Forest and Friends January 23, 2025

​Welcome to 2025, it is time to shake off the holidays and come on out to the first Forest and Friends of the year! If you are on the eastside on Thursday January 23rd, join us from 5:00-7:30pm at Cascadia Pizza (https://www.cascadiapizzaco.com/bellevue).  We’ll get together again to discuss climate, forests, startups, GIS, and technology in general; come join the discussion among friends. A lot going on in the world right now, so plenty to talk about – welcome to a new year full of new beginnings.

​This year has started pretty hard on the fire front.  Condolences to everyone impacted in the Eaton and Palisades fires.  SoCal isn’t out of the woods yet, so to speak, with San Diego joining LA in the danger zone (and thus far still lucky) with draught and strong offshore flows.  I’ve lived and worked in these now burned neighborhoods and have friends and former colleagues evacuated or with  homes lost.  In these conditions there might not have been a lot a direct fuels work that would have helped, but outside extraordinarily extreme events like those, fuels work helps reduce subsequent burn impacts and provides opportunities to establish suppression lines in the event of a fire – it gives you a chance when you need it most.

​Building, or rebuilding, for fire resilience is challenging because you need to get people to agree to collectively limit their freedom of choice.  This article in Heatmap goes into depth, but the What to do is well know, it is the agreement to do it that is hard.  Even in Paradise, which burned in the Camp Fire, they couldn’t adopt zone 0 rules for the rebuild, it isn't an easy challenge.

So, we'll definitely talk a bit about fire but also about forestry in Washington and what we can do to help our forests and communities thrive.