Daily Archives: January 10, 2019

WASHINGTON—Training has been halted for thousands of western firefighters. The U.S. Forest Service can’t award contracts for needed equipment. In forests across the West, no federal employees are doing work to reduce dry “fuel” that feeds catastrophic blazes. These are some of the impacts of the 19-day federal shutdown on federal firefighters, and experts say the situation could quickly worsen. If the shutdown drags out for several more weeks, federal fire crews won’t be ready for the months ahead… “This is the second year in a row we’ve had a shutdown right in the middle of the (firefighter) training season,” said Jim Whittington, … who runs an Oregon-based crisis management consulting firm, Whittington & Associates. “The last thing we want is for fires to break out, and not have the kind of crews we need…” …Even without the shutdown, firefighters were facing an increasingly compressed “window” to prepare for the upcoming fire season, Whittington said. 

For more than three decades, US farmers have been growing genetically engineered crops. Now researchers are pushing to move the technology from farm to forest by releasing transgenic trees — engineered to carry genes that would make them resistant to pests — into the wild. Regulatory and research challenges to such genetically modified trees could make that transition harder, according to a report released by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on 8 January. However, genetic engineering’s potential to boost forest health is promising enough to warrant further research, the report authors say. Unfortunately, commercial interests are already hampering scientific work on transgenic trees, says plant geneticist Steven Strauss of Oregon State University in Corvallis. … few companies will allow him to plant his trees on their land because doing so could make them lose their certification by organizations including the Sustainable Forestry Initiative.

POLLOCK PINES — President Donald Trump’s Wednesday tweet criticizing California’s forest management comes at a time when the government shutdown is preventing federal forest workers from doing their jobs. …Heather Campbell… a retired U.S. Forest Service ranger and firefighter who is now the director of the Pollock Pines-Camino Fire Safe Council. …This is the time of year when Forest Service crews are usually busy working to thin out the forests to reduce the threat of major wildfires. But that work is not being funded during the government shutdown. The president’s tweet is baffling to people like Campbell, who are familiar with the work that has been done. That work can ramp up again as soon as the government shutdown ends.

President Trump said Wednesday that he has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to withhold funding for California unless the state improves its forest management to prevent wildfires. “Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forrest (sic) fires that, with proper Forrest (sic) Management, would never happen,” Trump tweeted. …Trump has at least twice before threatened to withhold disaster funding from California and pressed the state to fix what he sees as major flaws with its forest management. Local officials and fire experts, meanwhile, have criticized Trump for ignoring the impact that climate change is having on the length and severity of fires while giving too much credit to forest management. …California passed a comprehensive law last year aimed at wildfires. …A majority of forest land in the state, however, is owned by the federal government.