Now I’ve come to realize that the climate catastrophe will not go easy on Oregon. The atmosphere’s revenge will not come mostly in the form of unprecedented floods, torrents, droughts, heat waves, and/or cold snaps. It will come in the form of seasonally debilitating horrible air quality caused by increased combustion of vegetation due to warming temperatures.

As public forestlands in the West cover more area than private timberlands, most of the smoke that plagued the Rogue Valley this summer came from public lands on fire. This might lead one to think that more logging on federal public lands would help, but one would be wrong.