"For much of this week and last, devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey in Houston and Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean has grabbed front-page headlines. But wildfires in the West have been wreaking destruction of their own, though it has attracted less attention. Vast swaths of land have burned, choking the air with ash and smoke."
"A wet winter and spring in the Western U.S. brought predictions that the 2017 wildfire season would be mild. It was anything but. It ended up one of the worst in U.S. history in land burned."
"Wildfires burned across hundreds of thousands of acres in the American and Canadian West this week, fueled by scorching temperatures that are breaking heat and fire records across the region." "'These unprecedented extreme events are exactly the types of events that are more likely due to the global warming that’s already occurred.'"
"Fire officials said on Monday they had effectively stopped the uncontrolled spread of the largest wildfire in Los Angeles history, with a little help from cooler weather, but were still working to contain it."
"A study finds strong links between climate change and the spread of southern pine beetles, whose damage increases the risk of ecosystem harm and forest fires."
"When Tony Tooke became regional forester for 13 Southern states in 2015, he made a promise that's shaped his reputation at the Forest Service: He wanted to meet soon with every state forester in the region."
"In the 1980s, an ecologist named Thomas Lovejoy conducted an unusual experiment in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. As loggers moved in with chain saws to clear trees for cattle pasture north of Manaus, he asked them to leave untouched several small “islands” of forest to see how the animals within them fared."
"Eastern larch beetles, tiny burrowing bugs native to Minnesota, are exploding in number across the state’s northern forest and have killed or damaged about a third of the state’s tamarack trees — one of the first clear signs of a rapidly changing climate."
"ELY, Minn. — It is high season in the Boundary Waters, when legions of canoe-carrying trucks transform this small outpost 20 miles from Canada into one of the nation's primary gateways to wilderness recreation."
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