Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Over the last decade we've seen standard placing wildfires that are uncharacteristic of their
historic fire regime moving across the landscape and the y continue to get larger and larger
as the years go buy.
Fires are a very useful tool and here in the Pacific Northwest especially on the east of
the Cascade Mountains, those forests over there are fire-adapted forests.
It's a very visual experience; I mean you see the change instantly.
We really need to think about its habitat on the landscape and maybe creating
fire sheds. You know, these are really creating a home for fire.
The more you mess with fire, the more bases you better have covered.
Part of my fascination with fire is tied to that scale issue you have, because at that
small scale, fire is imminently predictable. But at that largest scale, fire is ultimately
unpredictable. We really have no idea in that it makes it magical.
To me fire is like water, it's like oxygen, its like soil, it's like microbes in the soil.
Its part of the whole picture. Its part of the whole environment.
I think that it is a true benefit that the College of Forestry is now offering a complete
fire science curriculum. I think it will help guide and engage the students in what they
need to know.
We now have multiple perspectives in one house that are all very strong programs and we can
work together to really look at how we transition into this future where fire becomes a part
of how we live, part of what we do, part of our *** acceptance.
I mean- some of these fires that we've been at are thousands and thousands of acres and
its not that they're gone, it's that they've been instantly transformed.
If we don't have the ability to understand fire and its effects on landscape, then we
aren't able to treat the landscape in an economically feasible way, or an ecologically appropriate
way. I think the Fire Science program is very important.
I can come out here and years from now I will be able to reference what I've seen and learned
out here.
We can give them concepts in the classroom, but until you actually place it on the landscape,
you never really understand fully how those concepts fit into this bigger picture in the
forest.