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During the last Pleistocene Ice Age advance ice covered much of the North American Continent, as well as the mountainous areas of the West. Depending on who you consult the ice retreated sometime between 15,000 years to 12,000 years before present. A minor expansion of ice occurred during the Little Ice Age sometime between…
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Irregular militia followers claim to be supporting the prison-bound Hammonds- They began to filter into Burns, Oregon about a week ago. Participants in what was to become a protest parade through Burns and later seizure of a national wildlife refuge headquarters, numbered from about 150 to 300, according to several reports and statements on Saturday.…
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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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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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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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Recovery of the Yellowstone grizzly bear has been an intense interest of mine for most of my adult life. Yellowstone Park has been a refuge, inspiration and cause for me since I was a boy in Rexburg, Idaho, and my parents began to take me there. The grizzly bear was put on the threatened species…
Author
George Wuerthner is an ecologist and writer who has published 38 books on various topics related to environmental and natural history. He has visited over 400 designated wilderness areas and over 200 national park units.