Wildfire
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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…
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One of the often repeated remarks used to explain the large fires we are experiencing around the West is that a hundred years of fire suppression has led to unnatural accumulations of fuels. Yet such assertions assume that fire suppression was always efficient and effective—a questionable assumption especially in the early days of the Forest…
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Little Queens fire a new worry- With in incredible 1714 people assigned to fighting the Beaver Creek fire which has slowly grown to 108,000 acres, good progress has been made securing its long east flank, greatly reducing the threat to burning these towns. The fire is rated at 30% contained. Matt Leidecker Photography has a stunning…