Though
this excellent article
is about California, it could just as easily be written about Colorado, or any other state, in which large tracts of forest have overgrown in the last several decades. We need to have these conversations, and more action, put into proactive mitigation and prescribed burns over millions of acres to prevent more deadly, destructive fires from happening here. As things stand now, it's a matter of when, not if, we have another Hayman Fire in our area. That fire, in one 24 hour period, burned an area the size of our district. Let's keep working to make our homes and neighborhoods safer, and ask your representatives to keep up their efforts to do more as they have been trying, as evidenced by work at Flying J Ranch and Alderfer/Three Sisters among others.
“What’s it like?” Tim Ingalsbee repeated back to me, wearily, when I asked him what it was like to watch California this past week. In 1980, Ingalsbee started working as a wildland firefighter. In 1995, he earned a doctorate in environmental sociology. And in 2005, frustrated by the huge gap between what he was learning about fire management and seeing on the fire line, he started Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. Since then FUSEE has been lobbying Congress, and trying to educate anybody who will listen, about the misguided fire policy that is leading to the megafires we are seeing today.
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up.
There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
God bless all of you and all our first responders. Unfortunately we all pay for past mismanagement of our forests. We seem to be in a triage condition now. Preventing massive wildfire spread now requires big clearances that seem drastic to many. I've been up here since before the Buffalo Creek fire and we have seen spread of fire and wind carried burning embers so rapid most wouldn't believe it. Keep up the outstanding work, we surely appreciate it.
I have heard that anytime the Forest Service wants to permit logging in beetle kill areas, lawsuits by enviromentalists are filed.
Anyone else heard this? My source does contract work often with the USFS. It really scares me to imagine all the beetle kill on the Western Slope catching fire.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
