forestmanagement

The wildfires sweeping Canada have become the largest in its modern history. Across the country, 30 million acres of forest have burned — three times as much land as in the worst American fire in the past 50 years.

The scale has forced an international response and a re-evaluation of how the world handles wildfires.

Firefighters on the front lines discuss the challenges they face, and David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The Times, explores how climate change has shifted thinking about wildfires.

Guest: David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The New York Times. 

Background reading: 

• With most of Canada’s fire season still ahead, the country is on track to produce more carbon emissions from the burning of forests than all of its other human and industrial activities combined, David Wallace-Wells writes in Times Opinion.
• Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season shows the need to shift from suppressing fires to preventing them as they become more difficult to combat.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Smoke from wildfires in Canada has created a crisis in the American Northeast and beyond, with air pollution in New York reaching its worst level in modern history.

David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The Times, explains why this happened, and why there is so little we can do to keep it from happening again.

Guest: David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• New York City experienced its worst air quality on record. Here’s how to stay safe as the smoke spreads.
• David Wallace-Well’s column on the smoke that shrouded New York City.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

What’s the customary 5th Anniversary gift? Apparently… WOOD! So we wrangled our favorite sawmill owner/operator of LA’s Angel City Lumber, Jeff Perry – who rescues downed street trees from the chipper and turns them into beautiful planks, boards, stumps and chonks. We cover everything from forest management to 2x4s, wood grain, burls, bog logs, sawdust, tree disease, asparagus tips, salvaged lumber, kiln drying, Westward expansion, Indigenous forest management, cedar whiff, and how working with wood changes your relationship to death. 

Angel City Lumber website

Donations went to The Mother Tree Project via this link

Episode sources and links

Other episodes you may enjoy: Bryology (MOSS), Dendrology (TREES) Encore, Mycology (FUNGI), Indigenous Fire Ecology (GOOD FIRE), Carobology (NOT CHOCOLATE TREES)

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Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media

Transcripts by Emily White of The Wordary

Website by Kelly R. Dwyer

Theme song by Nick Thorburn

Elizabeth Weil, the author of today’s Sunday Read, writes that, in her marriage, there was a silent third spouse: California.

“The state was dramatic and a handful,” Weil writes. “But she was gorgeous, and she brought into our lives, through the natural world, all the treasure and magic we’d need.”

However, for Weil, there is internal conflict living in a state where wildfires have become the norm. She describes living through a discontinuity in which previously held logic fails to stand up to reality.

Today, Weil analyzes the sources of California’s crisis — from the impact of colonization and the systemic erasure of Indigenous practices to the significant loss of fire-management practices and critical dryness caused by global warming.

In California, as in much of the world, climate anxiety and climate futurism coalesce into trans-apocalyptic pessimism. But, in spite of the doom, Weil suggests the situation is not completely devoid of hope.

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