Learning to live with mosquitoes sometimes requires working from the body outward. Photo George Wuerthner
Our approach to mosquitoes and wildfires has much in common. Both are typically maligned, and most humans wouldn’t care if they were all eliminated or suppressed. Yet both are essential components of the ecosystem. What we […]
Continue Reading →A high severity blaze on the Boise National Forest. Almost all large fires occur during extreme drought conditions. Photo George Wuerthner
One continuously hears from the timber industry and its allies that the present occurrence of large wildfires is primarily the result of 100 years of “fire suppression” and thus “abnormal” fuel […]
Continue Reading →Senators Steve Daines of Montana and Diane Feinstein of California have once again introduced legislation, the “Emergency Wildfire and Public Safety Act of 2020” that is based upon misguided assumptions that fuel reductions will preclude the large blazes occurring as the West.
Never mind that climate change is the driving force in all these fires […]
Continue Reading →The April 25th article in the Yakima Herald “Fewer low-intensity fires means more severe fires” quotes Ryan Haugo, director of conservation science at The Nature Conservancy and contained many misstatements that lack context about wildfires. https://www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/study-low-intensity-fires-way-down-in-northwest-s-dry/article_aef38135-95ca-5689-aaab-5fc9906c3818.html
It is possible that Haugo stated more ideas and simply wasn’t quoted in the article, but since he […]
Continue Reading →The recent wildfires in California make me feel even more worried about the fate of anyone whose homes are built in the woods. California has experienced the 9 of the largest fires in its history in the past two decades, but large fires have occurred in many other western states during the same period.
What […]
Continue Reading →In Medieval society, if someone were sick, the common solution was to bleed the patient to rid the body of “bad” blood. If the patient recovered, then obviously bleeding was the cure. If the patient died, it was because not enough of the “bad” blood had been removed.
In many ways, […]
Continue Reading →Montana GOP Senator Daines recently published a simplistic and misleading guest commentary on a wildfire in the Washington Post.
In that editorial, Daines, like many other misinformed logging proponents claims more logging would reduce large wildfires and he blames “environmental extremists” for delaying the forest reduction projects.
Most of the wildfires burning under […]
The House Subcommittee on Natural Resources chaired by Tom McClintock (R) of California is advocating more active management of our national forests based on the presumption that logging/thinning will reduce large wildfires.
A clear indication of McClintock’s perspective is found in the title of a recent hearing he chaired called “Oversight Hearing on Burdensome Litigation […]
Continue Reading →“Rather than alarming, a lack of conifer regeneration allows other vegetation its “moment in the sun” so to speak, and provides for a much more diverse forest ecosystem” . . . . George Wuerthner
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Recently researchers at UC Davis and the US Forest Service presented a new scientific […]
Continue Reading →It is now wildfire season in Montana and in the rest of the western states. It is similar to recent years. This means quite a few wildfires in August. The year-to-year differences are almost entirely accounted for by the weather (forest dryness, the temperature, thunderstorms, and presence of wind). August is the prime month because […]
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