Dead. Most of us have negative associations with the word. After all how did Death Valley get its name? Not because it was a favorite vacation spot for prospectors. Is anyone interested in fishing the Dead Sea? And when we say someone looks like “death warmed over” it’s not usually taken as a compliment. […]
Continue Reading →A hundred years ago or so there was a pseudo-science that focused on measurements of the human skull known as phrenology. Phrenology was based on the flawed assumption that skull size was indicative of intelligence. These studies demonstrated and confirmed that men had larger skulls and thus were smarter than women. The only problem was […]
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 →The Deschutes National Forest with the blessings of the Deschutes Collaborative is busy cutting and degrading our forest ecosystems based on several flawed premises.
First, they assert that 100 years of fire suppression has led to higher, denser stands, and secondly that has created what they term are “unhealthy” forests. Both are used […]
Continue Reading →The recent guest commentary by Joe Prinkki and Joe Skinner, members of the Custer-Gallatin Working Group, supporting the logging of Bridger Canyon was full of misleading and scientifically inaccurate common myths about forest health and wildfire.
The editorial asserts that the forest is “unhealthy” and at risk of death from wildfires and bark beetles. That […]
Continue Reading →Tree fire scars are used to reconstruct past fire occurrence. These historical reconstructions are often used to guide current forest management on federal lands.
Trees charred but not killed by past fires often form scars where the cambium and inner layers were burnt by fires. A researcher can count the growth rings between scars and […]
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This past winter, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) began preparing two Environmental Impact Statements to review the environmental consequences of creating a region-wide series of “fuel breaks” that will add thousands of miles of new linear pathways across the Great Basin portion of Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Utah.
The goal of fuel breaks […]
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