Saving forests – to burn or not to burn

Safford examining damage from the 2021 Caldor Fire in Eldorado National Forest, California, near Lake Tahoe, in the United States. — AP

ON a steep mountainside where walls of flames torched the forest on their way toward Lake Tahoe in 2021, blackened trees stand in silhouette against a gray sky.

“If you can find a live tree, point to it,” Hugh Safford, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of California, Davis, said touring damage from the Caldor Fire, one of the past decade’s many massive blazes.