The US Forest Service’s Misguided Approach to Wildfires

BY GEORGE WUERTHNER

APRIL 4, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Smoke from a prescribed burn, Mt. Hood National Forest, Oregon. 

Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Recent federal announcements declare that millions of federal dollars are coming to the West to “restore” forest health and “reduce” the risk of large-scale wildfire, primarily through logging and prescribed fire.

However, the underlying assumptions of this flood of dollars are misguided.

First, large-scale wildfires result from climate/weather conditions, not fuels. Climate change is fueling the larger blazes. Nearly all the acreage burned annually occurs during the relatively few weather conditions that promote fire spread. Nearly all fires self-extinguish or are easily suppressed if these conditions are not present.

We have numerous examples where fuel reductions failed to stop a fire under extreme fire weather. For example, the Holiday Farm Blaze that raced down the McKenzie River burned through enormous clearcuts, which failed to halt the blaze.

Second, the agency doesn’t count the trees it kills with chainsaws as losses. But research has shown that in many instances if you add the trees removed to “save” the forest lost to insects, disease, or fire, the total is greater than what any of these natural processes would kill.

Third, thinning and prescribed burning are not benign. They often require roads (which, incidentally, are one of the major places for human ignitions) that disturb wildlife and cause sedimentation in streams.

Prescribed burning often increases the growth of fine fuels like grasses and shrubs that carry fires. To preclude them from being a means of fire spread, prescribed burns must be repeated every few years. To be effective, such burns should be immediately adjacent to communities and maintained FOREVER.

Fourth, keep in mind the bias of the timber industry, forestry schools and the Forest Service, they are all committed to logging the forests. Their assessment that large high-severity fires are undesirable merely demonstrates their bias.

These wildfires are ultimately rare events. Of the 1.5 million wildfires that have burned since 2000, only 2% are considered “large” though they contribute to the bulk of the acreage charred. These large blazes are essential to maintaining healthy forest ecosystems. The snag forests that result from such blazes are critical to numerous plants and animals who live in mortal fear of green forests.

These snag forests support more mushrooms, bees, wildflowers, many bird species, small mammals, and even fish (when the logs fall into creeks) than so-called “healthy” forests.

Fifth, while it is accurate to say that all the forest types in central Oregon periodically burned, what is not said is that most of the plant communities in the region only burned at long fire rotations of many decades to hundreds of years. They are not “unhealthy,” nor do they require “fuel reductions.” This includes sagebrush, juniper, spruce-fir, aspen, and all other plant types. The only exception are dry forests of ponderosa pine; however, even in these forests, occasional high-severity blazes occur, so they are not “unnatural.”

Even dead trees killed by wildfire or insects store carbon. Logging removes the carbon from the site and releases it immediately into the atmosphere, contributing to climate warming, which is driving large wildfires. In Oregon, logging contributes more to Greenhouse Gas Emissions than transportation.

Protecting all public lands from logging is the most cost-effective means of reducing large wildfires. The Biden administration recent effort to protect old-growth forests is a step in the right direction. Still, we also need to protect mature forests which ultimately transition to old growth over time.

Finally, the best way to protect communities is not to log the forest but to harden them and prepare for evacuations.

Home hardening means removing pine needles from roofs and gutters, keeping flammable vegetation away from home foundations, and installing devices like roof sprinklers.

These and other methods are proven to work even with high-severity blazes.

George Wuerthner has published 36 books including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. 

END THE EMBARGO!

Biden Must Remove the Designation of Cuba as Terrorist-Sponsoring Nation

BY W. T. WHITNEY

 APRIL 4, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photo by Alexander Kunze

President Obama in 2015 removed Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism (SSOT). President Trump reversed that action in January 2020, thereby aggravating economic difficulties for Cuba. President Joe Biden needs to end the designation. The time is now for representatives, senators, and other elected officials to pressure him.

Cuba is no terrorist-sponsoring nation. In accusing Cuba of hosting terrorists, the Trump administration disregarded Cuba’s invitation to Colombian guerrillas to join representatives of Colombia’s government on the island to negotiate peace.

The SSOT designation requires that targeted nations not use dollars in international transactions. The U.S. Treasury Department punishes institutional offenders. Dollars are the world’s dominant currency, and in normal circumstances, banks would use them in transactions involving Cuba. Now, however, foreign lenders steer clear of Cuba. Payments for exported goods and services may not arrive. Cuba is financially paralyzed.

Cubans are suffering. Food is short, as are spare parts, raw materials for domestic production, school and healthcare supplies, spare parts, consumer goods, and cash.  The aim of U.S. policy, as specified by a State Department memo of April 1960, is to cause shortages, despair and suffering serious enough to induce Cubans to overthrow their government.

The labeling of Cuba as a terrorist-sponsoring nation is part of the decades-long U.S. policy of embargo, which is more accurately characterized as an economic blockade, this in recognition of its worldwide reach. Reasons for removing the SSOT designation are the same ones for ending the blockade.

After all, ending the blockade is the Cuba solidarity movement’s prime goal. The campaign to persuade congresspersons to pressure the president to remove Cuba from the SSOT list must refer to the blockade, even as it pursues the more limited goal.

Congresspersons know that, as per the Helms-Burton Law of 1996, congressional action is required for the blockade’s end. They know that current political realities are unfavorable for such action.  Were they to agitate for presidential action on the SSOT matter, they would, in effect, be preparing for a fight against the whole blockade. That’s why it makes sense to use the one rationale to back up each fight.

Ending the blockade (and SSOT designation) has its uses

+      Producers and manufacturers would sell goods in Cuba.

+      With despair and discouragement having diminished, fewer Cubans would be heading to the United States; 425,000 Cuban migrants arrived in 2022 and 2023.

+      U.S. citizens could visit Cuba for recreation, cultural enrichment, and education. Their exposure to Cuban artists, scientists, and educators visiting in the United States would be gratifying.

+      For the blockade to end would disappoint proponents.  They should have been disappointed by the results of the decades-long experiment showing that the blockade did not work. Regime change did not happen. Blockade apologists could reasonably enough move on to something else.

+      An end to the U.S. blockade (and SSOT designation) would gratify nations in the UN General Assembly that annually, and all but unanimously, vote to approve a resolution calling for the blockade’s end. Critics of U.S. interventionist tendencies, wherever they are, would be pleased. The U.S. government would earn some love.

Ideals and values 

+      The blockade is cruel. It causes human suffering.

+      It violates international law: “Whatever view is adopted, either that of coercion or aggression, it is quite evident that the imposition of the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba constituted an illegal act … the blockade is a fragrant violation of the contemporary standard which is founded on … sovereign equality between states.” (Paul A. Shneyer and Virginia Barta, The Legality of the U.S. Economic Blockade of Cuba under International Law, 13 Case W. Res. J. Int’l L. 451 (1981) 

+  The blockade is immoral. It contributes to sickness and deaths: “By reducing access to medicines and medical supplies from other countries and preventing their purchase from US firms, the embargo contributes to this rise in morbidity and mortality.” (Richard Garfield, DrPH, RN, commenting on Cuba’s “Special Period” of shortages following the fall of the Soviet Bloc – Am. J. Public Health 1997, 877, 15-20.)

+ The blockade exposes certain failings of U.S. democracy. U.S. political leaders remain oblivious to polling data showing strong support for normal U.S.-Cuba relations and for ending the blockade. Leaders of the Cuban exile community have long exerted undue influence in determining U.S. policies toward Cuba. The appearance is that of an important aspect of foreign policy having been farmed out to a strident minority.

Contradictions

The U.S. government claims the blockade serves as punishment of Cuba for allegedly violating human rights. But the United States has easily co-existed with governments famous for disregarding human rights, like Nicaragua’s Somoza regime, Chile under Pinochet, Haiti ruled by the Duvaliers, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

U.S. policymakers see Cuba as a Communist dictatorship and, on that account, as deserving of economic blockade. Even so, the United States trades with Vietnam and China, where Communist parties are in power.

Vice President Joe Biden presumably backed President Obama’s action in removing Cuba from the SSOT list. Contradicting himself, he refuses to reverse former President Trump’s placement of Cuba back on the list.

Contradictions point to Cuba as special case in the history of U.S. relations with other countries. Only Cubans find an open door on arrival in the United States as irregular migrants. Such red-carpet treatment stands alone in the record of how the U.S. government handles immigration.

The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 ensured that Cubans arriving in the United States without documents would at once receive social services and a work permit and a year later be granted permanent residence and the opportunity for citizenship.

The fact of U.S. hegemonic intent and actions regarding Cuba for 200 years must be extraordinary in the history of international relations. From Thomas Jefferson’s time until the 20^th century, leaders in Washington sought to own or annex Cuba. They would later on find other modalities.

U.S.- Cuba relations have long been on automatic pilot. Pursuing justice and fairness, elected officials in Washington would be moving beyond that history. They would go against the grain as they pressure a U.S. president to no longer designate Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Persevering, they would fight to relieve Cuba of all U.S. harassment.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.

Law and Order Is Republicrat for Fascism

BY NICKY REID

 APRIL 5, 2024

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

“Force is the midwife of any old society pregnant with a new one.”

-Karl Marx

If you watch the news today, you’d think that Americans are living in one big stateless continental crimewave, stretching from sea to shining sea. Even on the crunchy granola liberal networks, every hour carries another newsflash about our nation’s perilous decent into utter lawlessness. The undocumented are swarming the border! The homeless are swarming the subways! Wayward gangs of sticky-fingered Black youths are coming to a Target near you! Rape, murder, it’s just a kiss away! You can practically hear every white liberal soccer mom in the burbs collectively dropping their morning coffee and screaming, “We never should have defunded the police!”

Bitch, relax. Take a deep breath and stop watching the fucking ‘news-today’ because it’s at least 90% bullshit on a good day. Don’t get me wrong, things are still getting pretty wild down in the streets and they’re likely to get even wilder, but nobody had to defund the police for them to get there and practically nobody has. When George Floyd was slowly lynched before a live studio audience and the nation exploded in an appropriately violent uprising the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the race riots of 1968, the Democrats were forced to dawn dashikis and take a knee just to keep their target demographic governably passive. Everybody promised police reform, even old racist crooks like Joe Biden, but nobody actually did it.

During those uprisings, every major city in the country saw these protests met with grossly disproportionate acts of police brutality and every single one of those police forces was being commanded by a Democratic mayor who then spoke eloquently about “reimagining” the police with fresh blood still wet on their jackboots. But these corporate shills didn’t so much reimagine the police as they did reimagine their funding. Cities like New York and Minneapolis simply moved the money around in circles without ever affecting police budgets.

So, why then are the streets getting wild like it’s nineteen-seventy-something? Because Americans are having an existential crisis like they did back in nineteen-seventy-something. This nation’s last big crime wave peaked somewhere between the early seventies and the early nineties after the American Empire lost the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement failed to cure systemic racism, and Richard Nixon exposed the highest echelons of Babylonian power to be little more than an elaborate organized crime outfit. Long story short, America lost its faith in the system and sadly that faith was what passed for a moral center in this country. So, the shit got wild and here we go again after the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Pandemic, and two consecutive presidencies defined by Nixonian grade dysfunction.

We’ve been here before but this time the damage is far worse, and it may be irreversible. But that isn’t stopping the mandarins of the two-party system and their devoted courtesans on ‘the-news-today’ from trying to fix this crisis the way they did with the last one back in nineteen-seventy-something. With our next sham election heating up, Joe Biden is tearing off his dashiki and pulling his white hood back out of the closet and while Trump warms up the MAGA set with promises of Christian Sharia Law and flaming border moats, Genocide Joe is flexing his muscles by attacking common sense reform to the District of Colombia’s ancient criminal code and pushing immigration deals that promise to dump napalm into the Rio Grande. Meanwhile, the media is chumming us all with sensational stories of a Mad Max-style dystopia.

It’s Law and Order Two: Electric Boogaloo. But here’s the rub; nobody is actually asking for a sequel. Even amidst this synergistic propaganda deluge, most major polls show crime trailing behind the shit that causes it, like inflation, recession, and shitty leadership, on the list of demands for both Democrats and Republicans. In other words, average Americans don’t want law and order. They would much rather watch the Temple of Emptiness burn like their savings. But American power desperately wants us to want law and order to save their hides from the fire the way they did the last time around.

The great crimewave of nineteen-seventy-something ended for reasons that continue to allude the experts but the powerful still believe that they cured that plague with a crimewave of their own called mass incarceration. The violence never ended, it just got monopolized by the police state. While burglary in the suburbs may have dropped, an entire generation of Black, brown, and Queer people were essentially kidnapped under the auspices of the War on Drugs and Broken Windows before being sold into virtual slavery to a modern-day gulag archipelago that would make Josef Stalin thick with envy.

In 1970, the state and federal prison population stood at 196,441. By 2020, the caged population had swelled to over two million with most of its indentured citizenry locked up for non-violent drug offenses. One out of every three Black males born American today can expect to serve hard time before he dies, along with one in six Latino males. Meanwhile, women have become the fastest growing incarcerated population in the country and Queer folk like me are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population, with one in six trans people serving time, usually in prisons that don’t match our gender identity.

The US now incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, including China, and dumps $80 billion taxpayer dollars into the coffers of a bustling prison industrial complex every year, but law and order doesn’t end at the prison gates. The spree in federal legislation that began with Nixon’s War on Drugs and peaked with the Clinton Crime Bill that Joe Biden midwifed back when he still had all his marbles, turned American law enforcement into a colossal army of heavily armored goons with near unlimited power and state-of-the-art battlefield technology. There is a word for this, for the wholesale militarization of every facet of civilian society for the purpose of preserving the glory of a failed state. That word is called fascism, and while it may seem like Donald Trump is the only man running for president who is proud of this slur, both parties are thoroughly invested in the American swastika known as law and order.

Democrats may use white supremacy and January 6 to spook their rubes, but the result is funding the exact same system that curb stomps migrants and Muslims. Fascism isn’t really an ideology, it’s just a very ceremonial list of excuses to put a collapsing power on life support by using the state to monopolize an unstoppable crimewave. The harsh reality is that whenever an old system collapses beneath the weight of its crimes, shit gets nuts, the streets get wild, but this is a stupid fucking reason to double down on the same system that brought us here.

This may be a little hard for the soccer moms of suburbia to grasp but the best way to fight crime, all crime, is to teach people that they don’t need laws to have order, they just need values. The reason for the wave of violent nihilism washing over the country right now is that generations of Americans have been raised to believe that they need powerful people to define their moral integrity. It’s a kind of spiritual learned helplessness invented by a powerful minority to infantilize the majority into a state of moral paralysis and once that powerful minority is exposed, there is nowhere left for the amoral majority to go but down. But just like law and order, this perception is nothing but an illusion. It can be broken. Not by voting or passing more laws but by building self-sufficient, autonomous communities that don’t require such silly rituals to be decent human beings.

This is how we win, dearest motherfuckers. This is how we kill American fascism without firing a single shot. Live free and let the tyrants shoot themselves.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.