Wildfire Management
From the Ag Information Network, I’m Bob Larson with today’s Fruit Grower Report. Wildfires are filling our news with stories and our air with smoke this summer, while farmers across the state are worried about their harvests.
Save Family Farming’s Dillon Honcoop says years of calling for better forest management appears to have fallen on deaf ears …
HONCOOP … “The land is not being managed the way it used to be. There’s a reason why we’re seeing more wild, more devastating wildfires than we’ve seen in the past.”
But Honcoop says fires happen, it’s a fact of life …
HONCOOP … “A lot of people wanted to talk about climate change. Is that a contributor? It’s somewhere on the list, but we didn’t suddenly, magically pass some kind of threshold. You know, even if we’ve gone up a couple of degrees, and people will go back and forth on what warming really is or not. That’s not sparking these fires. It’s not causing them to spread so huge. It’s just not that big of a contributor, nearly as much as how this land is being managed, or as we’re pointing out, not being managed.”
The focus is skewed, Honcoop says and it’s not based on science …
HONCOOP … “People cherry-pick the science to try to back it up, but really it’s a religion of no touch, of let it go back to nature. Then it ignores the fact that we are dealing with managed systems at some level.”
This, as the U.S. Forest Service proposes rescinding the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which restricts forest management practices across more than 44 million acres of national forests.
