The music in between
Notes from the Fire Tower
Looking toward 2024
It’s been a minute! We have been busy preparing for, and then hosting, the Red Sky Summit on behalf of Convective Capital and The Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. You can read more, and see some photos, here. Thanks to everyone who came, lending their voice and knowledge to the common objective of developing and scaling innovative, technology-based solutions to our wildfire crisis.?
On that note about getting busy, as I round out my first full year working at Rain (??) and studying the media about wildfire these news aggregations can start to be a bit more succinct. In the coming year we’ll be more discerning about which news stories to spend time on, looking for exemplary reporting, fresh research, and especially revealing storytelling, while keeping in mind what we’ve already read. (One small caveat: we don’t really need to read more stories about firefighting goats but—who doesn’t love a good firefighting goat story now and then?!).?
This week:
Just one thing ?? | Fire on the prairie
Fire, Generally ?? | Fresh research on cancer-causing wildfire-modified heavy metals, two years with Hotshots, and fire trends
Climate ?? | Recipe for greenhouse gas: Tundra + wildfire, great news from the redwoods and a podcast on the hit to air quality from wildfire
Firefighting ?? | Three firefighters die in Australia ??, distinctly different fire season assessments in California vs. Virginia, & Cory the rescue dog rides a helicopter
Firetech ?? | Pano news and something fresh from Airbus
What’s burning? ?? | Ventura County
If you read just one thing:
What we’ve been seeing in stories about fire, and forests, and climate, is that the problems and their solutions are on the whole very particular to each landscape. For example, one can imagine that the recipe for catastrophic fires in Maui and that solution set are distinct from those in California. This exquisitely written opinion piece, peppered with lyrical prose from novelist Willa Cather, catalogs the particular risks and problems of the Great Plains, which I confess to not often consider when I think about fire.
On the Great Plains, the devil is red cedar coupled with the pioneering desire to see trees on the landscape, the solution is prescribed burns and grazing, and the outcome is a carbon sink more reliable than treecover. Grasslands storing over 90 percent of its carbon underground, out of reach from wildfires that would send that carbon back into the atmosphere. “The Great Plains biome is dying. Losing grasslands at this scale is akin to losing tropical rainforests or coral reefs,” acccording to Dr. Twidwell, rangeland ecologist, University of Nebraska.
Many have detailed the human history of the landscape, others the broader ecology. But Cather captured the music in between: that symphony, at once melancholy and free, terrifying and strange, that swells within us, like the land itself, when we are confronted by the horizon unbroken. “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out,” says Jim Burden, the narrator of Cather’s “My ántonia.” “I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”
Fire, Generally
领英推荐
Fresh research on cancer-causing wildfire-modified heavy metals, two years with Hotshots, and fire trends
“We are seeing increasing evidence of fires departing the natural range of historical variability being more frequent, more intense, and larger.” —David Bowman, University of Tasmania
Climate
Recipe for greenhouse gas: Tundra + wildfire, great news from the redwoods and a podcast on the hit to air quality from wildfire
Firefighting
Three firefighters die in Australia ??, distinctly different fire season assessments in California vs. Virginia, amp; Cory the rescue dog rides a helicopter
Firetech
Pano news and something fresh from Airbus
What’s burning?
Thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting if you are so moved.? Until next time,
Andrea