CHIP WARD, wardchip at hotmail.com
Ward writes regularly for TomDistpatch.com and is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. He just wrote the article “How the West Was Lost: The American West in Flames” in which he examines the recent forest fires in the western United States and connects them to “global weirding.”
“These past few years, mega-fires in the west have become ever more routine. Though their estimates and measurements may vary, the experts who study these phenomena all agree that wildfires today are bigger, last longer, and are more frequent. A big fire used to burn perhaps 30 square miles. Today, wildfires regularly scorch 150-square-mile areas.
“Global warming, global weirding, climate change — whatever you prefer to call it — is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It’s here now.”
Background: 60 Minutes “The Age of Mega-fires”
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167