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Opinion: The nature of fire has dramatically changed


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By Mike Benefield, High Country News

It’s time to move irrigation pipe. It’s one of those things you have to do when you have a certain amount of land and enough water to irrigate it. My knees hurt as I walk each piece of pipe over to the next dry spot. Here in central Oregon, it’s always a race with evaporation. The sun beats down hot as I hear that familiar sound overhead; it’s a DC-7 air tanker flying to another wildfire.

I didn’t always spend my summers moving irrigation pipe. I was a city kid growing up on the beaches of Southern California until I turned 18 and started fighting wildfires. At 19, my wife and I loaded up all our possessions in a Volkswagen bus and moved to north-central Washington.

It was 1978, and a new world lay before us. We had both ended up working for the Forest Service. We rented an old, five-bedroom farmhouse on the banks of the Entiat River for $185 a month. It was surrounded by massive black walnut trees and heated by a woodstove. I was fighting fire in the summer and doing whatever I could do in the winter to survive until the next summer. Some winters, I’d work at the local salmon hatchery. As the years passed, I worked as a fire lookout and served as a fire-prevention technician, while gaining more fire experience on hotshot, helitack, engine and fuels crews.

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Comments (1)
  1. Garry Bowen says - Posted: August 28, 2015

    Focus if you will on the word “conditions”, as any change attributed to the climate (versus using the dreaded ‘global warming’) means that man’s rampant activities are setting ‘conditions’ that nature cannot keep up with, so reverts back to “time-honored” methods (think predator/prey balances) in lowering any excesses back to naturally-manageable levels. . .

    The term anthropogenic was coined to emphasize that man has “so dominated” all of the Earth’s systems that there may be no turning back – the reason you now hear the word “urgent” so often – we’ve even hyped ideas like ‘urgent’ so often that no one pays any attention to that use either, preferring to go about one’s business (BAU) as if nothing out-of-the-ordinary is going on. . Couldn’t be more wrong.