Thinning is often justified on the assumption that reducing “fuels” will slow or stop large blazes, but there is more nuance to the issue than just fuels. Photo George Wuerthner
One frequently hears from proponents of thinning that active forest management can reduce fire intensity and thus is a beneficial policy […]
Continue Reading →The wind-driven pattern of fire in the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Photo George Wuerthner
A new documentary titled The West Is Burning continues to promote a flawed narrative that large blazes are a consequence of “fire suppression” and “fuel build-up.” Starting from this perspective, it promotes policies like thinning the forest and prescribed […]
Continue Reading →Record temperatures across the West, including a record 121 degrees in southern California by Los Angeles. Massive wildfires charring millions of acres including record large blazes in Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, and California, with the smoke that spread across the entire West. Half of the country is experiencing “severe drought”. Hurricanes ravage the Southeast. Do we […]
Continue Reading →The influence of fire suppression is exaggerated. The idea that there was a “hundred years” of fire suppression ignores the fact that in the early 1920s and 1930s as much as 50 million acres burned annually. Furthermore, climate controls fires, as indicated by the cool, moist decades between the 1940s-1980s. Courtesy of […]
Continue Reading →The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest is proposing to log the Lostine Wild and Scenic River corridor. The basic justification is to reduce the potential for large wildfires.
Yet according to the Oregon Department of Forestry, in 2019 only acres 67,795 acres burned in the state, compared to 846,411 acres burned last year. Why the […]
Continue Reading →Governor Bullock recently created the Montana Forest Action Advisory Council that is biased towards logging and is dominated by timber industry interests and supporters to “reduce wildfire risk.”
I don’t expect the Governor to be an expert on wildfire or forest ecology, but it is clear from the makeup of his council that its […]
Continue Reading →We often hear that our forests are “unhealthy” and among the indicators of forest ill-health are large acreages burning in wildfires. However, if you look back a few centuries or more, you find that we have a fire deficit.
Many paleoclimate studies document major wildfires long before there was “fire suppression”.
Indeed, one study by […]
Continue Reading →Recently I was wandering through a burnt forest in the aftermath of a wildfire with a mixed group of people as part of a field trip with a forest collaborative. We were examining the burn severity pattern that a wildfire had carved through the forest. In many places, the fire had barely charred the ground, […]
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