Bad environmental stewardship - massive plantings of monocultures of the wrong kind of tree. Add heat and an exceptionally dry few seasons and fire.
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Much later, I learned that the trees we were planting, black spruce, are so combustible that firefighters call them gas on a stick. The trees evolved to burn: They have flammable sap, and their resin-filled cones open up when heated to drop seeds into charred soil. In “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World,” an investigation of the devastating wildfire in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, John Vaillant laid out how climate change had turned some forests into combustible time bombs, where “drought conditions, noonday heat and a stiff wind” can turn a black spruce tree into “something closer to a blowtorch.”
In a naturally occurring forest, black spruce is often found in a mix with trees like aspen and poplar, which are full of moisture and provide a natural resistance to fire. But as a report by the Forest Practices Board of British Columbia pointed out, “Large homogeneous patches of forest are more likely to lead to large and severe wildfires.”
The dangerous mistake we were making gets to the heart of what people often get wrong about environmental stewardship: the notion that, no matter how rapacious or careless we are, we can always dig or plant our way out through sweat, pluck and industry. Rather than leave a forest intact, we clear-cut it, then plant a new one. My troupe of planters thought we were making things better. I spent this summer watching that youthful idealism literally going up in smoke.
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bug zappers
A poor move if you want mosquito protection.
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In 1997, the University of Florida’s medical entomological laboratory tallied the death toll from one bug zapper over a single night: 10,000 insects. Just eight were mosquitoes. Similar studies reflected those findings.
Around the same time, researchers at the University of Delaware used a bug zapper to trap 13,789 insects over a summer. Only 31 — 0.22 percent — were biting insects such as mosquitoes and gnats. What did it kill?
Beneficial bugs, mostly. Roughly half the victims — 6,670 insects — were harmless aquatic species from nearby rivers and streams, fish food in the aquatic food chain. Many of the others were parasitic wasps and beetles that naturally prey on mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes are not fooled by zappers because, along with other bloodsucking insects, they have evolved to home in on animals’ exhaled carbon dioxide, not ultraviolet light, scientists say. Even if mosquitoes are drawn in by a bug zapper, they will immediately redirect their attention to their favorite foods: warmblooded mammals, especially humans.
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06:43 in environment, General Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)