ecology

Canada’s Clayoquot Sound is no stranger to logging controversies. In the 1990s, thousands turned out to protect its verdant rainforests from logging during forest blockades. While the Sound’s outstanding ecosystems have been recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve—a designation that carries no legal protections—logging continues to threaten its few remaining intact rainforests.

I never thought they could dig themselves out of the situation. But they did--and the way they did it is a great lesson for all conservationists who work with people.

Perhaps because we are such Olympians at moving, at shifting and transitioning to new lives, new jobs and new houses, Americans know relatively little about the places in which they live. Much of my own work has been about the creative ideas for educating about place and region, and for deepening connections to nature and landscape. There are many possibilities, some tried, others only pondered. Part of the task I think is to make learning about community and place fun; something that you would want to do, and that would compete well with the many other life diversions available.

The firefight is the great set-piece of American fire management.  It seems so obvious: Control the bad fires before you introduce good ones.  Seize the battlefield.  The drama is overpowering, a moral equivalent of war; exciting, potentially lethal, inextinguishably telegenic.  For some seven decades the U.S. threw everything it had into the fight against fire.  It won far more battles than it surrendered, and in the end it lost the war.