Roadless Rule Attack in the Senate

[Harvey_NW]

So why don't we address the maintenance backlog on the already existing roads first before adding this huge workload to agencies that are already underfunded? If this was truly about wildfire prevention, they wouldn't be trying to starve the FS and other relevant agencies while adding an enormous workload for them. If you're for this because you want to be able to drive all over the forests then I can at least understand your perspective...but let's not pretend the politicians supporting this amendment really care about YOUR access. They want it open for commercial use.They've given us example after example the last several years they have no appreciation for our forests and wild places.

I agree with the first part of your statement, but see it the opposite with the last portion. I'm not saying we need to go punch a bunch of new roads in, but right now (in WA) there are hundreds of thousands of acres of unmanaged and overgrown forest, with plenty of closed roads already there, because they STOPPED commercial use. If they fire back up, the forest gets managed and thinned, animals come back, and the public has access.

 

[RockAndSage]

This is super common in our untouched areas. What thrives in this besides worms.View attachment 1079031

Fires.

Fires that burn the soil in such an inferno that it decomposes everything down to bear mineral earth, spread through crown fires that race across the tops of the forest at tens or hundreds of miles per hour.

 

[Marbles]

Fires.

Fires that burn the soil in such an inferno that it decomposes everything down to bear mineral earth, spread through crown fires that race across the tops of the forest at tens or hundreds of miles per hour.

You know, it is funny because a good fire is one that burns down to bear earth. At least up here they will give 30 years of good browse (10-40 years after).

I'm using it exactly as intended.

Those who want to kill off hunting are the same people funding and orchestrating roadless rules - and they're the same people funding and orchestrating wolf reintroductions and anti-gun laws.

They always push these things while wearing a mask of benevolence.

Because it suckers in the Karens and "useful idiots" at the local level - by convincing them they're all just being good people. It's the very definition of how you manipulate useful idiots - just organize them from behind a mask of benevolence.

Each of these issues is simply a salami-slice approach along tentacles that reach back to the same root ideology. Google any of the ones mentioned and add in "Agenda 2030" or the Tides Foundation, and you'll find their leadership and money are all interconnected. And the higher you get from the local Karens, the more intense and narrow those connections become.

The people who advocate for turning every inch of land into industrial production are the ones trying to scrap the roadless rule. They use useful idiots to propagate their propaganda while intending to strip everything. There agenda is to make you utterly dependent on corporations for everything, a Jim Crow for all social structure, while they sell our resources to China.

At least that is as accurate as your position.

 

[akhunter3]

The number of folks who think this bill is actually meant to help the common person access govt held lands is astounding.

Do you all sleep through what happens in Congress these days? They have no intention of helping the citizens- this is a more easily palatable way to push big commercial interests into public lands and move towards selling that land for future data centers, or whatever the current land-needing commodity is from the private sector.

Simple, basic research into previous bills pushed by the folks supporting this one should make it very clear.

 

[Blowdowner]

How will this impact hunters Please explain why hunters should oppose this legislation. The text of the proposed change doesn't make it clear to me.

Your arguments in favor are mostly true. Sometimes fire prevention is bundled with timber harvest that's not really justified for example in areas where dense stands of timber extremely rare and harvesting them is going to screw game animals for thermal cover.

But the real argument against it is if you're very young and healthy, or you have kids who are they should be able to launch on a long distance expedition on foot without some old dude beating them to the spot in a pick up truck.

 

[dreamingbig]

How will this impact hunters in a negative way? Doesn't it allow the FS to put in roads to allow more timber harvest, more thinning and controlled burns, and therefore provide more access for hunters? Timber harvest, thinning and controlled burns create a more diverse landscape, a landscape that more closely mimics a natural state where fire brings renewal and diversity of flora, benefiting a multitude of fauna. Controlled burns in the west are also a major tool to limit the spread of the western pine bark beetle. Please explain why hunters should oppose this legislation. The text of the proposed change doesn't make it clear to me.

Increased vehicle presence on public lands will move animals to private land sanctuaries.

They don’t want roads for the public. They want to be able to convert to private resource extraction and not for the tax payers benefit. It will end up in the pockets of a few and mostly offshore.


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[RockAndSage]

But the real argument against it is if you're very young and healthy, or you have kids who are they should be able to launch on a long distance expedition on foot without some old dude beating them to the spot in a pick up truck.

This is an argument that our national public lands should be the sole preserve of the young, fit, and healthy. It is an anti-access argument.

It gets even more grotesque when faced with the reality that 89% of my state is government-controlled land, along with several other of our Western states at that level.

 

[RockAndSage]

They want to be able to convert to private resource extraction and not for the tax payers benefit. It will end up in the pockets of a few and mostly offshore.

Can you point to the US Government-owned mining companies, forestry companies, and oil companies, please?

Because until you can do that, private companies are the only ones doing this work - while paying taxes to do it. The public does benefit from that - at a societal level - in far greater numbers than anyone benefits from roadless forests. Especially when entire regions of states are closed off to anyone not healthy, young, and fit enough to hoof it into what was not, before, "backcountry".

This romanticized bull$h*t about untouched lands needs to stop.

The only people who benefit from those lands are the rare few who can and want to enter the "wilderness" on foot - and those organizations who want all lands not in a city to be untouched by human hands.

Unless you want our foundational supply chain resources controlled almost entirely by off-shore suppliers, we need to be doing this work in the US. If you don't want our forests obliterated by raging wildfires we need to manage them.

Public resources are not the preserve of special people - they are the preserve of our entire society, even those who don't hike or backcountry hunt. If you want "untouched", fly to Alaska, or buy a ranch.

 

[rafiki]

it's possible to accomplish both things (manage forests/protect roadless areas).
the broad roadless repeal language is dangerous as is. it should be removed from the bill.
if it is to remain, they need to include some guard rails:
-no disposition of federal lands,
-prevent new roads/fire treatment as evidence that an area has lost its conservation value,
-no loss of public access,
-focus work on actual fire risk reduction in areas near communities instead of opening roadless areas to commercial use,
-etc.
if roads for fire management are truly needed, the bill needs to be narrowed and only allow for what is needed for real fire risk reduction while making it harder to sell public lands and simultanesously preventing habitat fragmentation/loss of public access/permanent road expansion.

given Lee's past efforts, i have a hard time seeing this repeal purely as a requisite for fire prevention.

 

[RockAndSage]

it's possible to accomplish both things (manage forests/protect roadless areas).
the broad roadless repeal language is dangerous as is. it should be removed from the bill.
if it is to remain, they need to include some guard rails:
-no disposition of federal lands,
-prevent new roads/fire treatment as evidence that an area has lost its conservation value,
-no loss of public access,
-focus work on actual fire risk reduction in areas near communities instead of opening roadless areas to commercial use,
-etc.
if roads for fire management are truly needed, the bill needs to be narrowed and only allow for what is needed for real fire risk reduction while making it harder to sell public lands and simultanesously preventing habitat fragmentation/loss of public access/permanent road expansion.

given Lee's past efforts, i have a hard time seeing this repeal purely as a requisite for fire prevention.

In general, a lot of what you're saying is reasonable and agreeable. One distinction I draw a hard line at though, is whether something has always been "roadless" vs whether it had roads that were closed and left to nature from the 1990s onward - those are not roadless. They are closed roads. And that's what's making forest management and hunting harder. Nothing following those same older roads, re-establishing them or rehabilitating them, is a "new road". And if a fire incident requires a "new road", as deemed by the incident commander, that would need to be permitted. But the genuinely rare, Congressionally-established Wilderness tracts of land that have always been roadless, leave them roadless unless permitted by Congress. A huge part of the problem with all of this, has been Executive Branch rulemaking that was never authorized by our national representatives.

As far as "habitat fragmentation", 95% of the time it's red-herring of complete dishonesty by those wielding it as an ideological weapon - especially when things like selective cutting actually create more food opportunity for big game. It's not the kind of thing that a faceless bureaucrat put in power by any given administration should have the power to declare.

 

[RockAndSage]

You know, it is funny because a good fire is one that burns down to bear earth. At least up here they will give 30 years of good browse (10-40 years after).

There's a terminology distinction here. Fire-adapted forests need fire to burn off the duff and brush on top of the soil that starts choking things out, but not burn so hot or so high that it gets into tree branches. That's why conifers drop their lowest branches as they grow, leaving feet of nothing but hard-to-burn bark. Their seeds even are fire-adapted, with a wax coating that literally needs to be melted off by fire.

The "bare mineral earth" I'm referring to is a wildland firefighting rule - when clearing a fireline, you leave nothing but bare mineral earth that cannot burn or carry a smolder further underneath and into what you're protecting.

These fires that rage through unmanaged forests burn everything right down to bare mineral earth - the reason this is bad is because it destroys the topsoil. Especially the organic matter that fertilizes everything, and even more importantly, the fungal/mycological ecosystem that healthy soils require.

It essentially sterilizes everything, instead of refreshing it like normal fires would.

What does come back, at first, is deer food...and then it chokes off the landscape and makes it far harder for a healthy forest to return. The mycological ecosystems can take decades to recover - and that matters immensely for tree health.