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Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future

Winds of change? Federal judges uphold collaborative forest restoration projects

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The Colville National Forest’s A to Z forest restoration project employs a variety of tree-thinning methods across 12,000 acres. Photo: Colville National Forest

Federal judges are increasingly endorsing the methods and goals of the U.S. Forest Service’s collaborative forest management process, as evidenced by two recent U.S. District Court rulings.

Evergreen magazine’s Jim Petersen provided the analysis in a recent online article. Both cases in question involved the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, an advocacy group based in Helena, Montana, that has actively litigated Forest Service decisions for decades.

The decisions came on appeal from judges considering these cases:

  • Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Jim Peña (U.S. Forest Service Region Six) and Rodney Solomon (Colville National Forest)
  • and Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Mary Farnsworth (Idaho Panhandle National Forest), Leanne Marten (Forest Service Region One) and Thomas Tidwell (now former-chief, U.S. Forest Service).

[Read more…]

The West is on fire: Get used to it, says Montana fire ecologist

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Heat, low humidity and high winds sent the Lolo Peak fire on a spectacular run late on Aug. 18, filling the sky to the south of Missoula, Montana, with its pyrocumulus cloud. Photo: Kelly Henkel

Are the 2017 wildfire season and its long, miserable, smoke-choked days the new normal?

University of Montana journalism professor Joe Eaton recently sat down with UM fire ecology professor Philip Higuera to explore the reasons why the West is burning up this summer.

The resulting Q&A, published Sept. 11 by City Lab, is a thoughtful look at the role of global warming, shorter-term climate events, and longtime forest and fire management policies on the severity of a wildfire season, this one being the case in point. [Read more…]

Forest management, climate change blamed as wildfires ravage southern Europe

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Wildfires threatened resort towns and islands on France’s Mediterranean coast in late July. Photo: Matt Fidler via Facebook.

Wildfires are personal. They threaten your home, your favorite campsite, maybe even your entire city.

So it’s easy not to look up during the onslaught of fire and smoke to see that you are not alone in confronting what one western Montana firefighter recently called “the beast.”

But 2017’s ferocious wildfire season is, in fact, a global phenomenon playing out from the American West to Portugal, Spain, France and Greece. [Read more…]

Study: Wildfires emit 3 times the fine particulate previously thought

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The study also showed that prescribed burns produce far less smoke per unit area burned than do wildfires. Photo: USFS/Rice Ridge fire/via inciweb.com

Naturally burning timber and brush launch what is called fine particulate into the air at a rate three times as high as levels noted in emissions inventories at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a new study. The microscopic specks that form aerosols are a hazard to human health, particularly to the lungs and heart.

“Burning biomass produces lots of pollution. These are really bad aerosols to breathe from a health point of view,” said researcher Greg Huey from the Georgia Institute of Technology, which led the study. The research also describes other chemicals in wildfire smoke, some never before measured, and it raises the estimated annual emission of particulate matter in the western United States significantly. [Read more…]

U.S. Forest Service researcher studies firefighting decisions as costs escalate

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Research shows that using an air tanker to drop retardant on a wildland fire late in the afternoon on a steep, timbered mountain slope is usually the least effective time to use one, but it’s when managers often call for them. A Forest Service researcher is studying the reasons behind firefighting decisions. Photo: U.S. Forest Service, Rice Ridge fire, Montana.

In 1995, the U.S. Forest Service spent 16 percent of its total budget on fighting fires. Today, it’s 52 percent and growing. What’s changed?

“Everything,” said Matthew Thompson, a research forester who works at the agency’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado. “The length of the fire season, more people on the landscape to start fires or to be impacted by them, more community interest in the relation between managing fires and protecting lives, property, and natural resources, and more media interest partly because there is so much more media today, including social media.”

What hasn’t changed is the agency’s key role in managing wildland fires that threaten local communities and natural resources and its desire to manage them as safely and cost-effectively as possible. [Read more…]