In Oregon Timber Country, a Town Buys the Surrounding Forests to Confront Climate-Driven Wildfires [insideclimatenews.org]

Jenna Quinn 7/10/2312:00 PM

^{Don Hamann discusses the age and condition of a felled tree in the Butte Falls Community Forest during the regular Community Forest Chat on Saturday, June 10, 2023. Credit: Amanda Loman}

By Grant Stringer, Inside Climate News, July 9, 2023

With a population of just 400 people, Butte Falls is a speck in an ocean of remote timberland, much of it burned.

The community is tucked into a vast forest of pine and fir about 35 miles from the California border. Outside town, snow-capped Mt. McLoughlin towers above a vast burn scar, where blackened trees from the South Obenchain Fire stand crookedly across miles of the Cascade Range’s foothills.

In September 2020, logger Don Hamann watched with awe as that blaze cast embers over his head in the middle of the night. Hamann, 70, ignored an evacuation notice to protect his property and that of his neighbors on a woody rise above Butte Falls.

[Please click here to read more.]

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Mike FlaningamMember

When I first moved to Oregon over 2 years ago, I loved all the trees and it felt like heaven. Then I gradually came to notice how most of the trees were logging forests and looked nothing like the few remaining old-growth (natural) forests and the biodiverse ecologies they provide. The logging trees are all the same type, they're bunched together leaving no room for undergrowth shrubs or wildlife, and there's none of the beautiful (and carbon-storing) moss seen in old-growth forests. I now see logging forests as horrific reminders of how we humans have pillaged the planet for profit. A swath of land next to my work was clear cut last year, and it was genuinely traumatic to watch.

7/11/2310:04 AM

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