Burning our forests is the best way to save them

Here's the prescription for our catastrophically burned forests: Burn them again ... and again. In Southern Arizona, scientists and land managers are enlisting environmentalists and residents of threatened settlements to support an effort to make the forests safer and healthier by reintroducing fire on a "landscape scale" to our Sky Island mountains and the grassy plains beneath them. The Coronado National Forest -- where the U.S. Forest Service manages nearly 1.8 million acres of old-growth forests, rolling grasslands and semi-arid deserts -- is creating those landscape-scale burn programs, dubbed "FireScape," for most of its 17 Sky Island mountain ranges. Plans would increase the number of planned fires and would make more use of "resource benefit" fires, in which the Forest Service doesn't immediately extinguish naturally occurring fires. It's a fairly easy call in the most remote ranges, but it will take finesse and scientific expertise to pull it off on two troubled mountain ranges...read more