Clinton Nagel: Our ignorance on forest management nearly as dangerous as arrogance

It is astounding how much our society doesn’t know or perhaps care about how our living planet works.

When serious problems arise, we’re so eager to point the finger at someone or something else rather than ourselves. We’re so eager to jump on the bandwagon for catch phrases such as “Fix Our Forest” implying that our forests are broken without realizing that we perhaps had a role in that process.

How many people actually believe our forests are broken? How does a forest break itself? Impossible, but our society refuses to realize that whatever we don’t like about our forests, it is because of what we ourselves have done. We need to look in the mirror.

Catch-phrases masquerading as quick and easy solutions are just part of the problem. When have those solutions ever solved anything? Yet our politicians love to make this stuff up to confuse and conqueror support from the American public.

Heck, they even fall for it themselves; politics, the home of shallow thinking.

There is nothing wrong with our forests other than what we are doing to them. Climate change, constant intrusion into the inner sanctity of our forests, fire-suppression, thinning and forest depletion are all examples of manipulation. It’s time to look in the mirror.

The “Fix Our Forest Act” (FOFA), S.1462 lies in wait in the U.S. Senate. Although there are improvements over the House version, the Senate version is not a panoply of greatness. There are still many elements wrong with this bill, serious omissions that need to be corrected.

This bill undermines Section 7 provisions of the ESA whereby it stipulates the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management must consult wildlife agencies when new species, critical habitat or new information is revealed. This decision overturns legal precedent and the Cottonwood Decision.

This bill undermines judicial review. It restricts the American public’s right to have a say in their own government, thereby allowing illegal actions to continue.

The bill dramatically shortens the time to challenge projects in court from six years in most instances to 150 days. The changes to injunctive standards favor logging projects and makes it harder to grant injunctions protecting species under the ESA.”

This bill expands the size of NEPA categorical exclusions from 3,000 to 10,000 acres, without scientific or environmental review. This is an alarming change that could prove devasting to our forests, especially our large, old-growth forests which are the most fire resilient.

These actions would result in huge acreages of logging projects exacerbating habitat loss and fragmentation.

This bill fails to provide dedicated funding for home and community hardening, methods proven to save lives as well as infrastructure. It fails to address defensible space and emergency planning.

If these shortcomings aren’t rectified, we will indeed see ramifications from our inaction, perhaps more disastrous than those from action. Again, we need to look in the mirror.

Do our forests need fixing? No, but we do. We need to fix ourselves from our own arrogant thinking.

Do we really think by doing more of the same treatments, practices, logging, whatever you want to call it, actions that we’ve been doing for over a century, that our forests will be better?

What is the definition of insanity again? Oh yeah, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We obviously know that quote was from Albert Einstein, but did you know he also said: The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.

It’s time to change our paradigm of our relationship with wildfire and wildfire science. Inside Climate News quotes Ralph Bloemers, who is director of Fire Safe Communities, a part of the nonprofit Green Oregon:

“U.S. wildfire policy has long been driven by a flawed premise: that cutting and thinning forests will protect communities, despite repeated evidence to the contrary.

The most destructive fires in recent years, he said, were driven by wind and embers that ignited homes and spread rapidly through neighborhoods, overwhelming suppression efforts regardless of fuel treatments. “Fire is inevitable. Home loss is not”.

It’s time to Fix “Fix Our Forest Act” and obviously look in the mirror while we do it.