Medford, Oregon — In the heart of Southern Oregon’s Fremont-Winema National Forest, crews are going to new heights to harvest a precious commodity. “We’re looking for the ripe cones on the top of the tree,” said Brian Kittler, chief program officer for the Resilient Forests program at the nonprofit conservation group American Forests. Using lift operators and climbers, Kittler and his team showed CBS News how his team hunts for pine cones. “The more that we lose forest, we’re losing our clean air and clean water, our ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere and address climate change,” Kittler said. The threat comes from the West’s unprecedented breed of megafires which, fueled by climate change, have destroyed more than 33 million acres since 2020, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. That’s around the size of the state of Arkansas.