Ok, This is Damn Scary – Solution Time
Confluence West is a consortium of preeminent western water leaders.
Our work: Water - the face of climate change in the American West Learn more
Friends of Confluence West:
As a kid, I spent a few summers in the Oregon Cascades in Forest Service lookouts. Every morning and evening, my Dad would do a 360 with the viewfinder. In those three summers, we saw only one small wildfire.
Fast forward: There are two recent, scary reports on what the current catastrophic wildfires are doing – not just to the health of trees, fish, mammals, and birds – but also to human health.
Most of us have seen the study that came out late last year - wildfire smoke now accounts for up to half of all fine-particle pollution in the Western U.S. This week, a new study identifies wildfire smoke as a potentially infectious agent – thanks to all the microbes in the smoke.
Since none of you reading this piece need more scary information (or more about the economic costs of wildfires), let’s take a quick look at three paths forward to get our forests and woodlands healthier:
1. More money. That one’s obvious. Approximate restoration cost per-acre: $3,000. Twenty-two million acres need restoration in Oregon and Washington. One million acres in California – in the first five years. Then you start adding up all the acreage in the other Western states. Per-acre costs are lower with fewer barriers to prescribed burning and indigenous-wisdom burning being more widely used (and funded.)
2. To the ‘more money’ challenge, I’ll add more multi-beneficiary partnerships. Partnerships like the Rio Grande Water Fund, 4FRI, and the French Meadows project work – and raise significant amounts of money – because everyone pools their expertise, connections, and political muscle.
3. Workforce. This one may not be as obvious, but to get dead/dog hair trees out requires the people, machinery – and places to take the wood products. There’s capacity in regions with historic commercial timber operations, such as the Pacific Northwest. There isn’t much capacity in states like Arizona or Colorado, places that never had much of a timber industry. Any scaled up industry needs to, of course, provide living-wage jobs and training.
At Confluence West, we’re taking a deeper dive looking at the barriers to large landscape restoration in the West, and more importantly, some of the policy solutions. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, get ready for what may be an even more horrendous wildfire year in the American West.
Footnote: Working on a Western landscape that desperately needs help? While we still haven’t figured out how to print money, we’re very good at catalyzing smart partnerships. Email us
