Wildfire
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This past week, Public Broadcasting’s Nature film series featured the Sagebrush Sea. The film’s main focus was on the Greater Sage Grouse which is the emblematic creature found in this vast landscape that covers the bulk of many western states including substantial parts of New Mexico Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, California, Montana and Idaho.…
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This article is full of misinformation, untested assumptions, and pejorative language It is so typical of the way the timber industry and U.S. Forest Service have “framed” the issue of wildfire to justify more logging. I added my comments afterwards highlighted in bold – – Grant will fund work to reduce wildfire risk in northeast Washington…
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A new publication titled Post Fire logging reduces surface woody fuels up to four decades following wildfire was published in Forest Ecology and Management this week. You can find the article here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112714006823 The research will undoubtedly be used by pro logging advocates to justify more post fire logging under the guise that it will…
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Recently I was wandering through a burnt forest in the aftermath of a wildfire with a mixed group of people as part of a field trip with a forest collaborative. We were examining the burn severity pattern that a wildfire had carved through the forest. In many places, the fire had barely charred the ground,…
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The merging of the Nez Perce and Clearwater National Forests offers opportunity to plunder- Two very important national forests in north central Idaho were recently combined through administrative action. The Clearwater and the Nez Perce National Forests both operate under separate forest management plans, developed after years of analysis and public comment. There was even…
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Politicians claim states will make money managing federal lands. They conveniently avoid the “elephant in the room” The renewed effort to move the national forests, BLM lands, and maybe national parks and monuments into state management or ownership likes to talk about economics. However, these people don’t use hard economic figures in their quips to…
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Recently I received an alert from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC) asking me to send a letter to the Montana Dept of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MDFWP) requesting a slight reduction in their wolf killing/trapping quota outside of Yellowstone Park. The main rationale of the alert was that wolves were important to the local economy…
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There are widely held assumptions that logging will reduce or preclude large wildfires and beetle outbreaks. The recent adoption of the Farm Bill categorical exclusion that will permit logging up to 45 million acres of national forests is based on flawed assumptions about forest health and wildfire. LARGE WILDFIRE CLIMATE DRIVEN Large fires are driven…