By Lily Hess, Landscape News
Across continents and climates, uncontrollable and destructive wildfires are becoming an expected part of annual calendars. This year has been a case in point.
By Nick Engelfried, Waging Nonviolence
Even as communities begin picking themselves up after the devastation, West Coast climate activists are experimenting with what an effective response to such crises looks like.
By Bill Tripp, The Guardian blog
As wildfires rage across California, it saddens me that Indigenous peoples’ millennia-long practice of cultural burning has been ignored in favor of fire suppression.
By Natalie Holmes, Medium
It all happened so fast. The temptation was to shut down and succumb to the shock. Instead, a group formed in neighboring Ashland and started to figure out how to help.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
There remains a hope that once we get past the economic and social effects of the pandemic, all of us will be able to return to something resembling normal life before the pandemic—even if it is a "new normal" marked by heightened vigilance and protection against infectious disease ... But the date for this recovery to a new normal seems to keep getting postponed.
By John Kaufmann, Resilience.org
We are in the midst of an unmitigated natural disaster here in Oregon and on the West Coast. I struggle to find the words to express what’s happening and the toll it’s taking – on our natural treasures, on homes and businesses, and on our collective psyches.
By Sanjana Paul, Degrees of Change
In 2019, intense fires sprung up on every inhabited continent on the planet. In just one year, 250,000 fires across the world resulted in almost 40 million hectares of land being burnt.
By Vanessa Warheit, Laura Neish, Common Dreams
As the smoke continues to blanket our state, we call on insurers and other institutional investors to be a powerful force for good, and to end the madness of continued extraction. Our ability to thrive on this, our only planet, demands it of them.
By Iva Korbar, Resilience.org
Cultural burning is far more than a new method in the spectrum of hazard reduction burning; it is a recognized official Australian wildfire prevention technique. Cultural burning sets focus on re-establishing the kinship between the species in a certain ecosystem; it pays full attention to fire relationships of the area.
By Oliver Costello, The Guardian blog
We live in fire country as taught through fire lore, this is how I understand what is happening across country. These times are hard for us first peoples, so often we are ignored.
By Peter Bridgewater, Relational Thinking
We still have time to learn the lessons and get this right, but many strongly held beliefs (yes they are beliefs, not science) have to go out of the window, and we need much more science focus on this issue, rather than the ever burgeoning clamour for “saving” threatened species, which takes oxygen and energy for the real questions that need answers at landscape scale.
By Darren Evans, The Conversation
All species are embedded in complex networks of interactions where they are directly and indirectly dependent on each other. A food web is a good example of such networks. The simultaneous loss of such large numbers of plants and animals could have cascading impacts on the ways species interact – and hence the ability of ecosystems to bounce back and properly function following high-severity wildfires.