national forests
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Tracy Arm and Ford’s Terror Wilderness, Tongass NF, Alaska. Photo George Wuerthner A new paper, Southern Alaska’s Forest Landscape Integrity, Habitat, and Carbon Are Critical for Meeting Climate and Conservation Goals, published in AGU Advances, outlines the reasons why Alaska’s Tongass and Chugach National Forests should be given protection as carbon reserves. Both…
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Thinned lodgepole pine forest on Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest. As often is the case, thinning puts more “fine” fuels on the ground which can promote fire spread. Photo George Wuerthner Montana Senator Daines announced that he intends to reintroduce wildfire legislation co-sponsored by California Senator Diane Feinstein that, among other things, would speed up and…
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Old-growth forest like this on Admiralty Island, Tongass National Forest should be protected as a carbon reserve. Photo by George Wuerthner The Biden Administration supports protecting 30% of US lands by 2030 or what is termed the 30 x 30 proposal. One of the best ways to meet that 30 by 30 goals would be…
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Far more ignitions start by roads than in the backcountry. Ironically thinning forests will create more roads, hence more ignitions. Photo by George Wuerthner Like zombies rising from the dead, legislators continue to push the flawed notion that logging can preclude large wildfires and protect communities. The “Emergency Wildfire and Public Safety Act…
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Note the lack of plant diversity on the left side of the path which was “treated” to “restore” the forest. Photos by George Wuerthner These two images display a recent example of a forest “restoration” project designed to improve the “health” of a ponderosa pine forest. The area to the left of the path was…
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On September 14 and 15 Katie Fite and I visited the Miller Creek Allotment on the Mountain City Ranger District of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest to check out the riparian areas there. What we found was just a horrible mess that any land manager should be embarrassed about enough to actually do something about but,…
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Your Comments Are Needed by March 3, 2009! Wild bighorn sheep are native to North America, and once numbered in the millions. But their numbers have drastically declined to just a few thousand. The biggest threat wild bighorns face is disease from domestic sheep. Most experts agree that when wild and domestic sheep come into…
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Alert on Idaho roadless areas- On December 26, 2007, the Forest Service released its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) that seeks to weaken protections for much of Idaho’s 9.3 million acres of roadless lands. Nearly 6 million acres of those lands would be opened to potential logging and mineral development. An additional 600,000 acres in…