Western Fires Fueled by Emerging Earth Religion

Ironically, as horrible as the Western fires have been this season, the damage has been made worse by environmentalists and earth-focused US Forest Service personnel who have created a nightmare for those trying to fight the fire. Every night Americans have witnessed over 6.6 million acres of Western Forests burning in living color. While it is true 2000 is one of the worst fire seasons in over 50 years, 6.6 million acres did not have to burn. In a very real sense, the pagan earth-centered religion of many U.S. Forest Service and environmentalists caused the destruction of nature in their mindless effort in saving it.

Earth-based fire fighting is lunacy

On Friday, September 1, the Washington Times reported that environmentalists are crippling efforts to extinguish fires. "At Clear Creek, [Idaho}, they stopped the whole fire line to look at sensitive plants to make sure proper riparian and stream management was followed," said one fire fighter. The US Forest Service shut down the entire fire fighting effort for up to two days while environmentalists within and without the service argued whether fire fighting techniques might harm the environment.

In one case, said the Times, "firefighter Charlie Parke said federal officials are also reluctant to drag the chopped wood out of the fire areas [to starve the fire of fuel] because environmentalists are accusing them of logging the burned areas." (italics added for emphasis) This ludicrous policy would be laughable if so much damage was not being done and so many Americans hurt.

In what can only be described as lunacy, Forest Service policy led to decisions to stop pumping water from streams to fight the fire because "too much water" is being taken and the trout may be harmed. Never mind that when the fire inevitably reaches the stream, the stream boils the water and all the fish with it. In personal interviews with local residents by Discerning the Times, complaints also included decisions by the Forest Service to give the last word to wildlife specialists over highly trained fire bosses, and forbidding fire retardants to be dropped in fear of polluting streams that were soon to be choked with ash and silt from blacked slopes.

Perhaps the most devastating decisions that were made were those to pull firefighters off the fire at night because it is "too dangerous," when any hope of containing a fire when it is still relatively small is to beat it back in the still, humid night air. Discerning the Times Digest's editor, Dr. Michael Coffman, has fought several major Western forest fires, and claims these decisions almost guarantee major catastrophic fires when aggressive firefighting action could have contained many of these fires.

Coffman is not alone. "Once the fire starts and you...put all these caveats on what fire bosses can do and what equipment is used you just tie the hands of the professionals," claims Cy Jamison, former director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under President Bush. There is, Jamison noted, "a lot of pent-up anger" about Clinton administration policies that have "tried to manage forests like pre-European times … you can’t do that. They have sat on their hands for the last eight years."

Seventy-five year-old Montana farmer Don Shearer "sparred with the Forest Service recently when a fire broke out on his private property and an official ordered Mr. Shearer to stop fighting the fire because he was not following safety regulations." Shearer ignored the threat, telling the bureaucrat: "Get … out of my way, I have work to do." Assisted by his son and local volunteer firefighters, "they were able to draw a fire line and stop the fire on his property." But "while Mr. Shearer was fighting the fire on one end on his property the fire was left unattended by federal officials on the other side and the fire escaped...." Discerning the Times Digest was told by local residents that Shearer was threatened with arrest by the FBI if he did not cease and desist from fighting the fire on his own property.

Clinton polices guarantees disaster

This earth-centered tragedy is not confined to the U.S. Forest Service and BLM. This sickness goes right to the top. On August 22, the Washington Times reported that the Clinton administration sliced more than $100 million from the Bureau of Land Management’s fire preparedness budget, even as it boosted the agency’s land acquisition budget by $11 million so they can mismanage even more of America’s resources. President Clinton has already put millions of acres into National Monuments that can never be managed again, and is withdrawing roads from 40 million acres of federal land, permitting dead fuel to accumulate and making it nearly impossible to effectively fight the inevitable fires that will result from his "environmental" legacy.

Even as Clinton attempts to blame mother nature for the crisis, Montana’s Governor Marc Racicot’s offered a blistering condemnation of Clinton’s tactics. "The Clinton administration didn’t cause these fires, but their policies have left the Forest Service under-funded and under-prepared for this crisis," he told the August 12th New York Times. "I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, but it’s a philosophy they have that leads to explosive fires that destroy everything." Thirty fires ravaged more than 630,000 acres in Montana, demolishing much of the state’s resource-based economy.

Governor Racicot is among many who have warned for years that federal forest management policies were creating conditions for apocalyptic wildfires. "As long ago as 1992," reports the September 26 New American, "Racicot had warned officials from the Forest Service and BLM that forced reductions in the timber harvest were creating a dangerous accumulation of fuel."

Bill Clinton, [Dept. of Interior] Secretary Babbitt, and Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck — "are caught in a rigid ideological bind that has prevented them from taking effective fire preventive action for the past seven years," asserts Dr. Nelson of the University of Maryland, a former Interior Department official.

This tragedy is the future of global governance and its earth-based religion. Lead by the Earth Charter and all the interlocking environmental treaties that are in effect or will soon be, this kind of lunacy will direct all land management activities around the world. The old saying, "The inmates will be in charge of the prison," is rapidly becoming fact as a totally unaccountable world government and religion becomes a reality. V mc