Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
News Story Falsely Claims “Everything is Dead” One Year After Yosemite Fire
Year-old AP article that Misrepresented US Forest Service Scientists and the Impact of the 2013 Rim Fire is Released as “News” by CBS Affiliate
SAN DIEGO, Calif. – The CBS affiliate in Sacramento, California, recycled a sensationalized 2013 Associated Press news article this week with a new headline that falsely claimed “1 Year Later, Scientists Find Yosemite Rim Fire Left Behind a Sierra Moonscape.” The US Forest Service, scientists, and environmental groups called for the article to be withdrawn immediately.
“It’s hardly a moonscape,” said Robert Guy, Research Associate for the California Chaparral Institute. “The post-fire environment within the Rim Fire area is exploding with new life. Conifer seedlings, shrubs, wildflowers, and a wonderful variety of birds and insects can be found nearly everywhere.”
John Heil, the Press Officer for the US Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Region, asked CBS to remove the story from their website. He said the quotes from one of their researchers were, “taken out of context and misquoted/misrepresentation” of what was said to the Associated Press reporter over a year ago.
11 Reasons Why Burned Forests are Beautiful
A severely burned forest is not a “destroyed” forest, but rather a habitat restored.
That is not something you are likely to hear during or after the next large forest fire in the Sierra Nevada. It certainly wasn’t during the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite and the Stanislaus National Forest. It should have been, however, because the science is clear – severely burned forests provide some of rarest and most biodiverse habitats on earth.
Severely burned forests should be left alone, protected, and allowed to thrive without our meddling. This is why we are joining with several other environmental organizations to stop “salvage” logging and “reforestation” projects in the forest burned by the Rim Fire. The Forest Service will make a decision about what they will to do in a few weeks. Stay tuned.
1. Severely burned forests provide rich habitats.
Why? Because, as described by wildlife biologist Monica Bond, “These post-fire, complex early seral forests are rich in post-disturbance legacies (e.g., large live and dead trees, downed logs), and post-fire vegetation (e.g., native fire-following shrubs, flowers, natural conifer regeneration), that provide important habitat for countless species and differ from those created by logging (e.g., salvage or pre-fire thinning) that are deficient in biological legacies and many other key ecological attributes.”
Location: Tahoe National Forest, after the 2008 American River Complex Fire.
The Cliven Bundy Narrative – Intoxicating, uncompromising, quasi-religious
You may have heard about the standoff between the federal government and a rancher named Bundy in Nevada. He has refused to pay his grazing fees and his cattle are endangering the desert tortoise. We posted a short quote from Mr. Bundy along with an editorial cartoon about the subject on our Facebook page (you can see the cartoon and the quote at the bottom of this post). But, wow!
We usually receive about 1,000 post views, but this time? It’s currently at 348,000 and climbing. The good part of this is that the Chaparral Institute is getting a lot of attention. But there’s also a scary part.
There’s an intoxicating, uncompromising, quasi-religious narrative out there that some very vocal folks have so surrounded themselves with that they have created an alternative state of reality. This narrative is promoted by several financially successful “news” media outlets that have rejected the most basic principles of news journalism. For example, fact checking. The Sean Hannity Show is a case in point. Hannity even created news himself by initiating rumors that federal agents were going to conduct a secret raid on the Bundy Ranch. Gone is one of the most fundamental requirements for rational thought, the art of unbiased questioning.
Fortunately there’s a lot of rational people helping to promote the actual truth. But it remains an ongoing battle, one that will unfortunately have to play out for some time to come.
Pulling from the hundreds of comments we’ve received this past week on our Facebook page, here are some of the most common tenets of the Bundy narrative:
1. Anti-federal government and government in general.
“I believe this is a sovereign state of Nevada. I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.” -Cliven Bundy
There is also the notion that the federal government cannot own land and that everything from national parks to national forests are illegal.
“The fact is, the Bundys as well as many Americans who do the research know that the government has no jurisdiction on this common law land and only by fiat and though environmental conservationist ideals media attempts to sway Americans to believe they do.” -Joel