Some may have noticed (recently, or decades ago) that the U.S. Forest Service-U.S.D.A. (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management-U.S. Department of Interior (BLM) speak in a cryptic language of words with no source, no reference, no definition, and consequently no meaning.

This is a deliberate blinding process designed to deprive the American public of sight and understanding. Trickery is used by land managers as a weaponized psychological tool to create mass delusion, dominion and deterrence over vast landscapes and we, the common people.

In his seminal (1983) book entitled Sterile Forests, Ned Fritz warned of the renewed "onslaught..." inflicted by the "modern clearcutters, by burning, poisoning and other methods preventing the original forest composition from ever returning."

Forest genocide is not new. Its cumulative detrimental effects now threaten our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. A warming planet and extended regional drought drive air and water temperatures higher, simultaneously as baseline and trend. Clearcutting and long-term deforestation are accelerants that must stop. Warming waters explode algal blooms that rob aquatic ecosystems of oxygen. Aquatic insect populations deprived of oxygen no longer persist, breaking the food chain, placing trout survival in serious jeopardy.

Legislative efforts to reform federal land management agencies and gain control over the commodification and sterilization of public forests have failed miserably. Indiscriminate clearcutting and bulldozing logging roads into untrammeled forests proceeds unabated. Massive agency-arson programs burn, masticate, and cultivate the fragmented forest creating man-made 'temporary deserts.' These programs to grow commercial tree crops and cows allegedly to meet and expand the nation's demand wood fiber and red meat haven't changed much since Puritans repaid City of London investors with beaver pelts and timber in the early 1600s.

Under the direction of seldom identified oligarchs, technocrats, fascist ideologues, and their infantile mannequins of power in Congress, in the Supreme Court and White House, almost all funding for non-commercial activities was eliminated. Federal forest management programs and projects have reduced 21 century public forests to a single purpose: 'meeting demand' for low value commodities at great expense. Expenditures almost always exceed net revenues.

Example #1: The $1.35 per AUM (Animal Unit Month, i.e., one cow with calf/month) is a federally set grazing lease fee that applies to lands managed by the BLM and USFS. Fees on private land range between $20 - $30 per AUM.

Example #2: Timber 'stumpage' was recently sold (liquidated) on the Flathead National Forest in northwest Montana, adjacent to Glacier National Park, at $2 per ton. This is not a misprint. Currently, merchantable (100 years or older) stumpage is subsidized and sold on average between $3 to $10 per ton. You cannot buy a ton of goat manure at those prices.

"Multiple-Use" is a ruse. As always, America's working class, what's left of it, is literally paying for the destruction of sacred forests, water quality and quantity, cold-water fisheries, wildlife and wildlife habitat, contemplative pursuits, and scenic quality. Wilderness fragments, solitude, and spiritual values that remain on the landscape after centuries of institutional efforts to erase any trace of the divine in Nature are being hunted down and exterminated, with extreme viciousness and prejudice.

Far-fetched, you say? Even the federal government shutdown won't slow down the forest-eating machines. Approximately 20,000 of the 32,390 Forest Service employees will continue to work in the following, arbitrarily approved areas of agency (euphemistically, of course) work: wildfire prevention, expand timber production, arson, and deforestation to clear the way for more cows. Each spring massive numbers of baby birds are incinerated when helicopters and drones drop napalm and drip torch their nests. When desertification intersects with lack of foresight and plain old stupidity, what shall we call this expanding desert, which now extends beyond external territories, encroaching into the landscapes and dreamscapes of human minds and bodies.

Clearcuts and too many roads on public lands eliminate big game hiding cover, driving animals onto private land where hunters must pay to play (kill something). It gets worse, and more costly, for big game and hunters every year.

I'm imagining a time not too far away when the U.S. Department of War will commence bombing forests to control insect infestations and conquer 'encroaching conifers,' wolves and space aliens. Who is the enemy? Wildness, we proles, and Nature herself.

The high-velocity flows of excessive information and word magic manipulate public perception, creating a herd effect. Propaganda spews forth in volumes that would fill a high-pressure fire hose. In the final analysis, however, if all legal fiction and contorted language were to be destroyed, we must realize that nothing in Nature, nothing in Reality, and therefore no man, woman or child would actually be harmed. The Laws of Nature would be unscathed, for Nature's true, self-existence requires nothing of mankind; no names (titles), no numbers, and no language arts.

Conifer encroachment. What does this mean? This is a term of art, which implies that natural reproduction of conifers on BLM and USFS land is bad. Its origin, its definition, and its meaning in the context of the forest planning, management programs and proposed projects, remains cryptic, at best. Conifer encroachment at odds with a future desired condition, a simulation, a copy of a desired synthetic landscape imagined, analyzed, and modeled by computer programs. These machinations exist as a twin, with no reference to a real landscape, to be copied and reproduced ad nauseam until the common folk accept it as an object (a thing) that can be manipulated, along with the all the people duped into believing in simulacra as if it were real. The objective, I suppose, is to make us all believe that there are still real forests and fenceless prairies out there somewhere.

Unlike legalese (the ruling class's language), the common or general language of the common people is violently twisted into a language of fraud and deceit in direct opposition to Life and Mother Nature. This magical spell (the spelling and construction of words) must first be understood as a simulation, a state of despotic dualism, where we are intentionally misled to a wrongful understanding of meaning. Hallucination, fantasy and hyperreality collide to create the pure simulacra of man-made law and language that imprisons so many good men and women as one meaningless body politic under false names (nouns).

The presumption that public forests require 'help' from the USFS and BLM continues apace with no discussion and little resistance. These quasi-military institutions can only speak of themselves through denial and by simulating crisis and death, ostensibly to escape their real death throes. So, they stage their own murder by murdering the public domain in a feeble attempt to rekindle a flicker of existence and legitimacy.

Presumably all this industrial activity is remedy rushing to aid in a simulated 'forest health crisis.' Vegetation manipulation (desertification) masquerades behind magical words. Forest resiliency, enhanced biodiversity, restoration, watershed improvements, reduce wildfire risk, protect the Wildland Urban Interface. All simulacra.

It is certainly debatable whether most forest ecosystems in the Northern Rockies bioregion need any restoration/manipulation. Nearly all higher elevation (mountainous regions) mixed conifer and subalpine forests have historically grown (very slowly) in dense stands that tended to burn at medium to long intervals (often hundreds of years) with large patches of mixed to high mortality - so, they are functioning well within the range of historic conditions.

The agencies try to regenerate their moribund theories through simulated scandal, self-inflicted crisis, and mass murder. Exaggeration, fabrication of symptoms of a dis-eased forest creates fear and irony. For over 100 years these "out-of-whack" forests were under federal agency management. In the gangster-like world of timber management, problem-reaction-solution functions as a mechanism for constructing and hyping the "problem" to gaslight the public into accepting death and destruction (desertification, sterilization, and domestication) as the sole remedy.

It's hard to ignore how this all resembles a scaled-up version of the mental illness Munchausen syndrome by proxy - driven by a psychotic desire for ever bigger budgets and sympathy. It's too late. Caught in a vicious cycle of its violence, irresponsibility and its fundamental irrelevance, no solution or alibi can prevent the system's ultimate demise.

It's time to abandon the failed dogmas of capital and materialist technology and science and stop pretending that we already know all the answers. Science's future will be shaped by recognizing that natural, self-organizing systems, including native forest ecosystems, like all lifeforms, are constantly evolving, impermanent processes rather than things, organisms, not machines. Society's future is interdependent with Nature and man's unpredictability and impermanence. The entire universe operates as a developing organism.

We face unprecedented problems that modern science and technology have helped to create. As the sciences are gradually liberated from this exclusively rationalist, materialist ideology, there is cause for guarded optimism. From an artist's perspective I imagine the process as a complex, ineffable, work-in-progress functioning beyond our ability to know.

According to Natural Rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence each citizen faces the age-old challenge of despotism. An appropriate human response is to rebel - as individuals, and in cooperative groups - to end desertification and sterilization of landscapes and mindscapes. It is time to fight to protect and defend all lifeforms from the multiple global threats initiated and enabled by a small cult of billionaire assassins (oligarchs) who fund and enable global forms of neo-colonialism, genocide, and desertification.

Understanding Public Lands 'Management' and Other Hallucinations of Nature