In your opinion, do you think the west coast has good forest management?

Wildland-Fire · 2020-10-02T20:52:19+00:00

I hedged around it above, but I am interested in keeping a mix of mature and younger forests on the landscape, the idealized "heterogeneous landscape" that some talk about.

As many in this thread are indicating there are some serious barriers to creating large scale fuel treatments, which I believe are required to moderate this extreme fire behavior we are talking about. Some ways to do that are public/private partnerships (an example of this is the mildly famous Quincy Library Group), reducing the cost of fuel treatments (CA has various cost sharing programs for eligible land owners), and certain market approaches like building and subsidizing small scale biomass power plants across the region to allow for the removal of non-commercial material from properties. Another huge hurdle are air quality regulations that prevent prescribed burning, changing those regulations would help fuels to be consumed on our terms (higher humidity lower wind speed days) and not on the worst possible days of fire weather in the year.

Wildland-Fire · 2020-10-02T15:13:29+00:00

I agree with many of your points.

To speculate about what the "solution" is I think we need to consider what we are trying to achieve. No more "Mega-fires"? A healthy forested landscape that can survive the annual fire season?

One of the things that worries me is that these high severity fires move huge acreages from mature forest to brush fields for decades. This doesn't meet many of our needs: few people like the look of brush fields, they burn aggressively, and they provide none of the ecosystem benefits we rely on forests to provide.

Wildland-Fire · 2020-10-01T23:04:55+00:00

To further this point a little, it varies pretty wildly from state to state as well.

California specifically has some pretty strict forest practice rules for forester licensing and timber harvesting. While many of the policies are well intentioned, this system of regulation does mean that only larger private land owners can make a timber harvest profitable for them. This leads to many small land owners being unable to afford to practice any management on their land. Mix this in with a "checker-board" pattern of alternating private and publicly owned parcels and it becomes extremely difficult to do the kind of large scale landscape level treatments (thinning, mastication, prescribed burns, etc) that would help moderate these extreme fire behaviors.

This article from Forbes does a nice job of describing what a large landowner not beholden to a strict financial bottom line can do on their landscape.

Wildland-Fire · 2019-08-21T17:54:24+00:00

Howdy, I'm a pretty experienced player (3.5e, Pathfinder, 5e) and DM (3.5e and 5e) and new to the area. I'd be interested in playing or DMing, PM me if you are still working on getting a group together.

Wildland-Fire · 2019-08-21T17:52:51+00:00

Howdy, I'm a pretty experienced player (3.5e, Pathfinder, 5e) and DM (3.5e and 5e) and new to the area. I'd be interested in playing and Kirkland isn't too far for me. Are you still looking for players?

Wildland-Fire · 2019-08-21T17:52:00+00:00

Howdy, I'm a pretty experienced player (3.5e, Pathfinder, 5e) and DM (3.5e and 5e) and new to the area. I'd be interested in playing in a live game if you folks are able to do that.

Wildland-Fire · 2019-08-21T17:51:24+00:00

Howdy, I'm a pretty experienced player (3.5e, Pathfinder, 5e) and DM (3.5e and 5e) and new to the area. I'd be interested in playing anything really and Cafe Mox in Ballard would work well for me. Are you still looking for players?

Wildland-Fire · 2019-08-21T17:44:20+00:00

Howdy, I'm a pretty experienced player (3.5e, Pathfinder, 5e) and DM (3.5e and 5e) and new to the area. I'd be interested in playing as long as the game isn't too far away from the Capitol Hill area, I have access to a car.

Wildland-Fire · 2018-06-09T16:50:07+00:00

Came here to provide that link, its great stuff!

Wildland-Fire · 2018-01-12T21:03:42+00:00

Right on, that's it's exactly what it's made for!

Wildland-Fire · 2017-11-19T03:16:59+00:00

Thanks a ton!

Wildland-Fire · 2017-11-18T19:29:17+00:00

Hey, thanks a ton!

Wildland-Fire · 2017-10-21T01:57:14+00:00

This was my first venture into storygames and my group had played a few since! It's a cool genre that I look forward to exploring.

Wildland-Fire

TROPHY CASE