ultimately


[click images]


...

The term "forest management" is an oxymoron. Unbeknownst to most environmentalists, though I figured it out some twenty or more years ago, it has been too late in ALL of our lifetimes to do anything cogent about this. I mean that, since the logging fests of the 1800s and then again in the mid-1900s, it has not been cogent to abstain from efforts to manage forests.

I didn't want to realize this, but, well, I'm not blind, and I've seen the difference between the awful mess of most of our forestlands and the much saner state of places like the Collins Pine Woods up in Chester. Which is somewhat in need of more weed tree removal just now than historically, but still waaay less conflagration encouraging than any formerly logged plots of the National Forests in our state.

They're either naked clearcuts or fuels choked ex-clearcuts all the way through... with dead and dying trees from the drought mixed in with the dead and dying and living fuels so thick you cannot walk through these forests. Redwoods will ultimately fix this problem themselves if left to it for a couple hundred years, but it's unclear if mixed conifer and pine forests can recover fully without fuels removal intervening.

It doesn't look like it and hasn't for a few decades.

And I guess I'm late to the party as regards the state of suspicion against PG&E as the cause of the Camp Fire, which now appears to be a solid theory which is beyond merely ironic, given that they have been playing hardball with their customers by turning off power during bad fire weather events.


I wonder if they warned the fire department too....

I mean, I am trying really, really hard not to get paranoid and accuse state agencies of using avoidable cataclysms for getting the feds to foot the bill for our ever increasingly obvious mismanagement, but it looks more like it every day. It looks as though they have figured into the equations for neglecting their duty that it won't be the state having to pay the restitution. It will be the federal government and all the taxpayers, not The State of California.

Like with the Oroville Dam not being maintained.


pipe up any time....