This was excellent and deeply sad. I know all of what you write but I hurts to read it all the same. It’s taken me a week to draft my own write up about this and I’m still not done because the words aren’t right.
Federal bureaucrats haven’t been practicing any real land management for nearly fifty years now. It was at about that time that environmental extremists began taking over the forestry schools, most of which are Back East, and most of whose professors have never worked in the woods or even spent so much as a night there.
The Forest Service men who KNEW the woods - many of whom had come in via Roosevelt’s CCC program - were getting old and retiring. They were replaced by fresh young faces who knew nothing, and were unwilling to learn.
Soon, we had Real Forestry being blocked by unending EIS “studies,” ever-increasing Wilderness set-asides, and the foolish goal of forest “preservation.”
You cannot preserve a living thing. Forests are living things.
Now, the hallowed Gifford Pinchot concept of Multiple Use has given way to single-use: recreation, and in many cases, no use at all. And the result is as predictable as rain in Oregon: catastrophic wildfires burning up thousands of acres, instead of Wise Use that removes a few hundred acres of wood here, a few hundred there, and keeping the forests healthy and continually producing valuable fiber and other products for people to actually use.
Don’t cry for the misguided ideologies of the past: they have led only to disaster. A new bunch is in charge of public lands now; people who actually understand land management, and the current purge of Leftist ideologues will be complete soon. Then, and only then can we begin to actually manage our vast public lands in the way that was lost fifty years ago.
Public lands in America have a bright future ahead.
This was excellent and deeply sad. I know all of what you write but I hurts to read it all the same. It’s taken me a week to draft my own write up about this and I’m still not done because the words aren’t right.
Federal bureaucrats haven’t been practicing any real land management for nearly fifty years now. It was at about that time that environmental extremists began taking over the forestry schools, most of which are Back East, and most of whose professors have never worked in the woods or even spent so much as a night there.
The Forest Service men who KNEW the woods - many of whom had come in via Roosevelt’s CCC program - were getting old and retiring. They were replaced by fresh young faces who knew nothing, and were unwilling to learn.
Soon, we had Real Forestry being blocked by unending EIS “studies,” ever-increasing Wilderness set-asides, and the foolish goal of forest “preservation.”
You cannot preserve a living thing. Forests are living things.
Now, the hallowed Gifford Pinchot concept of Multiple Use has given way to single-use: recreation, and in many cases, no use at all. And the result is as predictable as rain in Oregon: catastrophic wildfires burning up thousands of acres, instead of Wise Use that removes a few hundred acres of wood here, a few hundred there, and keeping the forests healthy and continually producing valuable fiber and other products for people to actually use.
Don’t cry for the misguided ideologies of the past: they have led only to disaster. A new bunch is in charge of public lands now; people who actually understand land management, and the current purge of Leftist ideologues will be complete soon. Then, and only then can we begin to actually manage our vast public lands in the way that was lost fifty years ago.
Public lands in America have a bright future ahead.
lmao ok guy