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Show Viewpoints The Park Record. A-11 Wed/Thurs/Fri, May 15-17, 2019 editorial LGBTQ rights are human rights, and it’s time US law reflects that GBTQ people should not be victimized by bigotry when applying for a job or searching for housing. In Park City, where we pride ourselves on being forward-thinking and inclusive on such matters, that’s hardly a controversial statement. But unfortunately, it’s not the law of the land in the United States. That would change, however, if Congress passes the Equality Act, which would amend civil rights laws to cover sexual orientation and gender identity, giving LGBTQ people a much-needed shield from discrimination in matters of employment, housing and education, as well as in places of public accommodation like retail stores. The legislation is expected to receive a floor vote any day in the House, where it has already earned committee approval. Utahns should be proud to live in a state that already gives LGBTQ people many of the protections included in the Equality Act, the result of a hard-earned, landmark anti-discrimination measure state lawmakers passed in 2015. But it’s past time for everyone in America to enjoy the same rights. We call on Utahns of both political parties to press lawmakers to support the Equality Act and help relegate discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity to the waste bin of history, where such behavior belongs. The supportive voice of Utahns is critical as an argument is raging — even among those who support the broader ideal of LGBTQ protections — about whether the legislation is the L perspective Prescribed burns may decrease threat of wildfires in the West COURTNEY SCHULTZ CASSANDRA MOSELEY HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS The Conversation As spring settles in across the United States, western states are already preparing for summer and wildfire season. And although it may seem counter-intuitive, some of the most urgent conversations are about getting more fire onto the landscape. Winter and spring, before conditions become too hot and dry, are common times for conducting planned and controlled burns designed to reduce wildfire hazard. Fire managers intentionally ignite fires within a predetermined area to burn brush, smaller trees and other plant matter. Prescribed burns can decrease the potential for some of the large, severe fires that have affected western states in recent years. As scholars of U.S. forest policy, collaborative environmental management and social-ecological systems, we see them as a management tool that deserves much wider attention. Forests need ‘good fire’ Forests across much of North America need fire to maintain healthy structures and watershed conditions and support biodiversity. For centuries, Native Americans deliberately set fires to facilitate hunting, protect communities and foster plants needed for food and fiber. But starting around the turn of the 20th century, European Americans began trying to suppress most fires and stopped prescribed burning. The exception was the Southeast, where forest managers and private landowners have consistently used prescribed burns to clear underbrush and improve wildlife habitat. Suppressing wildfires allows dead and living plant matter to accumulate. This harms forests by reducing nutrient recycling and overall plant diversity. It also creates more uniform landscapes with higher fuel loads, making forests prone to larger and more severe fires. Today many forested landscapes in western states have a “fire debt.” Humans have prevented normal levels of fire from occurring, and the bill has come due. Increasingly severe weather conditions and longer fire seasons due to climate change are making fire management problems more pressing today than they were just a few decades ago. And the problem will only get worse. Fire science researchers have made a clear case for more burning, particularly in lower elevations and drier forests where fuels have built up. Studies show that reintroducing fire to the landscape, sometimes after thinning (removing some trees), often reduces fire risks more effectively than thinning alone. It also can be the most cost-effective way to maintain desired conditions over time. This winter in Colorado, for example, the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest conducted a prescribed burn while snow still covered much of the ground. This was part of a broader strategy to increase prescribed fire use and create areas of burned ground that will make future wildland fires less extreme and more feasible to manage. State and local action heats up From Oregon’s municipal watersheds to the Ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest, community-based partners and state and local agencies have been working with the federal government to remove accumulated fuel and reintroduce fire on interconnected public and private forest lands. California’s legislature has approved using money raised through the California carbon market to fund prescribed fire efforts. New Mexico is using the Rio Grande Water Fund — a public/private initiative that supports forest restoration to protect water supplies — to pay for thinning and prescribed burning, and is analyzing ways to expand use of pre- scribed fire for forest management. Oregon is in its first spring burning season with a newly revised smoke management plan designed to provide more flexibility for prescribed burning. In Washington, the legislature passed a bill in 2016 creating a Forest Resiliency Burning Pilot Project, which just published a report identifying ways to expand or continue use of prescribed fire. At the community level, prescribed fire councils are becoming common across the country, and a network of fire-adapted communities is growing. Nongovernmental organizations are building burn teams to address fire backlogs on public and private lands, and training people to conduct planned burns. This work is all in an effort to build a bigger and more diverse prescribed fire workforce. Barriers to conducting prescribed fire In our research on forest restoration efforts, we have found that some national policies are supporting larger-scale restoration planning and project work, such as tree thinning. But even where federal land managers and community partners are getting thinning accomplished and agree that burning is a priority, it has been hard to get more “good fire” on the ground. To be sure, prescribed fire has limitations and risks. It will not stop wildfires under the most extreme conditions and is not appropriate in all locations. And on rare occasions, planned burns can escape controls, threatening lives and property. But there is broad agreement that they are an important tool for supporting forest restoration and fuel mitigation. The conventional wisdom is that air quality regulations, other environmental policies and public resistance are the main barriers to prescribed fire. But when we interviewed some 60 experts, including land managers, air regulators, state agency partners and representatives from non-government organizations, we found that other factors were more significant obstacles. As one land manager told us, “The law doesn’t necessarily impede prescribed burning so much as some of the more practical realities on the ground. You don’t have enough money, you don’t have enough people, or there’s too much fire danger” to pull off the burning. In particular, fire managers said they needed adequate funding, strong government leadership and more people with expertise to conduct these operations. A major challenge is that qualified personnel are increasingly in demand for longer and more severe fire seasons, making them unavailable to help with planned burns when opportunities arise. Going forward, it will be particularly important to provide support for locations where partners and land managers have built agreement about the need for prescribed fire. Humans have inextricably altered U.S. forests over the last century through fire exclusion, land use change, and now climate change. We cannot undo what has been done or suppress all fires — they are part of the landscape. The question now is where to invest in restoring forest conditions and promoting more resilient landscapes, while reducing risks to communities, ecosystems, wildlife, water and other precious resources. As part of a broader community of scientists and practitioners working on forest and fire management, we see prescribed fire as a valuable tool in that effort. Courtney Schultz is an associate professor of forest and natural resource policy at the Colorado State University. Cassandra Moseley is the senior associate vice president for research at the University of Oregon. Heidi Huber-Stearns is an assistant research professor and director of the Institute for a Sustainable Environment at the University of Oregon. This article originally appeared in The Conversation (theconversation.com) and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. right way to achieve equality. The debate flared in Utah on Monday as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints voiced opposition to the bill, despite backing Utah’s 2015 anti-discrimination law. Church leaders argue the Equality Act would prioritize LGBTQ rights over those of people to act on sincerely held religious beliefs. That’s a major development, considering all six of Utah’s congressional lawmakers are members of the church. Indeed, the Deseret News reported Tuesday that all five Republicans in that group have come out against the Equality Act on religious freedom grounds. Concerns about First Amendment infringements, of course, should be taken seriously. But the fact remains that a person has no more control over their sexual orientation or gender identity than they do their skin color, regardless of what some argue. It follows, then, that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights to equal treatment under the law afforded racial minorities in the Civil Rights Act. Regardless of their rationale, an employer refusing to hire a trans person — or a Colorado baker being unwilling to make a cake for a gay couple — is just as wrong as a restaurant owner hanging a “Whites only” sign in the window. The Equality Act would write that truth into U.S. law, ushering in a new era of freedom for the LGBTQ community. Stand up and encourage lawmakers to seize their opportunity to make it so. perspective Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance stands strong for wildlife in face of uphill battle PAUL ANDERSEN The Aspen Times The redrock country of Southeastern Utah is sacred land. Sinuous canyons slice through eroded sediments of an ancient, miles-deep sea bed of layered sandstones and limestones. Where an inland sea once spread from Mexico to Canada, a great uplift drained it off. The artful sculpting that remains is where a growing community of desert aficionados stride as mendicants amid the divine glories of nature. Geology provides a palpable dimension of time to these canyons, and yet there is a timelessness here that is both humbling and grand. Walking this land is a walk through epochs so ancient it staggers the imagination. Some would disfigure this natural sacredness for a nickel worth of profit. Thanks to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), the plunderers are being held at bay. The profound beauty and deep silence — the inner stillness — remains sacrosanct. U.S. Congress recently protected 663,000 acres of redrock desert landscapes that have been saved from the iron glacier of capitalism. A vast region of our natural treasure and our national heritage has been conserved for today and for future generations. SUWA has long been waging an uphill battle against an entrenched Mormon mindset that defines the politics of the state, or used to. New blood is coming into the Beehive State that is slowly and tectonically shifting views on motorless recreation and conservation, which go hand-in-hand. “In 1983,” reflects SUWA Executive Director Scott Groene, “when SUWA was born around a kitchen table in Boulder, Utah, the rallying cry of Utah politicians was ‘not one more acre of wilderness!’ It was a war cry, but it also seemed to take on elements of a quasi-occult incantation meant to ward off something — the inevitable, perhaps. “In the face of this virulent anti-wilderness fervor, SUWA and the Utah Wilderness Coalition articulated a remarkable vision to protect 5.1 million acres of redrock wilderness. Utah’s political establishment dismissed our proposal as a pie-in-the-sky joke.” The joke is on the Utah political machine that has until now held sway with Congress and the Utah state Legislature, which has spilled over into the Bureau of Land Management and conservative Utah counties. That spell may now be broken. “Politicians come and go,” Groene acknowledges. “Wilderness remains and so do we. Our antagonists find the movement to protect the redrock abrasive. It is quite literally that, wearing down our opponents much as water shapes the slickrock — unceasing and relentless, if at times imperceptible.” We who live in the mountains share a common bond with our desert brethren. We seek warmth and beauty in the deserts. They seek respite from summer heat amid lofty peaks in the mountains. Our goals are the same — to protect the lands that give meaning to our lives and a promise to the future. Wilderness Workshop, born around a kitchen table in Aspen and now based in Carbondale, is in the same league as SUWA. WW is striving to protect existing wilderness and secure wilderness values for endangered lands like Thompson Divide. Support for these embattled organizations is critical to endorsing their missions, and there is a huge spinoff of benefits of which most Americans are not even aware. Foremost is the life force required for healing our beleaguered culture. I know this as a vital part of my life as I take troubled veterans of our military industrial establishment into nature for healing opportunities through Huts for Vets. We, too, were formed around a kitchen table, up the Fryingpan Valley, seven years ago. Veterans who sustain moral injuries, for which there is no pill to erase the deep trauma of service, find comfort in wild places. “This is what I fought for,” said an Iraq War veteran last week on a Huts for Vets trip to the Canyonlands of Utah. We were hiking through a majestic slickrock amphitheater under a brilliant sun and deep blue sky. This man had been a sniper in Iraq. He had taken lives with the squeeze of a trigger. Wilderness, he says, gives him life sustenance. Long live kitchen tables! They are the seedbeds for crucial, long-term action that saves land and saves lives. Paul Andersen is a columnist for The Aspen Times, a sister paper of The Park Record based in Aspen, Colorado. letters to the editor Bridge divides to slow climate change immediate national action.” Let’s reach across divides and provide U.S. leadership in the fight to slow climate change. Editor: In response to a recent letter by Thomas Hurd, there are ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are also good for the economy. Over 3,500 economists, including 27 Nobel Prize-winners and top economic advisers to presidents of both parties, have endorsed a plan to fight climate change. Their “Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends” advocates putting a steadily rising price on carbon dioxide emissions and returning the money to the American people. This statement concludes that the price signal will encourage technological innovation and steer our economy toward a low-carbon future. Returning the revenue to households will shield consumers from rising energy prices, and “the majority of families, including the most vulnerable, will benefit financially.” A border carbon adjustment would protect U.S. competitiveness and encourage other nations to adopt their own carbon pricing systems. A bipartisan bill embracing these principles has been introduced in the House of Representatives — the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. The first sentence of this Economists’ Statement asserts: “Global climate change is a serious problem calling for Terry Hansen Hales Corners, Wisconsin Help our furry friends Editor: Every day I wake up to a furry face that guarantees me sanctuary and never-ending bliss. What this daily affection has taught me is that a dog’s love is forever and it is something that too many people take for granted. Currently, millions of stray dogs are abandoned on the streets of Mexico and most everyone turns a blind eye to it. Dog toys and fresh dog food are all things with which we spoil our pets. These are privileges that many owners presume all canines receive, when in fact most dogs are being denied these basic necessities. Most stray dogs are not sterilized and uncontrollable reproduction has become a critical dilemma. The only solutions present are at the clinics that carry out stray dog sterilizations. Next time you look into your dog’s eyes remember that you’re as lucky to have them as they are to have you. Dogs give us love, so why aren’t we loving them back? With simple donations to clinics like Compassion Without Borders and The Antonio Haghenbeck Foundation, we can help these loyal companions receive the love they earned. Kaylee Hale Ecker Hill Middle School The Park Record Staff PUBLISHER ....................... Andy Bernhard Editor ................................... 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