Didn't know we had billions of acres of USFS Land. We start with the most critical acres and move on from there. If we can get past the lawsuits and start managing were it makes sense, that would be reasonable, would it not?
 
BigHornRam said:
Didn't know we had billions of acres of USFS Land. We start with the most critical acres and move on from there. If we can get past the lawsuits and start managing were it makes sense, that would be reasonable, would it not?
Click to expand...

Who gets to decide where the most critical acres are?

Was Lolo Peak a critical acre area?
 
BigHornRam said:
Didn't know we had billions of acres of USFS Land. We start with the most critical acres and move on from there. If we can get past the lawsuits and start managing were it makes sense, that would be reasonable, would it not?
Click to expand...

My bad BHR, typing on an IPhone can lead to types, can it not?

Is it reasonable to expect to treat MILLIONS of acres with these management techniques? Is it reasonable to expect we could have strategically predicted the areas in Montana that would have needed to be treated in order to avert last years fires?
 
Straight Arrow said:
BHR, are you and Terry Anderson concluding that if that L&C National Forest project had been completed, then the nearby forest fire would have been averted? Although I agree that more projects such as that should be completed, especially in the WUI areas, it is difficult to link such examples of relatively small areas of forest management to prevention of wildfires across the vast landscape of millions of acres of the Northwest.

Terry Anderson is a highly educated and articulate advocate of private property rights, privatization of lands, and applying capitalistic principles to every land management issue, but much of which he writes and speaks is derived from ideology rather than pragmatism and the reality of public land ownership and management challenges.
Click to expand...

The point there is the litigants used the lynx as the reason to stop the work. The fire destroyed the lynx habitat that they sought to protect. Same thing is happening to spotted owl habitat.

Hadn't heard of the guy that wrote the original article I posted. I have heard of PERC. Found this article by him as well, so can see why he might ruffle some feathers here.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/09/11/land-of-many-uses-or-no-uses/

BHA spent 1.4 million on this political campaign ? I could think of lot better things to spend that kind of money on then that.
 
BuzzH said:
Pretty sure you're painting with a mighty broad brush...Managing a forest isn't free and I'd argue that realizing a profit from intensive management might work in some places, but there's a lot of acres where the margin is well past paper thin.
Click to expand...

You are correct, managing a forest is not free (nothing is), but somehow private timber companies manage to make money, somehow they are able to do it while owning their own log trucks, harvesters, etc. just like any other private industry, sink or swim by their own accord. The margin would increase if there were more mills, and there would be more mills if the industry knew they would be logging in proximity to them, which currently they do not. I also challenge you to list places where it is not profitable to manage the forest as there are tens of millions of acres in western Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Wyoming and other states that could easily be profitable if allowed to log (again according to my dad who has worked in logging in Oregon, Washington, BC, Idaho, and Montana but what does he know).

Also, even Fin mentioned it on his podcast a while back. The public land debate tends to flare up around times that states are not making as much money on their resources and there are fewer jobs available. It doesn't take too much thinking to realize that a coal miner in Gillette, Wyoming, logger in Forks, Washington, or gold miner in Elko, Nevada wants the state to own the massive amount of public land nearby that puts food on everyones table through jobs and resource money, if the government is curtailing resource extraction from those nearby lands. Allow the resource extraction and I bet the debate goes away, is that so broad of a brush?
 
BuzzH said:
Who gets to decide where the most critical acres are?

Was Lolo Peak a critical acre area?
Click to expand...


USFS and private silviculturists decide the critical areas and management plan as they are the experts in the industry, same as any other format.
 
JLS said:
My bad BHR, typing on an IPhone can lead to types, can it not?

Is it reasonable to expect to treat MILLIONS of acres with these management techniques? Is it reasonable to expect we could have strategically predicted the areas in Montana that would have needed to be treated in order to avert last years fires?
Click to expand...

Yes to first question. No to second.
 
375H&H said:
You are correct, managing a forest is not free (nothing is), but somehow private timber companies manage to make money, somehow they are able to do it while owning their own log trucks, harvesters, etc. just like any other private industry, sink or swim by their own accord. The margin would increase if there were more mills, and there would be more mills if the industry knew they would be logging in proximity to them, which currently they do not. I also challenge you to list places where it is not profitable to manage the forest as there are tens of millions of acres in western Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Wyoming and other states that could easily be profitable if allowed to log (again according to my dad who has worked in logging in Oregon, Washington, BC, Idaho, and Montana but what does he know).
Click to expand...

While this may sometimes be true, lots of times it is not. What most don't take into account is the price of finished lumber coming out of the mills. If logs costs are high in a weak lumber market all the logs in the west won't help a mill. In a perfect market with good numbers on housing starts and a strong economy ya it works. A soft market and $325 studs,,,not so much.
 
tjones said:
While this may sometimes be true, lots of times it is not. What most don't take into account is the price of finished lumber coming out of the mills. If logs costs are high in a weak lumber market all the logs in the west won't help a mill. In a perfect market with good numbers on housing starts and a strong economy ya it works. A soft market and $325 studs,,,not so much.
Click to expand...

Ask any remaining mill operator in the NW what keeps them up at night. # one concern is stable supply of logs.
 
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