Even the most outrageous lies that defy your own common sense can infect your thinking, do an end run around your reasoning powers, and ultimately alter your beliefs, if you hear the lies often enough, from multiple sources, for years. This is how propaganda works, just ask any student of WW2 — or arguably any war, which convinces one human populace to demonize another populace to such an extent that the extermination of a people (or species of non-human animal like wolves) becomes justifiable.
The proven propaganda technique of replacing The Truth with a simple, bold lie, and then endlessly repeating it, which can overwrite and replace a previously held complex, truthful belief, is specially insidious in our digital age. Today, you’re encouraged to “do your own research,” which isn’t bad advice per se, but only if you’ve developed critical thinking skills.
Of course, we should all be reading, thinking and learning for ourselves — Ai can suck my Webster’s dictionary — if you have also learned how to separate out insightful commentators who have something to teach you from the teeming tech bro charlatans, orange con men and good old-fashioned ignoramuses. For example, I’ve learned, over time, to trust George Wuerthner on many environmental issues, and doubt the U.S. Forest Service I formerly, innocently, but erroneously assumed was the agency protecting and stewarding America’s public forests. Until I learned from Wuerthner and others that, sadly, the USFS has long been corrupted by corporate influence, politics and money. The timber, cattle, wood pellet (so-called “bio-fuels”), and chemical pesticides industries to name a few.
You can tune in to this idiot pundit — that’s me! — to hear more about all this, on our new “Sky-Jack” Podcast time of 10am this and every Tuesday, June 16th, 2026, as I present this case to co-host Skyler. Namely that an anti-nature alliance exists and growing between profit-driven, extractive and destructive companies and government agencies. That in partnership, they are together Hell-bent on instilling the fear of Hell-fire into the public, convincing people that one specific organism in nature, which has been historically adored, loved, even worshipped for millennia, is today an enemy to be feared — and killed.
This new enemy organism is the beloved, sacred tree. And collectively, entire forests, especially forests in dry western states, are now a threat to humanity’s existence. The nuance here, which requires the critical thinking absent in too many Instagram shorts, is that in fact many western forests are hotter and drier than in recent decades before anthropogenic climate crisis ramped up average global temperatures — in large part from deforestation, which is cutting down so many hundreds of millions of Earth’s trees!
Forests, this false narrative goes, now present an existential wildfire danger to humans. And the remedy for the increased chance of forest fires isn’t simply protecting our communities with the scientifically proven Defensible Space and Home Hardening treatments and techniques. Instead, now it’s cutting down literally millions more trees!
This is similar to the cattlemen’s solution the same climate crisis exacerbated by the methane gas from too many millions of beef and dairy cows we humans raise for food. The prescription for too many cows and their GHGs? — more cows! Just run the cows around more, over more deforested land, but package, label and sell this cow industry false fix with their Grade-A choice propaganda term, “regenerative” cattle ranching. READ MORE.
Like the cults of MAGA or Ai’s gushing techno-capitalist boy con-men, there is a mass hypnosis suffusing our culture, teaching people to fear trees and swaths of wild forests which, in reality, sustain life on Earth (as do unpolluted oceans). The natural, normal and necessary ecological process of wildfire is demonized and suppressed — even as de-foresters (“foresters”) and many wildfire agencies and land “managers” simultaneously insist that our past decades of fire suppression were a dangerous mistake we must now correct for — with chainsaws, masticating machines and chemical poisons.
The false, even self-contradicting narrative goes like this: due to decades of erroneous human fire suppression, forests are now “overgrown” and must therefore be “thinned” and “trimmed” or else they will burn “catastrophically,” destroying themselves and us along with them. Believing this requires overwriting the self-evident science, biology, ecology, evolution and common sense that forests have been perfectly self-correcting, adaptive, and self-sustainable and thriving for literally millions of years before us arrogant, cocky, ignorant, destructive, and self-destructive hominids showed up. Just sayin’…
“Thanks but no thanks, humans; we got this, just stop attacking us.” – Earth’s forests
Forest have never, ever needed any human care, including from so-called “native” peoples. Today, they desperately need us to stop cutting them down, to stop “thinning” them, to stop running our masticating machines through them, and to stop dumping thousands of gallons of herbicides in them.
The sophistic narrative of human “management” continues with an alleged cure, a prescription: massive tree-felling over millions of acres of our remaining wild, public forests. This means killing — masticating or “mulching” as I’ve actually heard these well-intentioned, tragically hypnotized land “managers” call it — more millions of understory plants which grow beneath forest tree canopies. Countless more millions of birds, insects, reptiles and mammals animals are directly or indirectly also dying from this industrial destruction of their forest homes.
Then add the toxic icing on this layer cake of Death: thousands of gallons of toxic chemical poisons — herbicides made by the likes of Bayer-Monsanto (e.g., Roundup® formulations) and Dow Chemical (e.g., Garlon® formulations). Rachel Carson warned us about these in the 1962 environmental classic, Silent Spring. Since then, we’ve only ramped up the use of these anti-nature, anti-life biocides.
War is Peace, and all of this death and Mother Nature-killing is labeled “management” — or “Man-Age-ment” as I often call it.
I’m listing this depressing litany of lethal “treatments,” dear reader, for a reason: so that you might become more knowledgeable, confident and outspoken in challenging the widespread, endlessly repeated conflagration of popular, now mainstreamed misinformation, disinformation and outright lies about trees, forests, and wildfire “management.” Don’t let industry and its government assistants corrupt your mind and poison your heart against your, our lifetime love of wild, UN-managed nature, in all her timeless, infinite, beauty, variety and majesty. We need more humans to wake up and get involved, before it’s too late.
RESOURCES:
• READ MORE about WILDFIRE lies — and truths: https://www.TreeSpiritProject.com/wildfire
• READ MORE about a DEFORESTATION project at Tomales Bay State Park in Marin County, CA: https://www.TreeSpiritProject.com/CalFire
• READ 101 Reasons to NOT deforest Tomales Bay State Park: https://treespiritproject.com/tomalesbayforest101reasons/
• DONATE to support this advocacy work and TreeSpirit’s mission.
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