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By Nick Smith Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities For years, foresters, firefighters, and rural communities have argued that active forest management can reduce wildfire impacts. New research is putting numbers behind that experience. Researchers examining hundreds of wildfires across the West

Karl Brauneis is a retired U.S. Forest Service forester, former smokejumper, and longtime student of federal forest policy and history. Over a decades long career in the woods, Karl witnessed firsthand how active forest management, rapid fire response, and sustained

Wildfire-driven deforestation rates in California are now among the highest in the world, according to new research highlighted by Phys.org.  California’s wildfire crisis has become so severe that Governor Gavin Newsom waived portions of the California Environmental Quality Act, commonly

Some anti-forestry groups claim active forest management comes at the expense of outdoor recreation on public lands. Stop logging, they argue, and rural communities will transition toward more prosperous tourism-based economies. New research recently highlighted in The Conversation disputes those

The House of Representatives has passed the Save Our Sequoias Act with strong bipartisan support, advancing a focused effort to protect and restore giant sequoia groves in California.  The legislation directs the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service to

For decades, federal wilderness and forest policies have largely been guided by a preservation framework rooted in laws written 40 to 50 years ago.  These policies were adopted in a different era, before prolonged drought, extreme wildfire behavior, insect outbreaks,

New research from the University of Washington shows that active forest management can strengthen water security. In a study published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, researchers examined how forest thinning affects snowpack in the eastern Cascade Mountains.  Snowpack

As wildfires grow larger and more destructive across the West, forest health projects remain stuck in court. It can take a decade to plan a project and a single court ruling to stall it completely, even as wildfires continue to

This guest post is from Cody Altizer of the Give for Grouse Initiative. Please contribute to this important campaign here. There was a time, in our not-so-distant history, that an iconic upland species called our young forests home. All across

Note: This blog post responds to an oped in The Hill by Mike Dombeck, Dale Bosworth Tom Tidwell and Vicki Christiansen, former Chiefs of the US Forest Service. Twenty-five years ago, when the Roadless Rule was adopted, few people anticipated