Climate Change
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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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One of the biggest impacts resulting from logging our forests that is largely ignored by public land management agencies is the contribution that timber harvest makes to Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Increasingly it is clear that the greatest value of our public forests might be to end all thinning/logging and protect them as carbon…
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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 is…
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This past winter, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) began preparing two Environmental Impact Statements to review the environmental of consequences creating a region-wide series of “fuel breaks” that will add thousands of miles of new linear non-sagebrush habitat across the Great Basin portion of Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Utah. The goal of fuel breaks…
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Logging, conducted ostensibly to “thin the forest”, “reduce fuels” or for so-called “restoration”, causes a net loss of carbon from forest ecosystems. One of the best strategies for reducing CO2 levels is by protecting our forests. Yet few environmental groups, even those who focus on climate change, advocate for the reduction of logging on…
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By Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project Dr. Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s foremost ecologists and thinkers, will be in Washington, D.C. next week for a series of presentations on migration corridors in the United States and the diversity of life across the globe. This is part of Dr. Wilson’s ‘Half-Earth’ campaign, a proposal…
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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 low to…
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During the 1992 election campaign, Bill Clinton famously coined the phrase: It’s the “economy, stupid” to admonish George H.W. Bush for his failure to understand the real problem facing voters. Today the timber industry and Forest Service continuously advocate logging to reduce fuels and assert that this will reduce large wildfires. But fuels don’t drive…
