PYROGANDA: Creating New Terms and Identities for Promoting Fire Use in Ecological Fire Management
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PYROGANDA: Creating New Terms and Identities for Promoting Fire Use in Ecological Fire Management

Agencies, organizations, and institutions in the wildland fire community will have to engage in an explicit pro-fire “pyroganda” campaign to help counter its historic anti-fire propaganda and inspire necessary changes in consciousness and behavior in the public and fire management workforce. As part and parcel of this effort, FUSEE proposes renaming wildland firefighters as fire rangers.

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Run to the Water
Spotfire! Blog Mike Beasley Spotfire! Blog Mike Beasley

Run to the Water

Christmas turkey in Australia this year was served smoked, if not charred.  In the final days of 2019 the increasingly familiar eerie visions of a day sky turned to night with embers flying in all directions were dished up on the people of New South Wales and Victoria, Australia.  Sirens sounded out and residents were told to flee to the water…to the beaches.  Many huddled together in small groups out in the sand, others staged a Dunkirk-style apocalyptic retreat under red skies onto the water in boats.

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10 Ways that the Climate Crisis, Wildfires and Militarism are Intertwined
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10 Ways that the Climate Crisis, Wildfires and Militarism are Intertwined

The war on wildland fire is simply an extension of our country’s extreme militarism – a place where veterans of foreign wars, wanna-be cops, and other conservative-minded men, mostly, can assemble, bond, and wrap themselves in a narrative of strength, heroism and sacrifice. There is a place for men and women to suppress fires near homes and vulnerable infrastructure. However, claiming glorious victory when fires are easiest to suppress, go out on their own, or when a break in the weather moderates conditions is disingenuous.

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We Had to Do Something: Futility and Fatality in Fighting the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire
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We Had to Do Something: Futility and Fatality in Fighting the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire

Fire managers felt pressure to “do something” to stop the spread of the Ranch Fire, attempting a hastily planned burnout along a bulldozer fireline. But this action contradicted the advice from Forest Service risk management experts who warned that aggressive firefighting tactics had low probabilities of success given record-level fuel dryness at the time.

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World on Fire
Spotfire! Blog Mike Beasley Spotfire! Blog Mike Beasley

World on Fire

It's no wonder that we live in a society rife with depression, adolescent suicide, mass shootings, and opioid addiction. One might think that all this despair was driven solely by economic distress and hopelessness - the inability to even get one rung up on the ladder to prosperity, but I believe that there are deep feedback loops connecting humans and the natural world.

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Forests, Wildfire and Climate Change
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Forests, Wildfire and Climate Change

Wildre has been an integral part of western forests for thousands of years, but in recent decades conicts between people and re have increased dramatically. Climate change is bringing hotter, drier conditions to western forests, which is increasing re activity, and scientists predict that this trend will continue as the planet heats up. This guide is intended to help climate and forest activists understand the unique dynamics between forests, wildre, and climate so we can collectively chart a new path towards community resilience to the impacts of climate change. By modernizing our wildre policies, we can protect homes and communities while restoring the important role that re plays in the forest ecosystems of the American West.

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S.E.E. the Science #3: A new social contract for science
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S.E.E. the Science #3: A new social contract for science

FUSEE sees a Wildfire Triad that inalienably links Safety with Ethics and Ecology. Scientific analyses remain the best chronicles of this triad. In this series, we explore crucial articles, analyses, and reports that demonstrate the best in wildland fire research.

In the third post in the S.E.E. The Science series, Letter Burn examines the necessity for science to be in line with the urgency of climate chaos.

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S.E.E. The Science #1: Insights from wildfire science blaze a new path
S-E-E The Science Letter Burn S-E-E The Science Letter Burn

S.E.E. The Science #1: Insights from wildfire science blaze a new path

FUSEE sees a Wildfire Triad that inalienably links Safety with Ethics and Ecology. Scientific analyses remain the best chronicles of this triad. In this series, we explore crucial articles, analyses, and reports that demonstrate the best in wildland fire research. Read Letter Burn’s response to “Insights from wildfire science: A resource for fire policy discussions” by Schoennagel et al. January 2016.

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