George Wuerthner
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By Thomas M. Power and George Wuerthner “A national park will not save the area. Rather, the restrictions and red tape that come with federal control would inhibit growth. Survival requires economic development, but a national park will limit our options.” Kathy Gagnon editorial opposing a national park in Maine published in Bangor Daily News…
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Once, years ago, I was hanging out with Doug Tompkins at his home in Chile, sipping tea and sitting by the fire, when Doug began telling me tales of his early climbing days with his first climbing partner, Johnny. I asked what became of Johnny, and Doug told me he had died in a climbing…
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Conservationists, if they wish to succeed in legislating more wilderness and parks in the West, must actively counter the misinformation and flawed logic surrounding forest health, thinning and wildfires. It may seem counter-intuitive, but fighting the fear of fire is, often, the best way to promote new wilderness/park designation. There is an on-going effort by…
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Recently Yellowstone National Park announced the intentions of culling (read kill) as many as a thousand of the park’s genetically unique and only continuously wild herd of bison. The annual slaughter has no basis in science, and is ethically bankrupt and corrupted management precipitated by ranching interests. The slaying of bison is an annual event.…
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As delegates meet in Paris in the next few weeks to consider ways of reducing human-caused climate change, one topic that is unlikely to get much focus is the contribution that protected areas make in mitigating human-caused GHG emissions. Parks, wilderness areas, and other nature reserves are generally off-limits to development and exploitation from livestock…
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The Ecological Importance of Mixed Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix Edited by Dominick DellaSala and Chad Hanson. 340 pages $89.95 This important new collection of essays in The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires presents some of the latest research and thinking about wildfires by some of the most respected fire ecologists and other thinkers in the…
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WHY FIRE SUPPRESSION HAS HAD LITTLE INFLUENCE ON WILDFIRES A common assertion, oft repeated by the timber industry, the Forest Service, and even far too many conservation groups (like The Nature Conservancy) is that a hundred years of fire suppression has contributed to the large wildfires we are seeing around the West. The logic goes like this.…
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I sent the following note to reporter Sarah Kaplan responding to a news report in the Washington Post. Hi Sarah: Just read your piece in the Washington Post on wildfire. https://www.washingtonpost.com/rweb/top/a-combustible-combination-of-climate-change-and-bad-luck/2015/11/11/9afce5f4-7ca2-11e5-b575-d8dcfedb4ea1_story.html?wpisrc=nl_draw You did a good job of capturing the grief that accompanies the death of fire fighters and people whose homes are lost, but there…