Chad Hanson

Less than a mile from Yosemite national park, Chad Hanson is wading through a sea of knee-high conifers that have burst from the ashes of the vast 2013 Rim fire. The US Forest Service essentially says the baby trees don’t exist. The agency says that “catastrophic” fires have “devastated” parts of the forest, painting an eerie picture of swaths of blackened tree trunks like something out of a Tim Burton film. But the vibrant green pines, firs and cedars surrounding Hanson among the patches burned during California’s third-largest wildfire tell a different story. Hanson, a California fire ecologist, is on a mission to stop the forest service from expanding its clear-cutting of trees in snag forest, the name for the burned areas.