Cafeoutdoors.com: Forest Fires are for Suckers?like you!

stats for HB, federal government owns 671.8 million acres total, including all its buildings, army bases, forest lands, BLM, national parks and monuments.

Since, 1996 71.9 million acres have burned, that's 11 percent of all federal lands (even though some of this is on state lands, federal lands is used for a comparison purpose only here, and by the way that comparison favors you more than me), since 2000 55.1 million acres have burned, that's 8 percent, we're a mere 200,000 acres (Year-to-date) behind last year's record setting year of 9.9 million acres burned. Since 1960, 205.7 million acres burned, that's 31 percent.

So essentially for 36 years (60-95), we burned about 20 percent and then in the last 12 we've burned at better than double that rate in a third of the time. In those 47 years of stats on record, there has never been any 12 year or even a three year stretch that compares to what has happened since 1996 or compares to the last three years or the last four years.

Since 2004 (four years with up to date stats from this year included), we've burned 33.1 million acres, that's five percent of the total federal lands, which is more than double the pace of the previous eight years (96-03).

It takes forests that burn badly, like they have been doing since 2000, 100 years to recover, if they recover with some species of pines, then they recover and are immediately at risk for catastrophic burns as certain pines have a 90-110 year lifespan.

Leaving them alone is not an option. It's an ecological disaster. And considering how many of these fires are not the healthy kind that burn the one and ten hour fuels, but rather fires that burn all the one and ten hour fuels and the thousand hour fuels as well, not leaving any life in their wake, meanwhile they ruin the soil, any clay is fired to pottery in these fires, large expanses of dead stands, charcoal spears sit waiting for the next wind gust to blow down, any usable timber is left standing dead as well as they generally don't let people come in and take any dead usable timber away, which has marketability for about two years after a fire has killed it.

And you stand right there next to the Sierra Club and the huggers and say let's not do anything about it. And call me a liberal to boot, as if that has any merit at all.

What are you, drunk?

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