George Wuerthner
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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…
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Another new study published by the Ecological Society of America titled “Does wildfire likelihood increase following insect outbreaks in conifer forests?” by Garrent Meigs and coauthors concludes that bark beetles outbreaks do not lead to greater likelihood of fires. This research joins a growing list of studies, all using different methods of evaluation that finds that bark…
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One of the assumptions behind federal legislation like the Resilient Federal Forest Act is that more thinning of our forests will halt or significantly reduce large wildfires. Yet the scientific evidence for such a conclusion is ambiguous at best. Any number of studies have find that thinning usually fails under severe fire conditions. First, the…
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Florida just held its first bear hunt in several decades, targeting 300 of the bruins for death. Just three years ago, the black bear was listed as threatened, and the state’s bears had not been hunted since 1994. The proximate reason for the hunt is that bears, according to representatives of the Florida Wildlife Commission,…