Wildfire
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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…
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Much of the current political discussion about forest thinning and many of the efforts being implemented or proposed for federal forest lands are aimed at reducing large severe wildfires. It seems intuitively obvious to most people that reducing fuels will eliminate or minimize large fires that burn across large swaths of the West and occasionally…
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Join WWP’s wildfire lecture Monday! Western Watersheds Project is proud to announce a presentation by Author, Ecologist and Photographer George Wuerthner on “Rethinking Wildfire and Dead Trees” Boise State University Old Business Bldg Room 105 7:00 P.M. Monday, November 18th click on map for directions Wuerthner recently toured the Beaver Creek Fire area near Sun Valley,…
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More effective and less expensive than logging, beaver also provide fish, wildlife and flood control benefits- After almost every large wildfire or fires that do significant damage to structures, people ask for proactive measures. The desire for this is rational. It needs no explanation. Officeholders usually respond, verbally at least. Politicians’ solutions, however, are often…