The Best Kind of Preservation
I think we can all say that making this part of my old stomping grounds into a “Land Trust” is a very good thing. As a kid, I rode my bicycle all around Napa County, with the west side being my favorite. Way up at the end of Napa’s Redwood Road is a large parcel of land dominated by second growth redwoods and an isolated waterfall complex. They like to guide people during a visitor’s first hike, and I asked if they were worried about their fuels problem. They didn’t seem to care, willing to take whatever future wildfire will give, Man-caused or not. While the east side of the Napa Valley is notorious for intense brush fires, the wetter west side has a lot more fuels. Where fire-return intervals are long, increased impacts, due to higher fuels buildups, are not easily apparent. I think we’ll see that we underestimated fire intensities in unmanaged forests.
This kind of preservation is not a fight against resource extraction. It is more about banning human development, like mansions, retreats and recovery centers (smirks).
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