Colorado’s two U.S. Senators are asking the U.S. Forest Service for
an in-depth study of several major wildfires that destroyed hundreds of
homes along the Front Range wildland-urban interface — the red zone,
where up to 40 percent of the state’s population has chosen to live in
areas where fires are a natural part of the ecosystem.
“The unprecedented nature and pattern of these fires calls for a
systematic and scientific analysis to learn how we as a society can do
better. Our goal is to make sure that the lessons learned — positive and
negative — are captured and acted upon appropriately,” they wrote in a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. Specifically, the senators want the Forest Service to determine the
influence of beetle-kill trees on fire behavior and severity. Day by day
reports from the fire indicated that beetle kill was not a major factor
in the early phases of the fire, when most of the home destruction
happened on private lands. As the fire later moved west into national
forest lands, it did affect areas with a higher percentage of
beetle-killed trees. The senators also want the Forest Service to study whether previous
forest treatments were effective in stopping or slowing the fire and
reducing soil damage, and to outline the “long-term ecological
trajectories” of the burned areas...more
And NM's two Senators are asking for??
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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