Word: forestation
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...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...
...Losing Battle As more houses are dispersed through the fire zone - whether summer cabins or new McMansions - both firefighters and budgets are stretched ever more thinly. Last year the Forest Service spent a record $2.5 billion fighting wildfires that burned 9.9 million acres (4 million hectares), another record. Even though California has boosted spending on firefighting since the catastrophic blazes of 2003 - the state set aside $850 million for this year - when a megafire like this one strikes, officers on the ground quickly hit the limits of what they can do. "You're putting people between the unstoppable force...
...Outlook Does all this mean that the only way to stop the cycle of catastrophic forest fires is to change the way Americans live in the West? Probably - but the transition will be painful. Population growth in the affected areas has implicitly been supported by federal policies that protect private homes even if they're built in risky areas. This, in turn, has caused the Forest Service - which is supposed to perform a range of wilderness functions - to become largely a firefighting agency, devoting nearly half its budget to that one job. That has caught the eye of Congress, which...
...course, nature rarely abides apocalypse. By the time the flames finally begin to go out, the charred forests will be on their way to rebirth. "The plants will put in new growth soon," says David Weise, a project leader with the Forest Service's Forest Fire Laboratory in Riverside, Calif. "The forest is amazingly resilient...