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More on Fire in Healthy Forests and Wildlands

(See previous article on prescribe fire)

Prescribed fire is not the only way to manage a forest or wildland. Although one of the best tools available to land managers, it should be combined with other techniques like mechanical thinning. The bottom line is that land managers should have ALL the tools possible available to them to manage our public lands. Radical environmentalists have influenced enough law-makers (politicians) that land managers are severely hampered in doing their job.

Land managers should be able to write a scientific prescription for a piece of land, and follow it without excessive political considerations. Not being able to use controlled burning because of air pollution laws influenced by radical environmental groups, is ludicrous! Controlled burning causes ten times LESS air pollution than wildfires. It comes down to particulate matter in the air. Because controlled burning means you can select the time, place and atmospheric conditions to start the fire, land managers can not only prevent a wildfire, but also REDUCE air pollution.

Then when you add mechanical fuel treatments (thinning, selective harvesting, brushing, hand-clearing, etc.) to small, mosaic controlled burning, you have a landscape that becomes nearly fire proof!

Communities need to work with their public land managers and help them get to the point where the land is managed based on local conditions and local objectives, with solid science backing everything up. Land managers need to have the ability to manage without excessive, unruly, unnecessary politics driving everything. It can be done if we all work together and tell our politicians what we want. There's a lot of good politicians who are working for us. We need to help them so they can be a stronger influence on the ones who are being swayed by the radical environmental groups.