Word: forest
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Researchers from the 3,000-acre Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., where much of the University’s research in forest biology is conducted, confirmed that wildfires in the southern California region were to be expected...
...When I was an undergraduate, my ecology professor said that coastal California was being developed in order to burn down, so this is nothing new,” said David R. Foster, the director of the Harvard Forest. “This is a landscape that was made to burn. It’s got vegetation that dries out and has conditions that are perfectly conditioned to carry immense fires...
...winds become a flamethrower, spreading glowing embers half a mile (800 m) or more. The Santa Anas have been midwife to the most destructive wildfires in California's history, from the Great Fire of 1889 to the 2003 disaster that blackened nearly 700,000 acres (280,000 hectares) of forest. Lifelong residents of the state know the Santa Anas and dread them. As Joan Didion has written, "The wind shows us how close to the edge...
...Development Scourge Part of the reason Southern California has become such a dangerous place to live is that it's such an attractive place to live. The migration of people drawn to the West by the region's mountains, forests and proximity to the ocean has led to more and more new residents building houses on the shrinking borderlands between edge suburbs and untouched wilderness. More than 8.6 million Western homes have been built within 30 miles (50 km) of national forest since 1982; in California, where the population has more than tripled since 1950, in excess...
...Fighting and Feeding The Flames Even when we try to be smart about fires, we often just make things worse. For more than a century, the U.S. Forest Service - the federal agency responsible for combating wildfires - has pursued a policy of stamping out blazes wherever they occur and doing so all the more aggressively as population grows in the endangered regions. For those accustomed to living in urban areas, that makes sense - the job of a city fire department is to stop blazes before they damage property. But that's not how things work in the great Western forests. Paradoxically...