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Those same agencies are also hamstrung in budgeting by the politicians trying to make a land grab and sell of those lands. How? By continual rejections of proposals to have those catastrophic wildfires classified as "natural disasters" the way every other natural disaster is classified and funding to fight those fires coming out of budgets other than the management budget of the agencies. If the management budget is eaten up fighting fires each year, there's nothing left to manage the lands with and the politicians get to complain dishonestly about poor management.

As to the state mandates for management; that's a laugh. The state mandates are to manage for maximum economic benefit, including sale, and not for any other purpose.

Budgeting wouldn't be a problem if something was actually returned for that money.
The billions spent standing around watching fires should have gone toward planning vegetation management actions targeted at making fires fightable. This is possible, and its also possible to make money doing so.
And 458 brings up a heck of a point. I have been around long enough to see an amazing number of USFS staff retire and then come back into the process working for environmental groups, actually on the payroll. There are others who volunteer, safe on their cushy pensions, taking amazingly extreme positions that call into question their entire body of "public service." Oh, taxpayers got SERVICED, all right.
I mean, why does someone work for EPA rather than as a private sector environmental engineer or something? Why do people work for the Park Service? The cool uniforms?

All this^^

Dave Skinner,
Fires are necessary, healthy and have been occurring since the Pleistocene. Many (but not all) forests in the west are overgrown with trees with little market value. Indians in the west routinely set fires when they left the higher terrain for the lower winter ground.

There is evidence that between 800 AD and 1100 AD 60%-80% of all the Ponderosa pine forests in northern AZ, NM, and southern CO burned, and burned straight through several winters.

Many (but not all) species of wildlife benefit from fire.

We gotta ask ourselves how did these lands survive until modern Europeans showed up to play god..............

Casey

I didn't see Dave saying anything bad/wrong with fires, but not in the way they currently occur.

'Tis true........

This needs to be read and re-read by lots of folks.

Oregon is privatizing Parkland as we speak.

Yep. 80K acres of the Elliot State Forest.

Oh, right, the Elliot.
Don't insult me with that false canard, Pointer.
The Elliot was MAKING MONEY until the ENVIROS sued to have restrictions imposed for either the murrelet or the dotted phoul, I forget which.
But the CORE REASON the ESF is on the sale block is because environmentalist litigation -- even the Oregonian's editorial board (not exactly a producer-friendly entity) pointed out this bitter fact.

Fact:
"The case began in 2012, when the Audubon Society of Portland, Cascadia Wildlands and Center for Biological Diversity sued the Oregon Department of Forestry to halt timber sales on 1,956 acres in the Elliott, Clatsop and Tillamook state forests."

And yeah, it was the murrelet. The commie Governor is now trying to have a public bond floated for a park, to save it. And is she reaming the litigants for their shortsighteness? No, she's a commie, remember?

So, are these green groups anteing up? Heck no, there's no accountability for them. Doesn't cost THEM anything.
And let me remind you of something ELSE that was just criminal. The Tillamook, burnt abandoned forest, home of the infamous Seven Year Jinx of repeated fires from 1930 on, the state floated bonds in the 1950s to take over and replant the lands, nobody cared except dirt bikers until the forest came SCREAMING back.
Been there, done that, with the aging foresters who are seeing a lifetime of work finally pay off. In spades. To anyone with a clue about forestry, the Tillamook is the gold standard of long-term, sustained yield forestry. Just wonderful,stupendous. A fabulous example of forestry done right BY THE AFFECTED STATE.
So what do the moron Greens want? They wanted to turn it into a wilderness, basically. To stop doing forestry, close off the trail networks to everyone but hikers, let it burn in the next drought.
There was a ballot issue, and it failed, thank God. Even in Oregon.
The sick truth is that ESF would not be on the block for sale to private owners (not constrained by the terms of the litigation) were it not for the eco-idiots.
And the not-sickening truth is, state forestry departments do, in toto, a good, even GREAT job of forestry and habitat managment on state lands.
Sorry, but some of you "sportsmen" really need to get out of the scope and start looking at the big picture and where your problems really originate. Who, pray tell, are your real enemies?

Steelie, thanks for that backhanded support.

Turns out there's a growing body of academic work that recognizes something about North America -- it has been a managed landscape ever since humans came across from Asia.

Burning triggers a lot of vegetative changes that benefit hunting and food-gathering. It's not hard to grasp -- some of us have set fires on spring pasture to impressive results in the growing season. Indians certainly noticed where the game went after fires, and quickly caught on to triggering desired outcomes.

The bottom line is, much of North America was under intensive and deliberate vegetation management from the time the glaciers backed off. Indians set fires time and time again where those fires would either help hunting or mess with tribal enemies. Fire was a weapon and a tool, with "natural" fire dominating only in areas where it didn't make sense for an Indian to set a fire.

If Indians had invented iron before the white eyes, the world would have been different, for sure. But we must all remember, fire was a human tool, used by humans for thousands of years on this continent, and the "pristine" environments supposedly "discovered" by white people post Columbus were not really natural. What they were, mostly, were vegetative artifacts of human origin.

So yeah, fire, controlled and set by humans, WHEN THE CONDITIONS ARE RIGHT, need to play a role. Want an example? Try your local neighborhood Indian reservation and have a tribal forester walk you through their timber plans, with repeated entries, repeated set fires after harvesting, a light hand applied early and often, that makes a buck and produces great hunting, too.

The practice of setting fires is still used in Africa by the herding tribes. After the long grass season fires are set when cattle are pulled out of an area. This burns the dry low nutrient dormant grass and makes way for new growth. It also makes hunting better as you can see the game better and they concentrate in the new grass areas.

Tejano,
North America, no matter how many times the Greens describe someplace as "America's Serengeti," isn't Africa. Not even in Texas where they have exotics (I'm okay with that, by the way).
But the landscape is such, with 83 million acres of USFS in Class 3 condition (meaning unprecedented fire conditions, completely unnatural), with megafires immolating miles upon miles of sage (and further affecting the sage grouse, with all the implications of THAT) -- if we are going to have fires, they need to have their fuel loads adjusted so the resulting fires don't destroy what we want to keep, and KNOW we need to keep.
Again, the tribes have already figured this out. They don't have to listen to the white Greens, and don't. They do it their way, and pretty effectively. They don't manage for pure profit, but they do manage so that the outcomes are worth the effort input.
And states have to manage for the long term and at least break even or generate schools revenue. Most of them succeed quite well.
You can't say that for very much of what happens on federal lands.

I wouldn't characterize the fires indians set as intensive management. Lightening created fires burned far more acreage than humans do, even today. Most fires burn only small plots. Some types of forests only burn every few millenniums, some every decade or so, most burn somewhere in between. Without a doubt when indians showed up 20k years ago, they had an effect on the ecosystems, but it's important to remember we had mostly the same ecosystems in between ice ages going back a few million years. Couple million years (at least) before humans appeared in North America we had lots of fires and we had most of the large mammals currently living here existing back then too.

Secondly, it's a bit of a straw man to compare the pitiful few acres the western states own and manage as state forests compared to the the amount of land the feds manage. The western states can't even begin to cough up the money needed to manage 100's millions of acres compared to most western state forests consisting of a few hundred thousand acres. Heck, single BLM Districts in your state or mine manage more land than probably all the western state forests combined.

It still keeps coming back to this: For anybody other than a full blown socialist, we have to have a willing seller for any willing buyer. The American citizens aren't willing sellers.
And secondly, most of the "buyers" advocating federal land transfers have their hand out wanting that land for free. Because the majority of those advocating land transfer are used to getting those traditional natural resources FAR below market value. It's even more foolish to think that's going to happen for free anytime in our lifetimes.

Lastly, sport hunters and anglers are realizing they have something very important in common with environmentalists--preserving habitat.

I know it goes against the "fire's stereotyping, but most environmentalists are not opposed to hunting. It's just the press and media love to report on the extremists. Whether it's the stereotype of all firearm advocates being ignorant beer-swilling rednecks or the stereotype all environmentalists being bunny hugging ignorant anti-gunners.

Most active environmentalists I know may be more likely to have a Sierra Club sticker than a NRA sticker on their truck or Subaru bumper, but they still break out the $150 Monkey Ward '06 with a 40 year old Bushnell scope on it once a year and go elk hunting. Partly because they like elk meat, partly because it's one more great excuse to get "out there".

Casey

Uh-oh. Ringman's gonna be pissed.





And conversely, not all hunters are against conserving habitat, clean water, ans clean air.

Well yeah, I just assumed we all knew that!.........

And why is Ringman gonna be pizzed at me? What did I do now......

Casey

he thinks the world is only 6000 years old LOL...

Not if you read the Hunters' Campfire.

Sorry in find offense to stating what the state of OR is selling. Canard? You can do better than that.

PS- I'd gladly discuss differences of opinion as to the management of federal lands much more easily than lament their loss.

Pointer,
The fact remains that you used a terrible example to narrate the "states will sell" story. I'm fortunate in that I've been able to actually see these places, talk to the managers in rather formal contexts.
What I resent the most is that many people will take your assertion at face value because it does take a lot of effort to actually verify reality. A good sound bite, passed on to lazy, ignorant "media" by a savvy fib-teller, does an incredible amount of damage over time.
I've been on the press meat wagon, with credentials, and been horrified at what passes for professional conduct from bylined, credentialed people. You know about guns, right? And you know how "reporters" tell THAT story, who gets quoted or is treated like an expert? Do gun control stories in your view have ANY relationship to reality?
Well, guess what? Natural resource issues are similarly distorted.

And Crick, I'm sorry you can't quite wrap yourself around the history of induced fire. Indians burnt north and south, east and west, everywhere it made sense for them. It was intensive, which is why whites found "Pauite forestry" so objectionable upon settlement. With no fixed infrastructure for the most part, for Indians, fire didn't pose a risk to "wealth" worth worrying about.

Finally, this thing about CONSERVING habitat. Does anyone here care to explain the difference between conservation and preservation posing as "conservation?"

No, but I'd love to hear your explanation of the differences between a false canard and a red herring.

Seems apropos.