The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
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As if right on cue, today the LA Times published a lengthy and in-depth story (full of some pretty cool graphics) titled “Forest thinning projects won’t stop the worst wildfires. So why is California spending millions on them?” The article features the perspectives of a number of folks and organizations who’ve either participated in this … Read more
The following piece was written by Steven Krichbaum, a PhD conservation biologist and longtime forest defender. Many of us in the forest protection community have been pushing some of these same ideas for almost twenty years now.- mk It seems both major parties can be sadly misinformed about forests and fires. The president recently promoted … Read more
The Western Governors’ Association has been having a Working Lands Roundtable with sessions on different topics. I previously posted on a session here. Here is a link to the presentations- they are all on video. Nothing “newsworthy” happened there. For me, as a retiree who doesn’t work daily with the folks slogging through this … Read more
Thanks to Nick Smith for including this May 28 “60 Minutes” segment in his Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities newsletter: “Why fighting wildfires often fails — and what to do about it.” Text and video online. Features Q&A with Robert Bonnie, Jack Cohen. Overall, very well done. I plan to show it at a meeting of … Read more
Dr. Jack Cohen – Fire Science Researcher with the U.S. Forest Service – explains current research about how homes ignite during wildfires, and the actions that homeowners can take to help their home survive the impacts of flames and embers. This video was produced by the National Fire Prevention Association. “Uncontrolled, extreme wildfires are inevitable. … Read more
Sometimes you wake up in the morning and the newspaper has an article that basically re-states what you’ve been saying for nearly the past twenty years, at least as far as home wildfire protection is concerned. Making rural homes more resistant to fire is the best way to reduce the number of homes lost to … Read more
Below are excerpts from Rob Chaney’s article in today’s Missoulian: It’s common to assume the walls of flame under a towering smoke column pose the biggest threat in a wildfire, said Jack Cohen, a scientist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula. That’s true for people, but not for houses. “The same heat radiation … Read more
In this series of posts, I will use as an example a recent paper The Myth of “Catastrophic” Wildfire: A New Ecological Paradigm of Forest Health. An article in New West brought this to my attention. I’ll use it as an example to describe situations that, from a science policy perspective, shout “watch out.” I … Read more
“If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing.” Aaron Wildavsky [Author’s note: This is a lengthy (for a blog), partisan, historical view rant on the road from NFMA “forest planning” to “adaptive governance.”] Let’s face it, the “forest land and resource management plan” is an anachronism—an artifact of a bygone era. That era was in its … Read more