You probably don’t know it, but there is a war going on, right now, right here, in lovely, peaceful, sylvan, wild animal-friendly, environmentally-minded California. But it’s being sold to you, the public, with so many Orwellian euphemisms, you aren’t aware of it. It is mankind’s War on Mother Nature herself.
To focus on just one specific battlefield, this ongoing War on Nature is currently targeting over 40,000 acres of western, wooded Marin County, CA just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The weapons in the War on Nature are chainsaws, masticating machines, chippers, and industrial chemical poisons which will be unleashed on Marin’s wild forests and wild lands while the county’s nature-loving residents won’t realize the scale of the destruction until it’s too late.
The agency’s not-telling is by design. For example, one the deforestation’s project’s draft plan is 150 pages long, a county version of a 1,000-page federal bill delivered to Congress that the opposition party has to wade through to even learn the disastrous details hidden under a mountain of material: exaggerations, false claims, pseudo-scientific assertions, and outright lies (like herbicides helping forests).
Literally hundreds of thousands more acres of California forests and wildlands, both northern and southern CA, are being targeted for assault. One such assault, in Plumas County, CA, north of Lake Tahoe and Tahoe National Forest, is being waged by the U.S. Forest Service, which has targeted 274,000 acres of public forest, under the supposed care of the USFS, which tragically is a servant of the timber industry and is now an active combatant in the War on Nature.)
Unimaginably large numbers of trees are being targeted for destruction during our climate crisis, caused in large part by deforestation projects, which these are.
As with wars between humans, fear is the most powerful, effective tool of acquiescence, mobilization and marketing. The War on Nature relies on an ancient, primal genuine human fear: the fear of wildfire. It’s right there in the name, wild fire. Wild is dangerous and must be tamed, controlled, managed, stopped.
For you to allow this War on Nature in your neighborhood, you have also been targeted for attack. Not with chainsaws and herbicides, but with a sophisticated propaganda campaign which converts you from what you may have been, an admirer or lover of forests, into what is required for war, which is someone who fears forests.
It’s easier than you think, because you’re already in its grip. Your mind has already been, as we Bay Areans like to say, ‘colonized’ by fear and propaganda. Fear of so-called “catastrophic” wildfire which will, it is (falsely) claimed, “destroy” forests, and your home, and kill everyone.
This fear is driven home despite your knowing that wildfires are normal, natural and ecologically beneficial. (As were both Marin County’s 2020 Woodward Valley fire and 1995 Vision Fire. The latter destroyed houses that were not properly prepared with home hardening and defensible space. More on that later.)
The weapons in the War on Nature feature chainsaws, masticators and herbicides. They are given new, appealing, even medicinal names which are Orwellian. “Treatments” are “applied” to entire forests “by hand.” Trees are “removed,” implying a silent, non-violent process which is both noisy and violent.
The forest will be “opened up” and made less “overgrown” and “safer” and “healed” and more “resilient.” And in the ultimate Newspeak, forests will be cut, burned, poisoned, limbed and “thinned” — to become “healthier” and “restored.”
Foresters — more accurately called de-foresters — will cut, burn, shred, chip and poison and reduce our forests in order to “save” them.
The de-foresters will never utter or print the words “deforestation” or “killing” or “cut down” or “shred” or “poison” to describe the reality of the killing — despite being accurate descriptors of what chainsaws and masticating machines actually do to trees and shrubs in your neighborhood. The verb “poison” will never be used to describe what thousands of gallons of herbicides do to soil and waterways.
Also never mentioned in the lengthy planning documents of the deforestation project is the full effect of operating large, gas and diesel-powered, high-decibel machines, along with human deforestation work crews making noise, ongoing, for years. How will the thousands of wild animals who live in the forests and wildlands react? Deer, owls, raccoons, foxes, bats and bobcats, badgers and opossums, and countless more thousands of songbirds, hawks, woodpeckers and mice who live in the quiet, undeveloped places away from us noisy humans will react how, exactly?
They will all flee and run and fly away, of course, as their homes are invaded and destroyed.
And YOU have already been conditioned to fear trees and forests. Instead of exploring and enjoying their lush, green beauty, and dark, mysteries at night, to explore and renew and restore yourself, you now fear the unknown. They are labled messy, “overgrown” — and dangerous. Wild places where coyotes and cougars may attack you and eat your dog. And wildfires will destroy your home — unless the wild forest is tamed, treated, thinned, managed.
The most effective propaganda, of course, has a kernel of truth beneath a mountain of distortions, exaggerations and outright lies.
My purpose with this essay is to alert you to the War on Nature, to have you see it for what it is. And to take action — because it’s not too late. Don’t let bureaucracies stoke irrational fears that burn out your love for Mother Nature.
The biggest danger, the greatest threats we face aren’t forests. They are these so-called “vegetation management,” fuels reduction” and “forest thinning” projects. They have already spread like wildfire, but are far more destructive.
These projects waste precious millions of dollars of public funds which should be spent on home hardening and defensible space, all within about 30 feet of houses, and never over 100 feet from houses. This is how you protect yourself from wildfire. Attacking forests and plants beyond 100 ft. from your house offers no additional protection — and actually increases wildfire danger, because a “thinned” forest is sunnier, hotter, drier — and windier. And thus more, not less, wildfire ignition prone.
Winds fan, feed, and spread wildfires. Winds can blow firebrands (embers) for miles. across any and every so-called “shaded fuel break” — which are just another destructive, ineffective deforestation “treatment” that de-foresters cut to make you feel safe, while offering no actual protection.
The War on Nature, which is also a war on wild forests, and on wild life, is being waged in Marin County, and across California. It’s likely already being waged or planned in your neighborhood. What are you going to do about it?