The Reason Why OKANAGAN is BURNING with Forest Fires

It looks like the #BC Lumber industry has a lot of explaining to do ... as #wildfires erupt in and around #logging zones and areas cleared of forest in #Revelstoke and the #Okanagan ... #Kelowna city went as far as even convincing the public that thinning out trees (i.e. further deforestation) would help prevent fires, which is actually just giving them a reason to actively LOG and URBAN DEVELOP those areas. Don't buy this tree thinning lie, because we all know how far wind can carry those lit ashes, which land on dried out timber fallen patches,  covered in  combustible  LOGGING debris.

It's time for the BC government and forestry / logging industry to take accountability for the increased fires that are occurring in our LUMBER driven BC province. They are cutting hundreds of thousands of trees each year, drying out our forests, and leaving patches of combustible timber debris everywhere. They are CREATING the perfect conditions for fire to start. Stop using corporate owned media to conditionally programm people to call it "fire season", when you are actually worsening the fires and making them start. Stop selling our trees to China and the global market in order to fill your own pockets. Stop selling out to the World Bank.

Take a look at the timelapse of the Okanagan above, to see how our land has become transformed, deforested, uprooted, and drought struck over time, bringing us the worst forest fires in our history in the past two decades. 

Related Articles:

BC Government & Media LYING about the Cause of Revelstoke FIRES

#OkanaganValley #okanaganfires  #BCfires #Savetheforest #savethetrees #savethepeople #genocide #depopulation #agenda21 #deforestation #canada #SLAVERY #bankers #globalism #globalwarming #climatechange 

Did Massive Deforestation Cause the Fires of 1910?

In the summer of 1910, a devastating series of forest fires swept over Idaho, Montana, and Washington, culminating on August 20–21 in what is known as the "Big Blowup." Official reports after the Big Blowup estimated that 1,736 total fires burned more than 3 million acres of private and federal land and consumed an estimated 7.5 billion board feet of timber. At least 85 people were killed. Several small towns were completely destroyed, and one-third of Wallace was burned. Smoke from the fires reached New England and soot travelled all the way to Greenland. Nationally, wildfires in 1910 consumed more than 5 million acres. The Lake States region saw its worst fire season ever, with more than a million acres lost. (Forest History Society)

It is strongly recommended that you read our previous post, entitled Lumber Industry Responsible for BC Fires, which shows the clear link between forest fires and active logging. Imagine how many giant red cedars and giant old trees were cut down during the early 1900s (see photos below), and just think how much moisture those massive roots retained underground, as well as their contribution to evapotranspiration. Now consider what else was happening during the early 1900s:

Between 1900 and 1930, multiple lumber mills were put into place, which accelerated the pace of logging in the region. In 1906, a land clearing forest fire that started near Leek road in Roberts Creek got out of hand and spread more than 5 kilometers towards Gibsons. Although no lives were lost, the fire destroyed a sawmill near Payne Creek, along with the majority of the flume it used, as well as most of the standing timber in the area. This frightening event halted logging in the vicinity for almost 20 years, but also served to open it up for more settlement. (Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives)

Native Americans used fire throughout North America for thousands of years and influenced the

ecosystems and fire regimes of the areas they inhabited. Native American use of the natural

environment was limited to meeting personal and communal needs rather than intense market

oriented production. In estimating the impact of Native Americans on fire regimes in U.S. Day

(Day 1953) considered the duration of occupation of the landscape, population density,

population concentration and movement, and local patterns of settlement and location of village

sites in the northeastern US. Over the past 300 years the influence of Native American burning

appears to be increasingly less significant compared to the impact of European settlement and the

influence of modern era human activities notably agriculture, industrialization, and contemporary land use. (Pyne 1982) - (Fire History and Climate Change)

Logging Industry Will Cause More Fires and More BREATHING Problems

I have a very important message for you regarding the forest fires in Canada. If people don't take action now, we will suffer the loss of millions of hectares of forest this year, with air quality so severe, you won't be able to breathe. This will tie into COVID19 and viral infections - more on that below. 

Areas that have been logged have shown the worst fires on record, due to leaving behind fragmented, dry, combustible forests. I strongly recommend that you read our recent post here, entitled, Lumber Industry Responsible for BC Fires. 

Source: Canada's National Observer

If people don't stop the lumber industry and Canada from selling out and exporting its forests (i.e. lumber) all to stay ahead of the controlled economy, we will suffer great loss. Some of Canada's main buyers have been: United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Europe and India. Some facts about where our lumber is exported:

Source: Trade and Invest, BC. 

Interfor Corp. says the company has increased lumber shipments from Canada to China as a result of tariffs imposed on its U.S. production. ... “We're still active on some products in the South to China. (Financial Post, Feb 8, 2019)

As a result of raging fires and forest loss, there will be far less safe places to seek refuge if more forests burn. It will affect camping, outdoors, hunting, air quality, quality of life, forests, health ... and the list goes on. 

Piles of dead trees that were once a part of rich life-sustaining forests.

COVID-19 and Air Quality

If you live in BC or Alberta, you know how bad the air quality can become from forest fires. Don't be surprised when they blame these upcoming asthma and lung failure problems on COVID19. The bottom line is that air pollution, like those caused by forest fires, affects the immune system:

Air pollution alters immune function, worsens asthma symptoms. ... The researchers found that air pollution exposure suppressed the immune system's regulatory T cells (Treg), and that the decreased level of Treg function was linked to greater severity of asthma symptoms and lower lung capacity. (Berkeley News) 

Source: CBC News

What can we do? Be proactive. Make your MPs, doctors, media outlets, public, and members of parliament aware of this issue. Share this information with others. Wildfires affect all of us, including farming and agriculture, that produce our food. 

SHOCKING: LUMBER Industry RESPONSIBLE for BC Forest Fires

Studies reveal: When you mess with native forests, they become more flammable. Commercial logging of moist native forests creates conditions that increase the severity and frequency of bushfires. Is it simply a coincidence, that the province which has the highest rates of deforestation, is suffering from the worst forest fires in our country? Pine beetle devastation - we often hear climate change, but not a word about their predators' (woodpecker) population decline due to logging.

In the summer of 2017, there were over 1 million hectares of land burned, over 60,000 people evacuated, and half a billion dollars spent for fire suppression. This year, it has gotten out of control again, wrecking havoc on land and making it hard for us to breathe at times. British Columbia has the largest forestry industry in Canada, and now it is paying the price. To speak truthfully, yes, there has always been forest fires every year. But what has been causing them to worsen over the years? This is what we will explore. The corporate-owned media is quick to point the finger at global warming, causing our heads to turn away from any other causes, such as industrial practices. An investigation by The Narwhal shows that since 2012, the year the federal government formally designated whitebark pine as endangered under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, more than 19,000 cubic metres of the trees have been logged in B.C. If those trees were telephone poles, they would string a line from Vancouver nearly 800 kilometres north to Prince George.

Imagine a Forest

Imagine this: one to three hundred years ago, a natural untouched forest, with hundreds of millions of enormous trees, whose roots held in large amounts of moisture in the ground. At nightfall, water vapor fills the air, forming a natural fog, while the trees and vegetation release their moisture via evapotranspiration. The whole forest is wet and humid, with the natural vegetation that surrounds it, and the moss that grows on the tree, thriving in the humid environment. How likely is a fire to start here?

Now, fast forward to three hundred years later, where the logging industry is cutting down billions of trees each year, milling and exporting Canadian lumber in vast amounts. Roads are paved through the forests to allow lumber trucks to pass, while the forest is losing its trees in many areas, causing the ground to eventually dry up over the years - many unwanted trees simply left uprooted, only to dry out and act as tinder for fire. Trees are replanted each year, but not enough to replace the lost trees, and not even close to their age and size.

All these trees, for many years, are what kept the ground moist, creating microclimates within the forest, preventing massive fires - now, they are uprooted in millions each year, creating dry pockets, as the dry ground becomes more prone to fire. Keep this term, dry pockets, in mind, because you will be seeing it a lot. It's the same problem, anywhere you go in the world, whether it be the Amazon, China, or Russia, where the chopping down of trees has become the norm. Welcome to the world of deforestation.

A simple Google image search: Deforestation before and after

The Studies: Deforestation and Fires

There have been a number of studies done on the relationship between deforestation and forest fires. They all seem to conclude the same thing: deforestation is causing our forests to become more prone to wildfires. Here's what an interesting study entitled, Effects of logging on fire regimes in moist forests, has to say on the topic:

Logging can change forests in at least five interrelated ways that could influence wildfire frequency, extent and/or severity. These include changing: (1) microclimates,(2) stand structure and species composition, (3) fuel characteristics, (4) the prevalence of ignition points, and (5) patterns of landscape cover.

Do you recall us discussing the old forests and their microclimates that have changed over the years? Here is what another study has to say on the topic, entitled, Logging makes forests more flammable:

Commercial logging of moist native forests creates conditions that increase the severity and frequency of bushfires, an international study claims. "The evidence from rainforests is unequivocal, the evidence from the wet forests in North America is unequivocal and the evidence is starting to build in Australia as well. When you mess with [native wet] forests they become more flammable." The researchers found the removal of trees by logging creates canopy openings [dry pockets] and this in turn alters microclimatic conditions, especially increased drying of understory vegetation and the forest floor, Lindenmayer says.

There was also an interesting study done in the central region of the Brazilian Amazon. For simplicity's sake, we have pulled out some important information. In this study, entitled, Deforestation-Induced Fragmentation Increases Forest Fire Occurrence in Central Brazilian Amazonia, it states:

Forest edges resulting from landscape fragmentation are highly fire-prone due to increased
dryness, higher fuel load compared to forest interior and proximity to ignition sources from adjacent
management areas. Fragmentation and its resulting edge effects may act synergistically
with the ongoing large-scale changes in climate and fire regimes, threatening the Amazonian forest
ecological integrity... Fire density (FD) increased with habitat loss (HL), with greater variability in the higher levels of deforestation ... About 95% of active fires and the most intense ones (FRP > 500 megawatts) were found in the first kilometre from the edges in forest areas [dry pockets] ...We conclude that the susceptibility of the landscape to forest fires increases at the beginning of the deforestation process.

In other words, from a study done in the Amazon, we learned that majority of the active fires and the most intense ones, were found within the first kilometre from the edges of deforested areas, close to those dry pockets. Now, let's do a simple Google image search of "BC fires bird's eye view" and compare the results below. Notice how close these fires are to the edge of deforested areas [dry pockets], where yearly logging has increased ground dryness.

One study of Amazon deforestation concludes: About 95% of active fires and the most intense ones (FRP > 500 megawatts) were found in the first kilometre from the edges in forest areas [the dry pockets].

Now people might be thinking, yes, but that study was done in Amazon, and here we are talking about British Columbia, Canada. But, wait a minute. If deforestation is causing wildfires in a much more wet area that receives up to 9,000 mm of rain each year, as compared to a few hundred mm of rainfall in BC, imagine how much more important this study is for drier areas. In other words, if deforestation is causing increasing wildfires in rainforest areas like the Amazon, imagine the havoc that deforestation would be causing in much drier areas, like Canada.

The Pine Beetle Connection

The issue of pine beetles is not so black and white - it involves a complex ecosystem of various trees and their resin defenses, climate, and natural predators of the pine beetle. The main predator of the pine beetle is the woodpecker, and as anyone could guess, their population has been steadily declining, due to habitat loss and destruction by the lumber industry. Simply put, less woodpeckers means more pine beetles. Williamson's sapsucker is listed as an endangered species in B.C. with only about 400 pairs remaining. Now you could just guess why the Lewis's woodpecker population is at risk, and we can expect more species decline to come in the near future if logging continues the way it has been going.

The main threat to bird species in the mountains hasn’t been crowds of weekend gawkers. It’s tended to be smaller groups, mostly riding bull­dozers and packing chainsaws. The logging industry has left its deadly mark on local wildlife habitat. Far too many river valleys in southwest mainland BC have had a logging road punched to the back of the watershed, with its forest cloak ripped to tatters by clearcut logging. The decline of woodpeckers is largely due to logging of cast areas of woodland as well as their conversion to farmland has been the major cause of range contractions, regional extinctions, and population declines both now and historically. Some trees dispersal even relies on such birds. For example, Pinus albicaulis or whitebark pine is a slow-growing, five-needled pine tree generally found at higher elevations. One bird species, the Clark’s Nutcracker, is responsible for the natural dispersal of its seeds. This bird feeds on the seeds from the tree’s egg-shaped, purple cones. As colder weather approaches, it flies away with the seeds and buries them in small caches, typically within a couple of kilometres of the cones it has harvested, but sometimes more than 30 kilometres away.

Woodpeckers on the Decline

Woodpeckers use a lot of energy scaling bark from trees to reach beetle larvae. As well as devouring beetle larvae directly, three-toed woodpeckers indirectly kill beetle broods when searching tree trunks for food. A Swiss study estimates the number of bark beetles devoured at all stages of development (from larva and pupa to beetle) at approximately 670,000 per year and per woodpecker, meaning that Switzerland’s entire population of three-toed woodpeckers eats an estimated 1.7 billion bark beetles per year. If these birds find a tree that offers plenty of food, the bird can strip the bark off of virtually the entire tree in a short space of time. This exposes the beetle broods to adverse weather and they die from dehydration or unfavorable temperatures, for example. Fungi also infest breeding galleries. Bark beetle broods in sections of bark that have fallen to the ground are in turn prey for other birds or small mammals. When bark is thinner owing to sections being stripped away, this can trigger increased parasitisation of bark beetle larvae. In this case, parasitic wasps with short ovipositor are able to parasitise the larvae beneath the bark, which they would not be able to reach under normal, thicker bark. This indirect destruction of bark beetles brought about by three-toed woodpeckers bark scaling is more considerable than direct consumption. Three-toed woodpeckers can therefore play a key role in controlling bark beetle populations in forests dominated by conifers.


Moisture Affects Tree Resin Production

Many coniferous trees defend themselves against mountain pine beetle attacks with toxic resin. Low or endemic beetle populations cannot overcome the defenses of healthy trees and attack suppressed, weak or dying trees. According to Vité (1961), "the deficiency of water or rapid transpiration decreases the turgid pressure inside the epithelial cells lining resin ducts, which in turn decreases the pressure inside the resin ducts and the amount of oleoresin produced." In other words, less water means less tree resin being produced.

Conclusion

Loss of of natural vegetation and trees, and wetness of the forest floor is causing our ground in certain areas of the forest to dry out and become more prone to fire. We have cherry-picked and biased studies put out by the logging industry in an attempt to prove that logging does not affect birds and their populations, along with other environmental destruction - all done in order to allow the logging industry to continue wrecking havoc in our beautiful forests.

The media will have people yapping about global warming, temperature changes, pine beetles, people not putting out their cigars, and record-breaking heat-waves - but not a single mention of lumber industry practices or deforestation, and their effects on avian predators of pine beetles or bushfires and forest health. What has the continuous logging over the many years done to the vegetation, tree-pests, micro-climate, humidity, and ground of our forests? Think about it.

Do we really need a study to tell us this? Just take a walk in the forest and feel the difference in how these trees cool the climate when compared to an urbanized concrete built city. The study can be read here. 

Something to be proud of? How many of those ancient giant trees did they cut down?

Check out that dry pocket! If that's not tinder for fire, then what is?

Current map of fires in BC - Aug 22, 2018. Is it a coincidence that the province which has the highest rates of deforestation is suffering from the worst forest fires in Canada? 

Imagine how much moisture these giant trees held in the forest. Oh no problem, we'll just replant some tiny trees!

A perfect recipe for fire: Logging roads and deforested dry pockets.

The media that is owned by our industries and corporations: blame the heatwave, not the logging industry.

Do not think for a minute that Canada is alone. Russia, along with other large lumber-exportring countries also suffer. A Russian woman wears a mask as she stands in the burnt-out village of Mokhovoye, Lukhovitsi municipal district, some 130 kilometres from Moscow

Do you see the lumber roads and dry pockets? 

Agriculture also affects our forests. Just imagine how much moisture and shade those trees provide.

The studies have been nailing this topic for years now. All right, time to pay a bunch of scientists to put out studies to conclude that logging is good for the forest fires now.