#douglas-fir

#douglas-fir

Researchers have known since at least 2008 that wildfires can create chromium-6, but a new study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology in November, is the first to report details such as how long it might persist in groundwater.

The Trump Administration's sweeping changes to the Forest Service, which operates under the Department of Agriculture, represent a gutting of an agency that has been a stable fact of life for over a century.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia's history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City.

Tucked into the ridges overlooking California's San Francisco Bay and against an expansive nature area, the house Thouati and his wife have owned for 30-some years sits in one of the highest wildfire-threat areas in the state. A scientist with a penchant for diving deep, he poured into the research. Hundreds of articles later, he said, it became clear I had to swallow my pride.

The new trees number in the thousands - at least 4,000 per acre or as many as 20,000, depending on who is counting. A few rise above head-height, the most energetic sentinels of regeneration. What will become of this nursery in the wild in the next hundred years, or thousand, is the crux of a scientific and policy dispute.