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Yale Environment 360 e360@yale.edu
Yale Environment 360 e360@yale.edu ... October 8th 2020
Peter Burgess
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Date: 2025-08-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00019646 | |||||||||
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Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | |||||||||
| Why We Must Learn to Live with Fire; plus How China’s Crackdown Has Silenced Green Activists Yale Environment 360 e360@yale.edu via gmail.mcsv.net 11:17 AM (33 minutes ago) to me A Note From the Editor ... October 8, 2020 Can we learn to live with fire? That’s the question that environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne asks at Yale Environment 360 today. Fires have been part of the Earth’s landscape for millennia. But Pyne argues that by suppressing all wildfires and incessantly burning fossil fuels, humans have upset the role that fire has historically played in providing ecological balance. Damaging fires are now burning across the planet, and the pace and intensity of those fires can be expected to increase. We need to rethink our view of fire and accept its presence by changing how we manage lands and plan our communities, Pyne says. “We have too many bad fires — fires that kill people, burn towns, and trash valued landscapes,” he writes. “We have too few good ones — fires that enhance ecological integrity.” Read the article. Also at e360, journalist Michael Standaert reports from western China on how the expected resurrection of a controversial dam project is the latest sign that the nation’s once-robust environmental movement has been muzzled by the government’s crackdown on NGOs and its near-total control over social media. The quiet re-emergence of the Longpan dam has failed to spark the opposition it did 15 years ago, when local communities in Yunnan province banded together with environmentalists to block the project planned for the Yangtze River. That silence, Standaert writes, speaks volumes about how different the discussion surrounding the ecological and social impacts of China’s development have become under President Xi Jinping’s leadership. Read the report. View all our content at Yale Environment 360 and add your comments to the discussion. Plus, keep track of the latest environmental news at our e360 Digest. Roger Cohn Editor Share Share Tweet Tweet Forward Forward Published at the Copyright 2020 Yale Environment 360, All rights reserved. 205 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511 e360@yale.edu Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list | |||||||||