Opinion: Why California’s costly tree-cutting wildfire strategy fails – 5/22/2019

By Douglas Bevington California’s current approach to wildfires is pouring more and more money into subsidizing logging and fire suppression, often in remote areas. This strategy isn’t working. In recent years we have experienced skyrocketing state expenditures for this policy, paired with unprecedented loss of lives and homes. California is filled with forests and other ecosystems where wildfire is a …

Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming

Vast forests of dead or stressed trees prompt new federal approach to restoration out West – 12/7/18

By Jennifer Oldham Hikers climbing above tree line in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest nowadays encounter a startling landscape: the gray skeletons of millions of dead lodgepole pine. It is on these slopes of the Rocky Mountains that the U.S. Forest Service would pioneer a novel approach to rid forests of the detritus from “epidemic levels” of beetle infestations that …

wildfire in distance, bend Oregon

Fire & Our Future Online Event – 11/6/2018

Fire and Our Future – a Webinar for Funders Tuesday, November 6 | 12:00pm | Online 12:00-1:00 – Zoom meeting with fire scientists and hosted by COMPASS 1:00-1:30 – Funder-only follow-up discussion Description: Climate change has exacerbated wildfires throughout North America. As Carolyn Kormann recently wrote in the New Yorker, “Climate change is slow until it’s terrifyingly fast.” In many places, …

forest

Post-fire forest policies should focus on watershed health – 1/27/18

By Tim Palmer | Posted Jan 27, 2018 at 12:01 AM A drumbeat of misinformation after the wildfires of 2017 calls for abandoning well-established safeguards for the forests, wildlife and watersheds of the West. One of my county commissioners blamed the Forest Service for “absolute devastations” and, chiming in, my state legislator called for “changes in forest policy … across the Pacific Northwest.” Statements such as …

Rebirth of a forest: The Columbia River Gorge after the Eagle Creek fire – 1/3/2018

By Cory Eldridge, Jonathan Soll and Katy Weil When the first images of the Eagle Creek fire reached social media, the bereaved lovers of the Columbia River Gorge wrote post after post eulogizing the places that, from the awful photographs, seemed lost forever. Nearly all included words like “destroyed,” “death,” or “memory.” The fire caused significant economic and emotional damage. But …

wildfire in distance, bend Oregon

Yes, Something Can Be Done About Wildfires – 12/19/17

By Gregory Scruggs | Dec. 19, 2017 BEND, Ore. — On an autumn weekday here in Deschutes County, Oregon, a chain-saw roar ripped through a pine-scented neighborhood. Tree specialists were removing flammable lodgepole pines in Sunriver, a 4,000-home resort community. With summer crowds gone, the Sunriver Owners Association was reducing wildfire risk. This is a year when huge wildfires, characterized by …