Category: Forest Products Industry related
Source: The Forest Blog by Russ Vaagen The 2018 Wildfire season has been one for the ages. It seems as though wildfires are burning nearly everywhere in the west. Should we be surprised? After nearly 30 years of nearly no management on our National Forests in the United States, while simultaneously suppressing fires, we now have […]
Source: KTVZ WASHINGTON – Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., on Wednesday introduced the Wildfire-Resilient Communities Act, a $1 billion measure to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, and the smoke and economic losses that they cause. “Across the country, our communities have been threatened by increasingly severe wildfires,” Merkley said in a news release “As we saw this summer […]
Source: High Country News It is summer, so the West is burning — and we know well enough why it’s aflame. A century of wildfire suppression and solutions on public lands has made many forests more vulnerable to fires, whether caused by natural events or human activities; that risk is now exacerbated by climate change. […]
Landed a small remodel job with Yoda. Not sure how we’re going to install yet, but we’ll figure it out.
Source: Missoula Current The U.S. Forest Service will log 3,494 acres burned by the Rice Ridge fire, hoping to salvage some of the commercial timber affected by the 160,000-acre fire. Forest supervisor Tim Garcia said his decision allows the salvage of about 26 million board feet of “fire-affected timber,” as well as the removal of […]
Source: Missoulian The U.S. Forest Service’s “shared stewardship” approach to wildland firefighting will take more resources than the agency currently has, architects of the new strategy say. And the challenge of cleaning up 35 million acres of hazardous forest fuel with little or no commercial value could require Americans to get used to much more […]
Source: Bloomberg Government Wildfire contract spending in FY 2017 topped $1 billion for first time Many regions exceeded 10-year average for burned acreage As the number and severity of wildfires grew nationwide in 2017, federal contract spending on wildfire suppression surged to more than $1 billion. According to the National Interagency Coordination Center’s 2017 Wildland […]
Source: National Geographic Trees grow big in the water-abundant Seeley-Swan valleys, but the granddaddy of them all is a 1,000-year-old western larch, known locally as Gus. A gentle, mile-long nature trail loops through the Girard Grove near the western shore of Seeley Lake. There’s plenty of big trees in this 250-acre grove, averaging perhaps 600 […]
Source: KBZK.com Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke suggested that climate change may have a role in the recent wildfires that have ravaged California. When asked by CBS News reporter Weija Jiang whether he accepted that climate change was part of the problem, Zinke said: “of course.” He also acknowledged that “temperatures are rising.” However, Zinke also reiterated an argument […]
Source: Mens Journal by Kyle Dickman On a cool morning last November, Tirso Rojas, a lifelong firefighterOpens a New Window. turned disaster-cleanup specialist, parked his Chevy Silverado pickupOpens a New Window. among a cluster of burned houses in the charred foothills surrounding Santa Rosa, CaliforniaOpens a New Window.. A man in a hard hat and a Day-Glo vest sat smoking […]
Source: All About Birds By Scott Weidensaul If there’s been a central, unquestioned tenet of bird conservation in the past quarter-century, it’s been the absolute importance of large, intact tracts of mature woodland. As populations of species such as Wood Thrush, which evolved to nest deep in the interior of mature woodlands, have continued to fall for […]
Source: KGVO Radio Wildfire experts are saying the upcoming fire season will be ‘above normal’, meaning more than 300,000 acres burned, due to hotter, drier conditions through September. Michael Richmond, meteorologist with Predictive Services at the Northern Rockies Coordination Center for the U.S. Forest Service, said his office works off of computer models for the […]
Source: Missoula Current The U.S. Forest Service is reviewing 14 recent wildfires to conduct post-fire salvage operations in western Montana, including five on the Lolo National Forest, one of which was approved by the agency’s interim chief earlier this month. Acting chief Vicki Christiansen used the emergency situation determination to begin work on the Sunrise […]
Source: Missoula Current BY LAURA LUNDQUIST The Lolo National Forest wants make the best of last year’s 160,000-acre Rice Ridge fire by logging some trees. This week, the forest released an environmental assessment proposing to log more than 5,600 acres and replant more than 16,000 acres within the burn zone around Seeley Lake. The document […]
Source: Treesource In the end, the orange-coated Lorax protesting outside the 2018 International Mass Timber Conference was not the most surprising development that March morning in Portland, Oregon. That came when I visited with the protest’s organizer and asked why Oregon Wild opposes the construction of mass timber buildings. He explained: “We aren’t necessarily opposed […]