Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters forest fires MD article

The elephant in the room is these are not normal times.

These trees are sick, sick bad, the beetles have killed them.

We can either let them go to waste, breath in and pollute and rot.

Or perhaps push for some type of economic gain by harvesting this resource before it goes up in Smoke.

It seems to me we've reached a place in time in America where the people who truly know how stuff works (in almost any field) are being forced to comply with laws and regulations made by people who do NOT know how the stuff works. Whether it's forestry, conservation/game laws, medicine, or anything else.

The average American is scientifically illiterate. He/she has watched "nature" shows on TV since childhood, has absorbed simplistic and often dead-wrong ideas from these sourced, and now considers himself/herself "informed", and as such, worthy of making policy. It is utterly ridiculous. But the plain fact of it is that unless and until governments stop kowtowing to these scientific illiterates and let the experts run their business, the mismanagement will continue. The fires are gonna happen. I'd sure like to see that change for the better, though.

the problem, issue, or challenge comes when applying scientific mgnt to the natural resources intersects or interferes with the rights of humans to choose.

that is, science is one thing. humans making choices might contradict good scientific mgnt options?

that means democracy comes into play. republic choices aren't fixing anything.

just raising insurance rates of various kinds would have an impact.

One of the problems with all of these forests is over stocking, too many trees per acre. In the way backs low level frequent fires kept down both the litter acculiminations and the number of surviving seedlings. With lower stocking rates, when a drought hit, and there have always been droughts, there was more soil moisture so the trees that were there didn't get so stressed. Less stress equals less pine bark bug damage and fewer dead trees. The put it all out mentality of the last 75 yrs coupled with a pseudo science idiocy of many of the environmental wackos have left all of our forests, especially in the west, in bad shape.

Big fires burning wildly are the result.

So much truth in this post!! So much...

A tiny number of prescribed burns in the Rocky Mountains have ever gotten out of control--Los Alamos being the shining example. The dilemma natural resource managers face is people building homes/cabins in or near wildlands, and often near wildlands with frequent fire regimes. Most prescribed burns are done under such wet conditions these days that rarely does the fire actually burn enough to have the intended effect.

If one chooses to build in or near public lands, then they should understand there will be a fire some day, and it might burn their place down. Natural or prescribed.

Currently 70% of the USFS budget is "burned" up fighting fires to protect people's homes and cabins and their desire to play some yuppie version of Jeremiah Johnson. These are often the same free, rugged, individualists who think government should stay out of their lives--until there is a wildland fire. Then they are cheering the tax payer employed fire fighters on........

Burn baby burn.

That article you wrote for penthouse forums was top notch.. or was it for handloader regardless great article..

Sounds like an article that just might describe hand-filling of various kinds!

This forum needs a like button....... Rick, whats it gonna take??????? I thought it was in Martha Stewart Living.......

Regardless of the benefit to hunters, the real problem is the danger of both the fires and the smoke to humans. Logging benefited wildlife, rural economies, and the nation as a whole, the religious belief that it had to be ended is the real issue here. You are not allowed to burn your land and endanger your neighbors or government managed lands, why should government be able to burn private lands by not managing their fires? It is possible to stop the horrific burning taking place now,, and it must be stopped. No hunting opportunity is worth a family losing its home, or the fear we rural people endure each summer in this age of insensitive management.