https://twitter.com/ethanbaron https://twitter.com/ethanbaron appears to be in the park right now and is photojournaling some of the destruction. As he says in

https://twitter.com/ethanbaron https://twitter.com/ethanbaron appears to be in the park right now and is photojournaling some of the destruction. As he says in one of the tweets, "More redwoods near Big Basin park, appear to have made it but as Mercury News environment reporter @PaulRogersSJMN points out, fire prevention for years means lots of fuel that could threaten even fire-resistant redwoods including ancient ones in park interior" [1]. Clearly a number of the larger trees aren't going to survive this [2][3][4][5]. I see statements about "wildfire being a part of the natural cycle" pretty often but it seems to stem from a misunderstanding about the different scales of wildfire. Smaller, cooler, more frequent brush fires were a part of California ecology in some areas; modern wildfires are far hotter and more destructive and are killing vast swaths of forests that have previously survived for hundreds or thousands of years. There's an arboretum just outside Eugene, Oregon that does a nice job of talking about fire's historical role in the local ecology, and the Oregon Garden just outside Silverton also has a section dedicated to walking through different kinds of forest ecologies and explaining which plant species flourish as a result of different management strategies. The unmanaged, fire-suppressed forests are terribly vulnerable to wildfire as well as stress from pests and competition. I also took a few photos just a couple of weeks ago of a once-forested area that had burned over 20 years ago. It's still dead. My first visits to Big Basin were at least 35 years ago and I don't know how to express how saddened I am by this news. [1]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296547748259360768 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296547748259360768 [2]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640252279312384/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640252279312384/ph... [3]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640967299063809/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640967299063809/ph... [4]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296641416802656256/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296641416802656256/ph... [5]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296643324275593216/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296643324275593216/ph...