<
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09072023/in-oregon-timber-country-a-town-buys-the-surrounding-forests-to-confront-climate-driven-wildfires/>
"BUTTE FALLS, Oregon—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.
In the light of day, Hamann could see the smoke from a separate fire burning
thousands of homes in nearby Ashland and Talent, and further to the north, yet
another blaze leveled the mountain community of Blue River. The Obenchain would
burn 33,000 acres and skirted Butte Falls by just a quarter of a mile.
“You can’t stop it,” Hamann recalls. “It was amazing.”
Butte Falls residents disproportionately live with disabilities or in mobile
homes, risk factors that make it difficult to prepare and evacuate from
wildfires that have become increasingly destructive. The hamlet itself, once a
logging powerhouse, is still struggling to provide residents with good-paying
jobs more than 40 years after the local timber industry began its long decline.
Almost 10 percent of Butte Falls residents left town between 2010 and 2021.
Conventional wisdom in the region would have Butte Falls try to reclaim its
former glory as a logging hub. But community leaders have hatched an ambitious
plan to protect their future by looking to the forest itself as a source of
protection as much as prosperity."
Via
The Fixer July 19, 2023:
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/new-zealand-plastic-produce-bag-ban/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
