by 
Something’s amiss here.
Since the beginning of July, more than 1 million acres of national forest land has been burned in Idaho and Montana. Whole communities have been evacuated. On any given night, 1000 Montanans are sleeping somewhere other than home as firefighters try to prevent more damage.
5% of Idaho’s public lands have burned this year alone.
Last night homes were burned IN the Missoula valley.
This is worse than it’s ever been. 1000 hour fuels (the big stuff) is drier than kiln-dried lumber – the stuff you buy at the lumber yard.
Mann Gulch, where 13 firefighters were killed in 1949, burned again this year.
And the media isn’t touching it, save local papers. Instead we hear about the poor trapped miners, the economy, and the NBA referee.
This is an environmental disaster, driven by climate change and driving a whole shift in ecosystems…and nobody wants to say it.
Scream it from the rooftops. the west is afire. people are dying. people are sleeping in gyms. the west as we know it is gone this year.
peace.
by 
They’ll start paying attention soon enough. It’s just that they haven’t figured out how to make money at it yet.
http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/21928
I’m sure David Stern would gladly give up his time in front of the news media for the fires. Now if only the sports media gave a rip.
if ya liberal pantie waste hippie seirra club smokey the bear loving peaceniks weren’t fucking fighting forest management every step of the way “It is natural to let the forest grow” stomping out every spark that came the way of the forest for the last 50 years…
yall wouldn’t have the problem…
manage your flippin forests…
the fucking trees out there have “evolved” WITH fire for the last 100k years or more… the ecosystems and plant life NEEDED fire… it is possible to manage the land w/o fire but it takes some work…
rather than filling the skidder’s oil with sand and the fuel with rice and chaing yourself to a fucking old growth tree… maybe ya could be out clearin some low level fuels and shit…
sure the dry wood has an issue, but if there wasn’t all that crap on the ground… the big shit would survive just fine…
now it is all fucked up – and yall bitching about the fire now?
only a matter of time…
manage the shit or lose it…
oh – but – i am very surprised this ain’t getting coverage on the National news level.
pretty saddened as well… as much as i fault the lack of management and the anti-management… it is a shame to see all that lumber and firewood go up in smoke.
And people wonder why there is a heat wave in the middle of the country. I guess they’ve never been around a real big campfire before.
I say let it burn as long as it wants to. Fuck the trees, fuck the idiots who build their homes in the ass-end of Montana or Idaho.
Who really cares? My bike isn’t made out of trees, and neither is beer.
What we REALLY need is another Mt. St. Helens and Pompeii to cool us down a few degrees.
http://earthbulletin.amnh.org/D/3/index.html
is there oil there? seems a convenient way to clear out land from sum drillin…
Thanks GeWilli.
We burn the prairie here in Iowa ON PURPOSE. It is natural and the ecosystem thrives on it.
Look, I know the fucking tree huggers in the bunch don’t get this as squirrel or three might become bbq, but fire is good.
It is good for the forest.
It is good for the land.
It is good for the earth as smoke clouds the atmosphere and cools the globe.
Did you ever stop to think one moment that “global warming” might be a product, in part, of us not letting fires burn? Watch Science Nova. Read. Pull splinters out of your fucking arms from hugging trees and when the fire starts, grab the bbq sauce.
To think twenty years ago the media was all agag about us “freezing to death”.
Fucking morons.
Great response GeWilli, and so true. Especially the nod to the eco-cockslaves. Instead of suing the resource depleted agencies and continuously fucking them over, get off your whiny, pasty skinned vegan ass and help out- volunteer with your local districts, help reduce the ladder fuels, etc. To somewhat be fair though, massive suppresion efforts started a long time ago (late 1800’s or early 1900’s) due to to extensive loss of life and property in WA state.
The Zaca fire near Santa Barbara has been going for months as well, yet no news on the “national” media front. Typical 3 card monte with the public’s (limited) attention span…
Today’s NIFC report has some pretty impressive stats, including the fact that we’re at Level 5 with 1.4 million acres lit.
http://www.nifc.gov/fire_info/nfn.htm
All I know is it sucks breathing smoke on the bike. It’s a 3 mile ride home for me and my lungs felt like I’d been taking bong hits by the time I got home from work. Burns the nose something fierce too.
Here’s what we watched from the highpoint of our ride last Sunday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rsWHw1TgFI
The next day the smoke from that fire rolled into Bozeman and made things miserable.
I’m sure glad things are better here then by Missoula though. I spent the summer of 2000 about 20 miles from where the famous picture of the elk in the river running from the fire was taken, and it sucked. Glad I’m not doing that again.
Laughing my ass off at Bikepunk’s response.
I’m pleasantly surprised that this didn’t turn into a Global warming-Gore-suckoff. Gee, a fire started and where there is fuel (i.e. wood and squirrels) it will burn.
It does suck, but life just ain’t fair.
Jesus, I don’t even know where to start with you people. As somebody who has spent his life working for the types of organizations the good readership above refers to as “eco-cockslaves” and “pantie-waste hippies” (I assume he meant “waste” and not “waist” — that’s actually a good one!), I’ll just say this one thing:
Contrary to punkndrubk and GeWilli’s claims, I am not aware of a single environmental organization anywhere that does not support prescribed fire and the return of natural fire to the National Forests. The Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, Forest Guardians, every non-industry funded public lands advocacy organization supports more fires in National Forests, and has been doing so for at least two decades — often longer. We are aware that “squirrels will burn.” (Actually, fewer do than you may suspect.)
The posters above both accuse environmental interests of opposing fire and then urge more logging to discourage fire, which is confusing (do you want more or less fire?). I assume the hidden message here, as it is with industry, is that we should log our trees and not have fire. But as pretty as this picture is, I am sorry to report it just doesn’t work that way. If you want logging to reduce fire, you have to remove pretty much everything, and the results are worse than any fire for squirrels and everything else except maybe cows.
Global warming is right now colliding with decades of industrial forest practices, and the massive fires the West is experiencing right now is the result. We cannot log ourselves out of this problem. The fires are going to burn, the cheatgrass is going to invade, and trees and forests are going to die. They will be replaced with something different. Our healthiest forest ecosystems are the ones that have been left alone because they are too far away or too steep to log. Formerly logged (and grazed) forests are getting hit very, very hard right now by fire.
I re-read the above posts and did not see any references that supported logging. Typical. Any posts on the removal of materials specifically cited ladder fuels, not logging.
I was just looking at the google yesterday for news stories about this. Seems that Aug. 15 was a day of record breaking heat in many places in the US as well as worldwide. There has been over 6,600 temperature records broken this year…yeah. While I know not to confuse weather with climate, it sure seems that the scientists who’ve been predicting more extreme weather have been right. I suppose the widespread forest fires are just more of the same and would provide another piece of evidence for an inconvenient truth , and you know how this administration and their corporate media cronies feel about that.
Uhhh….have you seen the hurricane forecasts for the last two years???? Last year was supposed to be the WORST in history…and we got NOTHIN. This year, we are FINALLY getting our first major hurricane…predictions were for 15 or so this season, now downgraded to possibly nine.
“An Inconvenient Truth” stated that the circular current that affects the Atlantic Ocean was growing stagnant and possibly stopping…causing extreme weather in Britain. While Britain HAS had its share of extreme weather this year, a new study in the news TODAY found that current is running just as strong as ever..and has been for the last decade.
I don’t deny that the climate is possibly changing, but one stinking volcano can cause an ice age…it ain’t just us.
1. “Ladder fuels” is just about always another word for “tree.” Here in the the southwest, most “ladder fuels” are ponderosa pine trees around 12-16 inches in diameter, owing to a hugely successful cone crop about 100 years ago. The way you “remove” these “materials” is by constructing a road in their vicinity and then constructing skid trails to the “materials.” You drive heavy equipment over the landscape and human beings with chainsaws cut down the trees, limb them, and skid them back to the road where they are piled and then loaded onto log trucks and shipped away. Larger trees are milled for lumber, smaller ones are chipped. My apologies to Heckler for erroneously referring to this process as “logging.”
2. One volcano does not cause an ice age. There is a scientific consensus that continued fossil-fuel burning on the scale of what is occurring now will be directly responsible for a 2-4C increase in global temperature by the end of the century that will result in the extinction of approximately 50 percent of the earth’s animal species. We are deploying a death wish. You can enjoy it, ignore it, or fight it, but using spurious arguments to claim it isn’t happening is childish.
…well, mr ryberg, i for one appreciate your erudite opining on these inter-related subjects. I’ve lived in the bay area for forty years but having been raised in northern ontario w/ a father who was a consultant in the forestry business, it’s interesting to listen to all the various postings.
although there are ongoing controversies in canada, it was recognized about 35 (+,-) years ago that a moratorium w/ selective cutting would be an intelligent idea. Of course, a huge number of the cutting rights, on government land, were owned by american pulp, paper & lumber concerns.
greed & ambiguity are seemingly the common denominators in this country as regards real environment issues w/ maybe a little (& i’m guilty of this) blind faith, thrown in, but there is always someone willing to exploit that weakness.
the decimation of south american rain forests will probably have a greater affect than any of we laymen might imagine & denying that the various aspects of the eco-system are related is pure foolishness.
nikita kruschev once stood up in the united nations, literally pounded on the desk w/ one of his shoes & said, “america, we will bury you !”
that ain’t gonna happen, but beautiful mother nature will be exponentially taking her toll on us & our future generations, count on it.
That wasn’t the type of ladder fuel cleanup I was talking about, but hey thanks for putting words in my mouth. Stick to your CBD assfuck crowd and get the fuck off my ass.
Wait. It’s August and the west is on fire.
What’s the news?
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