Category: Wildfire
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National Prescribed Fire Act Flawed
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is a co-sponsor of the National Prescribed Fire Act of 2025. The bill is ill-advised and based on flawed assumptions about the effectiveness and efficiency of prescribed burning. Prescribed burning is promoted as some magic bullet that can preclude large wildfires, but it has many disadvantages that are seldom discussed. The presumed…
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TNC Misinformation On Wildfire
The recent June 18th editorial in the Oregon Capital Chronicle by the Nature Conservancy representatives, “Oregonians deserve a smarter approach to wildfires: Both suppression and risk reduction are necessary,” was based upon flawed assumptions about wildfire. It is worth noting that TNC has a conflict of interest since it receives significant funding from the federal…
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Wildfire: A Government Shell Game
Are we all fools? Apparently, the US Forest Service and our politicians think so as we see exploding budgets for addressing wildfire that result in taxpayers subsidizing logging our National Forests in remote wild places. I call it wildfire hysteria because it certainly is not a logical thought process as politicians and agencies rely on an uninformed public…
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Should One Remove Adjacent Vegetation By Homes?
Over the years, I’ve visited dozens of major wildfires to examine how they burned and what they didn’t burn. One noticeable pattern in urban settings is how houses burn to their foundation, while nearby trees and shrubs remain green. Global climate change is exacerbating urban wildfire risks. For instance, between 2003 and 2023, the global…
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Protect Communities Not Log The Forest
A recent article in the Daily Montanan State wildfire briefing indicates fire season ‘could be significant’ that promotes misguided information about wildfire. It starts with Montana Governor Greg Gianforte’s claim that the state firefighters have been able to keep “95% of wildfire starts to 10 acres or fewer since 2021.” What is missing from such…
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How Common Were Low Severity Blazes in Western Ecosystem?
A recent article in the Arizona Republic, “The only way to save Arizona forests is to let them burn,” repeats the misguided idea that low-severity/high-frequency fires keep the forest open and park-like, with limited fuels to sustain tree-killing wildfires. In other words, if a fire kills most trees, it is “lost” and “destroyed.” In the…
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House Tax Bill Accelerates Public Lands Resource Exploitation
The debate over provisions in the recently approved House tax legislation (Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill) has numerous environmentally destructive provisions which I will get to in a moment. However, one victory amid the unbridled promotion of resource development was the removal of an amendment that permitted the sale of 450,000 acres of public lands across…
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Fix Our Forests Act Doesn’t Fix Forests
Senators Curtis, Hickenlooper, Padilla, and Sheehy introduced Senate 1462 Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) legislation. Similar legislation has already passed the House of Representatives. FOFA is a solution looking for a problem. Unfortunately, our forests do not have problems; even if they did, FOFA would not fix them. The idea that logging and prescribed burns…