Clearcuts, Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Every Creation of Nature that inhabits a public forest governed by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) or Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is being systematically displaced, seriously harmed, and murdered in cold blood by federal government agents.
Bulldozing roads and clearcutting our public forests is incredibly barbaric. Please try to imagine the homes of pine squirrels, pygmy owls, goshawks, or migratory, interior forest songbirds raising their young in a native forest being clearcut, masticated (mechanized pulverizing of trees and brush into “mulch”), and/or burned alive. Only scorched bare earth remains.
Government forest management operates like a plantation and land-management corporation. The U.S. empire was built to dominate and exploit, not coexist. Empire’s planned collapse is now in full liquidation mode, on the ‘downlow,’ but directed and relentless.
Federal and state agents and their paid collaborators in local government, industry, and Big Green corporations (controlled opposition) all march in lockstep to a legal concept I call Presumption of Management. Presumption of management conditions (brainwashes) managers (predominantly bureaucrats, foresters, and civil road engineers) and directors (politicians who write forest management laws) to believe they are acting in the best interests of the common good and public shareholders. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Presumption of management aims to preserve artificial (man’s imaginative fictions) and commercial decisions made by those in charge. In this Alice in Wonderland world of destruction and death, forest management contains no moral consideration whatsoever or any substance of the Natural Processes of Creation and Renewal.
In 1905, the management of the forest reserves (renamed national forests in 1907) was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture, which instituted our corporation nation’s colonial, utilitarian and commercial concerns. Our nation’s plantations were carved out of wilderness and expanded with criminal intent as expressed in behavioral patterns of bad faith, self-interest, reckless intent to deceive, acting beyond their regulatory authority, and blatant conflict of interest. Racketeering, corruption, and gross mismanagement is now practiced uniformly across hundreds of million acres of federal public land with relative impunity.
“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.”
– Michael Corleone, The Godfather.
Right now, all of Nature, all of God’s Creation, is in a state of alienation when compared to government’s clear intent and actions. Instinctively, government feels it must conquer (recreate names and purchase) all of God’s Creation by naming each part with legal names (nouns) and titles (nouns).
“Forest Health” (noun)
National public forests are not sick. However, they have sustained serious injury caused by madmen and their machines. “Forest health” is a legal term of art of man’s imagination, or in other words, a euphemism used to justify clearcutting, thinning (exploiting) old growth forests and bulldozing roads into untrammeled forest land that has not yet been domesticated and usurped into government’s failed commercial tree plantation operations. Or in other words, machines and monsters kill the native forest to convert it to a perpetually managed monoculture. Killing it again and again ensures that every square inch of Nature’s Forest is dead and gone, forever domesticated (managed).
Falsification and omission of key research and historical fire frequency data has buttressed the government’s psychotic passion for mechanical forest torture and sterilization.[1]
This demonstrates how government is only a dead thing (noun) and necromancer extraordinaire, which worships destruction, sterilization, blood sacrifice and exploitation of the dead to gain power over the Living. Government is never a Living Being (verb). It creates no life. It is important to understand that when Nature’s verb is nouned, it’s enslaved/subjected by its man-made name to a new, fictitious (virtual) status as a thing. It becomes (legally) lifeless property, flatteringly (insincere) titled commercial property.
“Restoration” (noun)
Restoration, commonly defined as renewal, revival, re-establishment, or recovery, is another commonly abused noun, which implies a directed government management action of returning colonized/domesticated, mismanaged forestland to a former, arbitrarily selected, static condition. Presumption of management cannot fathom Nature’s infinite, incredibly powerful restorative process (verb). Government’s insistence on domination and dominion over all living beings is the principle belief (foundational source) driving this 21st-Century, secular-technocratic Death Cult. Western “civilization” can no longer conceive of Nature’s life-sustaining powers or its supremacy in all matters of Creation and Renewal.
“(Conifer) Encroachment” (noun)
To the 21st-Century descendants of early western settler-colonialists, conifer encroachment is perceived as a threat to the commercial production of livestock (meat).
Encroachment is another example of government’s obsession with killing natural processes by nouning Nature’s verb. The BLM and USFS are at war with conifers which are entering gradually and quite naturally onto domesticated government plantation lands, specifically categorized, and renamed “range or rangeland” (noun).
This colonization process is better understood by simply revealing the nature of the East-India Company of Great Britain, the same corporation that colonized America. Not much has changed since Plymouth, Pemaquid Point and Jamestown first seized land to establish corporate colonies along the Atlantic coast.
Encroaching conifers threaten the imagined, so-called, man-made rights or possessions of God’s chosen elite and the federal government flunkies, which both see naturally expanding conifer forests, not as a gift from God, but rather as Nature’s unlawful intrusion into territories legally stolen at gunpoint from free and sovereign American Indian nations.
Range/Rangeland (noun)
The term “range,” and later “rangeland,” was first used (1870s-1900s) to describe the vast open spaces of the American West. Rangelands are primarily natural ecosystems with native vegetation of diverse habitat types, including natural grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, wetlands, and deserts that support domestic and/or wild grazing and browsing mammals – and a multitude of other lifeforms that are never mentioned. Rangeland is all about meat!
Juniper and pinyon pine are being burned (murdered) mercilessly in the arid and semi-arid Rocky Mountain region to expand livestock herds that graze prairie ecosystems down to the dirt at below-market rates on BLM and USFS lands.[2]
Agencies and pseudo-green collaborators almost never acknowledge the cumulative consequences of multiple management actions (“treatments”) on the whole ecosystem. Severe ecological harm to natural ecosystems can ultimately lead to deforestation and desertification.
Fire
Clearcut logging and thinning large, mature trees to reduce the severity of wildfires at some time in the future often has the opposite effect by creating drier conditions, increasing fast-drying fine fuels, and opening the forest to high winds that drive fast moving wildfires – the ones everyone is most fearful of. It’s almost as if the government is doing everything in its power to encourage “catastrophic” fires so agencies can leverage mass fearmongering into congressional appropriations for bigger and bigger fire-suppression budgets.
Prescribed burns, the latest and perhaps the greatest government management “tool,” sterilizes Nature’s sacred landscapes, diminishes ecological integrity by reducing forest ecosystems to ashes. Biological diversity is incrementally destroyed one man-made fire at a time, the same way eugenicists covertly reduce human populations. Bulldozing roads and firebreaks into the remaining roadless forests fragments landscapes, reduces habitat quality and quantity and depletes diverse wildlife and fish populations. Extinction is the feature, not an unintended consequence.
The cumulative impacts of clearcut logging, burning, livestock overgrazing, road building, motorized recreation and mountain bike use are seldom taken seriously or analyzed cumulatively by federal land managers or Congress.
It’s beyond ignorant to destroy the last functioning native prairie and forest ecosystems just to save a few random homes from fire and grow more government-subsidized meat. Our western landscapes need more protection, not more Presumption of Management, which always generates great ecological harm and a tremendous loss of net public value which Nature has provided for millennia for free.
Nothing western colonizers say can be trusted. They never let go of the future prospect of managing their possession. Domination and exploitation of land and murdering all native lifeforms is their business, their only business. Our publicly owned western landscapes will only be free when “The West” can no longer operate with impunity destroying the native ecosystems and sacred landscapes upon which all of Creation depends.
What can an individual do?
Free our national public forests and prairies. Resist don’t collaborate. Dissent (verb) vs. the Death Cults (noun)! Remember, someday you will be the ancestor young people will come to with questions about the meaning of life. Imagine now, what will you tell them?
Steve Kelly is an artist, gardener, and environmental activist living in Bozeman, Montana.
Notes.
1. See: Baker, William L., et al. “Countering Omitted Evidence of Variable Historical Forests and Fire Regime in Western USA Dry Forests: The Low-Severity-Fire Model Rejected.” Fire, vol. 6, no. 4, 2023 ↑
2. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-30/bureau-of-land-management-deforestation-pinyon-juniper-great-basin ↑
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