Staff Articles

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.

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.”

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.