The last time Dumb Donnie visited California’s forests and said the state should do a better job of “raking” its forest floors, an image of a Roomba (you know, one of those robotic vacuums) on the forest floor circulated for laughs among some United States Forest Service staff who knew what Dumb Donnie didn't — that 57% of the forest in California is owned and managed by the federal government under the USFS and BLM. In some high forest fires hazard areas, the federal government owns 70%.
The dark joke was that the USFS had never been given a budget to keep the forest floors clean and therefore the federal government had been a major contributor to California’s forest fires. Of course, Dumb Donnie didn’t know that because you can't learn those facts from pictures.
In fact, for many years, The USFS has spent half of its annual operating budget fighting forest fires, in spite of the fact that avoided costs studies in California have shown that preventing forest fires by removing brush, thinning out dead trees and creating fire breaks, would cost just one third to one half of the cost of fighting fires when the property damage costs are also considered — and still no money from Dumb Donnie and his GOP cohorts to clean the federally owned forests.
USDA Secretary Vilsack (USFS is under the USDA) for the Obama administration had tried for eight years to get the GOP-controlled House and Senate to classify forest fires as natural disasters so that FEMA money could be used to fight them. Then, the USFS budget could be used to prevent them — to no avail. The USFS’s own consultants have estimated that, at their current rate of funding for forest landscape restoration, it will take seventy years before they are brought back into balance. In the meantime, the fires burn and there are forty million acres of beetle-killed tress in federally managed forests, just waiting for a lightning strike.
But wait, it’s even worse than that. Good ‘ole Smokey the Bear, back in the day, worked for Uncle Sam to stop ALL forest fires. But, he was really an advocate for the timber industry. You see, nature had maintained a balance of seventy trees per acre of forest for thousands and thousands of years. She did this with brush fires, which cleaned the forest floor leaving carbon to nourish the soil, killed saplings and senile trees, and left the healthy trees in tact.
But, when you want to get maximum efficiency out of land planted for timber, brush fires are bad — ALL fires are bad. You want the trees planted as closely together as possible so that they're easier and less expensive to harvest. So we, the people, bought Smokey’s schtick, allowed the government to stop ALL forest fires and now we have three times as many trees — two hundred and ten trees per acre — all vying for the same amount of sun, water and soil nutrition that kept seventy trees per acre healthy. The trees are under-nourished, they get sick and nature sends in the beetles to hasten their demise. And now, because trees are so close together, fires hop from crown to crown, burn down, not up, are much hotter than brush fires and kill every tree plus the soil ecosystem five feet into the ground. We, the people, did that. Global warming doesn’t help but we created the problem long before droughts aggravated it.
So, thanks Smokey, you and Dumb Donnie have a lot in common. But he's one up on you where his infantile, “Cailfornia blue. Me no like California. Me let California and all nation forests burn to the ground.” logic is concerned. Pick up a vacuum cleaner pea brain. Buy some Roomba’s. Or fund the USFS to fix the problem. You’re the majority forest owner in California. You must know what “majority” means, right? It means that you can do anything you want and then blame all the problems you create on someone else.
