The Left's National Forest Reichstag Fires

Regarding the big wildfires in the American West this year:

A number of them are attributed to "pyroterrorism".  It's actually a real thing: USFS and other federal agencies have been holding training sessions and meetings about pyroterrorism at a more & more feverish pace the past few years...

Why?

Because jihadi groups have discovered that American forests have become supremely vulnerable -- and as a consequence, they can cost the US lives and billions -- for the price of a cellphone, a few ounces of gasoline, and a few matches.
 
The idea is not new: Hamas has been torching Israeli farm fields and nature reserves for many years in similar ways; and there is mounting evidence that the disastrous fires in Greece this year were largely a result of Turk and Muslim pyroterrorists who snuck into Greece alongside refugees & immigrants.

What's new, though, is that these extremists in America have begun training in remote-activated incendiary devices designed to ignite fires in fire-prone areas (think IED's for Smokey Bear).

Plus, stupid people are always around.

So why are American forest and grasslands are increasingly vulnerable?

One reason is that federal land policy has gotten trapped by lawsuits (many of which are funded by the forced "investment" by American taxpayers via the EAJA -- in other words a wholesale wealth transfer from taxpayers to the lawyer-industrial complex) which have done much to shut down logging on forests “managed” by the federal government, together with environmental activist political pressure to stop forest "management".   Land managers are increasingly restricted from setting up prescribed / controlled burns to eliminate fuel.  Nor can they contract out to resource (eg logging) companies to clear overgrown areas.

Besides the external pressure towards ignoring management, there is internal inertia trending in the same direction: older forest managers who understood that American forests and open land were supposed to be for a balance of uses, including recreation, wild areas, logging, mining, and drilling, and so on, are gradually being replaced by a newer generation of land managers who are increasingly opposed to any uses other than recreation -- or, better yet: human-prohibited wild space.

So a perfect storm is building bigger and bigger every year -- with increasingly devastating wildland fires as the predictable result.

Common sense says global warming isn't global if it's local.  However, environmentalists and their leftist brethren are now peddling the idea that global warming can occur in one small region, which is absurd.  Nevertheless it is the "logic" behind claims that local heat records are evidence of global warming.  This is how environmentalists play their game.

Suppose those of us who are not alarmists do the same?  Let's try it:

"Arsonist forest fires are definitely a sign that Man’s activities has increased local temperatures – as much as 800-1000 degrees C. If environmentalists' opposition to sensible forest management contributes to this 800 degree rise in the local temperature, they should pay for the damages they've caused."

That’s the way, right?

If, by your actions, you create conditions that result in the destruction of property, which includes causing "local" ... er... "global" warming by 800 degrees, then you can expect to bear the consequences in law and liberty:

Pay up, y'all.

But the real solution is to get politics out of the environment (and insurance), and thenceforth to protect property rights.

The fed should sell off the millions of acres it owns to the highest bidder, and from that point on, allow property owners to provide for the protection and management of their property.  How they do so will be managed by their insurers.  Such a regime will encourage proper management of forest resources and the mitigation of harmful practices.

Libertarians have called for the abolition of the BLM, USFS, NPS, and other alphabet-soup bureaucracies, and the wholesale privatization of government property.  We also call for the abolition of welfare for lawyers and political activists who profit endlessly by suing government.  If governments didn't own property, taxpayers wouldn't be left holding the bag on both sides of every argument over the environment.

------------------------------------------------------------

Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, August, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

------------------------------------------------------------
For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
------------------------------------------------------------