Forest Health

You might have seen my interview about forest health in February of 2019 with recently-retired ASU professor Stephen Pyne. He helped me dig through some of the myths and realities of forest health and wildfires.

Well, with over 300 fires going in California alone and more than a dozen in Arizona, I thought it might be worth publishing that again. I also saw this article in the Arizona Republic about how forest health was managed before Europeans settled in the west.

As you watch the news and see many false narratives about wild fires and all that, I encourage you to have a look a these articles. Arizona needs to invest realistic amounts of money and people power in to making our forests healthy.

The nice thing is that we can generate jobs and spur industries in the meantime. It is expensive to thin forests of the underbrush that has been building up for 100 years. But if we treat it like the common good that it is, we could clear the materials that make fires worse, we could make the forest floor healthier and we could encourage new technologies, like cross laminated timber.

The sad reality, of course, is that global warming is real and we are not moving quickly enough to reduce carbon and avoid hotter weather. However, if we have a serious investment in responsible, science-based forest thinning, then we can eliminate much of the materials that make fires bigger and hotter.