Currently viewing the tag: "California"

Remains of a home burned in the Camp Fire which destroyed 19,000 structures in the town of Paradise, California. Photo George Wuerthner 

State Farm Insurance Company announced it would no longer take on new insurance clients in California due to the rising cost of fire-related losses.

The company cited “rapidly growing” catastrophe […]

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High-severity blazes are critical to healthy forest ecosystems. Photo George Wuerthner 

I read yet another study circulated by UC Davis and doggedly promoted by the national media, encouraging more prescribed burning, thinning, and forest manipulation to reduce large high-severity blazes characterized as “bad.”

The headline from UC Davis proclaims that […]

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The Dixie Fire charred 900,000 acre plus acres in 2021. The fire burned through numerous portions of the forest that had been thinned or even clearcut as seen in this photo. Photo George Wuerthner 

A December 20th article in the New York Times declared California had a quiet fire season. […]

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Active forest management is viewed as a solution to large blazes, but fails to acknowledge that climate is driving wildfire. It is true that if you completely remove forests, you won’t get a forest fire. Photo George Wuerthner 

Proponents of “active forest management” or logging as a means of reducing […]

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Male sage grouse strut on a lek to lure females into breeding. Photo by Bob Wick, BLM

One often doesn’t get good news, but this week, the U.S. District Court agreed with conservation groups that the Bi-State Sage Grouse was illegally removed from its listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Efforts […]

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In May, 2021 I happened to be traveling through northern California on my way to Lassen National Park. When I drove out of Chester, California, I encountered a number of forest thinning projects along the highway. So I photographed some of them, in part, because in many cases large fire-resistant trees were being removed.

Then […]

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Approximately 5700 cows graze national park lands at Point Reyes National Seashore. Photo George Wuerthner

A federal lawsuit against the National Park Service (NPS) at Point Reyes National Seashore was filed on January 10th by four environmental organizations. The lawsuit contends the National Park Service in a new management plan for the […]

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Cattle grazing and production is one of the most destructive of human activities, if a full accounting of all the costs were considered. Photo George Wuerthner

I recently received a video titled Audubon Conservation Ranching: Hooves on the Ground, Wings in the Air from the Audubon Society. The video promotes beef […]

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Northern Spotted Owl Photo US FWS

A couple of years ago, I attended a meeting of the Deschutes Collaborative. Spotted Owls and wildfire was the topic that day. The meeting was a classic example of how collaboratives selectively use science to justify more logging of our forests.

The two-hour meeting featured a […]

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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 […]

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Quote

‎"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."

~ Edward Abbey