How a California Community Helped Prevent the Bridge Fire From Destroying Their Town

September 23, 2024
By Chad Hanson
Los Angeles Times Op-Ed

In recent years, Wrightwood got very serious about community fire-safety measures. Long before the Bridge fire began, the local Fire Safe Council held educational events, coordinating with multiple agencies and governments. They promoted the importance of simple “home hardening” measures to make homes more fireproof, such as sweeping pine needles and leaves off of roofs and installing modern exterior vents that prevent flaming embers from entering houses.

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Wildfire Prevention – What’s Working and What Needs Improvement?

KTLA | Dr. Chad Hanson is in the studio discussing state and federal wildfire prevention efforts–what’s working and where improvements are needed. He compares traditional wildfire management approaches to the John Muir Project’s focus on community-driven fire prevention, emphasizing strategies like home hardening and defensible space to help protect homes from wildfires, making them more fire-proof.

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WORLDFIRE – Chapter 16, Part I: A Green Fire Rising

Coming Home to Gaia, Tom Weis | As explained by one of the world’s top wildfire authorities, Chad Hanson, in his eye-opening book, SMOKESCREEN (which should be on every forester’s bookshelf): “[F]ire-adapted forest ecosystems evolved with fire and depend on it. Excluding fire from these ecosystems is like trying to keep rain out of a rainforest.” Hanson reminds us that mixed-intensity forest fires are natural and have been occurring since time immemorial.

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Logging Industry’s Wildfire Claims are Misleading the Public

August 12, 2024
By Chad Hanson
The Hill Op-Ed

The Park Fire in northern California has reached approximately 400,000 acres in size, and already logging industry advocates are pushing out misinformation about the fire in an attempt to promote their deceptively-named Fix Our Forests Act logging bill. The timber industry’s political apologists tell us that the Park Fire grew so big, so fast ostensibly because public forestlands are “overgrown” and in need of “thinning.”

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