Forest in California may be disappearing. Scientists say repeated fires, drought and beetle infestations are altering the Sierra Nevada. Despite relatively mild wildfire seasons this year and last, California has
Forest in California may be disappearing. Scientists say repeated fires, drought and beetle infestations are altering the Sierra Nevada. Despite relatively mild wildfire seasons this year and last, California has
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. Damage in this area of Eldorado National Forest could be permanent — part of a troubling pattern that threatens a defining characteristic of the Sierra Nevada range John Muir once called a “waving sea of evergreens."