Gene Yahvah died in Libby, Montana on May 23, 2023, his ninety-seventh birthday. He was a legend among Montana foresters
The citizens of our country - those who own our federal forests - paid my salary for 38 years. I
One of my best friends has known Randy Moore for decades. To my pleasant surprise, they are alike in ways
The six living former Chiefs of the U.S. Forest Service have jointly signed a letter to the U.S. House and Senate majority and minority leaders urging them to fix the fire borrowing mess that annually sabotages the agency’s ability to treat diseased and dying National Forests before catastrophic wildfires destroy them.
We have been harping about this crisis for 20 years. Last summer’s carnage – 58,000 wildfires and 9.3 million acres incinerated – is a precursor of things to come. Some 80 million National Forest acres are now in what fire ecologists call “Condition Class 3,” meaning they are ready to burn. An estimated 70,000 rural communities lay in harm’s way. 70,000.
“This is not an anomaly,” the Chiefs write. “The National Forests are in crisis.”
Boy, howdy!
Congress requires the Forest Service to borrow money from its forest management budgets to pay its firefighting costs. Those costs – more than $2 billion in 2017 - consumed more than half the agency’s entire annual budget. No wonder so little preventive restoration work is done.
It’s time to separate firefighting and its costs from forest restoration and its costs. Let’s hold hearings in an airtight glass enclosure in which air quality matches last summer’s Rice Ridge Fire near Seeley Lake, Montana. Shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, 15 at the most.
California Assemblyman, Miguel Santiago, is apoplectic at the news that Elon Musk’s Boring Company pre-sold 20,000 of its
Another forestry giant is gone. Wesley Moss Rickard, who is widely believed to be the intellectual force behind modern-day industrial
Northern Idaho’s 1967 Sundance Fire will be remembered in four solemn ceremonies later this month, including one honoring the
Huzzahs to the public relations genius who figured out that the most visually memorable way to showcase the herculean efforts
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