Paul Hessburg

ST. GEORGE – Offering possible solutions instead of assigning blame, Dr. Paul Hessburg, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, has traveled across the West to share the result of 30 years of research into wildfires and what might be done to prevent them. Hessburg, who lived through wildfires in his home of Wanatchee, Washington, in 2015, stopped at Southern Utah University Oct. 18 during a run through Utah with his “Era of Megafires” presentation. …“We’re trying to take all the research we’ve published in journals and written in books and get it to the people in the community so they can understand why we’re having these big fires,” Hessburg said. Hessburg… said the way the Forest Service has treated fire suppression, among other factors, has unwittingly helped turn western forests into timber boxes.