California’s giant sequoias are burning up. Will logging save them?
The question of how to protect the remaining sequoias, and more broadly how to manage America’s remaining forests in an era of climate-magnified megafires, has divided scientists and the public. The two wildfires that burned in and around Yosemite National Park this summer — including among the famous Mariposa Grove of sequoias — rekindled the debate about what humans can or should do to protect these iconic trees.
Aggressive attacks on fires money well spent
The aggressive initial attack and continued flow of resources that saved those homes reflects back to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s commitment to do whatever it takes to extinguish all wildfires in the state this summer, whether they’re on state or federal forestland, tribal reservations or wilderness areas.
“In Montana, we do not, and will not, have a ‘let it burn’ policy,” the Republican governor told land managers at a fire briefing in early May.
Of course, such aggressive attacks don’t come cheap.
The average annual cost for fire suppression in the state was about $23.3 million over the last decade. The Elmo and Redhorn fires alone have eaten away half of that amount in just two quick weeks.
A year after wildfire disaster, life returns to California forests
One year after a wind-whipped wildfire charged across a craggy mountainside above Lone Pine, California, flashes of new growth are emerging in this still-charred corner of the Inyo National Forest, a hiking, camping, and fishing playground about 350 miles southeast of San Francisco.
Tiny clusters of white and purple wildflowers stand out against denuded pines, many stripped of bark in the fire. Green shoots of horsetail as thin as yarn strands break from the ground below a tree’s barren branches. A fistful of new leaves emerges like a fresh bouquet from within an incinerated stump. It’s the start of a long recovery, and a cycle that’s being repeated more often across the West as climate change brings drier, hotter seasons and more wildland fires.
Announcing a new Program in Wildland Fire at Lane Community College!
A new Wildland Fire Management Certificate program at Lane Community College is for wildland fire practitioners and those who seek to understand the ecological role of wildland fire, indigenous use of fire, and the issues facing fire managers today.
Including the required “red card” training and a whole lot more. Lane Community College (LCC) in Eugene, Oregon, is currently accepting applications for the upcoming Fall Semester to participate in the rollout of their new Wildland Fire Management Certificate. Some courses have a field component, and every effort will be made to get students experience on-site to view and participate in nearby prescribed burns this fall in the Willamette Valley. Registration for classes closes September 15th.
Starting this September, introductory courses in fire science and management will be offered in a unique, first-of-its-kind certificate program in ecological fire management. Courses are designed to prepare the next generation of fire practitioners with the skills and knowledge needed for fire-related jobs enhancing community safety, resource sustainability, and land stewardship. Certificates can be earned in three academic terms, but current "red carded" firefighters can earn their certificates in just two terms. Community members not interested in earning a certificate can enroll in individual courses that interest them. Classes will provide valuable information for anyone who is interested in or affected by wildland fire including those who work in the woods, aspiring and current wildland firefighters, forest conservationists, members of prescribed burn associations, prescribed fire councils, Fire Safe & watershed councils, environmental educators, small woodlot owners, and rural residents. Be among the first in our region to enter LCC's new "trailblazing" program in wildland fire!
Learn to monitor fire weather and fire behavior.
To complete the certificate program, students will take National Wildland Fire Coordinating Group (NWCG) courses required to qualify for an agency “red card,” unless they already have one. That basic instruction is followed up with help in applying for wildland fire jobs at the Federal, State and local level. Students will explore traditional cultural burning practices alongside the writing of fire historians like Stephen Pyne. They will learn the language of wildland fire behavior. Those in the program will also learn how to plan and implement a prescribed fire and how to characterize and measure forest fuels. Working with fire, rather than always fighting and excluding fire, students in the certificate program will also get coursework in Forest Ecology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). And, most importantly, they will go to the field to watch fire practitioners from other agencies conduct burns and participate directly in those burns if they already possess a current red card. Sign up for classes now! Spaces are filling fast.
Learn to measure live and dead fuel attributes.
The Forest Service is overstating its wildfire prevention progress to Congress despite decades of warnings not to
NBC News found that throughout the country, the Forest Service has counted many of the same pieces of land toward its risk-reduction goals from two to six times, and, in a few cases, dozens of times. The agency has reported that it reduced “hazardous fuel” on roughly 40 million acres of land in the past 15 years, but that figure may be overstated by an estimated 21% nationally, according to the analysis of public Forest Service records. In California, it is overstated by approximately 30%.
The inflated figures provided to Congress deprive those making funding decisions of knowing the true scope of the challenge, experts say.
Billions in Feds’ spending on megafire risks Seen as misdirected
Congress is spending billions to save communities from Western megafires by thinning large swaths of forests even as scientists say climate change-driven drought and heat are too extreme for it to work.
The money would be better spent thinning woods closest to homes and shoring up houses against embers raining down from firestorms, according to academics, former agency officials, and others who study wildfires.
In red California, a deadly fire ignites political rage at liberal government
Research has shown that government fire suppression policies, along with the displacement of Indigenous people who performed cultural burning, have contributed to denser vegetation in the Klamath bioregion. But experts also say commercial logging can lead to the replacement of larger, fire-resistant trees with stands of abnormally dense and young trees that are more susceptible to carrying fire.
“There’s plenty of evidence to say that if you just did logging and thinning you could actually make the problem worse,” said Jeffrey Kane, a professor of fire ecology and fuels management at Cal Poly Humboldt. “Because it’s not just a matter of removing trees, it’s a matter of reducing fuels, and in many cases when you thin forest you don’t always remove the fuels.”
Death toll of northern California's Mckinney Fire reaches 4
Firefighters, already in short supply due to labor shortages, are exhausted. And with these erratic fires burning so hot they create their own weather, the conditions often just aren't safe for crews to even try to slow down the flames. Retired firefighter Timothy Ingalsbee runs the Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. It's a group pushing for an overhaul in U.S. fire suppression and prevention policies.
Ingalsbee says mostly crews can just try to protect homes and lives in the fire's path - you're not going to stop these blazes. That's, again, the plan today on the McKinney Fire in Northern California, where firefighters are working to slow its eastward spread toward the town of Yreka.
Wildfires are setting off hundreds of unexploded bombs on WWI battlefields, endangering firefighters
The summer's unusually hot temperatures have led to several wildfires across Europe and, according to Vice World News, they are setting off unexploded World War 1 bombs in the process. It is estimated that, as of Thursday, there had been more than 500 detonations, according to local media. The unexploded ordnances, mostly underground, explode when they overheat due to the extreme rising of temperatures as a result of the fires. An incident on July 22 saw the heat from the raging fire set off an unexploded WWI-era bomb, launching shrapnel at nearby firefighters, per local media. Nobody was injured.
Op-Ed: Why forest managers need to team up with Indigenous fire practitioners
The forests of the Western United States are facing an unprecedented crisis, besieged by wildfires and climate change. There is a precedent for part of the solution, though: intentional burns such as those set by Indigenous peoples.
Two California fires in the Sierra Nevada have very different outcomes. Why?
Why was one fire so much more destructive? Experts attribute the difference to variations in weather, vegetation and topography. The management history of each landscape also played a role: Yosemite boasts decades of active stewardship, including prescribed burns, while areas outside the park bear a legacy of industrial logging and fire suppression.
The case against commercial logging in wildfire-prone forests
The truth is that logging activities tend to increase, not decrease, extreme fires, by reducing the windbreak effect that denser forests have, for example, and by bringing in highly combustible invasive grasses that are spread by logging machinery.
USDA promises $1B in wildfire preparation grants
While much of the national debate about wildfire focuses on forest management and environmental protection, critics of the federal government's past approach say the conversation overlooks the greater impact of measures that protect homes in case of fire. Those measures include clearing combustibles from near homes and reducing vegetation up to 100 feet from homes — the idea that wildfire protection begins at the home and goes outward, rather than from wilderness areas toward communities (Greenwire, Jan. 8, 2019).
"This is exactly what needs to happen," said Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology in Eugene, Ore.
While forest management shouldn't be overlooked, Ingalsbee said, preventing ignition of homes through defensible space should be a high priority for public policy. "We need to do both."
Forests in the American West need more “good fire.” Tribes can help
National conversations about fire policy often ignore the fact that millennia-old models of “best available science” and “on-the-ground-implementation” are right before our eyes: Long before U.S. bureaucrats embraced prescribed burns as a forest management tool, Indigenous stewards across the West tended woodlands by routinely removing excess vegetation, pruning trees, and setting “good fires.” This practice, known as cultural burning, should be a key part of fighting what scientists predict will be a mega-wildfire season for 2022—and beyond.
At Yosemite, a preservation plan that calls for chain saws
Central to the thinking of scientists looking for ways to protect forests is research showing that the “natural state” of America’s wild lands was for millenniums influenced by humankind.
Decades of research have shown that the wilderness appreciated by early European settlers, as well as 19th century naturalists like John Muir, was often a highly managed landscape. Core samples from beneath a pond in Yosemite, retrieved in the way that scientists might bore deep into a glacier, showed centuries of layers of pollen and ash. The findings suggested a long history of frequent fires in Yosemite and buttressed the oral histories of Native American tribes who have long seen fire as a tool.
Scientists explain the factors that caused the Oak Fire to explode so suddenly
Ironically, the growth of the Oak Fire began to slow on Monday as it started to run into fire scars from previous large fires, including the Ferguson Fire, which burned in the same region in 2018, Burke said. That slowdown is further proof that fire management, including the prescribed burns that were put out of practice for more than a century, are integral to preventing large wildfires from occurring -- especially as climate change conditions continue to warm the planet and create scenarios for devastating wildfires to wreak havoc on communities and nature, Dahl said.
The California carbon rush
The outlawing of cultural fire and landscape burning in the United States emerged through industrial forestry practices that originated in seventeenth-century Western Europe—particularly in France—where foresters viewed fire as having no ecological role and considered it a wild, unnatural threat to future timber yields. In the late nineteenth century, settler-colonizers brought this approach to the western United States where, unlike Western Europe, forests had evolved to burn. Through violent means, the U.S. Forest Service imposed the idea that forest fires are the unnatural result of moral and ecological degradation.
Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), told me that we need to end the “war on fire [and] focus on helping communities coexist with fire.”
A new proposal to ensure fire protection for all
“If they’d stayed at home, they would’ve likely perished,” said Dan Efseaff, the Paradise Recreation and Park District manager. Sparked by electrical transmission lines, the Camp Fire was the deadliest, most destructive fire in California history. The blaze killed at least 85 people and destroyed 18,000 structures. And it showed how the usual suggestions for home hardening, such as clearing vegetation or removing propane tanks near homes, are not always enough on their own — especially since not everyone can afford to do them. Efseaff and other Paradise government leaders realized that when a fire is that dangerous, individual actions aren’t enough to protect homes and people from future fires. Efseaff is now working on a project that he hopes can protect entire neighborhoods, not just individual properties: a combination firebreak and trail system that would encircle Paradise.
These maps show severe fires are morphing California forests into something we won’t recognize
Megafires with high burn severity are a reflection of a landscape changed over centuries by exploding populations and suppression-oriented fire management policies and practices — one in which flame-friendly shrubs grow where trees once stood, making the environment even more vulnerable to fires.
New documentary looks at alternative approaches to wildfires
What if we learned to co-exist with wildfires rather than constantly fighting them? Portland filmmaker Trip Jennings’s new documentary “Elemental” includes the voices of climate experts, Indigenous people and fire survivors, and asks us to reimagine our relationship with wildfire. We hear from Jennings about what he hopes audiences will take away from his film.