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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, August 03, 2007

Them's That Can, Do; Them's That Can't, Complain 

...this may be, by geography, an Oregon blog, but I am, by birth, an Idaho boy, so issues that pertain to the state in which I spent my first 22 years still tend to capture my attention. Criticism by the current Idaho Governor and its two U. S. Senators of the manner in which Bureau of Land Management personnel handled the collection of lightning-strike fires that became known as the Murphy Complex on the Idaho/Nevada border is one of those things...

To be honest, it also caught my eye because of my background. I have spent over 30 years in natural resource management and have - in my younger, healthier days - spent my share of time fighting wildland fires. It is hot, grueling, dangerous work, and at the decision-making level (especially in the early hours after a fire start, before the fancy regional or national Incident Command teams show up in their matching logo’ed hats and t-shirts with all their marvelous resources) it is the closest that you might be able to get to the feeling of ‘the fog of war’ without actually being shot at....and there are some places in the Intermountain West where that might happen if you read your map wrong in the vicinity of private property. Information can be fragmentary and sometimes incorrect; crews and equipment end up in places other than where they were supposed to be; rapidly changing burning conditions may not be detected soon enough to warn the people on the ground; resources you didn’t order are lined up around the block and resources you did order are nowhere to be found; a whole coop full of decapitated chickens would in comparison look like the epitome of reason and calm . During those times when conditions lead to extreme fire behavior even at night - such as this year - making decisions that lean toward safety as opposed to aggressively attacking the fire can seem to be mismanagement even though they are made to keep people from being put into situations that get them burned to death under these sorts of circumstances...

Of course there were locals with bulldozers ready to charge off and build tractor lines to hell and back. There usually are, especially on range-land fires where there are private ranches interspersed with public land. The reason they are usually told to “stay put” is because they A) don’t have any better understanding of or training in wildfire behavior than your average man on the street and represent the most likely source for banner “Firefighter Dies” headlines in the local newspaper and B) will probably cause more environmental and physical damage than the fire as they roar up hill and down dale, through creeks and meadows and riparian areas and ancient Native American burial sites in the seat of Ol’ Bessie in their zeal to “show those Feds” and get the fire put Dead Out like Smokey wants...

This is almost like an instant replay of the bovine behavior of a certain - happily - former Republican US Senator from Montana who was saved from the butt-whuppin’ of his life from a fire crew that he chose to criticize in a Billings, Montana, airport last summer for their work only because their superior maturity trumped the arrogance of Republican US Senators. I have checked, and I can again if necessary, and as far as I can tell there isn’t a single instance where a sitting governor or United States Senator has burned to death while fighting a wildland fire. I haven’t actually found much evidence that members of either of those groups actually has credible experience even fighting wildland fires, and there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that any of them have actual experience applying the principles expressed in the Standard Firefighting Orders and Watchout Situations under circumstances where people might burn to death if they screw up. Craig, Crapo, and Otter are, however, well versed in craven servitude to the constituency that contributes to their campaigns and gets them elected. They won’t criticized the firefighters on the ground - they saw how that panned out last year for Conrad Burns - but they will criticize what they think is a safe target: people who have to make difficult moment-by-moment decisions and live with the personal pain and possible criminal prosecution for making decisions that might get someone burned to death....

Criticism of the management of wildland fires that go big isn’t a new thing; it’s usually the locals who are there to say “we were ready to go but they wouldn’t let us”. It is a bit of a twist this time to criticize the refusal to let grazing permittees graze rangeland vegetation down nearly to dirt as part of the reason for the fire (although for decades one of the arguments for grazing was to reduce the rangeland fire danger, even though there are a host of counter-arguments couched in history, physical science, and biology to that particular proposition). Most of all, the criticism from Craig, Crapo, and Otter is based in short-term economics because of the loss of grazing opportunities for this year, not on any actual failing of fire managers or their actual decisions with regard to the long-term health of rangeland ecosystems. The most deliciously ironic aspect to this particular story is that the defense of the actions of fire managers is being offered by Secretary of Interior Dirk Kempthorne....

That would be Dirk Kempthorne, fellow University of Idaho alum, former Mayor of Boise, former Idaho Governor, and Former United States Senator from the Great State of Idaho...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:21 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Pots and Kettles, Ver. 2.01 

...you don't have to travel very far in today's political landscape to find national Republican leaders trying desperately to recapture the glory days of their youth when life was good and they were the Masters of all that they surveys from atop their tall, strong, masculine legs at the peak of the Mountain of Political Power. The election in 2006 proved to them that elections have consequences, but one consequence that they haven't apparently come to grips with yet is that people have a capability of memory that is superior to planaria or what other simple invertebrate creatures to which they have equated the voting population. The response to the ethics reform bill that Democrats successfully passed in the House today is a perfect example:
A number of Senate Republicans, whose party controlled Congress much of the past decade (my emphasis), have complained the measure does not go far enough, but a Senate aide said most Republicans appeared to support it.

Well, by golly, there is an interesting point, isn't there? The Republican has held the keys to every door in government since January of 2001 and, more to the point, has generally been in charge of the legislative branch for over 10 years!!! Instead of actually standing up and doing something about ethical issues over all this time, Republicans have stylized themselves as some super-species of legislative humaniod ant with the appropriation process playing the role of aphid, as they milked it for every bit of money and political advantage that they possibly could. Democrats, to be sure, had their own hand in the public till (let us all clutch our proper Republican string of pearls at the thought of William Jefferson (D-Louisiana) and his frozen tinfoil blocks of cash and....uh...anybody else? Ok, so never mind...), but the Repub's were in charge of the process and the means to change the process...

They didn't.

To say now that the Democratic plan passed in the House somehow falls short is a bizarre but typically classic example of the degree of disrespect that Republican officials have for the American people. To them, we are dumber than cattle, and more easily managed and hygenic because we don't view the entire world as our bathroom, unlike your typical Holstein. They honestly believe that we won't understand that they had 3 election cycles to fix this problem and did nothing about it, and that we will nod our heads in bovine understanding and concordance as they trash the current Congressional majority for "not going far enough"...

One of the reasons that you should probably get all of your US political news from Reuters is highlighted subtly in the quote above. They 'get it' on this story just like they seem to 'get it' more often than any of our own media. The phrase "...whose party controlled Congress much of the past decade..." is a rather clean, tight little shot across the bow, reminding folks that all those patches of freshly shovelled dirt scattered across the political landscape probably indicate where a lot of bodies are actually buried. The Republicans had a number of years to 'fix' those very problems that have made their criminal convictions and the searches of the unindicted's homes, offices, wine cellars, checking accounts, and spouses Potemkin Village businesses all the news over the last few months, but they didn't. To complain that the Democrats aren't being sufficiently diligent now transcends the commonly understood boundaries of absurdity...

That's probably why we should keep Republicans around after the 2008 election. Somebody has to provide the moments of comedy relief...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:32 PM 0 comments

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