can you not add?

What is 8.2 million plus 2.7 million plus another 400,000 acres, why even I was low on the number

again do you favor local control over the forests or national control, it's a simple question.

the Creator uses us as well, or did you think that we were just witnesses to the world around us never having anything to do with anything.

hillbilly now we are getting somewhere you have hit the nail on the head without even knowing it.

"Thinking man can realistically manage the forests better than ma nature is just absurd."--hillbilly

and yet that's exactly what the forest service is doing and you want to continue their failed management, but in truth man has managed the environment around him as much as he is able since the dawn of time. It's no different than the beaver that backs up a stream, we have shaped these forests with fire, now we are simply destroying them with fire because we are not managing them properly.

"Thinking the forest service is responsible for all the idiots building houses next to them without some sort of fire prevention plan is utterly ridiculous."--hillbilly

who was there first, the forest service or private land owners, HB would say the forest service and he'd be wrong, I hope you are smart enough to know that the forest service is only about 100 years old and people lived in these woods long before they were instituted. I also hope you realize that there is nowhere on earth where you are not subject to one form of catastrophe or another and when a tornado takes out your house, at least you can have the comfort of knowing there are people as crass as you saying well if you are too stupid to live in tornado alley I got no sympathy for you.

When the New Madrid fault goes, would you like the rest of the country to just coldly say, well it's their own damn fault for living in an earthquake zone, they should have lived somewhere else. Where is this utopia you speak of that is not subject to one form of natural disaster or another.

We can mitigate the hazards of our surroundings, but when the government owns our surroundings and will not take care of their own property, where should people go? should we all be herded to some utopian place that does not exist or should we be allowed to live wherever and take care of our own as we currently do.

You speak ill of people who live in the forest as if that is somehow a crime and you assume that we do not take actions to secure our property. You think we do not utilize firewise practices and while that can be said of some people who build huge homes they live in about two weeks a year, the year round residents do what they can to prepare for the disaster most likely to befall them, just as you have probably purchased a home with a basement or storm cellar.