What you need to know about the Australia bushfires
“…Experts told The Verge that under the extreme conditions, there was not much more that firefighters could do until there was enough rainfall to stop the blazes or the fires ran out of fuel and burned themselves out. ‘It’s not humanly possible to prevent [these fires] or put them out,’ Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology based in Oregon, tells The Verge. ‘We have put so much of our strategy for living in fire environments all on firefighters, all on suppression, reacting to blazes. And, you know, now we are facing conditions, given climate change in particular, we can’t do that.’…”
“…Experts told The Verge that under the extreme conditions, there was not much more that firefighters could do until there was enough rainfall to stop the blazes or the fires ran out of fuel and burned themselves out. ‘It’s not humanly possible to prevent [these fires] or put them out,’ Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology based in Oregon, tells The Verge. ‘We have put so much of our strategy for living in fire environments all on firefighters, all on suppression, reacting to blazes. And, you know, now we are facing conditions, given climate change in particular, we can’t do that.’…”
Oregon Legislature considers four wildfire bills, as Gov. Brown calls for $200M
"It's essentially about bolstering an obsolescent philosophy of attacking all fires at all times and places at any cost,” Ingalsbee said. “Oregonians cannot afford to throw more good money after bad on capital-intensive 'heavy metal' suppression tools like large airtankers and bulldozers that are becoming more ineffective with climate change.”
Native Solutions to Big Fires
Cultural burning practices are working to reduce wildfires in northern Australia. Can they work in California, too?