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The first edition is entitled “An obsession with suppression,” by Zoya Teirstein & Nathanael Johnson. Looks like subscriptions are free.

This study is described here: Possible future for Western wildfires: Decade-long burst, followed by gradual decline. The gist of it is that after a decade more of big, intense wildfires, there won’t be enough fuel left to sustain such large wildfires. Nature will take care of the fuels build-up if we don’t.

In perusing Nick Smith’s Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities news roundup today July 18, I was struck by how many articles, essays, and letters called for active forest management…..

Opinion: Forest management is critical to preventing fires (Washington Post)
As a resident of the Methow Valley, I appreciated the Aug. 8 front-page article “ ‘Almost off-the-charts hazardous,’ ” a profile of the effects of wildfires on our community, which rightly identified the role of climate change in our ever-worsening fire seasons. However, there was no mention of the other key factor: long-term forest mismanagement leading to overcrowded, unhealthy forests with massive accumulation of fuels. Without those conditions, fire behavior would be far less extreme.

Brown: Wildfires Aren’t Just a Climate Change Issue (Utah Daily Chronicle)
One of my earliest memories is driving home from a family reunion in southern Utah during a raging wildfire. The stinging smell of smoke and the heat radiating throughout the car is imprinted in my mind. Every year, when I go down south, I see the effects of this wildfire and others. Since 1983, there have been three years where 10 million acres were burned from wildfires; all of these happened in just the last seven years. By all available metrics, wildfires in the United States are getting worse. But how do we stop them? While climate change is certainly to blame for a portion of worsening wildfires, it’s important to look at short-term fixes that could significantly reduce the environmental impact we’re seeing yearly.

Kendall Cotton: Active management creates healthier forests (Montana Standard)
Through the smoky haze, I could just barely make out the “H” on Mount Helena from my home during the last couple of weeks. This year’s fire season has been especially bad, reminding me of the several fire-filled Augusts from my childhood when football practice was moved inside and we’d find chunks of ash on the windshields of our parked cars. Growing up in the Bitterroot Valley, I’ve had a front row seat my entire life to the effects of forest fires. There is no question that increasingly severe fires and smoke-filled skies are bad for our health, our environment and ultimately, the way of life we enjoy here in Montana.

Nick Smith: Willamette National Forest should move quickly to mitigate wildfire hazards (Statesman Journal)
The public should support the Willamette National Forest’s plan to remove dead and dying trees along forest roads impacted by the 2020 wildfires. Quick action is needed to restore and maintain safe access to public lands for recreation, firefighting, forest management and other public uses. It also will save taxpayer dollars, but unfortunately, some groups want to stop this important work from happening. 

When ‘no action’ leads to catastrophe (Enterprise-Record)
On July 20, 2021, I sent a text to my son that the Dixie Fire had the potential to run up the North Fork of the Feather River skirt past the south side of Lake Almanor, overrun Greenville, and continue east to the outskirts of Susanville.  The reason is that there was more than 1.2 billion board feet of dead timber on national forest land along that path, not salvaged after the 1999 Bucks Fire, the 2000 Storrie Fire, the 2007 Moonlight Fire, and the 2012 Chips Fire.  These dead trees now are/were 50+ tons/acre of dry woody fuel. Sadly, my forecast is being realized.  This disaster could have been avoided if our courts would stop letting litigants prevail in stopping forest management based on minor technicalities rather than the merits of cases. 

Boebert: It’s time to chart a new path in forest management (GJ Sentinel)
Decades of eco-terrorism have effectively shut down our national forests from responsible management. The result? Now there are six billion standing dead trees in the West that create a tinder box waiting to ignite one devastating forest fire after another. It doesn’t need to be this way, which is why I introduced the most comprehensive forest management bill in decades. The bill pays for itself, generates revenue for local communities, and most importantly, makes our forests healthier and safer for all of us to enjoy.

Every two days, US wildfires are consuming an area the size of Washington, DC. And there’s no let up in sight (CNN)
The dozens of wildfires that have scorched the western US this summer have consumed on average 30 square miles — almost half the size of Washington, DC — on a daily basis, the US Drought Monitor said Thursday. And the unrelenting heat will make matters even worse as dangerous, dry thunderstorms are expected this weekend in Northern California, home to the nation’s largest wildfire. “Little or no precipitation fell on most of the (Western) region, and drought intensity remained unchanged from last week in most areas,” the monitor said, noting that the dryness, exacerbated by periods of intense heat, “has led to the rapid development and expansion of wildfires.”

Silva: No more Greenvilles, Paradises, Concows, or Berry Creeks (Chico ER)
Forest fires in the state of California are not new –particularly when you’re talking about fires in the Feather River Canyon. We’ve seen fires repeatedly burn within the canyon for decades, going back to the 1951 Mill Fire. There were big fires as we knew them then — like the 2001 Poe Fire and the 2007 Storrie Fire. There was the massive 2012 Chips Fire that burned near Lake Almanor. All of these fires were big and local media covered them as if they were big events. But in 2008 Butte County got its first taste of what a massive forest fire can do to our communities. The Humboldt Fire, which was started by an arsonist, one that has yet to have been caught for the crime, burned 23,344 acres and destroyed 87 homes.

Time for the Forest Service to clean up their land (Plumas News)
We have removed trees, trimmed branches, cleared brush, debris and pine needles surrounding our house on two acres at Lake Davis. Directly across from our home and all of the other homes here, is forest service land, which surrounds the lake, the trees grow thick like weeds, the understory is thick with brush and debris, another pending disaster. We don’t understand why any and all efforts to thin the forests occurs miles away from any populated areas. …..we need the forest service to send crews up here in the fall or early spring to thin and clear their property as well as the homeowners up here do….then we may have a chance.

California’s Forests Are at a Turning Point. Why Aren’t We Committing to ‘Good Fire’? (KQED)
Year after year, California wildfires shock us with their relentlessness. The 2017 North Bay fires stunned us with their speed and death toll. Then the 2018 Camp Fire became the most destructive on record in the state, nearly wiping out the entire town of Paradise and claiming 85 lives. Last year’s unusual lightning storms led to what officials called a “fire siege.” This summer, as I see towns ravaged, lives lost and the second largest fire on record in California continue to expand, I keep asking myself: When will preventing catastrophic fires feel as urgent as fighting them?

Climate change is only one driver of explosive wildfire seasons — don’t forget land management (The Hill)
The number of “uncontained large fires” around the U.S. has now reached 100, more evidence that America is in the midst of one of the most devastating wildfire seasons on record. These fires have forced evacuations of tens of thousands and burned more than 3.8 million acres. With months left in the season, wildland firefighters are stretched thin, burned out and faced with difficult decisions on all fronts. In response, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service recently sent out a letter calling the current situation a “national crisis” and temporarily restricting the use of prescribed fires and fires for resource benefit. This is not unusual and has happened before during intense fire years. The firefighting resources needed to pull off a complex burn and the stand-by contingency resources in case a prescribed fire escapes are simply not available right now. 

According to YubaNet:

WASHINGTON ⁠— Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the implementation of President Biden’s pay initiatives to recognize and support federal wildland firefighters. The initiatives will increase the amount paid to approximately 3,500 firefighters with the U.S. Department of the Interior and more than 11,300 firefighters at the USDA Forest Service to ensure all firefighters are paid at least $15 an hour.

…

The pay increase will go into effect immediately, and wildland firefighters will receive a minimum of $15 an hour with a backpay date of June 30, 2021. To ensure the pay increase happens immediately, the Departments will provide pay awards to all frontline firefighters that earn less than $15 an hour to ensure their pay will meet that minimum. In addition, all temporary frontline firefighters will receive a $1,300 award and all permanent frontline firefighters up to GS-9 will receive an award equal to 10% of six months of their base pay.

Last week, driving through Bend, Oregon, I saw signs outside three fast-food joints offering $14 to $15 per hour, and one of them offered a $200 signing bonus. Firefighters make more than $15/hour, when you factor in overtime and hazard pay. But will a $15 minimum be enough to attract new FFs? Maybe if they were permanent, year-round jobs with benefits….

Jim Furnish was featured in Greenwire yesterday — I think the story is not behind a pay wall: “Retired forest official plants trouble in timber debate.” Excerpt:

For his outspokenness — and for his memoir — Furnish has received a cold shoulder from agency officials and others. No other group, perhaps, is more rankled than former officials who make up the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, who’s known him since Furnish’s days as a forest supervisor in Oregon in the mid 1990s.

“They hate him,” Stahl said. “He’d be more reviled in that group than anyone I can think of.”

But to groups looking for a shift in Forest Service policies away from heavy logging, Furnish is something of a hero. The Dogwood Alliance, an environmental nonprofit based in Asheville, N.C., and Defenders of Wildlife invited him to speak there in 2017, calling Furnish a “dyed-in-the-wool logging forester transformed into an environmental agent of change within the agency.”

He’s vice president of the board of directors at the Geos Institute, an Ashland, Ore.-based consulting group focused on climate change and environmental protection. And he has served on the advisory board of the Western Environmental Law Center.

From the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University….

The Schultz Fire was ignited by an abandoned campfire on June 20, 2010, and burned 15,075 acres northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. Following the fire, intense monsoon rains over the burned area produced heavy flooding that resulted in extensive damage to properties in neighborhoods downstream from the fire, as well as one death.

A full-cost accounting of the 2010 Schultz Fire and post-fire flooding was conducted in 2013 (Combrink et al. 2013) to capture initial damage over a three-year period. At that time, costs were estimated to be between $133 million and $147 million. This analysis builds on and revises the 2013 study to derive a ten-year full-cost accounting. This multi-year analysis is a unique contribution to the understanding of the long-term economic, ecological, and social effects of a major fire and post-fire flooding.

The original study (Combrink et al. 2013) estimated a loss in personal wealth due to reduced assessed property values in the amount of $59.4 million. The new analysis revealed the difficulty of attributing losses of property value to the fire and flooding. After analyzing assessed property values over time, we concluded that the changes in value were similar to those in the greater Flagstaff area that were not impacted by the fire and flooding. We also found that average assessed property values in the study area had rebounded 51.5% from 2010. Thus, we did not include property value changes in our updated full-cost accounting. Removing assessed property values from the amount estimated in the original study (Combrink et al. 2013) would have resulted in an estimate of full costs in 2013 dollars between $73.6 million and $87.6 million.

Costs associated with the Schultz Fire and flooding continued to accrue over ten years, although at a slower rate than during the first analysis. In the current study, the total cost of the Schultz Fire for the ten-year assessment period was conservatively estimated to be between $95.8 million and $100.7 million in 2021 dollars, including the fire response and post-fire flooding response and mitigation, but excluding all losses and gains related to assessed property values. This represents a 30%–15% increase in the respective range of costs from 2013, excluding property values.

This webinar is aimed at urban planners, but perhaps the techniques would be valuable for forest collaboratives.

This webinar focuses on how to enable a web-based approach to participatory planning and the four types of spatial analysis that you can implement for your own online events. By using digital maps to engage with constituents, you can collect crowd-sourced inputs from residents and easily generate usable insights. No GIS degree required, this online approach not only enables broader participation alongside your in-person meetings (hopefully soon!), but also yields useful data that can be quickly analyzed to uncover feedback that planners need.

Thanks for Bill Gabbert at Wildfire Today for this article. An excerpt:

On August 4 Governor Gavin Newsom, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and new U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore met at the burn scar of the 2020 August Complex of fires in Northern California to discuss state and federal collaboration on ​wildfire response and fuels management across the West.

During a press availability, Secretary Vilsack uttered words we don’t hear from Chiefs of the Forest Service, or certainly from Secretaries of Agriculture:

We are prepared to do a better job [of forest management] if we have the resources to be able to do this… Candidly, I think it’s fair to say over the generations and decades, we have tried to do this job on the cheap. We have tried to get by, a little here, a little there, with a little forest management here, a little fire suppression over here, but the reality is this has caught up to us.

We have to significantly beef up our capacity. We have to have more boots on the ground… And we have to make sure our firefighters are better compensated. Governor, that will happen.

We need to do a better job, and more, forest management to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire.

This Statesman-Journal article (Salem, OR), “Forest Service moves to remove ‘hazard trees’ along fire-burned roads in Santiam, McKenzie canyons,” has a slideshow with 58 images from the burned areas. Gives you an idea of the hazards along trails and roads.

This photo is not from the article, but from Freres Lumber’s blog. Shows how a fire can weaken roots and undermine trees, so that they easily fall over.