Word: arizona
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...indocumentados entering the U.S. More than 3.5 million made it last year, compared with about 2.5 million a year for most of the '90s, according to Massey's estimates. The larger numbers mean that when things go wrong, more migrants are left to die on Texas highways and in Arizona deserts. Gonzalo, 19, a Guatemalan, barely escaped that destiny. "Last year I paid a coyote organization $2,000, and that's what finally got me into Arizona," he says as he sits in a detention pen near Minatitlan, facing deportation back to his country. "But then they just left...
This is the way the ponderosa pine forests of the American Southwest used to look, says Covington, director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University, and it is the way they could look again if thinned of an unnatural density of trees. But time is running out, he fears, for owing to more than a century of mismanagement, these once magnificent forests--along with the communities expanding around their fringes--are threatened by the elemental force that at one time sustained them--fire...
This summer, with blazes erupting once again across the West--from Arizona to Montana, Idaho, the Pacific Northwest and Canada--the concerns long raised by Covington and others are fueling an intense debate. Should the U.S. Forest Service, in the name of protecting communities and restoring ecological balance, authorize tree thinning on a massive scale? If it does, what size trees ought to be thinned and in what sorts of forests? And if it does not, what are the alternatives...
...frequent-fire regime that prevailed in the ponderosa pine forests of Arizona and New Mexico, for example, kept fuels low over widespread areas. In the ponderosa pine forests of Colorado's Front Range, however, big burns were spaced farther apart, allowing flammable material to accumulate. These fires rolled through every few decades or so and occasionally burned extremely hot. Their legacy, says Merrill Kaufmann, a senior scientist with the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station, was a mosaic of forested areas that alternated with clearings ranging from 5 acres to 100 acres in size...
...reservation, igniting the blaze that swept into Los Alamos. Lost in the finger pointing that followed was the fact that the fire would probably not have proved so dangerous had fuel loads in the adjacent forest been lower. And this is precisely why thinning can be useful. As Arizona State University environmental historian Stephen Pyne sees it, thinning is just a tool for "re-creating a habitat for fire...