Qualify to be a Forest Ranger

[Power Wagon]

Here's the test.



#ad






:-{}

 

[sdalton]

I dont get it. I thought the Sierra Club was for forest preservation. How does this tie into being a forest ranger??



I guess you have to be from Oregon to understand.

 

[Power Wagon]

The title is just to intrigue you. It's a forest management issue...



And if you're from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and a few other states, the cartoon is painfully clear



The Sierra Club would MUCH rather let it burn down in catastrophic wildfire than have a stick of timber be cut and used. They oppose ALL management options that involve any type of tree harvesting in which someone might profit. If it burns down and kills everything... Well, that's "natural" and therefore no problem at all.



They oppose ALL use of the forest, aside from living in the big city and having good feelings about it being out there, hundreds of miles away.

 

[illflem]

Economics will win

Part of recentlarger article



"The cost of thinning forests can be staggering - $2. 7 billion for the 1. 6 million acres of forest just in the rugged Klamath Mountains region of southwestern Oregon, according to research by the U. S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station.



"Economics is where the problems develop," said Jeremy Fried, team leader on the study.



Bigger trees bring in more revenue to help pay for the work.



But "if you just take big trees, you don't reduce fire danger. If you take small trees, it costs you an arm and a leg," Fried said.



In his computer model, Fried found when he limited thinning to trees less than 21 inches in diameter, the average cost was $1,685 per acre. In contrast, it cost $785 per acre for firefighters to control a 2,800-acre fire in southwestern Oregon. "



It would cost over 3 trillion dollars to thin the nation's forests. It costs close zero to just let them burn... Even clear cuts burn.

 

[Power Wagon]

Would cost WHO???



That's what I don't understand.



Is the USFS planning on hiring contractors to go in and "thin", but not sell anything? Are they planning on getting taxpayers to foot the bill, so they can waste everything or what???



Every sale we had in Montana WE did all the thinning and whatever other management they wanted done, including fuel reduction, and it was part of the terms of getting the sale in the first place.



The USFS made money on those sales, too.



I guess when you micromanage everything with overzealous bearocrats you can lose money on even the most profitable of operations.



And of course, the Sierra Club is desperately afraid the timber industry will fail to die off completely, or that somehow it will find some source of timber and dig itself out of the grave again.



Imagine, such evil people as loggers, who make money killing trees. Imagine thier frantic and desperate machinations when they realize that Big Mac they had for lunch... well, you get the picture.



The answer is quite clear, really. Presently, in excess of 90% of federally owned forest is off limits to logging of any kind.



No wonder the USFS loses money - while telling us that the inventory of harvestable timber has grown, and continues to grow every year for pretty much my lifetime.



So, instead of selling what would make money and give them the funds to do what so desperately needs to be done, we burn it down, fouling the air, water, and land. It is, in my estimation, criminal negligence to so badly mistreat our land and forests - one of hte greatest assets of the country.

 

[illflem]

Mark, there are very few timber sales where the USFS makes money any more, it's basically subsidized, you and I pay for it. Tree farming is better left to large corporations on private land, out of the government's hands. Take a trip over to Mt St Helens sometime and see where FS land and Weyerhaeuser

land butts up, replanted FS trees are 5 feet tall, private ones are 40'. No environmentalists involved there, just typical poor government management. That doesn't take care of the fire problem though. Let USFS land burn, they're the ones who messed it up by controling fires in the first place. Protect structures only.

 

[Power Wagon]

Can't do that... Just like you can't just let your neighbor's wheat field burn up to your fenceline, hoping his failure to prevent his combine from setting it on fire will stop at the fence.



Watersheds, wildlife, air pollution and oxygen... ALL of these are important. I simply refuse to accept that our forests must be allowed to burn. Reinvent the USFS, sell off our forests, I don't care, but just "accepting" the horrific damage going on just isn't an acceptable answer, to me.



It isn't inevitable, and it isn't necessary. I DO believe that the USFS can be overhauled, and our political policies CAN be re-written. But it won't happen with people just saying "let it burn".

 

[JLinder]

I'm no expert,

but I do know that there are several logging companies that have a "thinning" crew and they make money at it. Granted, it's thinning private land like Weyerhaeuser, but if they don't make money at it then why would they do it?



I do know one thing. When is that last time that privately owned timber was burning? Not to often... Only land that the feds and environmental radicals think should be left alone ends up burning and destroying homes in the process. I'm with Mark, the whole system needs to be overhauled and run like a privately held tree farm. Maybe then the government could actually make some money at something.

 

[Lhotka]

QUOTE]Originally posted by Power Wagon

Would cost WHO???



So, instead of selling what would make money and give them the funds to do what so desperately needs to be done, we burn it down, fouling the air, water, and land. It is, in my estimation, criminal negligence to so badly mistreat our land and forests - one of the greatest assets of the country. [/QUOTE]



The above statement is a prime example of the hypocrisy that plagues the political right. What a bunch of bull****! All of a sudden our hearts bleed for clean air, water and land. Bush admits that we are responsible for global warming, knows it's detrimental, but says we'll deal with it? How STUPID can you get? Now all of sudden he cares about our forests? You gotta be a nut to believe that!



Thank GOD for environmentalist. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have forests to argue about!



And don't forget... . the large scale logging industry has received subsidies of TAX payer money for decades. If the forest needs thinning, let's do it with small scale, horse, or low impact methods.

 

[JLinder]

Oh boy, this is interesting.

Thank GOD for environmentalist. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have forests to argue about.

Loggers are environmentalists. The environmentalists you speak of are radical, hairy granola eating morons that end up falling out of trees when they're protesting. These environmentalists are the reason for the fires we're having, they don't want any activity in our nations forests at all.



You're missing one thing. If you run our nations forests like a privately held tree-farm, you would make money. That's the reason private people do it.

And don't forget... . the large scale logging industry has received subsidies of TAX payer money for decades.

What are you smoking? Who is recieving these subsidies? We've got some of the biggest "large scale logging industry" players right here, and they would like to know how they can get these subsidies. If you are talking about tax dollars to operate the national forest service, I understand that. They don't make enough off the 5 trees per year they sell to cover their other duties like firefighting. If they thinned and harvested our nations forests, and managed them properly they could make some money. Also, don't forget many schools (around here at least) recieve timber revenues to help fund them.



Don't think we should thin? Go ask some of the people that lost their homes and everything they ever owned to a forest fire. See what they would tell ya.

 

[Power Wagon]

Originally posted by Lhotka

QUOTE]Originally posted by Power Wagon

Would cost WHO???



So, instead of selling what would make money and give them the funds to do what so desperately needs to be done, we burn it down, fouling the air, water, and land. It is, in my estimation, criminal negligence to so badly mistreat our land and forests - one of the greatest assets of the country.

The above statement is a prime example of the hypocrisy that plagues the political right. What a bunch of bull****! All of a sudden our hearts bleed for clean air, water and land. Bush admits that we are responsible for global warming, knows it's detrimental, but says we'll deal with it? How STUPID can you get? Now all of sudden he cares about our forests? You gotta be a nut to believe that!



Thank GOD for environmentalist. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have forests to argue about!



And don't forget... . the large scale logging industry has received subsidies of TAX payer money for decades. If the forest needs thinning, let's do it with small scale, horse, or low impact methods. [/QUOTE]



Say WHAT???



I doubt you could be more wrong, if you got a pet monkey and taught it to randomly pound on the keyboard... it's ramblings would be closer to being sensible.



First, I am NOT a hypocrite. Far from it. Nobody in thier right mind who knows me thinks I am about polluting, slashing our forests to the last stick, or anything else. I'm one of the few people on here who's actually gotten himself in trouble for getting irritated at people who let thier rigs smoke or make them do so deliberately, and people took it personally.



The point is, I have ALWAYS cared for our land, air, trees, wildlife... for the whole of nature. I oppose environmentalists because they scream thier emotions loudly, and then proceed to embark upon efforts to accomplish political goals, not make a real difference.



I HAVE BEEN a logger. I know very well what it means to cut stuff down. I've seen what happens when the USFS mandates a clear cut on a steep hillside. Been there, cleaned up the landslides... sheesh. I very well know what real CARING is all about. And that's why I am such a fanatical opponent of the environmentalists. They are highjacking an issue for political purposes, and when it's no longer useful, it'll be dropped faster than a red-hot welding rod in your bare hands.



But the only people who actually CARE for the forests ARE the loggers. And by CARE, I mean the physical act. Environmentalists are about the type of CARE you do when you hear your friend across the country just lost his much beloved dog. Hey, you feel bad for him. But you can't and don't DO anything. On the other hand there's the kind of CARE you have when you take CARE of a small child, or your aging parents. You actually DO the work. Loggers are just about the only ones that actually DO anything. (well, there are tree planters, and I suppose they important too) The true hypocrites are the environmentalists, the people like the Sierra Club who CARE in the emotional sense, but then do absolutely nothing in the physical sense, and block those who would.



As for global warming? Get a life. Global warming is pretty much totally debunked. We have no idea under the sun, really, what makes our climate do what it does, and have even less control over it. Our planet has been through warming AND cooling periods, and, if we examine historical records, find we're just in one of them now. Expect a dramatic cooling trend in the next 30 - 50 years. The cycle is due anytime now.



I oppose the global warming crowd because there is no sound science that says that:



1. We're causing global warming.



2. If we are, we can actually do anything about it.



3. It would be bad.



What's really going on, is that political types have found themselves a convenient tool for grabbing and wielding more power, more control, and giving themselves importance. For me, the gig is up. I know what they want, and I won't be fooled another day.



As for environmentalists, we can thank them for the destruction of millions of acres of forest a year. Not just tree cutting, which grows back... burning down, in some cases, sterilizing the ground and stopping ALL life. In reality, they are far more intersted in stopping capitalism and enterprise than any incidental concern about our physical world. They have a political agenda, and presently, people like you are enabling them to achieve political goals, while pretending to be doing something else. The environmental goals and ideas promoted by them over the last 40 years are the DIRECT cause of the problems we're facing with our forests burning down.



One last thing... This "subsidy"???



Funny, but this supposed subsidized industry funded our schools, built our roads, paid for immense amount of public works and recreation opportunities, maintained a forest management system, firefighting funding, and more, while historically, the USFS has operated AT A PROFIT. If they were "subsidized", I sure can't imagine how... Without logging, our schools have become dramatically underfunded, our roads are falling apart, you now have to PAY just to drive up into the woods, and the areas you can go are getting worse and worse and fewer and fewer. The mills all closed and the amount of money the state has had to spend in unemployment and has wasted on attemped "economic development" boggles the mind. Golly, if the alternative to what we have is some small "subsidy" that nobody can find or get, then by all means, BRING IT BACK!!!



Of course, if it sells politically, it doens't matter what the REAL truth is. In leftist politics, if it takes a lie to get people to "do" the right thing (vote for Democrats), that's still ok. Lies in promotion of leftist ideology is still virtue, just ask the leftists.







But, of course, it's much easier to promote stereotypes. "Hey, he was a logger, and a right-wing guy at that, so he cannot possibly be trusted to be responsible with anything, be concerned with anything, or even do the right thing, no matter what... " Of course, that's easy. It's not true, but it's easy. Only problem is, you're going to still be supporting people who DO NOT act in ways good for our land, ,water, rivers, lakes, wildlife, OR people (most environmental organizations). And opposing those who do (like me), because our politics are not "correct". So what is it, are you for results (the greens have absolutely NO success to point to) or the politics?

 

[Boldt's Wagon]

What a lot of chain yanking. Almost as good as an automatic transmission thread.

 

[illflem]

Sounds like subsudy to me

Didn't bother looking for anything more recent but I'll bet it's gotten worse. If the USFS ever operated at a profit they did so in the same manner as Enron.



"The US Forest Service's timber sale program lost $407 million in Fiscal Year 1998. According to similar reports by the U. S. General Accounting Office (GAO), the Forest Service lost $1. 05 billion from 1995–1997. This report was the continuation of a 1995 GAO study that cited $995 million in losses from 1992–1994. Together, these reports total more than $2. 5 billion in taxpayer losses over seven years. "



From http://www.taxpayer.net/forest/



The whole fire/logging issue is a very complex one that a cartoon such as the one above oversimplifies radically. Wish it was that easy. Personally I don't like the forest and have little use for it, the trees just block my view, give me desert any day.

Global warming is great in Montana, I wouldn't want to live much further south or near a coast though.

 

[JLinder]

"The US Forest Service's timber sale program lost $407 million in Fiscal Year 1998. According to similar reports by the U. S. General Accounting Office (GAO), the Forest Service lost $1. 05 billion from 1995–1997. This report was the continuation of a 1995 GAO study that cited $995 million in losses from 1992–1994. Together, these reports total more than $2. 5 billion in taxpayer losses over seven years. "

If it's on the internet, it must be true...



If you think about it, how could you lose that kind of money selling trees? The job goes to the lowest bidder, and the timber to the highest. The only way you could lose money selling trees is the same way companies do. To much overhead. When you have a hundred offices full of paper pushers then yes, you could lose money selling trees. That is why a large overhaul is needed, let them take lessons from these large private timber companies. They are always profitable. Our forests are like a garden, or like our farmland. If you let it grow and grow and don't harvest, what have you got? On the other hand, if you harvest and don't replant you've got just the opposite problem. The way to go about it is to plant, harvest, repeat. I don't think we should log everything and not put something back into the land. We should do as the the private sector does... Harvest, and plant 5 trees for every stump. Works nicely, and the newly planted clear cut can sustain a much larger number of wildlife than a stand of old growth could.



Earth First! We'll log the other planets later...

 

[Peter Campbell]

Enivronazi tirade (long)

I looked at a link- don't remember where ( on a thread here) a manufacturer had rubber tired low ground pressure logging vehicles. Expensive, probably not as productive as dragging. But would thin and reduce fuel with a tiny fraction of the environmental impact of ONE of the major fires. In a dry year if a fire did break out it would be less intense (less fuel) and less damaging as older trees would survive. And easier to control. The logging companies would not make the profit of more production intense methods. But the damage would be a tiny fraction of the "natural" fuels management program we have( LET IT BURN BABY BURN, BURN THAT M***** F***** DOWN). A fuels management program that the environazis think is wonderfull because it is "natural" Floods are natural earthquakes are natural and contagious infectious disease are natural. I would like these environazis with thier wood houses in the deep forest, beach houses on the surf do without fire insurance, flood insurance and antibiotics. Let them insure that the natural thing happens to them without support of those of us who work. OBTW Did you ever notice that when a national forest is established or expanded, when "smart" developpment ( none or very expensive) is pushed. It seems to be in sparsly populated places full of self sufficient people who do not vote DEMOCRAT. Ask a northern Californian or an upstate New Yorker how they feel. Keep the jobs from happening and the votes will never happen( no people). What a wonderfull system.

 

[illflem]

Originally posted by JLinder





If it's on the internet, it must be true...

Hear you there, if you feel like wading though pages of GAO documents to get that one paragraph go here http://www.gao.gov/archive/1995/rc95237f.pdf

 

[Power Wagon]

Originally posted by Boldt's Wagon

What a lot of chain yanking. Almost as good as an automatic transmission thread.

I know there's a joke about engineers in there somewhere, but I just cant' find it right now

 

[merryman]

Two things;



1. Back fifteen and twenty years ago, a major budget income item for numerous counties in Southern Oregon and Northern Calif. was a share of the profits from sale of trees from federal lands within those counties. My recollection is not precise, but as I recall it was around 1/4 of the annual income for Jackson County Oregon.

Those funds have dried up due to a), the federal managers became less and less able to make a profit selling trees on federal land, and b) environmentalist have pretty well stopped most logging.



2 I have been frustrated for years that the owner of private land can pay for land and then make lots of money selling trees from that land-----federal land managers on the other hand can lose money selling trees from land they did not have to pay for.

Just one more example of how government can rarely do ANYthing well.



Vaughn

 

[Power Wagon]

Originally posted by illflem

Didn't bother looking for anything more recent but I'll bet it's gotten worse. If the USFS ever operated at a profit they did so in the same manner as Enron.



"The US Forest Service's timber sale program lost $407 million in Fiscal Year 1998. According to similar reports by the U. S. General Accounting Office (GAO), the Forest Service lost $1. 05 billion from 1995–1997. This report was the continuation of a 1995 GAO study that cited $995 million in losses from 1992–1994. Together, these reports total more than $2. 5 billion in taxpayer losses over seven years. "



From http://www.taxpayer.net/forest/

Frankly, I don't care what the figures are for the last 2 decades. The last one was intensely screwed up, and things were getting bad in 1980 when I had left Montana.



The fact is, the USFS is little more than a paperwork factory, and what it accomplishes is merely incidental to all the administrivia it does.



With overhead and wastefulness like that, it's a small wonder it loses money. Environmentalists want to c laim that losing money is inherent in selling timber to logging companies. It is NOT. It's merely caused by our immensely wasteful and excessively administered USFS.



I had a conversation with the guy at the local district a couple years ago, the guy that makes the firewood sales. In the fall, before the roads are closed, he spends 2-4 weeks looking for and surveying to find roughly 20 to 30 acres of land, normally all along roads and normally spread into 2 to 5 separate areas. It then takes him MOST OF THE WINTER AND SPRING to do the paperwork to allow him to sell 30 to 70 wood permits at about 60 bucks or so each - or 10 to 15 dollars a cord. I asked him how he chooses the areas, and he pulled out a ring binder with about 200 pages in it and pointed to the wall behind him. "I follow the rules in this book and apply them to all the places people tell me to look. " Then, he has to generate the rules for each sale. I've had wood permits with FIVE PAGES of rules, rules which covered everything from what you can or can't cut down to when in the day you can cut and how to measure the trees and so on and so on.



And I've had them come out and tell me I cut the tree too short (stump too long). He walked 600 yards to his truck, carried a shovel, level, yardstick, and measuring tape. It took him nearly 20 minutes to verify ONE tree. Being on a slope, I actually had to go get MY shovel, dig the dirt away from the stump, and cut INTO THE DIRT with my chainsaw to make him happy. And he stayed there until I was done. Oh, yeah, I was just over 2 inches too tall. He warned me I needed to carry a level and yardstick from now on to avoid citations.



Efficiencies like this are the reason for the USFS losing money. I can't imagine the imense amount of work required to do even a small salvage sale. Surveys, environmental impact, wildlife surveys, scaling (estimates), if it's a select cut or select leave sale, someone has to mark every tree and then inventory ALL of it.



When I say the USFS is out of control and NOT doing it's job... I"m NOT kidding.

 

[illflem]

Originally posted by Power Wagon

When I say the USFS is out of control and NOT doing it's job... I"m NOT kidding.

Well, we all at least agree with that. Even Earth First supports private land corporate logging over the FS.