It’s Past Time to Manage California Forests

Reducing Catastrophic Devastation with Preventive Forest Management

By Patrick Cavanaugh, Editor

In light of the deadly Paradise fire in northern California, along with the other devastating fires in the state over the last 10 years, California Ag Today spoke with Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke about the state’s forests.

Perdue believes that significant losses could have been averted.

“The issue really right now is what are we going to do about it? These are called disasters. Because of the loss of life, wildland fires have been greater than hurricanes this year,” Perdue said. “We’ve had two significant hurricanes, but the death toll is surpassing that. And the interesting thing in this disaster: these are disasters that we can do some things about, and we need to be about doing things … that we can do, but we need the authority to do that.”

Zinke said that officials need to act on good forest management.

“We talked about active forest management for a long time, but you know, talking’s over,” Zinke said. “It’s now time to act.”

Zinke noted common sense forest principles that need to be addressed at once.

“One is to remove the dead and dying trees; to thin and do prescribed burns late in the season rather than midseason,” Zinke explained. “This is fixable. The president’s right, and this is not just one administration—this goes back years of failure to manage our public lands, and it is absolutely a situation that can be mitigated, but we need to act.

Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior

“It is unsustainable and unacceptable that we have the devastation, the loss of life, but we need to prioritize getting back to an active management system. There are other countries that prevent the devastation,” Zinke said. “I spent a lot of time in Germany, which does not have the scale of fire that we experience. There are models of active forest management that are effective, and this is the time to act.”

But Zinke explained that good forest management in California has a big problem: radical environmentalists.

“Take a look at who’s suing. Every time there is a thinning project, who’s suing. Everyone should recognize that the density of dead and dying trees is higher. The density of trees are higher and there are active forest management principles that we should use to mitigate these devastating forest fires,” Zinke said. “However, when there is lawsuit after lawsuit by, yes, the radical environmental groups that would rather burn down the entire forest than cut a single tree or thin the forest. And it’s easy to find who is suing and who has promulgated these destructive policies.”

Zinke said that he does not want to point fingers just at the environmentalists, though.

“There’s a lot of variables: the season’s getting longer, the temperatures are getting hotter. We’ve had historic drought conditions in California, which has lead to dead and dying trees from beetle kill. There is a high density of trees, with enormous underbrush and those things can be mitigated, but we have to get to work,” he explained.

Perdue challenges the radical environmentalists’ desire for an untouched, pristine forest.

“I think that’s been the theory from well-meaning environmentalist over the years: is that a forest that you did nothing to was pristine,” Perdue said. “We know that’s not to be the case. It gets undergrowth. It gets where you don’t have good recreational activity, poor hiking, poor access or wildlife growth and access, water quality, all those kind of things. It’s not pristine, and that’s the issue that we’re trying to bring up. A well managed, well-groomed forest is always better for all of those kinds of issues.”

Sonny Perdue, Secretary of Agriculture

A well-managed forest provides economy and jobs for rural communities as needed, but wildlife, the recreational aspect, the hiking, the water quality, all those also improve with well-managed forests.

“I think some environmentalists are coming around to that to that way of thinking, I think even some environmentalists realize they’ve overreached and [are] keeping management out of these forests, but we need more to come along, and we need the lawsuits to stop,” Perdue said.

Zinke said public land is for the benefit and the enjoyment of all people and not special interest groups.

“And what we’re seeing in the last decade [is] that special interest groups are really exercising their very tight agenda. The result has been a buildup of fuels coupled with droughts, and with increased density of dead and dying trees, as well as beetle kill. And so the condition of our forest as we look at them today, are not healthy—and they are a threat to populations like, like Paradise, and we can do better,” Zinke explained.

“I think the solution is looking at models that are effective, using best science, best practices, and certainly having more authority or we don’t have to go through an entire Environmental Impact Report (EIS) to cut a single tree,” Zinke said.

And that’s exactly what Zinke had to do when he was a congressman in Montana.

“[As] a former congressman, I sponsored the bill to allow a power company to remove vegetation in a prescribed easement. And it took an act of Congress to move the bill through. But is still gave 60 days for a notification before the power company could remove what was called an imminent danger tree. This is a tree that’s going to fall on the power lines, no doubt … it has a potential of starting a forest fire, but it still took 60 days of notification for a power company to have the authority to remove a single tree in a prescribed easement, he said.

Zinke noted that there are a number of legislative fixes, and some of them can be in the Farm Bill.

“We need more authority to have category exclusions, to do the right thing and take a common sense approach so we don’t have to go through year after year of these 100,000-acre-plus fires that are enormously destructive,” Zinke said.

The massive fires put our firefighters and our communities at risk.

“I do think that America is waking up, and sees that we can manage these forest using best practices, and best science,” Zinke said.

“We should be able to manage our forests. And when nature alone takes this course without management .. it has consequences, and those consequences, unfortunately, have led to entire communities being destroyed and a tremendous amount of loss of life. We can do better and we should,” Zinke explained.

2021-05-12T11:05:07-07:00November 28th, 2018|

Farmer Kable Munger Expands Operations to Other Countries

Fed up With California, Some Farmers are Relocating to Other Countries

By Patrick Cavanaugh

Kable Munger of Delano-based Monarch Farms is fed up with the man-made drought and over-regulations in California.

“We farm and process about 800 acres of pistachios, and we are one of the owners of Naturipe, which is the world’s largest producer and marketer of blueberries. We’ve always farmed in California until the last five or six years with the water situation, the regulations on water and other regulations, we have been expanding into Mexico and South America because that is where we can do what we want to do as farmers,” said Munger.

“In those countries, people understand that we are doing a service for them and not just taking away,” said Munger.

“Even on the environmental side, people have the misconception that farmers are not taking care of the environment; but in fact, it is just the opposite,” noted Munger. “If we didn’t have all this farming and all these trees, how do we get clean air? And we are good stewards of the water, most of California is using drip irrigation, we are conserving water, we are doing all that is asked of us. The problem, I think is in the urban areas, people don’t understand what we are doing and where the food comes from.”

In the other countries where they operate, “They look at us as providing a service, providing food,” Munger said.

“Here in the states, food’s been fairly cheap and readily available, so I think the public is losing respect for where the food comes from and its value. And also I think that as a country we are losing sight of what food security should be. We should be able to grow our own food. When you go to countries that don’t grow their own food, they understand what that means,” said Munger.

“In these other countries, you don’t have the same regulations, the labor is much cheaper, and it is a much easier place to do business. They understand that we are all stewards of the environment, and they do not think that a fish is more important than humans,” noted Munger.

“When you look at the water in California, over 60% goes to the ocean. There is really not a water shortage; it is all political.”

“We need to build more dams for the times when there is enough rain to capture it. But anytime we start to build a dam, there is some spider or something else in the way. We have to realize that the world existed all these years without someone protecting it, and we need to protect it, and we can do it in a reasonable way. But what the environmentalists are doing right now is not reasonable.”

“If you really look at the U.S., what have we really done in infrastructure since World War II? How man dams have we built? How many freeways have we built? Over time, we do something that will help the economy, but it has all stopped. For example, they say ‘we don’t want you to do this.’ They go to build a project, for example, a solar project, and they stop it because they say the sunrays will hurt the bird’s eyes. There’s nothing we can say to please them.”

”I was in China in a few days ago, and there was this bridge, 19 miles over the ocean, and I asked, ‘when did they start it?’ They answered, ‘Oh, in about one and half years. ‘I asked: ‘Did it take them 18-19 months to get permits, and they said, ‘no, it took us that long to build a bridge over the ocean.”

“We’re in Chile. Twenty years ago, Chile was off the radar. There was hardly anything coming out of Chile. Now Chile is the second largest ag producer, and the largest producer in the off-season, and feeds the world. It is a major exporter. Now Peru, they’ve changed their policies. Now the whole world is flocking to Peru. The public is so comfortable that they do not even realizing how much ground we are losing.”

 

2016-05-31T19:30:30-07:00February 20th, 2015|
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