Media Spin Western Fires On Guns, But It's The Environmentalists

[Kathianne]

Excellent and easily understood duo of articles:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/are-shooters-to-blame-for-western-wildfires/?singlepage=true


Shooters have been blamed for starting a number of fires recently in tinder-dry western states, where conflagrations have erupted near shooting ranges. One, Arizona’s Sunflower Fire, has been positively traced to irresponsible members of a bachelor party who fired an incendiary shotgun shell into the underbrush (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/arizona-forest-fire-879543):

The Sunflower Fire — which has burned nearly 18,000 acres of the Tonto National Forest and is not fully contained — began in mid-May after five Arizona men gathered to celebrate the upcoming May 19 nuptials of Bryan Reeder. The group — all in their mid-20s — traveled from Mesa to the Sycamore Creek area for a weekend “campout and bachelor party,” according to court records (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/arizona-fire-complaint?page=0).

On Saturday, May 12, the quintet awoke and “began to target shoot in an area close to their camp,” a United States Forest Service agent reported in a sworn affidavit (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/arizona-fire-complaint?page=0). About two hours into the target shooting, Craig Shiflet … loaded an “incendiary shotgun shell” into his Remington 12 gauge and fired the round.
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Tyler Pace, another bachelor party attendee, told investigators that after Shiflet fired the round, he “noticed smoke in the brush just behind” where the round landed in vegetation. Pace said the entire group “ran over to where the smoke was and noticed fire, which they unsuccessfully attempted to stomp out.”



Shiflet called 911 to report the blaze, but by then it was too late. He now faces charges for triggering the blaze.


The Salt Lake Tribune claims that 20 wildfires (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/54351910-82/shooting-state-dry-fires.html.csp) have been triggered by irresponsible shooters in Utah, including the Saratoga Springs Fire and the Dump Fire (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/0623/Too-many-wildfires-caused-by-gun-owners-says-Utah-governor-video), but provides no support for the claim. A New York Times report cites the same figure, crediting the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as its source.


The BLM web site on Utah’s fires does not provide the specificity of the triggers of manmade fires, but records 393 so far this year (http://www.utahfireinfo.gov/) in the state burning more than 99,000 acres. If these statistics are true, shooters have accounted for just 5% of the fires in the state, making them an odd scapegoat for what appears to be a low-level push by media outlets to restrict shooting on public lands.

...


As fellow PJ Media contributor Robert Zubrin notes, however, the mismanagement of wildlife resources has done more to contribute to the conditions (http://cdn.pjmedia.com/blog/incinerating-america%E2%80%99s-west/) to create wildfires than any shooter has:

As I write these lines, vast wildfires are sweeping through my home state of Colorado and other areas of the American West. Last week, two of my employees had to leave work early to rush home to evacuate their families from imminent danger. Hundreds of houses have already been destroyed, and thousands of acres of trees incinerated, and unknown myriads of wild animals burned alive.


This disaster was predictable, and promises to get worse. Over the past decade, from British Columbia to New Mexico, the world’s most rapid deforestation has been underway in the North American West, with an average of nearly six million acres of forest lost per year — roughly double the three million acres per year rate in Brazil. The culprits here, however, have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles, whose epidemic spread has turned over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition awaiting any spark to flare into catastrophe.


Yet while the global green movement has made a cause célèbre of the Amazon rain forest, they have done nothing to oppose those destroying our woods. Quite the contrary, they have been doing everything in their power to assist the wreckers. Indeed, over the past decade they have launched over a thousand lawsuits to block every attempt by the National Forest Service or others to take necessary counter measures.



“Green” activists have not only contributed to forest fires by creating the conditions for tree-killing beetles to thrive by fighting logging efforts, but also through refusing to let wildfires run their natural course and restricting prescribed burns that are designed to reduce the threat of uncontrolled fires by burning away tinder-dry underbrush.


If the media wants to place blame where blame belongs for western wildfires, the shooters that sparked just 5% of the blazes are the least of their worries. The so-called environmentalists that ultimately contribute to the tinder-dry conditions fueling the fires bear far more responsibility.

[Thunderknuckles]

I don't know Kat. Seems like the only spin here is trying to blame this on the enviros.
I get the argument but that idiot who fired an incendiary round into dry brush sure isn't helping the cause for the 2nd Amendment.

[Kathianne]

I don't know Kat. Seems like the only spin here is trying to blame this on the enviros.
I get the argument but that idiot who fired an incendiary round into dry brush sure isn't helping the cause for the 2nd Amendment.

The point being that even if all the media points were correct, it would account for 5% at most, which is an overestimation.

The lack of thinning is the problem. In actuality we in the Great Lakes region got that over 30 years ago. We use controlled burns. However in the Western States, it's the number of trees, a different kettle of fish. Historically big fires without housing weren't an issue, since populated with homes and such? Yes. Logging thinned and controlled the fires.

[Thunderknuckles]

Oh I agree with that. We do controlled burns here in Cali as well. I'm sure firearms account for a small percentage of wild fires.
It's just the article comes across as:
"it's the enviros fault for allowing our stupid actions to do more damage than they should have".

[aboutime]

As we have been seeing, from all corners of the spectrum of our failing society lately. The best, and most dependable way for anyone to explain anything, about any body, or things that happen is to BLAME someone else.
The more blame heaped on someone, the more convincing it sounds to the person making the accusations.

Look no farther for excuses, and reasons than 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

And, while you are at it. BLAME BUSH for the fires, and the shooting as well.

[Kathianne]

Oh I agree with that. We do controlled burns here in Cali as well. I'm sure firearms account for a small percentage of wild fires.
It's just the article comes across as:
"it's the enviros fault for allowing our stupid actions to do more damage than they should have".



Hmmm, did you read the second article?

http://pjmedia.com/blog/incinerating-america%E2%80%99s-west/


As I write these lines, vast wildfires are sweeping through my home state of Colorado and other areas of the American west. Last week, two of my employees had to leave work early to rush home to evacuate their families from imminent danger. Hundreds of houses have already been destroyed, and thousands of acres of trees incinerated, and unknown myriads of wild animals burned alive.


This disaster was predictable, and promises to get worse. Over the past decade, from British Columbia to New Mexico, the world’s most rapid deforestation has been underway in the North American west, with an average of nearly six million acres of forest lost per year — roughly double the three million acres per year rate in Brazil. The culprits here, however, have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles, whose epidemic spread has turned over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition awaiting any spark to flare into catastrophe.


Yet while the global green movement has made a cause célèbre of the Amazon rain forest, they have done nothing to oppose those destroying our woods. Quite the contrary, they have been doing everything in their power to assist the wreckers. Indeed, over the past decade they have launched over a thousand lawsuits to block every attempt by the National Forest Service or others to take necessary counter measures.here is one word that sums up the required course of action: logging. The beetles have been spreading uncontrollably because continuously connected and extremely thick forests densely populated with mature trees provide the ideal environment for their proliferation. Logging to thin the forests of mature trees that afford the beetles their favorite homes would slow their growth considerably. Logging out tree-free gaps between sections of forests would impose quarantine limits on the epidemic. Logging out trees that have already been killed would remove fuel for the otherwise inevitable conflagration.


These facts are well-known, and in many places there are those who would be delighted to do the logging (not everywhere, unfortunately, as the shutting down of 90% of the American timber industry by the environmentalists over the past two decades has forced many local sawmills to shut down) because pine beetle kill wood is fine timber. Indeed, its striking blue stain endows it with beauty prized by many carpenters for ornamental purposes. Yet time and again, plans to allow controlled preemptive logging to proceed have been blocked by spurious lawsuits from a multitude of self-described environmentalist groups, who additionally have used these suits to bilk the taxpayers (http://www.nowpublic.com/environment/environmental-lawsuits-rake-billions-lawyers)of billions of dollars.


The arguments that the putative environmentalists have used to justify their campaign have been risible. For example, in a legal brief filed August 29, 2011, on behalf of itself and several other groups, the South Dakota-based Friends of the Norbeck said:

Yes, bark beetles are killing many trees, but that won’t necessarily lead to large fires. Even if it did, there’s not much humans can do directly to forests to influence fire risk, except to begin reducing human causes of climatic change. Logging the forest will not significantly influence fire spread, and removal of dead trees has many negative impacts on forest ecosystems.

While as recently as this May, the allied “Native Forest Council” issued a statement saying,

Insects, fire and disease are part of nature. They keep our Commonwealth of forests healthy and alive. They did so until the white man came and began liquidating them, using them up because they were there. Nature’s insect, fire and disease don’t destroy forests. Man, chainsaws and greed destroy forests. Man, scientists, even foresters have never grown a forest, let alone a “like kind or better” forest. They don’t know how. They never have and they never will.

The illogic of the antihuman sentiments behind these, and endless numbers of similar statements put forth by the beetle’s Green apologists over the past decade, is incredible. Limited harvesting that would save the forest (and incidentally reduce damage to forests elsewhere, such as the Amazon, by driving down the global price of wood) is to be shunned — precisely because it would create jobs, useful products, and commerce. At the same time, vast depredations that destroy tens of millions of acres of wild habitat, kill countless numbers of terrified animals in the most horrible way, and throw millions of tons of smoke, pine-tar gas, and other pollutants into the atmosphere are discounted as irrelevant and unimportant by those who claim to care so deeply for nature and all its creatures.


Of course, there is another tactic that could be used to save the forests, and that would be to use pesticides. For example, as long ago as the 1940s, it was shown that DDT is extremely effective in countering the Western Pine Beetle. Thus on pages 287-288 of Biology and Control of the Western Pine Beetle (http://books.google.com/books?id=_HkWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA288&lpg=PA288&dq=pine+beetles,+ddt&source=bl&ots=KjE0XSYLqJ&sig=eyUoDK73-vx3IG8JVp4MORFvuUQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=DerpT6yaMKjS2AWz7JXJCA&ved=0CFQQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=pine%20beetles%2C%20ddt&f=false), (http://pjmedia.com/blog/incinerating-america%e2%80%99s-west/Biology%20and%20Control%20of%20the%20Western%20Pin e%20Beetle,) US Department of Agriculture Forest Service Miscellaneous Publication 800, 1960, authors J.M. Miller and F.P. Kern report on numerous studies done in the period from 1944 through 1951 that showed 90 to 96% mortality within hours among pine beetles that came into momentary contact with trees that had been sprayed with 5% dilute DDT solutions.


However, the same environmental groups that have halted western logging regard the idea of using DDT to stop the pine beetle with near hysteria. Rachel Carson’s 1962 tome Silent Spring (which falsely argued that the vital pesticide DDT should be banned because it was killing the birds, when actually it was protecting them — and us — from insect-borne diseases) is virtually sacred scripture to the greens, and the successful campaign to ban DDT that followed from its promotion serves as the core of their proudest creation myth. In enshrining this myth, the anti-technology cult has chosen to heartlessly turn its head away from the massive amount of human misery it has caused through its narcissistic sacrifice of millions of African children to malaria. It must perforce regard the very idea that its object of hatred might be used to save our forests and their wildlife from incineration as nothing short of outright heresy.


From DDT, to nuclear power, to fossil-fuel development, to genetically improved crops, the green movement has used the pretext of nonexistent or grossly exaggerated environmental hazards to block enterprises that would be of enormous benefit to people. However, when faced with a real and catastrophic threat to the wild they have taken the other side — precisely because allowing the necessary protective measures would not constrain human liberty, but expand it, in however limited a way, and this would undermine the central purpose of the “environmentalist” exercise.


To those seeking environmental pretexts for enhanced control over society, all changes to nature effected by humans, no matter how beneficial, must be portrayed as criminal. Thus global warming and carbon dioxide emissions are denounced, despite the fact that they lengthen the growing season, increase rainfall, and accelerate plant growth. Thus no actions may be taken to save the forests.


By the light of a burning wildness the truth may be perceived. The purpose of the green prosecution is not to protect nature, but to put shackles on humankind.

[Gaffer]

Want to blame someone for forest fires, blame the EPA. It needs to be defanged and completely reformed.

[Toro]

Maybe they could shoot the environmentalists.