ROSLYN With a wildfire burning out of control just five-and-a-half miles north of this Central Washington mountain town, Chris Martins neighbor came to him with a seemingly unorthodox proposition: Lets burn your woods. On purpose. Itll be a good thing.

Reese Lolley, whose employer, The Nature Conservancy, owned the parcel next to Martins property, was not proposing the awesome, awful sort of fire then sweeping over 36,000 acres on and around Jolly Mountain and threatening to torch Roslyn in the summer of 2017.

Lolleys fire would be small. It would creep across the dry brush and downed branches packing the understory of Martins woods on a ridge above Roslyn, the 959-person town just over the Cascade crest from Seattle that is best known for standing in for a fictional Alaskan town in the 1990s hit television show Northern Exposure.

Fire gentle, controlled fire is exactly what experts say is needed to address the huge wildfires tearing through parched forests east of the Cascade crest. Filled with dead wood and brush, many forests are growing more combustible by the year because of climate change and a century of misguided fire suppression. Those conditions now put communities at risk of annihilation by fire. This year saw half a dozen towns destroyed in Washington, Oregon and northern California.

In Washington, about 951,000 homes sit near forests threatened by wildfire. The most endangered communities lie in a swath extending from Spokane southwest to the Columbia River, and then running north past Wenatchee into the Methow Valley. Much of Central and Eastern Washington, in other words.

The state says the number of threatened homes is only set to grow.

Washington State Department of Natural Resources

Top 25 places most likely to be exposed to wildland fire in Washington.

Intentional burning of underbrush and dead trees prescribed fire to those who practice it is increasingly regarded as the key tool in making combustible forests fire-resistant and heading off megafires. But the technique is rarely used in the West, and prescribed fire rates actually decreased in the Northwest over the past two decades, one study showed.

Bucking the trend, Martin said yes to Lolley and, as the Jolly Mountain fire smoldered, foresters burned 12 acres of his land. In the years since, Martin has increased that amount ninefold and prompted the city of Roslyn to use fire to clear the underbrush in its municipal forest.

Honestly, that Jolly Mountain fire, to use a technical phrase, it was a change of underwear moment here in Roslyn, said Martin, who serves as Roslyns emergency management coordinator. I think our community had not really thought about fire. It was a big wake-up call.

Dan DeLong/InvestigateWest

Chris Martin sits among charred trees caused by a prescribed burn on his Roslyn property.

Planned burning down as wildfires rage

Aggressive firefighting has left forests across the western United States primed for megafires like those that devoured 1,600 square miles of Washington timberland in 2015, leaving an ashy gray moonscape where they flourished. Prescribed fire starves those apocalyptic burns while returning combustion to a biome built for it.

Following the U.S. Forest Services lead, land managers spent most of the 20th century extinguishing as many wildfires as they could, as fast as they could. On the dry slopes east of the Cascades, brush, branches and snags that wouldve burned then are burning now in forests packed too tightly for trees to stay healthy.

Dry forests like those surrounding Roslyn used to be seared every five to 10 years. Low-intensity fires, those that dont reach the crowns of trees, found ample tinder in the underbrush, saplings and fallen trees littering the forest floor. An ecosystem grew up around fires set by lightning and Native people, who used fire to cultivate staples like camas and to clear hunting ground for elk and deer.

Bold plans put forward by state leaders in late 2017 call for the intervention in 1,950 square miles of Washington forest. Prescribed fires would be set on hundreds of thousands of acres annually. The state governments leading evangelist for prescribed fire, Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz, has been pushing state lawmakers for years to create a dedicated tax to fund the plan.

Dan DeLong/InvestigateWest

A firefighter watches a prescribed burn as it approaches a forest road that will be used to contain the fire in Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest near Liberty in May 2019.

But Washington, like the rest of the West, has been slow to invest in prescribed burning. Trained fire workers are in short supply in the region, which has seen the acreage intentionally burned shrink even as a consensus for prescribed fire has formed. Ardent proponents note that, while burning could immediately protect towns and homes, decades will pass before prescribed fire has a meaningful impact on the growth of large fires.Returning to something approximating a natural fire cycle where less destructive blazes prune fire-prone forests would be the work of generations.

Prescribed fires burn low to the ground, removing combustible debris. It is a matter of physics: if flames can be kept short enough, fire on the forest floor doesnt climb the branches to the top of the trees and destroy them. Thinning treatments, which see people cut down, carry away or chop up detritus to clear the forest floor, have a similar impact at a significantly higher cost.

Dan DeLong/InvestigateWest

Savannah Herrera of the Roslyn Fire Departments Fuels Crew cuts the lower branches of a tree in the Roslyn Community Forest in August 2020. Herrera was part of a crew thinning the forest for wildfire management.

Whether that current political will and shift in public sentiment will succeed in returning fire to the forest, though, remains an open question.

Support for prescribed fire is climbing, but the actual practice is not, said Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor at University of CaliforniaMerced specializing in fire science. Reviewing fire records for a study published in April 2019, Kolden found the use of prescribed burning in the West hadnt increased from 1998 to 2018 and actually fell in Washington and Oregon.

Trends aside, the total number of treated acres remains tiny compared to the apparent need and proffered goals. According to the National Interagency Coordination Center, the federal governments fire hub, only 191 square miles in Washington and Oregon were treated with prescribed fire in 2019. While state-specific tallies were not available, experts agreed most of that fire burned in Oregon, where the state leaders recently relaxed restrictions on smoke created by prescribed fires.

When were talking about the forest that needs treatment and the amount of forest that weve treated, theres an order of magnitude difference between those numbers, Kolden said. Land managers, she continued, are struggling to keep up, and every year they fall farther behind.

At present, Washington lacks the capacity to return fire to the forest in force.

The state, like its West Coast neighbors, is short on trained fire practitioners and burdened with regulations formed decades ago when forest management almost always meant fire suppression. Regulators can deny a burn permit even after the crew has gathered on a remote site, making prescribed burns a chancy, expensive proposition.

Dan DeLong/InvestigateWest

A downed tree is engulfed in flames during a prescribed burn in Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest near Liberty in May 2019.

Extreme fire seasons becoming the norm

Climate change is expected to intensify the frequency and severity of megafires across the United States, particularly in the dry western interior. Widely relied upon estimates predict the average summer will resemble extreme fire seasons like 2015, 2017 and 2020, when Seattles smoke-soaked air was at least briefly among the worst on the planet. By the 2080s, the acreage of Washington forest burned annually is expected to quadruple from the 20th century average as temperatures rise and snowpack shrinks.

The climactic shift will find Washingtons forests filled with debris left to pile during a century that saw naturally occurring fire heavily suppressed on most lands. With fire gone, a fire deficit deepens each year in the dry pine woods east of the Cascades.

In a recent study, Nature Conservancy researchers found that in Washington and Oregon just one-tenth of the forestland that should see fire each year does. Forest Service researchers estimate that the debt in unburned acres grows 140 square miles annually in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, which blankets 2,711 square miles on the eastern slopes of the Cascades. At current restoration rates, it would take 53 years to revive Washingtons federal lands, which comprise about 44% of Washington forestland.

Were trying to fix issues that took 100 years to get there, said Steve Hawkins, a fuel program manager now in his 40th fire season with the Forest Service. Its going to take a while to get that rectified.

Prescribed burning coupled with thinning createsconditions that can better accept fire, which is inevitable, said Paul Hessburg, aresearchlandscape ecologist with the Forest Services Pacific Northwest Research Station.

For five years, Hessburg has been traveling the Northwest giving talks onwildfirescience. He describes the effort as an experiment, a successful one, to determine whether a better understanding might encourage people to address the problem.

Hessburgs takeaway was that public perceptions around fire are changing for the better but tragically not fast enough to get ahead of the changing climate. His hope is that targeted interventions may prevent the worstoutcomes.

As Hessburg explains it, the question isnt can we regulate the size of the fires? Any influence will be modest the climate and weather mostly determine how much land is burned.

The question is, he said, Can we moderate the severity so that we can maintain more forest or habitats for the future? I think the answer is prettysolidthat we can.

Washington beginning to burn

Washingtons advocates for prescribed fire see the megafires that swept Washington in 2014 and 2015 as catalysts for the shift in public opinion they hope will enable them to do their work. Taken together, the fires burned 2,330 square miles of forest and rangeland and, along with fires in British Columbia, blanketed the Puget Sound in smoke for weeks. The cost in firefighting expenses alone topped $527 million.

The fires drew a vigorous, if standard, response from policy makers and shapers in the state. Committees coalesced, studies aimed at driving future legislation and funding launched. Training for so-called burners who conduct the prescribed fires, as well as community engagement initiatives, were created or expanded.

And, in a limited way, prescribed fires started being set.

Kara Karboski caught what she calls the fire bug setting fires for the Defense Department at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Karboski, now a coordinator with the Washington Resource Conservation & Development Council and a leading booster for prescribed fire, learned how burners go about their work while clearing brush on the military installations ample open spaces.

Before a fire, burners draw up a prescription a set of judgments on what weather and forest moistness is required for the burn to be safe and effective, as well as a staffing and equipment list, and detailed emergency plans. Hose lines are set and test fires lit before a crew of 10 or 20 workers set the fire in earnest.

Ive seen burns called off because its just not burning well enough, maybe theres too much moisture, Karboski said. Ive also been there where fire behavior has been too high, too much, too hot, and theyve said, Wow, this is too much for us to handle.

Weather conditions are assessed to attempt to ensure the fires smoke clears. Practitioners point out that prescribed fires rarely smolder for weeks or months like wildfires, and that the smoke is lighter and less hazardous. Research has shown prescribed fire also helps tamp down climate change. Thats because thinned forests with fewer, larger trees sequester more carbon dioxide, and are less likely to burn to ash if a wildfire reaches them, releasing all that CO2.

On the prescribed fire line, workers building black with drip torches char a box of burned ground around the area slated for fire, Karboski said. Once the fire is set inside, they keep watch for any embers that cross that line.

Dan DeLong/InvestigateWest

A firefighter uses an ignition tank to set underbrush on fire during a prescribed burn in Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest near Liberty in May 2019.

Afterward, its not like its a blackened wasteland, Karboski said. The intention is to leave most of the trees still standing, so those are still there. And youll have spaces where the fire can get into, so you get more of a mosaic.

To Karboskis eye, prescribed burns in Washington have been kept too small.

Hundred-acre burns, she said, arent really getting us where you want to be.

Smoke regulations barriers to controlled burning

One of the few tangible actions taken following the 2015 firestorm, the worst fire year in state history, was a $1.7 million pilot project meant to assess Washingtons ability to use prescribed fire.

While proponents describe the project as a learning exercise crucial to expanding the use of fire in Washington, those lessons were hard won.

In the fall of 2016 and spring of 2017, fires were planned for 15 sites, 13 of which were in national forests. Tellingly, no privately held lands could be found to include in the pilot; private landowners have been put off prescribed fire by the bureaucratic hurdles, cost and liability concerns. Bringing fire to private lands is seen as a significant challenge to reviving Washingtons forests.

Although land managers selected the easiest spots, just one-third of the 13 square miles slated to burn during the project actually saw fire. One that did demonstrated a key argument against prescribed fire smoke.

For a week in the fall of 2016, smoke from prescribed fires hung in the semiarid, V-shaped valleys north of Leavenworth, the faux Bavarian tourist town west of Wenatchee that has moved into the forest, where glassy, loudly rectangular second homes increasingly share sight lines with the squat chalets built a generation before. Air quality fell to levels hazardous to people who are particularly susceptible to smoke.

Controlling smoke rivals containing the fire itself for the top spot on the to-do list of any prescribed fire manager, known as the burn boss. Washington law requires that a state meteorologist sign off on any burn the morning it is set to begin; crews gathered for the burns are sent home if that permission doesnt arrive.

The aging regulatory scheme governing smoke was drawn up at a time when industrial forestry filled Western Washington with smoke. The Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Ecology and the federal Environmental Protection Agency have been working on more permissive framework for years, but it is unlikely to receive a federal review until 2022 at the earliest.

Drawn up in the 1970s to satisfy requirements of the federal Clean Air Act, the smoke regulations last revised in the 1990s did not weigh the benefits of prescribed fire against its costs, said Lolley of The Nature Conservancy.

It really was focused on the reduction in emissions, but didnt really consider forest health, Lolley said.

Washington smoke regulations limit even the Forest Services prescribed burning. Though Oregons forests draw federal attention because they are more primed for intense, destructive fire, its also simply easier to burn in Oregon.

In the final report drawn from the pilot project, Department of Natural Resources researchers concluded that the regulatory framework keeps prescribed fire small and expensive by making larger burns impractical. Its a view shared by Karboski.

The system itself, she said, is set up to disincentive using fire.

Adam Bacher

Close-up image of Ponderosa pine bark burned in a 2015 megafire south of John Day, Oregon.

Incremental progress as concerns mount

Karboskis tempered frustration, one shared by many concerned for the forests and their neighbors, stems in part from fear.

While the intersection of urban areas and wildlands has long been a concern for those who worry about fire full time, the 2018 fire that destroyed Paradise, California, a town of 26,200 before it burned, laid bare the danger. Embers thrown miles by an intense fire in the neighboring forest set the town ablaze.

That the same could happen to Leavenworth, Roslyn or a host of other Washington mountain towns is beyond question. In Washington, homes and wildlands mix across more than 4,500 square miles, an area almost the size of Connecticut. Millions of acres of privately held timberland could be converted into subdivisions.

In Olympia, state land managers are drawing up watershed-centered plans to prioritize forest restoration in areas where fire is most likely, and most likely to be destructive. The idea is to shape the landscape and secure better options for firefighters when fire does break out.

State Forester George Geissler, of the Department of Natural Resources, describes the forthcoming plans as a granular examination of each watershed, looking at land ownership to find areas where intervention would be most successful.

The Forest Service, too, is considering a new targeted approach to prescribed fire. Prescribed burning would be used to create spaces that would slow large wildfires, increasing the likelihood that some could be allowed to burn while providing firefighters a safer space to work from when they intervene.

In an interview, Geissler ticked through the efforts underway. Assistance programs for landowners. Training initiatives to build a workforce. Changes in law to reduce restrictions on prescribed fire. The dialogue with the EPA to revise the smoke rules. His own appointment; Geissler, who had been serving as Oklahomas state forester, said he was hired two years ago specifically for his background in burning.

With each incremental change, we are making the opportunity to utilize prescribed fire greater, Geissler said.

Acknowledging that prescribed fire has been underused in Washington, Geissler cautioned that it is not a magic Band-Aid that can immediately fix what generations of fire suppression broke. He said he believes the public supports the work, and hopes Washingtonians including those in the Legislature will stay engaged.

We live in a society that if you cant get [something] done in two years you probably failed at it, and yet in forestry I was taught that 30 years is a short time, Geissler said.

The Nature Conservancys Lolley offered a similar view.

Were moving in the right direction, said Lolley, whose organization has been instrumental in training fire practitioners and bringing fire to privately owned lands. And I think we are getting smarter about how to prioritize the investments of money to have bigger gains.

But, Lolley allowed, at our current rate of treatment, it will make a difference, but its not near what we need.

The costs are substantial, and the benefits distant.

Advances in plywood manufacturing and heaters that burn pelletized scrap wood could conceivably make thinning less costly in some forests, but the forest restoration wont pay for itself. And while proponents contend restoration will save millions over the long run, firefighting costs will continue to rise even as the restoration work takes shape.

Behind the curve

Fire gently burns in the hills above Roslyn again, this time on the city-owned land bordering Martins property. The fire makes the town an exception, frustratingly so in Martins view.

Martin is enthusiastic about fires effect on his forest, which he bought to visit and protect from development. Since the fire, elk have returned to the newly open forest, as have turkey and bear. Hes proud that it may protect Roslyn the next time fire rises in the forests that surround it.

And yet he stops short of encouraging others to burn. The bureaucratic roadblocks, he said, are still too large for landowners without an abundance of money and energy to overcome.

In Washington state, we are far behind the curve on this stuff, Martin said.

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With nearly 1 million homes at risk, Washington is losing the wildfire fight - InvestigateWest

A Loveland man was trapped by the roaring fire in the Roosevelt National Forest until a helicopter whisked him away to safety. Fort Collins Coloradoan

Colton McDonald will be hard pressed to top his 30th birthday.

That's because it involved his first helicopter ride, being trapped in the Cameron Peak Fire and receiving a warm hug from his father when he returned to his Loveland home.

I was elated that I was out of there, for sure,'' McDonald said Thursday from his home. "But on the way home driving down the (Poudre) Canyon, I was processing the whole experience. I had set out to reconnect with nature. I had set out to catch a bunch of fish and have an adventure. And at the end I accomplished all that stuff.

Barely.

McDonald was the sole recreationist rescued via helicopter from the Cameron Peak Fire and is believed to be the last person in the fire that is raging in the Roosevelt National Forest west of Fort Collins.

He set out on a 10-day solo backpacking trip into the ruggedly beautiful Rawah Wilderness on Aug. 13, the day the fire started. He parked his vehicle at the Blue Lake Trailhead offColorado Highway 14 around sunrise and reached Blue Lake about noon.

He left the lake and was nearBlue Lake Pass around 1 p.m when he saidhe "distinctly heard a gunshot discharge.'' He said about a half hour later, he saw smoke from the area where the fire is believed to have started. He had not seen smoke before that time.

I initially thought the smoke was from another camper with a campfire,'' he said. "Then a half-hour later, that smoke got pretty significant and then I knew it wasnt just a campfire, that it was awildfire.

More: Cameron Peak Fire grows to nearly 16,500 acres; additional resources requested

Despite the fire, hecontinued heading north as planned, skirting the east face of the Medicine Bow Range to avoid the worst of the fire smoke,traveling about five or six miles a day, fishing lakes and camping. He said he had no idea how large the fire had gotten because he could only see one large plume of smoke.

Then the wildlife tipped him off.

After the first couple of days, I noticed an odd amount of deer, moose, bighorn sheep and lot ofbirds kind of following me,'' he said. "And so I kind of knew I was in the right area because all of the wildlife was fleeing to where I was, and wildlife knows where to go when there is a fire.''

"It was definitely on the back of my mind the whole time that it was probably developing, but I didn'texpect it to move as fast as it did, as wide as it did.''

On his fifth day, he figured his last camp was about 15 miles north of the fire. He thought if the fire made the Blue Lake Trail impassable that he would hike out the West Branch Trail to the Laramie River Road.

More: Wildfire map: Track smoke, fire from Cameron Peak Fire

At Blue Lake Pass, he was able to see he was in trouble the West Branch and Blue Lake trails wereboth blocked by fire.

"I could see flames coming from the trees, so I sat there thinking about my options,'' he said. "I had enough supplies to last another week or two, but I figuredthe fire was only going to get worse and that I was pretty much trapped.''

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So he reached for his Garmin Tracker GPS device, which he only started packing in December, and pushed the SOS button. An emergency team responded, and he explained his situation.

That definitely helped quench my fears,'' he said. "I was certainly a little anxious about the situation. But they had it under control and I knew I was in a good spot for the helicopter to land in an open field.''

He said on the second day of his trip, a helicopter flew over him at Island Lake, around 11,000 feet, likely searching for him after crews spotted his vehicle at the Blue Lake Trailheadparking lot.

"Im up there and this helicopter comes closer than Ive ever had a helicopter come to me,'' said McDonald, who saw planes and helicopters fighting the blaze almost daily."They do a couple of passes and Im like, 'I think they are checking me out.' The guy in the helicopter waves and I wave back. That was the only person I saw fromthen until they came and picked me up.

More: Fire investigators seek info on vehicle seen near small fire Friday near Cameron Peak Fire

But on Tuesday, the helicopter didn't fly away. It circled a couple of times before landing in anearby clearing.

They outfitted him with a helmet, ear plugs and maskand whisked him back to Colorado 14, where they landed so he could retrieve his vehicle, which had been towed a mile away because of the fire.

"I had never been in ahelicopter before, so it was pretty wild,'' he said. "The perspective of the fire up in the helicopter was incredible. It was both really terrifying and beautiful at the same time.''

He received an escort through the section of Colorado 14 that was blocked off because of the fire then made his way home where his father, CharlesMcDonald, was waiting.

"There was a big hug and then the humor kicks in,'' said Charles, who credited his son's Garmin Tracker for saving his life."I had confidence in Colton's skills and that he knew what he was doing. But it was a hell of a birthday present to have a helicopter bring him home.

Colton McDonald, who has lived in Lovelandfor three years and is a Colorado State University graduate,is an avid outdoorsman and has summited a dozen of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks. He said despite his recent anxious moments that he has plans to hike the 3,100-mile Continental Divide Trail from Mexico to Canada someday.

"I could tell that my situation could be dangerous,'' said Colton McDonald, who works as atattoo artist and at Biochar Now in Berthoud. "At the same time, it is so freeing and sobeautiful just being in tune withthe natural system. A lot of people never experience that feeling. But there is a lot in those experiences.''

Reporter Miles Blumhardt looks for stories that impact your life. Be it news, outdoors, sports you name it, he wants to report it. Have a story idea? Contact him at milesblumhardt@coloradoan.com or on Twitter @MilesBlumhardt. Support his work and that of other Coloradoan journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.

Read or Share this story: https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2020/08/20/cameron-peak-fire-colorado-backpacker-tells-harrowing-rescue/5620978002/

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Backpacker tells of harrowing rescue from Cameron Peak Fire - Coloradoan

SUPPLIED

It is normal for farmers to burn off the land for pastoral use at this time of the year.

A bush fire has been spotted in the hills near St Arnaud, but a regional fire boss says it isnt something to be worried about.

Stuff received a tip-off just before 4pm on Monday afternoon about the fire which was on the hill 45km south-west of Wairau Valley township on SH63.

Fire and Emergency NZ Marlborough principal rural fire officer John Foley said it was a controlled burn off and this was normal at this time of the year.

When the weather permits, August and September is the time for the controlled burn, Foley said.

A number of high country farmers will be undertaking land clearing burns to bring the pasture back, he said.

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Controlled burn off near St Arnaud raises heart-rates, but is nothing to worry about - Stuff.co.nz

Belgium shocked by police brutality footage, which shows cop doing Nazi salute

BRUSSELS Belgium is in shock after a video emerges showing a Slovak man being violently pinned down by airport police officers in images that recalled the fate of George Floyd in the US.

The CCTV images, seen by AFP, date to February 2018, when Jozef Chovanec was taken off a plane in Charleroi, Belgium, after refusing to show his ticket as he boarded.

Chovanec, who died in the wake of the incident, was taken to a holding cell where he is seen in harrowing footage banging his head against the wall until his face bleeds heavily.

Several police officers are later seen entering the room to handcuff Chovanec. When this fails to calm him, they return to hold him down, with one sitting on his chest for 16 minutes.

During this particularly shocking sequence, a female officer is seen in the cell dancing and making a Nazi salute.

Chovanec was afterwards taken to hospital where he died the next day, officially of a heart attack.

According to her legal team, widow Henrieta Chovancova chose to make the video public against their advice as she had grown frustrated with the investigation, which has dragged on for two years.

Our client wanted to show these images to the world because she has no faith in the criminal investigation, says Lennert Dierickx, a member of the legal team that is led by Ann Van De Steen.

She felt the case was not being taken seriously, he adds.

Chovanecs death has been likened to the case of George Floyd, who died in May after a police officer knelt on his neck during his arrest in the United States.

I am just sad, widow Chovancova tells De Morgen newspaper.

It makes me feel even more that they tried to sweep my husbands death under the rug, as if he were garbage that had to disappear, she says.

The video was first reported by Het Laatse Nieuws, a Belgian daily.

AFP

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Thousands protest in Tel Aviv, elsewhere over suspected gang rape of 16-year-old - The Times of Israel

A proposed development called The Gardens whichhas stirred local controversy ever since acontentious communityhearing last July now has the county planning boards initial approvaland will be considered by the Flagler County Commission.

The proposed community would straddle John Anderson Highway south of State Road 100 with a golf course and 335 homes. Its a dramatic reduction from an earlier proposal for 3,996 homeswhich had prompted the July2019 outcry during a community meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn and spurred the creation of an opposition group calledPreserve Flagler Beach and Bulow Creek.

Proposals for the land have been in play for more than a decade.

A versionof the community was first proposed in a 2005 Planned Unit Development, or PUD,for 453 homes, but the recession foiled former developer Bobby Ginns plans for the land, which was sold andisnow owned bydeveloper Ken BelshesPalm Coast Intracoastal, LLC.

"This deal has already been done its already been signed, sealed and delivered so I dont think we need to make a new one.

MARK LANGELLO, Planning and Land Development Board chairman

At an Aug. 11 meeting, theFlagler County Planning and Development Board faced two decisionsconcerning The Gardens: Determining whether the proposed development was similar enough to the 2005 planned unit developmentthat it could proceed under an amendment to the earlier PUD, as opposed to requiring a whole new PUD application; and, second, approving or denying a preliminary plat for the development.

It approved both, voting 5-1 to approve the PUD amendment, with board member Mike Goodman dissenting;and 6-0 to approve the preliminary plat.

I find that this application is considerably similar to the 2005 PUD, board Chairman Mark Langello said. This deal has already been done its already been signed, sealed and delivered so I dont think we need to make a new one.

The boards decision followed comments by community members who opposed the project.

A number of residents said they were concerned about increased traffic and flooding: The area already has adrainage problem, they said, and the addition of so much concrete would worsen it.

Resident Barbara Revels, a former Flagler County commissioner, said she understood that the developer has engineers who will say that theyve studied the drainage and that their project wontfloodother peoples homes.

"There will be nothing left absolutely nothing left, and I defy you to say that that's good development."

BARBARA REVELS, former Flagler County commissioner, on the land clearing and retention pond creation she believes the project will require in order to prevent flooding

But to do that, she said, theyll have to convert wooded areas into fields and create lakes to store the water. Thats what happened with a nearby land development proposalthe commission signed off on when she was on the commission, she said: Developers took a gorgeous piece of property in what became theBulow Shores developmentand bulldozed it, then used fill to raise home sites.

There will be nothing left absolutely nothing left, and I defy you to say that thats good development,she said.Im ashamed to say, as chairman of the Flagler County Commission,my name is on that plat on John Anderson. ... You sit there and you think youre relying on your staff, your engineers, your planning people, and then something gets put in place and its very poorly done. Dont let that happen this time.

Representatives of Preserve Flagler Beach and Bulow Creek told board members that the organization doesnt dispute the developers right to build.

Instead, they said, itbelieves the current proposal is inconsistent with the 2005 PUD.

They pointed to four areas in which the new proposal, they said, differed substantiallyfrom the 2005 one: The earlier one required a golf course whereas the new proposal doesnt include design for the golf course, leading the group to suspect it might not be built; the earlier proposal didnt include direct access to John Anderson Highway, while the new one does; the earlier proposal spread 453 lots over 1,305 acres, while the new one clusters home sites together; and the earlier proposal spread homes across both sides of the road, while the new one groups 335 on the east.

Attorney Michael Chiumento, representing the developer, said those aspects of the 2005 plan werent binding. They came from a 2005 siteplan, he said, while what the new proposal needs to be consistent with is not the 2005 PUDs site plan, but its concept plan.

As to traffic and the golf course, he said, the developer has had transportation studies conducted showing that John Anderson can handle the increased traffic, and the developer is planning to build the golf course in stages. The course is intended to provide the city of Flagler Beach with a location to distribute the city's reuse water, rather than emptying it into the Intracoastal.

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Gardens project earns Planning Board's approval, will advance to County Commission - Palm Coast Observer

Rattan Lal, an Indian-born scientist, has devoted his career to finding ways to capture carbon from the air and store it in soil. Ken Chamberlain/OSU/CFAES hide caption

Rattan Lal, an Indian-born scientist, has devoted his career to finding ways to capture carbon from the air and store it in soil.

More than 40 years ago, in Nigeria, a young scientist named Rattan Lal encountered an idea that changed his life and led, eventually, to global recognition and a worldwide movement to protect the planet's soil.

Lal was fresh out of graduate school, recruited to join the newly established International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, and given an assignment that, in hindsight, seems ridiculous in its ambition. "I was 25 years old, in charge of a lab, given the mandate of improving quality and quantity of food production in the tropics!" Lal says.

He struggled. The problem was the soil. Because of climate and geological history, it was more fragile than what he'd seen in India, where he grew up, or Ohio, where he'd received his Ph.D. Lal cleared parts of the forest for his research plots, but when the soil lost its vegetation and was exposed to sun and rain, it quickly deteriorated. What Lal calls the "life blood of the soil" the so-called organic matter, made of microbes and decomposing roots, which holds moisture in the soil and provides a fertile bed for growing seeds vaporized or washed away, leaving behind gravelly dirt as hot and hard as a road.

One day, a famous scientist named Roger Revelle came to visit. Revelle was one of the pioneers in the field now known as climate science. Lal told Revelle about his problems; about how the organic matter kept disappearing. Revelle pointed out that it was escaping into the air in the form of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Then Revelle asked a question: "Can you put it back?"

"That simple statement, 'Can you put it back?' was my introduction to climate and soil," Lal says.

Rattan Lal was awarded the World Food Prize this year. He previously won the Japan Prize. John Rice/OSU/CFAES hide caption

Rattan Lal was awarded the World Food Prize this year. He previously won the Japan Prize.

Lal, now a professor at Ohio State University, is courteous, polite and soft-spoken. But that can be misleading. "I am by nature competitive," he says. "You're either going to be in the top one, two, three, four or you are not going to survive."

It's a lesson from childhood. He grew up poor, in a village in India. He and his family were refugees from present-day Pakistan. His ticket out of poverty was a government stipend a few dollars each month to study at university. To earn that money, his grades had to be in the top five in the class, and he was haunted by fear that he'd lose it. "That insecurity never really left me," he says.

Soybeans growing at Ohio State's Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory. It's part of an experiment aimed at measuring the effects of farming practices on soil quality. Dan Charles/NPR hide caption

Soybeans growing at Ohio State's Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory. It's part of an experiment aimed at measuring the effects of farming practices on soil quality.

When Lal returned to Ohio State as a professor of soil science in the late 1980s, the insight from that conversation with Revelle became his calling card. He pushed a new view of soil, arguing that it's more than a simply a place where farmers grow crops. It's also a vast global reservoir of carbon that has been a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. Until the mid-20th century, cultivating the soil released more carbon dioxide than burning fossil fuels. Even today, farming and clearing forests for agriculture is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse emissions.

Farmers control that reservoir; they can continue to mine the soil by tilling it, spilling carbon into the air, or they can refill it, restoring some of the carbon that was previously lost. Soil that's rich in organic matter also is healthier in many other ways. It acts like a sponge, holding water, and it also contains nutrients like nitrogen.

In the American Midwest, for instance, the undisturbed soil of the prairie once was incredibly rich in carbon. Much of it was lost after settlers began plowing it to plant grain. Deforestation and land clearing continues in parts of Latin America and Africa.

Lal began experimenting with farming practices to see how they affect the level of carbon in that reservoir, and he discovered that it's actually possible to refill it at least partially by capturing carbon from the air. Some of those experiments are still ongoing. Nall Moonilall, a Ph.D. student at Ohio State, shows me one of them, an array of square plots at the university's research farm. For the past 30 years, Lal has been monitoring the effects of covering the soil with mulch. Some of the plots have been covered with different amounts of straw mulch every year. Others remained bare. Those bare soil plots now contain less than 1% carbon, but "the carbon content in plots that receive the maximum amount of mulch is probably upwards of 4%," Moonilall says. That's a healthy amount of soil carbon, close to what Midwestern soils contained before they were first plowed.

It also adds up to to tons of carbon in a single acre of soil, simply from adding mulch to the surface each year. Researchers also have found that farmers can enrich soil by leaving it undisturbed. Instead of tilling the soil before planting, which releases stored carbon into the air, farmers can deploy equipment that opens up a narrow slice in the soil and inserts the seeds. Such "no-till" practices have been widely adopted by American farmers in recent decades. Even better, at least from an environmental point of view, farmers can stop growing crops altogether, returning the land to permanent pasture or wetlands.

Soon after he returned to Ohio State University in the late 1980s, Rattan Lal laid out these research plots to study the capacity of soil to store carbon. Dan Charles/NPR hide caption

Soon after he returned to Ohio State University in the late 1980s, Rattan Lal laid out these research plots to study the capacity of soil to store carbon.

Lal was not the only scientist exploring this field. In fact, some of his colleagues and rivals in soil science privately criticize him for spreading himself too thin, publishing articles at a ferocious pace yet not always breaking much new ground. Few of them, though, were the equal of Lal when it came to bringing soil to the attention of policymakers and the general public.

Just in the past few years, dirt has turned trendy. Books have appeared, many of them featuring Lal. There's a TED talk about soil health. Agricultural industry giants like General Mills and Bayer are offering to pay farmers to adopt practices that restore carbon to the soil. There's a catchy new name for it: regenerative agriculture. A startup company called Indigo Carbon released a video calling this "the most promising technology we have to address climate change."

Last year, Lal received the Japan Prize, which many consider second only to the Nobel in scientific prestige. In June, he won the World Food Prize, and former Vice President Al Gore and Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, both called to congratulate him.

There are critics of regenerative agriculture who say the movement has become a fad, promising more than it can possibly deliver. According to the World Resources Institute, no-till farming is unlikely to capture enough carbon to make much of a difference for the climate. And more dramatic changes, such at converting fields back into permanent grasslands, aren't likely to happen on a large scale because there's a growing demand for food, and farmers probably won't stop growing profitable crops.

Lal agrees that rebuilding soil won't stop global warming, but insists that it can make a difference for carbon emissions and for a variety of other environmental problems, from reducing water pollution and expanding habitat for wildlife. He's mostly happy that soil is finally getting the respect it deserves. He even wants it written into law. The U.S. has a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act, he says; there should be a Healthy Soils Act, too.

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The Ideas Of A Pioneer In The Environmental Movement Are Finally Recognized : Goats and Soda - NPR

Bees pollinate about one-third of the worlds food supply, according to Sustain, a nonprofit agriculture policy organization. Bees pollinate all manner of fruits, vegetables, crops, and even some of the wild grasses used to feed cattle and other livestock.

Their impact to the U.S. economy are valued at about $15 billion per year, according to Scientific American. During the winter of 2018-19 bee keepers across the country lost an estimated 38% of their honeybee colonies mostly due to an Asian parasitic mite that is resistant to some pesticides that kill mites.

The bee population in Arkansas is in decline and it could have a devastating impact on the states agriculture industry. Neelendra Joshi, assistant professor of entomology for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, uses the research tools of his discipline to understand the greatest threats to the states hundreds of bee species and learn how to protect them.

There are an estimated 25,000 species of bees that provide pollination services to the world, Joshi said. Our research has identified more than 100 species in Arkansas, and we estimate that there may be as many as 300 to 400 native bee species in the state.

Using various sampling techniques, Joshi has determined that different species of bees are distributed to different areas of the state, mainly based on local resources like habitat and food sources.

Bee populations, both managed and wild, are in decline everywhere, Joshi said. Extensive research is underway nationwide to fully understand the causes, but the known threats are many.

Interactions among many stressors have created colossal maladies hitting bees at one time, Joshi said, and in many cases, the combinations have caused additive impacts. Also, he said, the factors causing distress in wild bee populations tend to be different from those harming domesticated honeybees.

Managed bee populations often suffer from restricted diets when they are moved from location to location to pollinate specific monoculture crops, where they forage on only one kind of flowering plant. Joshi said these bees are not getting the balanced nutrition necessary to maintain good health.

Also, the breeding and handling practices for managed beehives tend to make the bees vulnerable to rapid spread of disease pathogens or parasites and other pests.

The biggest threats to wild bee populations are loss of nesting habitat and loss of native flora that are primary food sources, Joshi said.

Most people think of bees living in hives, either in managed, human made hives or wild hives in trees or, on occasion, attics. But wild bees live in many different kinds of nesting sites, most of which are vulnerable to loss because of human development.

Seventy percent of bees are ground-nesting, Joshi said. Many others live in tunnels and cavities.

Bees can be quite industrious, rivaling human developers in creating living space. Joshi said they may occupy or even build cavities in the ground, tunnels in trees either moving into abandoned beetle galleries or, as in the case of carpenter bees, creating their own or live on the ground. Mason bees use mud, sand, leaf particles and other materials to build nests.

Bees lose habitat to human development like urban expansion, road building, logging, land clearing and tilling for agriculture, forest fires, and other natural or human-made reduction in wild land and forests.

Urban spread and monoculture agriculture contribute to loss of wildflower food sources for wild bees, Joshi said.

Bees require nectar and pollen from diverse floral resources to meet their nutritional needs, he said. Popular garden plants and the sameness of monoculture farming systems do not provide dietary balance.

Many other things also contribute to population decline, Joshi said, including pesticide use.

Joshi and his lab have conducted studies to measure the effects of common pesticides and biological alternatives on bee species. The studies included determining what levels of exposure are fatal, and those from which bees of different species can recover.

While its easy to point the finger at agriculture for pesticide use, Joshi said homeowners and gardeners use precisely the same pesticide chemicals, and often with less restraint.

Global climate change also is likely contributing to bee decline, though scientists are still collecting data. While Joshi said he had not seen evidence of it in Arkansas, there is much concern that rising temperatures may cause flowering cycles and the beginning of seasonal bee activity to get out of sync.

Solitary wild bees could emerge early and not find any food, he said.

Managed bees and wild bee populations have to compete for ever-shrinking resources, compounding the problem.

Beekeepers who maintain managed populations for breeding, honey or pollination services are already looking to researchers for the answers they need to restore health and stability for their hives.

Joshi said everyone can make changes to help wild bee populations recover.Homeowners and gardeners should be careful about pesticide use, he said. Farmers use the least amount necessary to protect their crops for economic reasons. Homeowners use pesticides for comfort to keep insects out of their homes and gardeners use them for aesthetic purposes, to keep their gardens pretty. Joshi recommends using pesticides that are less toxic to bees or natural alternatives, if possible, and to time their use for when bees are not active or present.

Maintaining non-compacted, well-drained soils offers suitable nesting substrates for ground-nesting bees, Joshi said. He suggested drilling holes in scrap pieces of wood and hanging them in trees at least 5 to 6 feet off the ground for tunnel-dwellers.

To provide food sources, Joshi recommended planting a variety of native wildflowers.

Many exotic garden plants will not be suitable, Joshi said. Its best to use a mix of colors and plant heights, as well as a sequence of plants that bloom at different times of the year while bees are active, usually from April through about mid-October, he said.

Joshi is conducting a study now to correlate specific pairings of bee species to plant species in Arkansas. Were looking at different flowers to identify which bee species are using them, he said.

Different species have different preferences, Joshi said. We want to learn what those are.

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Scientists try to stem the tide of bee losses - talkbusiness.net

Image via Peter Parks / AFP (L) and Flickr user Harley Kingston,CC licence 2.0 (R)

Conservationists and wildlife experts have expressed grave concern that Australian state governments are continuing to log unburned forests that are home to vulnerable koala populations.

Estimates suggest that at least 5,000 koalas were killed and over 2 million hectares of habitat was destroyed in the state of New South Wales during the 2019/20 bushfiresa devastating blow to a species that is already facing the compounding risks of climate change, urban development and deforestation.

In light of these threats, a recent government inquiry found that the states koalas could become extinct by 2050 unless there is urgent government intervention to prevent habitat loss.

Yet despite a number of clear recommendations from that same inquirythat the NSW government urgently prioritise the protection of koala habitat in urban planning, for example, and that they ban the opening up of old growth forests to loggingthe state-owned logging agency Forestry Corporation is continuing to cut down trees in increasingly rare koala habitats.

Its a scandal that the government isnt doing whats required to prevent the extinction of one of our most iconic species, James Tremain, from the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, told Vice News over the phone. Theyre schizophrenic on the issue. They say they have a koala strategy and an ambition to increase the population of koalas, but theyve introduced laws that have made it much easier to destroy koala habitat.

The recent bushfires destroyed millions of hectares of native bushland, but the NSW government has largely maintained the intensity of its logging operations: pledging to maintain wood supply at the same rate as before the disaster. As Tremain explained, that effectively means more intense logging operations across the state as corporations try to yield the same volume of timber from a significantly reduced area of bushland.

Forestry Corporation documents released through parliamentary processes showed that 85 percent of forest previously designated for logging on NSWs south coast was burned in the bushfires, along with about 44 percent on the north coast. In response, the Forestry Corporation increased its logging intensity to keep up with the demand for timber.

The Nature Conservation Council of NSW previously asked the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to investigate the logging, but was told that operations could not be halted when Forestry Corporation was not in breach of its approvals.

Unfortunately for koalas, they tend to like the same kinds of trees that loggers likeso theyre in direct competition, he said. The main extinction pressure thats placed on koalas is habitat loss, primarily from logging for timber production or land clearing for agriculture. And although there is a desire for the government to do the right thing, there are powerful industry interests to prevent it from doing what has to be done.

Video footage recorded by arborist and conservationist Kailas Wild reveals that logging operations are continuing in some of the last remaining koala habitats in NSW, in the Lower Bucca State Forest on the states north coast. Wild, whos worked in koala conservation since 2010, understands the ramifications that deforestation can inflict on biodiverse ecosystemsand he fears the governments business as usual approach could be devastating to already vulnerable wildlife populations.

The fact that theres just been no pause or stocktake from the NSW Government to be like lets just see whether this is going to cause impact is worrying, he told Vice News. These bushfires completely changed the game. I've seen with my own eyes the old growth forest that fires completely obliterated, and the habitat that no longer exists, and its really shifted and increased the value of these native forests.

Wild further noted that hes worried the remaining koala populations in NSW and Australia are even less than we thinkand that if the NSW government and state premier Gladys Berejiklian continue to neglect meaningful action on wildlife protection and habitat preservation, the extinction of koalas in the state could come even sooner than current projections suggest.

The fear is that 2050 is an optimistic estimate, he said.

Associate Professor Mathew Crowther, from the University of Sydneys School of Life and Environmental Sciences, said that although it is unlikely the whole koala species will go extinct in the near future, continued logging, habitat loss and fragmentation in areas where koalas live could increase the probability of localised extinctionthat is, the loss of koalas from certain areas.

It all depends on the amount of koala habitat that is to be logged, and what appropriate mitigation has been applied to maintain koalas in the area, he told Vice News over email. The Berejiklian government unfortunately has a very poor record regarding habitat and threatened species protection, and weakening of environmental legislation has led to greatly increased land clearing.

Professor Crowther said that in order to effectively mitigate risks to koala populations, governments need to stop the fragmentation of their habitats, reduce developments near areas of koala populations, invest in research addressing threats to koalas, and implement policies to target some of those other threats, such as climate change.

In the short-term, though, with Australia still reeling in the aftermath of the most devastating fire season on record, he suggested that logging corporations should refrain from wading into potentially fragile ecosystems.

Any logging of koala habitat at this time, when the full extent of the bushfires on koala and other species populations has yet to be ascertained, is short-sighted and potentially very damaging to the species, he said.

Vice News approached the NSW Forestry Corporation for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

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Koala Habitats that Survived Australias Bushfires are Now Being Logged - VICE

In a remote slice of Triunfo do Xingu, deep in Brazils northern Par state, swaths of lush forest have been engulfed by flames in recent days. In another stretch to the north, a patch of untouched jungle has been almost entirely cleared this year. In countless other parts of this vast protected region, the Amazon is being cut down and burned at a dizzying speed.

The rea de Proteo Ambiental (APA) Triunfo do Xingu spans some 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) across the municipalities of So Flix do Xingu and Altamira, long strongholds of Brazilian cattle ranching. It encompasses thousands of hectares of dense jungle and boasts a rich diversity of plant and animal species. It is also home to Indigenous groups and traditional peoples, who rely on the forest to survive.

Under federal protection since 2006, the territory is supposed to be used only for sustainable development, with landowners required to keep some 80% of the forest intact. When it was created more than a decade ago, Triunfo do Xingu was intended as a buffer that would protect vulnerable areas beyond its boundaries, like the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory and the Terra do Meio Ecological Station. The ecologically-rich Xingu Basin within which it is nestled is made up of some 28 conservation areas and 18 Indigenous territories.

But the area has come under pressure, becoming one of the most deforested regions in the Amazon in recent years. It lost some 436,000 hectares of forest between 2006 and 2019, with some 5% cleared last year alone, according to satellite data from the University of Maryland (UMD). Overall, the territory has lost nearly 30% of its forest cover, according to Francisco Fonseca, who works for The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a nonprofit focused on environmental conservation.

The problem is that a lack of land oversight led to this area being more and more occupied, more and more threatened, Fonseca said in an interview in late July. And this will now only worsen going forward.

The incursion into Triunfo do Xingu has only intensified this year, amid a wider surge in deforestation and burning across the Brazilian Amazon. In May and June, some 6,973 hectares of forest were cleared in APA accounting for two-thirds of deforestation in protected areas within the Xingu Basin, according to data from Rede Xingu+, a network of environmental and Indigenous groups working in the region.

These are areas where there definitely should not be any burning, said one advocacy source who asked to remain anonymous due to security concerns. And they are in flames.

With Triunfo do Xingu under attack, the surrounding territories it was meant to protect have also come under pressure. To the northeast, the deforestation is now chipping away at the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, local sources say. To the southeast, the clearing is edging into the Kayapo Indigenous Territory something we had never seen before, Fonseca said. In the Trincheira Bacaj Indigenous Territory, further north, deforestation rose tenfold in May and June, according to Rede Xingu+.

With this weakening of APA, it has become easier to reach conservation parks, indigenous territories beyond, Fonseca said. It ultimately didnt end up becoming the buffer it was supposed to become.

The destruction in Triunfo do Xingu is emblematic of a wider assault on the Amazon that is picking up speed this year. While large-scale burning captured international headlines in 2019, there are already signs it could worsen this year: in July, fires surged 28% over the same period last year, according to data from INPE, Brazils National Institute for Space Research.

The number of fires has soared in Triunfo do Xingu too. Over the last two months, NASA satellites picked up 3,842 fire alerts in the territory. August and September when Brazils fire season is normally at its peak are expected to bring even more intense burning.

In some cases, perpetrators had previously invested in deforesting the land and are now back to finish clearing it by setting it ablaze, according to Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). The bulk of the deforestation and burning across the Amazon is taking place on public lands that are directly the responsibility of the government, Alencar said. She added that many of the areas under attack have not yet been demarcated or are shielded by weak environmental protection.

Were seeing a huge volume of deforestation, it signals there are people investing in deforesting the Amazon, she said during a press briefing in late July.

Like in much of the Amazon, the drivers of deforestation in Triunfo do Xingu are diverse and complex. About two-thirds of the protected area lies within So Flix do Xingu, Brazils largest cattle-producing municipality and home to nearly 20 times more livestock than people. Up until recently, the biggest threat to the conservation area was cattle ranching, as more and more of its forests gave way to sprawling pastures.

But environmentalists warn that new threats are gaining ground. More recently, the area has emerged as an epicenter of land-grabbing and illegal mining, amid a surge in invaders who are betting that protections on the land they are occupying will eventually be loosened or scrapped altogether.

We have seen a wave of land-grabbing, Fonseca said. The pattern has changed many of these openings are now for speculation only, not for planting or pastures.

Environmentalists say invaders have been emboldened by President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been a vocal opponent of environmental protections and has repeatedly threatened to open up protected areas to wildcat mining. He blamed the current wave of fires engulfing the Amazon on Indigenous and traditional peoples.

The main driver is the total lack of environmental policy from this government, said Romulo Batista, Greenpeace Brazils Amazon campaigner.People who are disposed to invading are feeling emboldened.

Under Bolsonaros leadership, environmental enforcement has also taken a hit. The far-right president has repeatedly slashed budgets for environmental enforcement agencies like Ibama and ICMBio, while also attempting to stop their agents from destroying equipment found during raids on illegal operations in the Amazon.

The government has also been mulling a law allowing squatters to self-declare as the rightful owners of land, although the process was put on hold following an international outcry over the message it would send to landgrabbers. Environment minister Ricardo Salles, meanwhile, came under fire in May after urging the government to take advantage of the distraction of the coronavirus crisis to quietly weaken protections of the Amazon.

In the Xingu Basin, speculators have become bolder, feeling that the government is on their side, local sources said. Invaders have increasingly been razing small lots of land in patterns typical of land-grabbing, the advocacy source noted, in the hopes that this activity will eventually be legalized.

They arrive there and start clearing its completely illegal, the source said. And there is, behind this, a rejection of these indigenous territories and an expectation that the land they claim will eventually be legalized, that it will become theirs.

Local sources say weaker enforcement is already having a tangible impact in the Xingu Basin. Earlier this year, Ibama agents carried out a mass crackdown on illegal mines in several Indigenous territories including Apyterewa and Trincheira Bacaj, setting the equipment they seized on fire. Just weeks later, three high-ranking Ibama officials were fired. Emboldened, the miners have resumed operations in both of these territories recently, according to local sources.

People see this as an incentive to begin invading again, the advocacy source said. They feel a certain degree of security, they return knowing that nothing will happen to them.

Faced with mounting pressure to respond to the latest wave of deforestation, the government launched a highly-publicized military operation in early May aimed at cracking down on deforestation and burning in the Amazon. Initially meant to last a month, Operation Brasil Verde 2 was recently extended until November.

In July, the federal government also imposed a moratorium on burning across the Amazon and Pantanal for 120 days, in a bid to curb illegal fires that have been spreading out of control. Across the Amazon, ranchers often burn degraded pastures to renew them and small producers prepare their plots for planting agricultural crops by setting them ablaze. Oftentimes, these blazes spread further than intended and add more pressure on forests.

But these government measures appear to have had little impact on deterring illegal deforestation and criminal burning. In June when the federal governments crackdown on forest clearing was in full swing Brazil registered its highest level of deforestation in 13 years for that month. Meanwhile, satellites recorded some 1,314 fire alerts across the Amazon between July 15 and July 21, even though the moratorium on burning had already been in place for two weeks. Some 46% of these alerts were registered in the state of Par, according to Batista.

Combating deforestation has to be done year-round, Batista said. Combatting burning doesnt happen only in the moment when the forest is already on fire.

Meanwhile, the invasion of Indigenous lands carries even more risk now, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravages Brazil. Because of their relative isolation, Indigenous peoples tend to be more vulnerable to even common diseases. With a highly infectious virus like COVID-19, the risks are even greater for these communities, which have a history of being decimated by disease brought in from the outside.

There have already been 22,021 confirmed cases and 625 deaths among Indigenous people due to the novel coronavirus, with 148 communities affected across Brazil. The Kayapo Indigenous Territory, which is being invaded by illegal miners, has the highest number of COVID-19 cases of any Indigenous territory, according to Rede Xingu+.

Meanwhile, as the pandemic spreads into rural parts of Brazil, worries are also mounting that underfunded health networks that are already struggling to cope with COVID-19 may be further strained by patients sickened by ash and smoke. Last year, the plumes of smoke darkened the skies of Sao Paulo, thousands of kilometers away from the Amazon.

We already have hospitals overflowing with people, Batista said. Now, they could end up even more overwhelmed.

Banner image of a White-nosed saki (Chiropotes albinasus) by Valdir Hobus via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SE 2.0).

Editors note:This story was powered byPlaces to Watch, a Global Forest Watch (GFW) initiative designed to quickly identify concerning forest loss around the world and catalyze further investigation of these areas. Places to Watch draws on a combination of near-real-time satellite data, automated algorithms and field intelligence to identify new areas on a monthly basis. In partnership with Mongabay, GFW is supporting data-driven journalism by providing data and maps generated by Places to Watch. Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence over the stories reported using this data.

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Brazilian Amazon protected areas 'in flames' as land-grabbers invade - Mongabay.com

In late 2015, I arrived for the second time at a place called Orokolo Bay on Papua New Guineas south coast. The bay is a long grey-black beach, densely forested with hibiscus and coconut trees. As we approached by dinghy from the east, clusters of houses could be glimpsed fleetingly through the bush.

I had arrived with colleagues from PNGs National Museum and Art Gallery to commence an archaeological project in partnership with two village communities, called Larihairu and Kaivakovu. Working alongside local experts in Oral Tradition, I hoped to use Western archaeological techniquessurveys, excavations, carbon dating, and analyses of material cultureto unravel new aspects of the human history of Papua New Guineas south coast.

But in the weeks that followed, I became aware that we were covering old ground. Our archaeological surveys were not revealing previously unknown archaeological sites. Rather, locals introduced us to their ancestral places.

Many of these places bore surface traces of their ancestors lives, such as scatters of earthenware pottery sherds and shell middens, making it obvious how and why people were aware of them. To my surprise, though, the locals also had an intimate knowledge of what lay beneath the ground. Through the daily activities of cultivating crops (called gardening in the Pacific) and building structures, people in Orokolo Bay have been continually digging up and interpreting evidence of their ancestral past for generations.

This kind of unique archaeologyhistorical meaning-making by non-academic Indigenous peoples and conducted as part of daily lifecontinually breathes life into and sustains local Oral Traditions. The locals told us about how these cultural deposits, along with distinctive layers of dark sediment in the ground, spoke of the actions of their ancestors in recent generations and of a time when the Earth itself was formed in the cosmological past. All this gave me a new appreciation for the Oral Traditions of Indigenous peoples and how they may incorporate not just memories but also physical evidence of the past.

In Orokolo Bay and other parts of the south coast of PNG, people are in the business of working with the land. When locals want to establish a new garden, they find a location where the sandy soil is well-drained and fertile. Whether the garden is new or being remade, areas of vegetation and undergrowth are cut down and burned. Then holes are dug to plant the varied and colorful crops that grow so abundantly in the tropics, such as taro, yams, pineapple, sweet potato, and corn. In this process, the ground surface is laid bare and the subsurface exposed. Activities such as housebuilding have similar effects: Surface vegetation is cleared, and foundation posts are dug deep into the ground.

Some archaeological sites, like Popo, lie where the coastline used to be. Catherine Gilman/SAPIENS

Today the people of Orokolo Bay build their gardens in cleared forest patches a couple of kilometers inlandan area that was once situated on the coastline. Throughout the human history of coastal occupation in this part of the world, beaches have been growing rapidly southward at a rate of around 3 meters per year as river sediments pile up and extend the coast. Previous archaeological studies in the region have shown that people moved their villages with the changing coastline, preferring to live near the sea to access marine food and trade routes. For many years, the old inland sites have been overgrown with dense tropical forest. But within the past five generations, people have cleared areas of this forest to establish gardens.

On a Wednesday morning in September 2015, our archaeological team had just finished the technical drawings of a site we had excavated. Kaivakovu village elderswho had been busy with community meetingsarrived to take us on a survey of their ancestral sites. Each at least 40 years my senior, the elders took off at a startling pace; they threaded a trail through numerous named and storied places situated on ancient beach plains and hillsides. Wherever we saw evidence of recent gardening activity, there were physical remains of the past spilling out of the ground. At one site (called Maivipi), one of the elders had just dug scores of banana plants into the ground. Each plant was now surrounded by dozens of recently disturbed pottery sherds. At another site, we saw once-buried shells and animal bones strewn across a large communal garden area.

For locals, these materials signify two things. The pottery sherds are reminders of close social relationships with Motu people who live approximately 400 kilometers to the east. Up until the mid-1950s, the Motu (from todays Port Moresby region) would annually sail into villages such as those in Orokolo Bay, bringing with them tens of thousands of earthenware pots. They would return to their families months later with tons of food in the form of sago palm starch, along with new canoe hulls made from giant hardwood logs.

Women from Larihairu village use Hiri-traded pottery to make a porridge. Chris Urwin

Second, the remains of pots and food are reminders of the large, thriving villages that the locals forebears established. Women used their pots to cook food for daily sustenance and for communal feasts. Fragments of the pots are reminders of work and life in the village, and their presence indicates where centers of domestic activity might have been located.

Of the ancient villages, a 1.3-kilometer-long place called Popo looms large in local and regional Oral Traditions.

Popo is a legendary migration site for Orokolo Bay residents and for many other clan (biraipi) and village groups living in coastal locations up to 125 kilometers farther to the east. According to local Oral Traditions, the village was inhabited by ancestors between 16 and seven generations ago, or roughly 400175 years ago. (Western dating techniques put it at 700 to 200 years ago.) Clan-based social structures, 15-meter-tall cathedral-like buildings called longhouses, and ceremonies were all developed there. Locals recount that the site was divided into estates or suburbs, which belonged to the different clans that today occupy the coastal villages. The place known as Maivipi is one of these estates. Popo is also a cosmological origin place; their stories tell how the entire world was made there.

Interestingly, there is a strong correlation between the intensiveness of contemporary agricultural activity in various spots throughout Popo and the perceived antiquity of those sites. Estates where more land has been cleared and where people regularly encounter pottery sherds or shell middens are generally perceived to be more ancient. The remains have also helped locals to determine where the center of the village or the longhouse might have been located.

This process can be seen across the globe. Archaeological remains are most often found incidentally during land clearing or excavation for development, including in well-studied cities like London and Rome. Where there are concentrations of sites or finds, western archaeologists tend to view these places as especially ancient.

During our excavations at clan suburbs called Miruka and Koavaipi, we found thin layers of jet-black sand. According to Western geomorphology, these are layers of iron-rich magnetite sand: sediment that was transported by rivers from PNGs volcanic mountains into the Coral Sea.

But locals see their ancestors actions in the sand. Paul Mahiroson of the famed Orokolo Bay historian Morea Pekorotold me that the black sand was laid by his ancestors when they were creating the land. Mahiro said that two ancestor beings traveled from the west in a magical sky-borne canoe sometime in the deep, cosmological past. In their hand, they had black sand, he recounts, which they left at Popo and many other nearby coastal locations. When gardeners unearth these thin layers, they are reminded of their ancestors travels and actions.

Of course, Western scientific and local ways of reading the past do not always agree. For example, our excavations and radiocarbon-dating program provide a different order of suburb establishment at Popo than the Oral Traditions. Some of the youngest suburbs, according to Oral Tradition, are the oldest in our radiocarbon sequence. Likewise, according to Western science, the black sand layers formed in two relatively recent events: one dating to around 650 years ago and the other just before 200 years ago.

These temporal contradictions dont necessarily cause conflict. One night, while socializing in a house in Larihairu village, a younger community member asked me what I knew of the past. I replied that, as an archaeologist, I hoped to investigate human history using the materials people left behind. He replied, You only know about the human story, but we know about the mythical beings and spiritual beings.

I got the sense that Western scientific chronologies do not pose an existential threat to the mythical and spiritual pasts of Orokolo Bay. Within the Oral Traditions themselves, there are already overlapping and interwoven chronologies, each of which serves a different purpose. Popo is understood simultaneously as a migration site occupied between 16 and seven generations ago, and as a timeless origin place. Carbon dates provide another parallel chronology, which can help place the site in a broader context and enable a comparison of the history of places along PNGs south coast. They can also be used by locals to serve their purposes, for example to argue for government protection of certain sites from mineral extraction or deforestation

The Orokolo Bay example also has crucial implications for how Western archaeologists understand oral Traditional Knowledge. Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in millennia-old Indigenous Oral Traditions from North America and Australia that record details of environmental changes and interactions with long-since-extinct animals. Aboriginal Oral Traditions from across coastal Australia describe a time in which sea levels rose dramatically, which Western science dates to a time from 13,000 to 7,000 years ago. Even more remarkably, stories told by Gunditjmara people, Aboriginal Australians, may describe a series of eruptions that took place 37,000 years ago.

Pottery sherds sit next to a banana plant at the Maivipi estate. Chris Urwin

Outsiders who study Oral Traditions often refer to them as memories. The word suggests that experiential information was passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone.

What if Oral Traditions are not only handed-down stories? What if they incorporate Indigenous peoples knowledge of the archaeological and geographical features they dwell among?

In Orokolo Bay, people read the ancestral past in their landscapes. They identify stratigraphic features and relate these to the stories told to them by their elders. They observe concentrations of pottery and weave their interpretations of old village sites into the Oral Traditions their families curate. These interactions hint that Indigenous archaeologies and other forms of landscape knowledge are crucial to how Oral Traditions are sustained and maintained across generations.

It is time that non-Indigenous people reconsider the remarkable (and complex) ways in which Indigenous peoples record and reconstruct the past. I think outsiders will continue to be amazed by communities Oral Traditional technologies and what they record.

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Where Archaeology and Oral Tradition Coexist - SAPIENS - SAPIENS