The Oregon Department of Transportation has been busy hiring contractors to cut down fire-killed trees along heavily-traveled highways. These trees could pose danger to motorists or disrupt traffic if they fall. Now the U.S. Forest Service wants to conduct its own “hazard tree removal” in the Willamette National Forest – only in this case, the logging would occur along hundreds of miles of remote, rarely-traveled logging roads.

In June 2019, Pacific Power representatives attended a community fair in Happy Camp, California, 20 miles south of the Oregon border, to share highlights of the wildfire prevention plan the company had been required to file months earlier with California regulators.

Pacific Northwest forests are crisscrossed with roads — enough logging roads alone to circle the planet 13 times. Some asphalt, some gravel, some renowned for their scenic vistas and traveled by visitors from around the world, others rarely used, converted to trails or permanently decommissioned. These roads are among the most harmful human impacts to our forests: increasing wildfire risk, releasing sediment into our waterways and chopping up intact habitat into small, degraded remnants. 

Tyee Williams has been on the frontlines of climate change as a wildland firefighter. He helped battle the Pine Gulch Fire, one of three record-setting fires in Colorado last summer and fall — all scorching examples of how the climate crisis is intensifying wildfires in the Western U.S.

Oregon lawmakers are considering two bills that aim to prevent the kind of catastrophic wildfires that tore through the state last year.

Senate Bill 287 and Senate Bill 248 would require mapping wildfire risk across the state and working to reduce it with more funding for wildfire response and a variety of policy changes.

When fire scientists talk about prescribed burns, the discussion often turns to the Forest Service. Critics say the agency clings to a century-old “suppression culture” that resists deliberately starting fires. “For the Forest Service, the only good fire is a dead-out fire,” said Ingalsbee, a former firefighter with the agency in Oregon.

On a crisp, breezy February morning near Lake Tahoe, a crew of five firefighters descended on a snow-covered, heavily-forested park straddling the California-Nevada border. They came to start fires, not put them out.

Federal land managers are working to auction 10,000 acres of fire-affected public forest for timber sale in Oregon, but environmentalists are pushing back.

Los Alamos National Laboratory has failed to properly manage its forested lands, increasing the threat of wildfires at lab sites and surrounding areas, according to a federal watchdog.

Wildfires shattered records across a number of U.S. states in 2020, with scientists and state officials placing much of the blame on climate change.

If every person in the United States started driving electric cars powered by wind turbines tomorrow, and each country on earth agreed to dramatically reduce greenhouse emissions, the West Coast would still see catastrophic wildfires in the coming years and decades.

If anything illustrated the need for Oregon to invest more in wildfire preparedness, it was last year’s cluster of Labor Day infernos that chewed through a million acres of forestland, destroyed thousands of homes and structures and killed nine people.