Staff Articles

May 17, 2024
By Letters to the Editor, Jean Marquardt
Chico Enterprise-Record

The insurance crisis really hit home this week when my Chico home insurance premium doubled. These insurance companies have been requiring home hardening modifications because they are aware of wildfire risk and are minimizing risk. However, our government seems to be moving towards creating more risk of wildfires.

October 20, 2023
By Jeremy Clar and Chad Hanson
Fresno Bee Op-Ed

Two years ago, a mixed-intensity fire burned through Redwood Mountain sequoia grove in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, including a few hundred acres of high-intensity fire. The National Park Service quickly assumed the high-intensity fire area was too hot, and few, if any, sequoia seedlings would grow. Believing no natural regeneration would occur, officials devised a plan to plant up to 400 sequoia seedlings per acre in designated wilderness areas. Nature did not cooperate.

July 5, 2023
By Chad Hanson
Los Angeles Times Op-Ed

As my colleagues and I hiked through the Nelder giant sequoia grove south of Yosemite National Park recently, we could barely believe our eyes. In 2017, the Railroad fire swept through nearly all of the Nelder Grove, burning lightly in most areas but very intensely in the portion where we walked, about six years after the fire.

June 11, 2023
By Chad Hanson
The Hill Op-Ed

With wildfires sweeping across 10 million acres of Canada’s forests in recent weeks, residents of New York and other northeastern U.S. cities and towns have struggled with wildfire smoke, and the irritation of eyes and lungs that it can cause. The conversations under the hazy, orange-tinted skies in recent days have turned political.

February 17, 2023
By Chad Hanson
CounterPunch

A once-respected news outlet for environmental journalism that highlighted and exposed abuses of our natural world, High Country News (HCN) has now taken an ugly turn for the worse. On February 10, 2023, HCN published and distributed an article, “Does thinning work for wildfire prevention?”, that presented itself ostensibly as an examination of “what scientists find” to be true on the subject of “thinning”, wildfires, and climate change.

July 30, 2022
By Chad Hanson and Michael Dorsey
The New York Times Op-Ed

When the Oak fire swept through more than 10,000 acres southwest of Yosemite National Park last weekend, it burned through forests where widespread logging, including commercial thinning, accelerated in recent decades. Much of the forest canopy had been removed, exposing the remaining vegetation to more direct sunlight and creating hotter, drier and windier conditions that favor the spread of flames.

July 21, 2022
By Chad Hanson
CounterPunch

The Sacramento Bee misinformed its readers about logging occurring in Yosemite National Park, and the current Washburn fire near the Mariposa giant sequoia grove (“Did thinning help the Yosemite forest survive the Washburn fire?”, July 17, 2022). First, the Bee’s article repeatedly conveys the notion that the so-called “thinning” occurring in Yosemite National Park’s forests pertains to “brush” and “small trees” the size of “Christmas trees”, and that only a “few larger logs” are being removed. That is inaccurate.

June 17, 2022
By Chad Hanson
Fresno Bee Op-Ed

The Fresno Bee’s Editorial Board has gone on record opposing the lawsuit, by the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute, against a huge commercial logging project in Yosemite National Park. But the Editorial Board relies upon a scientifically discredited study by logging interests that blatantly manipulated data to promote a false and economically self-serving “overgrown forests” narrative.

February 15, 2022
By Chad Hanson
Fresno Bee Op-Ed

As The Bee recently reported, a new study, by Malcolm North and others (2022), promotes the idea of killing and removing 80% of the trees in the forests of the Sierra Nevada through commercial logging, ostensibly as a wildfire management strategy. The North study was authored by scientists funded by the U.S. Forest Service, an agency that financially benefits from commercial logging on our public lands, and the study neglected to mention some essential information and evidence.

January 11, 2022
By John Fielder and Chad Hanson
Denver Post Op-Ed

With President Biden and Congressman Joe Neguse surveying the devastating toll of the recent Marshall fire, this is a profoundly important time to reflect on our current wildfire policies and responses, and to ensure that we get it right to best protect communities. Driven by extreme dry and windy conditions, the Marshall fire burned approximately 6,000 acres in Boulder County and destroyed over 1,000 homes. The remains of one person have been found and another is presumed to have died in the fire.