A fire in the forest

 

With heat waves becoming more and more common, Alaskas boreal forests are under threat. Climate change has accelerated conditions ideal for conflagration, contributing to record fire seasons on a scale never seen before.
But warming is just part of the story. "Unprecedented spring snow melt", wrote Associated Press, "has added as much as a month more to the fire fighting season, allowing grass and other understory to dry sooner and spread flames to an ever greater area, sometimes until the snow flies in September." And there's more: increasing temperatures have disturbed the natural death-and-regret cycle. Since the mid-1990 the spruce bark beetle, once doomed to disappear during severe winters, have been flying over the Kenai forests, landing like a horror film - remember 'The Birds' of Hitchcock? - and wiping out young, healthy trees as well as the old ones. The area looked as Beirut nowadays.

We will visit this region, the Kenai Peninsula, during the last week of September and the beginning of October to see the present state of those boreal forests. During this trip we will also visit the Russian Old Believers, a religious community centred in and around Homer and Nikolaevsk.

The following week, in Fairbanks, we're going to talk with one of the leading forest ecologist, professor Glenn Juday of the UAF (University of Alaska). With a couple of important questions in mind: what is caused naturally and what by human interference? How US authorities are reacting to forest fires related to climate change? And, of course, what can be done? How one can prevent the burning? How one can protect and preserve these precious boreal forests?