Forests

"In recent months, as California officials started to calculate the fire danger posed by the state’s prolonged and historic drought, they tucked an extra $23 million into the Cal Fire emergency wildfire budget for the fiscal year that began July 1, bringing its total to $209 million."

"The California drought is helping save the state's signature tree - the mighty oak - by slowing down the spread of the plague-like disease scientists call sudden oak death."

"An environmental campaigner is killed every week in Brazil."

"Akif Eskalen steps through the dense, damp leaves in a wooded neighborhood, scrutinizing the branches around him. He's looking for evidence of an attack: tiny wounds piercing the bark and sap dried around them like bloodstains."

"This short documentary profiles residents of the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, as they confront a future threatened by sinking shorelines and rising seas.""

"FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A plant disease blazing through South Florida is killing off swamp bay trees, an important part of the architecture of the Everglades that provides food for a vast range of wildlife and traditional medicine for the Seminole Tribe."

"On Memorial Day weekend in 2011, an unattended campfire in Bear Wallow Wilderness sparked a small brush fire that quickly turned into a holocaust, burning through 538,000 acres and destroying 32 homes in the process. It cost taxpayers more than $79 million to suppress. The Wallow fire was the largest fire in Arizona history, with almost 6,000 people evacuated during the weeks it burned. The San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, just to the west of where the fire started, was hardly touched."

"The devastating wildfires scorching Southern California offer a glimpse of a warmer and more fiery future, according to scientists and federal and international reports."

"Last week was Wildfire Awareness Week in California, a time when firefighters and forest managers travel up and down the state talking about fire risk and public safety. Usually that would mean wildfire conditions were just picking up, with higher temperatures drying out fuels nurtured by winter rain and snowpack."