On Sunday, October 11 at 2 pm, Dr. Thomas Veblen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at CU Boulder and Dr. Karl Ford, environmental scientist (retired Bureau of Land Management), will lead an interpretive walk through a parcel of the Roosevelt National Forest five miles west of Gold Hill (10 miles west of Boulder) slated for "fuel reduction" by the U.S. Forest Service.
Colorado’s Proposition 137, on the ballot this election, would route $83 million in taxpayer dollars every year towards an unprecedented level of such landscape-scale fuel reduction on state, county, and municipal public lands.
On this 2-hour, 1/2 mile easy walk, Dr. Veblen and Dr. Ford, two of the leading scientific experts on wildfire and forests in Colorado, will address the following questions:
-Are Colorado’s forests “overgrown” due to past fire suppression or within the historical range of variability (HRV)?
-To what extent should recent extreme fire events in Colorado be attributed to fuel accumulation under a century of fire suppression or to a warming climate producing extreme fire weather? What are the historical, current and likely future ecological impacts of high severity fires in the different forest ecosystems of Colorado?
-How can we evaluate the effectiveness of landscape-scale fuels mitigation versus the need to invest more in home protection/hardening/defensible space as a scientifically proven way to save homes and lives?
This forest is part of the “St. Vrain Forest Health Project,” which involves 43,250 acres of fuel reduction across Colorado public lands, including 7,863 acres in two Roadless Areas.
St. Vrain is part of the “Big Four,” which involves almost half a million acres (474,872) of fuel reduction in four National Forests along the length of the Front Range across seven counties, including 61,439 acres in seventeen Roadless Areas. These projects include clearcutting, sale of large-diameter trees, as well as logging in endangered species habitat and old-growth forests, and 244,210 acres of herbicide sprayin
