Photograph Source: Nickpdx – Public Domain
Okay, this flood of forest BS is pissing me off. Hear me: The national reporters helicoptering in have not got this right. NPR, Reveal tonight, etc., even the fine Pro Publica.
By coincidence, I flew over the Holiday Farm Fire burn area six weeks before it burned.
Take a look at the clip on YouTube, and ask yourself: Is this a landscape “overloaded with fuel” from not enough “forest management”?
Too much deep, “unhealthy” forest from excess ”fire suppression?
Did the obvious, massive, unsustainable — and never mentioned — amounts of clearcutting keep this landscape from burning intensely?
[embedded content]
No. It didn’t stop the burning. The #HolidayFarmFire ripped some 20 miles through this “managed” landscape in one day.
This is an industrialized timber landscape, in the heart of Timber Central — Lane County — the county that’s typically the biggest sawlog producing county in the biggest sawlog producing state in the US.
This landscape has been “managed” (aka logged) to death, in the process radically accelerating the same runaway climate change that now dries it to tinder.
Seriously. NPR reporters helicoptering in, go around and quickly ask a bunch of official experts–embedded members of the Oregon timber industrial complex, spun by everyone from the Koch brothers (Georgia Pacific) on down–and then they credulously report the convenient mythologies they are given.
The US Forest Service is no more believable on forest issues, than ICE is on immigration issues. Especially, under the current administration.
What intelligent, incisive reporter would even begin to think otherwise?
But the helicoptering national reporters don’t get deep enough to know they are being had.
They act like “regulatory capture” hasn’t been at the heart of logging fortunes since colonial times. Since Weyerhaeuser got his start terminating the great old growth forests of the upper Midwest in the mid 1800s.
They zip through, and then obediently regurgitate industry propaganda on the national stage, as if they’d discovered “the facts.”
All of which allows the surviving Koch a sly little smile…
At the continuing expense of most of the things we love about Oregon.
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Kevin Matthews | Radio Free (2020-09-16T08:53:01+00:00) The True Facts About the Oregon Fires, With a Video Proving It. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/09/16/the-true-facts-about-the-oregon-fires-with-a-video-proving-it/
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