Hi Mephisto,
The weather here has been quite extraordinary for the past six weeks. It's been brilliantly clear, with much less humidity in the air than I recall from the past few summers. We've had a couple of regional fires that managed to smoke up the air here, but that's not too unusual. As far as my immediate situation, I live in a rural pastoral area with a ninety year old irrigation district that keeps us as a relative paradise compared to the undeveloped lands beyond. Forest fires are extremely unlikely within our community, mainly because of so much irrigated pasture land. There is a resort on the other side of Sisters, OR that you may be familiar with called Black Butte Ranch, last year they were forced to evacuate due to a forest fire I was able to comfortably watch with a spotting scope from my front windows. Last week the resort was again threatened, though not as severely as last year.
The forests to the west of us here, i.e. the eastern slopes of the Cascades, are a mess. They're a mass of pecker poles, undergrowth that's overgrown, diseased and dying trees and essentially none of it with any commercial value and little with aesthetic value. I don't have the answers for how to attend to all this. But there are some demonstration strips, particularly along the tourist highways, where pre-commercial clearing creates the kind of healthy open park pine forests that existed here 100 years ago. With 20% youth unemployment, it wouldn't be bad public policy to bring back the CCC or WPA type projects that were applied to improving the commons in the 1930s. Of course, we'll never see anything like that from the Bushies. |
