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  • How Formerly Incarcerated Firefighters Are Getting the Jobs and Pay They Deserve

    The Fire and Forestry Recruitment Program serves as an intermediary between formerly incarcerated people trained as firefighters and the agencies they seek work from once they have been released from prison. California has long used incarcerated firefighters in its wildfire-fighting work, paying them poverty wages and then usually denying them the jobs they're trained for outside prison. FFRP has helped more than 100 such people find jobs, using training, certifications, and job-searching help. Its services are in high demand as a lower prison population coincides with record wildfires.

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  • They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won't Anybody Listen? Audio icon

    California’s wildfires historically were contained through periodic but limited burning. But “misguided fire police” over many decades, focused on overzealous fire suppression, has accumulated more dry fuel, resulting in wildfires that have grown progressively larger and more dangerous. Climate change only increases the likelihood of more fires. And the inventory of unburned acreage that has accumulated is now so great that it makes it increasingly difficult to ever catch up.

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  • Why California spends billions but can't control its wildfires. ‘No simple or cheap solution'

    After 2017's devastating wildfires, the state of California and businesses committed billions of dollars to thinning forests and other fire-prone areas to contain the spread and intensity of wildfires. But the state's "fire deficit," a legacy of more than a century of policies to suppress fires rather than let them periodically consume the fuel on the ground, has been too great to solve the problem quickly. Experts say wildfires like the record-setting conflagrations of 2020, worsened by climate change, will continue without even greater efforts by California and the federal government.

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  • Community gatherings offer healing for emotional wounds after disasters

    Wildfires cause anxiety and other mental-health problems, but Sonoma County's Latino people can get help from a convivencia: a community gathering hosted by one of the nonprofit health and community centers in the area. To connect with people who may distrust or be blocked from using government-funded mental health care, or who may distrust mental health care altogether, the support-group therapy comes in the guise of a social gathering. Some sessions may focus as well on domestic violence or other social problems.

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  • To Manage Wildfire, California Looks To What Tribes Have Known All Along

    To combat wildfires in California, Native American tribal leaders and government officials are coming together to facilitate “cultural burnings” or controlled burns. Regularly burning the landscape prevents thick, dried out vegetation from catching fire and causing massive wildfires. Tribal groups used to perform this ritual in the 1800s, but as settlers moved West, many of them prevented Native Americans from doing these cultural burnings. While controlled burns can be challenging in places where there’s too much underbrush, these partnerships can bring together indigenous knowledge and wildfire management.

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  • The fire we need

    The Indigenous Peoples Burning Network works with a group of other similar networks with the shared goal of promoting prescribed fire in a positive and safe manner that will help local ecosystems and minimize the risk of unintentional wildfires. Since controlled burning has been part of Indigenous communities for much of their long history, there is an opportunity for Indigenous leaders and local fire experts to learn from each other.

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  • As more Mass. first responders test positive for COVID-19, police and fire departments lean on each other to maintain services

    As communities work to contain the coronavirus outbreak, the risk for emergency responders to contract the illness is high; but in Massachusetts, departments are putting new practices and plans into place to address this. From changing the way police respond to calls, to creating a backfill system if or when officers are quarantined, the departments are working to keep both their responders and their communities healthy.

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  • Reducing Fire, and Cutting Carbon Emissions, the Aboriginal Way

    With the dramatic increase in wildfire danger in Australia causing international distress, officials look to an ancient Indigenous fire-prevention technique that reduces the risk of large wild-fires. This Aboriginal technique - which involves lighting small, controlled fires throughout the year - eliminates excess debris that can easily catch fire in a wildfire, and it reduces greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires in the Northern region of the country by 40%.

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  • Shouldering the Burden

    Drastic solutions to climate change tend not to pan out (like trying to get everyone to stop eating meat), but careful adaptation is making real progress. In California, many smaller-scale farms are trying out new methods of adapting to the new realities of climate change, including not tilling the land so that nutrients build up and the soil strengthens. This article covers a range of approaches that farmers take to protect their livelihood and conserve their resources.

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  • Indigenous-wildlife ranger collaboration conserves rare Australian rainforests

    Revegetation and fire management practices are helping to preserve Australia’s biodiversity. In Western Australia, collaborative efforts between Environs Kimberley, an environmental NGO, and local rangers from the First Nation communities of the Dampier Peninsula are working to document, conserve, and manage the region’s monsoon vine thickets (MVT). As part of the Kimberley Nature Project (KNP), local rangers employ traditional methods like seasonal burns to allow for revegetation and to reduce the threat of larger bushfires.

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