A New Mexico facility where researchers work to restore forests devastated by fires faced an almost cruelly ironic threat: The largest wildfire burning in the U.S. was fast approaching. Owen Burney and his team knew they had to save what they could. Atop their list was a priceless bank of millions of ponderosa pine, spruce and other conifer seeds meant to help restore fire-ravaged landscapes across the American West. Next were tens of thousands of tree sprouts, many of which were sown to make them more drought tolerant, that were loaded onto trailers and trucked to a greenhouse about 100 miles away. New Mexico State University’s Forestry Research Center in the mountain community of Mora stands at the forefront of a major undertaking to rebuild more resilient forests. …Firefighters have managed to keep the flames from reaching the center’s greenhouses and there’s a chance some of the seedlings left behind could be salvaged.

Last week, the most comprehensive changes to Oregon’s forestry regulations in 50 years were ceremonially signed into law. What is remarkable about the bipartisan Private Forest Accord is not just that it is the most significant update to the Forest Practices Act since 1971, governing the management of more than 10 million acres of private forestland, but how the legislation came to fruition. …Old adversaries setting aside their differences and coming together to solve tough problems. Under the Accord, the timber industry and conservation groups reached an unprecedented agreement on the most effective ways to improve protections for the aquatic habitat needed by native fish and amphibians. …The rules that implement these changes still require approval by the Board of Forestry and need to be communicated to more than 65,000 forest landowners in every corner of Oregon. This will be followed by years of scientific monitoring and fine tuning.

Northern New Mexico’s still raging wildfire—now the largest in that state’s modern history—did not start out as entirely wild.  The wind-fueled blaze partly began as an intentional or prescribed U.S. Forest Service burn near picturesque Hermits Peak outside of Las Vegas, N.M. Such fires are set to thin forests of built-up fuel, restore forest health and prevent much bigger fires.  …There’s already a tremendous amount of backlash,” says James Biggs, who teaches wildfire ecology and fire behavior at New Mexico Highlands University whose campus in Las Vegas, N.M., is near the southern edge of the wildfire.  Biggs says ironically the scale and impact of this blaze underscores precisely why the Western U.S. needs to do more intentional burning after a century-plus policy of suppressing nearly every forest fire, which has resulted in the build up of dangerous and untenable amounts of fuel across forests.