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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 มิ.ย. 2023
- Smokey the Bear was wrong about wildfires. To restore healthy forests and mitigate the destructive power of wildfires, scientists urge lawmakers and foresters to embrace prescribed burns.
Many western forests need frequent, low-severity wildfires to thrive. But in the 20th century, the US government vowed to put out all forest fires and outlawed traditional burning by indigenous peoples. Most experts think that this policy contributed to denser forests … and the massive, deadly wildfires that now race through them.
“These are not your grandfather’s fires,” Senator Ron Wyden told me. “They’re bigger, they’re hotter, they’re more powerful. Communities wiped down to ashes - that’s what we’re dealing with.”
With temperatures rising and the western drought deepening, wildfires will be part of life for the foreseeable future. But there is wide consensus that we can dampen the impacts of those megafires by carefully reintroducing smaller fires to the landscape. That could mean letting some natural fires run their course. Or that could mean agencies and tribal groups setting more prescribed fires. This will require a massive increase in labor - there are many more burn projects needed than there are trained workers. And it will require policymakers to understand that the risk of prescribed fires is much smaller than the risk of doing nothing.
WHAT'S NEXT
The Inflation Reduction Act allocated $1.8 billion for “hazardous fuels reduction” in America’s forests. Those dollars are already funding some prescribed burns … and also “thinning” projects. In the latter, crews cut down small and medium trees to try and rob fires of their fuel. It’s a painstaking process - and the value of the harvested trees doesn’t come close to covering the expense. But there’s a bigger issue: a growing body of evidence suggests that thinning can often make wildfires worse unless it’s followed by a burn. Time will tell how much the Forest Service is actually investing in prescribed fire vs. thinning - and what impact these fuels reduction projects will have on the future fire seasons.
Meanwhile, Wyden and his colleagues from Colorado, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet have introduced a bill that would send $60 billion to forest “restoration and resilience projects” including “reintroduction of characteristic, low-intensity fire in frequent fire regime ecosystems.”
NOTABLE
Data-visualizations from the New York Times show what makes the issue of wildfires so urgent: more and more people are living in the path of destruction. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...
Oregon Public Broadcasting has led the coverage of wildfires in the pacific northwest, including this piece by Tony Schick and Jes Burns on timber industry efforts to push logging as a wildfire mitigation strategy. www.opb.org/article/2020/10/3...
Susan Prichard, the University of Washington fire ecologist featured in this video, lays out the mainstream scientific consensus on wildfire management in this review paper. She and her co-authors write, “an intentional merging of Indigenous and western knowledge is needed to guide future forest conditions and restore active fire regimes to western North American forests.” esajournals.onlinelibrary.wil...
Ecologist Dominick DellaSala (also featured) argues that most fuels reduction projects are ineffectual or counterproductive. He’s part of a vocal faction of conservationists often at odds with the Forest Service and mainstream scientists. www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Environmental scientist Melinda Adams examines “the powerful Indigenous healing that is nourished by the constructive action of cultural burning” in this recent paper. www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10...
“Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire” - a documentary film by Trip Jennings - explores our changing understanding of fire and shows how different people are learning to live alongside fire-adapted forests. www.elementalfilm.com/
![ทัศนศึกษาโรงงานผลิตโค้ก [THAI/ENG SUB]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/M9y-TJBNem0/mqdefault.jpg)
Video time stamps (By chapters)
0:01 Intro - Prologue
1:18 Chapter 1 - History of natural wildfires and Responses to wildfires
5:14 Chapter 1.5 - The increase of residential homes and Increase of latter fuel
6:27 Chapter 2 - Logging history, Thinning to win, and Why it has problem
9:06 Chapter 3 - Fight fire with fire and Revival of Cultural Burning
11:12 Chapter 4 - Lack of labor, Fire borrowing, The 1.6 percent and risky benefits
14:38 Epilogue - How to live with the Fire Genie and Becoming the master of your fire
Wow this was such a high quality production, I thought I was watching a really big channel. Super impressed with what you were able to put together. Thanks for the video!
Good reporting, I didn't really find Semafor until right about when you started this channel. I wasn't sure it would ever really grow but if you keep putting content like this out I have no doubt it will. Also, add time stamps to your video please!
Wow very enlightening. I am so much more well informed after having watched this video. So long as society does logging, then prescribed fires are necessary to burn away the slash in order to prevent a potential massive fire. I used to be a tree planter and yeah, there is a ton of slash that gets left behind in cut blocks
I take in audio delivered information better than text.
Really grateful to have these stories from this news organization.
THANK YOU.
If anyone reading uses a bot reader you recommend, please let me know !❤
Huge thank you to Adam Cole who led this episode. If you can't get enough - check out his amazing series Skunk Bear: www.youtube.com/@skunkbear
Key is burning constantly
Amazing video quality, really hidden gem on youtube
Excellent video production, top notch!!!
Well presented. And it makes sense to me. I still wonder about doing prescribed burns around communities as a buffer zone, and concentrating less on the whole forest.
Once again Semafor continues to impress! The next Axios!
Forest ecologists, academics, tribal leaders, many wild land firefighters and those just paying attention to the science (although NOT most policymakers, politicians, timber interests, certain key environmental groups and other leaders) understand that prescribed burning and indigenous fire management practices (aka Good Fire) are the main tool enabling communities to live in relative harmony, health, safety and ecological balance with forests in the 21st century. Western native communities have put good fire on the land for thousands of years, while modern forest ecologists have known for half a century that USFS enforced (Smokey the Bear) total fire suppression and industrial logging created unhealthy and unstable forests, and it is not well known that ecologically brittle and commercially manufactured forests were primed to explode in unprecedented firestorms whenever there was a season or two of lower than average precipitation. It will take several generations to get our forests back to healthy ecological balance. Regulatory, commercial, insurance and short term environmental (air quality restrictions that prevent modest increases in particulate matter during prescribed burns but set the stage for catastrophic air pollution when unplanned firestorms inevitably occur) barriers must be removed so indigenous fire and prescribed burning can be ramped up ten to fifty fold starting NOW.
Huge fan here. Thanks for sharing!
3:43 Love that segment, especially Hazy! They're so amazing, I wonder who's the voice actor?
someone in the newsroom guessed "Bernie Sanders, in his 30s"
@@Semafor Haha yeah, anyway I love the character! I'm guessing based on your response you guys didn't make the character? I live in the UK so idk.
@@Xamimus we definitely did! but we'll never tell who voices lil' hazy
@@Semafor Ah ok, would love to see them reappear in a future video!
Thank for this video
I really think having a permanent Civilian Conservation Corps would be good, as long as it's led by Indigenous people and ecologists. People need jobs for experience, but need experience for jobs, and find it hard to get out of that loop. Meanwhile, as our car-centric infrastructure and cheap plywood housing dilapidates, our colonial land practices have primed us for ecological disasters across the country, all because we arrogantly thought we knew better than the peoples who have lived here for thousands upon thousands of years. We plant genetically-identical GMO monocultures in all environments across the country; we use pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers out the wazoo; and, as explained in this video, our forestry practices have been horrific. Even now, as we settlers are starting to realize we've been wrong this whole time, and are starting to return power to Indigenous people to conduct prescribed burns, and lend manpower and resources to assist, we still don't have enough manpower at the ready to do that. We have lots of people who are unemployed and/or unhoused, and people who work jobs that they'd rather not work that are often pointless, anyway. We wonder why we're depressed, even as we know we're just cogs in the machine for capitalists. Restoring, making permanent, and decolonizing a new Civilian Conservation Corps wouldn't completely solve every last problem we have in this country, but my goodness, would it solve a lot. Imagine if we didn't invest so much in the military, if we closed down our hundreds of foreign military bases, decommissioned the bulk of the military, and had them and the nation's currently-poor employed in restoring and improving rail lines, reorganizing cities so that anyone can reach their needs within walking distance, building green energy plants and working on ways of reducing our dependence on electricity and fuel dependence. Gods, think of how revolutionizing our rail would make things cheaper! If you could walk to meet your needs, and take a train to reach most anywhere distant, for a cheap, affordable price, how much would you save on gas? How much less gas would be used transporting supplies to markets and distribution centers? People would be healthier, life would be more affordable, the land would be healed, if we had a new Civilian Conservation Corps.
Noticed locally, whenever the Parks Service takes over properties they look worse, extract water or go up for sale. May be my state who doesn't believe in the EPA or protection or oversight.🤠🐻
This is what caused New York City to happen from Canada.
All you have to do is burn everything once a year
What the heck???!?? Why would you chop down trees and reduce forests limiting oxygen to lessen the chance of a wildfire that is natural in those areas. HUMANS ugh 🤦🏾♀️ I- I’m just gone pray. That we do a better job to protect nature and be more in tune with her. The problem isn’t the fire, we need renewal, people need to move to allow nature to take its course. ❤
Better to manage the forests by selective cutting and clearing,than to allow it to grow out of control and then burn out of control.
Literally no mention on the pay issues for Federal Wildland Firefighters? I don't understand how one can research this problem and not make that a focal point of their study. Seems very lazy. As a Fire Ecologist and Wildland Firefighter, this video only superficially explores a very nuanced issue
Trump told u to rake the forest floors but u didn't listen.😅😅😅. 400 yrs r up.
this turns into a ren and stimpy cartoon eventually for some reason. I don't think the score was supposed to remind me of better things to watch instead. Think about it.
It's like this was made to steal eyeballs and not fill brains with good stories that were true. PEOPLE DONT START FIRES! GUNS DO!
also it's stolen valor to edit yourself in period style if you're whole show isn't set entirely within that period. it's sending mixed messages. It tricks people to think you were involved when those production methods were in vogue.
This video pisses me off that John K doesn't have this job instead of the people who do have this job.
I don't think this job needed to be done.... blame all the problems on a cartoon bear? How brave.
Whafug?!