Ground Truth
Don’t Offer up our National Forests for Industrial Carbon Waste Dumping
by Jim Furnish In my 34-year career at the U.S. Forest Service, the agency worked to support American industry while also maintaining public lands and the renewable resources they foster. That’s why I am shocked to learn that the agency plans to make a fundamental...
You’re not the Boss in Wilderness
by John Clayton, Writers on the Range When my friends and I encountered the fresh grizzly bear scat, we were deep in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness, 20 miles from a trailhead. I’d seen grizzlies before—from the car. But this experience was on a whole other level. I felt...
Old-Growth Forests
Can the Forest Service Kick its 100-year Addiction to Logging? President Biden was widely praised for Executive Order 14072, which ordered the first-ever national inventory of old-growth and mature forests on federal lands. Issued April 22, 2022 (Earth Day), the order...
Researchers Sequence Whitebark Pine Genome
Among efforts to stave off the rapid decline of whitebark pine trees, researchers have recently sequenced the genome of this keystone species and are publishing their findings. Conifer genomes can be challenging to sequence as they are 3-10 times larger than the human...
2023 Brings Quietest U.S. Fire Season in Decades
The most current data show 2023 was a relatively quiet fire year. The National Interagency Fire Center reports 54,273 wildfires burned 2,627,112 acres through Dec. 18. While the number of fires was in line with the 10-year average, the number of acres burned was the...
Mount Hood National Forest
The Mount Hood National Forest encompasses 1.1 million acres, with about a third of those acres designated as wilderness within eight wilderness areas. The Forest has a rich history and offers year-round recreation opportunities. Its watersheds provide drinking water...
Urge Your Senators to Pass the Wild Olympics Bill
The Wild Olympics Wilderness and Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (Senate Bill 1254) achieved an important milestone when it cleared the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Committee Dec. 14. Sen. Patty Murray (D, Wash.) first introduced the bill in 2012 and...
How Homes Can Survive Wildfire
While there’s no historical evidence that Nero “fiddled while Rome burned,” there’s been plenty of fiddling in our forests while homes and communities burn in the American West. Jack Cohen has not been fiddling. His decades-long research at the Forest Service Missoula...
The Camel’s Nose is Under the Tent
The Forest Service has the kind of problem that most of us wish we suffered from. It has more money than it can spend. Thanks to exceedingly generous appropriations by Congress to fix the Wildfire Crisis (sic), the agency is awash in cash. So what could be the problem...
Restoring the American Elm
Like the American chestnut, the American elm is threatened by an invasive species, but the future for the elms looks a bit brighter than the fate of the chestnuts. For elms the threat comes from Dutch Elm Disease, introduced in the 1930s, and researchers are making...
Federal Wildfire Commission Issues Report
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act established the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission and tasked the Commission with creating policy recommendations to address “the wildfire crisis.” In September, the Commission released a report with 148...
Forest Service Approves Logging Near Yellowstone
The Custer-Gallatin National Forest recently issued a Finding of No Significant Impact approving the South Plateau Landscape Area Treatment Project. The 16,462-acre logging project (to “improve forest resilience”) includes 5,531 acres of clear-cutting, 6,593...
FSEEE Featured in Fire Retardant Story
Susannah Frame with KING 5 News, Seattle's NBC affiliate, interviewed FSEEE Executive Director Andy Stahl for an in-depth feature on aerial fire retardant. Frame also spoke with Vertis Campbell of the Colville Tribe and Brandon Miller, CEO of GreenFire, which produces...
Tell Your Senators to Oppose S. 796
We need your help to stop the Forest Service from polluting invaluable water resources with aerial fire retardant. While our lawsuit has forced the Forest Service to apply for a permit as required by the Clean Water Act, members of Congress have introduced legislation...
Wood Vaults for ‘Forest Resilience’ and ‘Financial Returns’
The Forest Service recently approved a $250,000 grant for Kodama Systems, Inc., in collaboration with Blue Forest and The Trust for Public Land, to fund the creation of “wood vaults” in California. The pilot project will construct “engineered earthen wood vaults ......
Mature and Old-Growth Forest Inventory
The first national inventory of old-growth and mature forests on federal lands was completed this spring in response to Executive Order 14072, issued by President Joseph Biden on Earth Day 2022. The forest inventory report estimates that public lands managed by the...
Paying the Piper
In the 20th century, the Forest Service promised to build post-war America with logs cut from national forests. Logging would be sustainable, it promised, with no more timber removed in any decade than could be cut forever thereafter. Logging doubled in the 1940s,...
Jefferson Public Radio Interviews Andy Stahl About Fire Retardant
The Jefferson Exchange: The cavalry, or the contaminator? The debate over tankers dropping fire retardant FSEEE Executive Director Andy Stahl recently spoke about aerial fire retardant on Jefferson Public Radio in an extended interview with Geoffrey Riley, host of The...
Effectiveness of Landscape-Scale Fuel Treatments Questioned
A comprehensive 2021 Forest Service report by Theresa B. Jain, et al., identifies significant shortcomings in research supporting “fuel treatments” that focus on thinning our forests. Out of 2,240 research papers, the authors identified only 179 (8%) that evaluated...
FSEEE Featured on Front Page of LA Times
FSEEE is featured on the front page of the July 3 issue of the Los Angeles Times in Hayley Smith's article about fire retardant. Smith accurately points out some of the problems with Phos-Chek, the widely used red retardant that contains ammonium phosphate. "Studies...
Now Streaming: ‘Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire’
Elemental is a new documentary about wildfire in the drought-prone West. Directed by Trip Jennings, the film brings together respected experts from across the board — firefighters, wildfire survivors, research ecologists, indigenous elders, fire scientists, wildlife...