Shuang-Ye Wu, University of Dayton

The summer of 2025 brought unprecedented flash flooding across the U.S., with the central and eastern regions hit particularly hard. These storms claimed hundreds of lives across Texas, Kentucky and several other states and caused widespread destruction.

At the same time, every hurricane that formed, including the three powerful Category 5 storms, steered clear of the U.S. mainland.

Both scenarios were unusual – and they were largely directed by the polar jet stream.

What is a jet stream?

Jet streams are narrow bands of high-speed winds in the upper troposphere, around four to eight miles (seven to 13 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, flowing west to east around the entire planet. They form where strong temperature contrasts exist.

Each hemisphere hosts two primary jet streams:

The polar jet stream is typically found near 50 to 60 degrees latitude, across Canada in the Northern Hemisphere, where cold polar air meets warmer midlatitude air. It plays a major role in modulating weather systems in the midlatitudes, including the continental U.S. With winds up to 200 mph, it’s also the usual steering force that brings those bitter cold storms down from Canada.

The subtropical jet stream is typically closer to 30 degrees latitude, which in the Northern Hemisphere crosses Florida. It follows the boundary between tropical air masses and subtropical air masses. It’s generally the weaker and steadier of the two jet streams.

These jet streams act like atmospheric conveyor belts, steering storm systems across continents.

Stronger (faster) jet streams can intensify storm systems, whereas weaker (slower) jet streams can stall storm systems, leading to prolonged rainfall and flooding.

2025’s intense summer of flooding

Most summers, the polar jet stream retreats northward into Canada and weakens considerably, leaving the continental U.S. with calmer weather. When rainstorms pop up, they’re typically caused by localized convection due to uneven heating of the land – picture afternoon pop-up thunderstorms.

During the summer of 2025, however, the polar jet stream shifted unusually far south and steered larger storm systems into the midlatitudes of the U.S. At the same time, the jet stream weakened, with two critical consequences.

First, instead of moving storms quickly eastward, the sluggish jet stream stalled storm systems in place, causing prolonged downpours and flash flooding.

Second, a weak jet stream tends to meander more dramatically. Its broad north-south swings in summer 2025 funneled humid air from the Gulf of Mexico deep into the interior, supplying storm systems with abundant moisture and intensifying rainfall.

This moisture surge was amplified by unusually warm conditions over the Atlantic and Gulf regions. A warmer ocean evaporates more water, and warmer air holds a greater amount of moisture. As a result, extraordinary levels of atmospheric moisture were directed into storm systems, fueling stronger convection and heavier precipitation.

Finally, the wavy jet stream became locked in place by persistent high-pressure systems, anchoring storm tracks over the same regions. This led to repeated episodes of heavy rainfall and catastrophic flooding across much of the continental U.S. The same behavior can leave other regions facing days of unrelenting heat waves.

The jet stream buffered US in hurricane season

The jet stream also played a role in the 2025 hurricane season.

Given its west-to-east wind direction, the southward dip of the jet stream – along with a weak high pressure system over the Atlantic – helped steer all five hurricanes away from the U.S. mainland.

Most of the year’s 13 tropical storms and hurricanes veered off into the Atlantic before even reaching the Caribbean.

Climate change plays a role in these shifts

So, how does climate change influence the jet stream?

The strength of jet streams is controlled by the temperature contrast between the equatorial and polar regions.

A higher temperature contrast leads to stronger jet streams. As the planet warms, the Arctic is heating up at more than twice the global average rate, and that is reducing the equator-to-pole temperature difference. As that temperature gradient weakens, jet streams lose their strength and become more prone to stalling.

This increases the risk of persistent extreme rainfall events.

Weaker jet streams also meander more, producing larger waves and more erratic behavior. This increases the likelihood of unusual shifts, such as the southward swing of the jet stream in the summer of 2025.

A recent study found that amplified planetary waves in the jet streams, which can cause weather systems to stay in place for days or weeks, are occurring three times more frequently than in the 1950s.

What’s ahead?

As the global climate continues to warm, extreme weather events driven by erratic behavior of jet streams are expected to become more common. Combined with additional moisture that warmer oceans and air masses supply, these events will intensify, producing storms that are more frequent and more destructive to societies and ecosystems.

In the short term, the polar jet stream will be shaping the winter ahead. It is most powerful in winter, when it dips southward into the central and even southern U.S., driving frequent storm systems, blizzards and cold air outbreaks.

Shuang-Ye Wu, Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):

December 4, 2025

As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine and the risk of mass displacement, the World Meteorological Organization warned Thursday.

The 22 Arab region countries covered in the WMO’s new State of the Climate report produce about a quarter of the world’s oil, yet directly account for only 5 to 7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from their own territories. The climate paradox positions the region as both a linchpin of the global fossil-fuel economy and one of the most vulnerable geographic areas.

WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said extreme heat is pushing communities in the region to their physical limits. Droughts show no sign of letting up in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions, but at the same time, parts of it have been devastated by record rains and flooding, she added.

“Human health, ecosystems and economies can’t cope with extended spells of more than 50 degrees Celsius. It is simply too hot to handle,” she said. 

The region in the report stretches from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the mountains of the Levant and the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. It spans more than 5 million square miles, roughly the area of the continental United States west of the Mississippi River. Most people live near river valleys or in coastal cities dependent on fragile water supplies, making the entire region acutely sensitive to even small shifts in temperature and rainfall.

Egypt’s Nile Delta, one of the world’s lowest-lying and most densely populated coastal plains, is particularly vulnerable. The delta is sinking and regional sea levels are rising rapidly, putting about 40 million residents and more than half of the country’s agricultural output at risk. 

The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warns that large parts of the Nile Delta will face chronic flooding, salinized soils, and permanent inundation under nearly every future warming scenario. Some projections indicate that a third of the area’s farmland will be underwater by 2050. Because the delta is so low and flat, even modest sea-level rise will push saltwater far inland. 

The new WMO report shows that the foundations of daily life across the Arab region, including farms, reservoirs and aquifers that feed and sustain millions, are being pushed to the brink by human-caused warming.

Across northwestern Africa’s sun-blasted rim, the Maghreb, six years of drought have slashed wheat yields, forcing countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia to import more grain, even as global prices rise. 

In parts of Morocco, reservoirs have fallen to record low levels. The government has enacted water restrictions in major cities, including limits on household use, and curtailed irrigation for farmers. Water systems in Lebanon have already crumbled under alternating floods and droughts, and in Iraq and Syria, small farmers are abandoning their land as rivers shrink and seasonal rains become unreliable.

The WMO report ranked 2024 as the hottest year ever measured in the Arab world. Summer heatwaves spread and persisted across Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt. Parts of Iraq recorded six to 12 days with highs above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), conditions that are life-threatening even for healthy adults. Across the region, the report noted an increase in the number of heat-wave days in recent decades while humidity has declined. The dangerous combination speeds soil drying and crop damage. 

By contrast, other parts of the region—the United Arab Emirates, Oman and southern Saudi Arabia—were swamped by destructive record rains and flooding during 2024. The extremes will test the limits of adaptation, said Rola Dashti, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, who often works with the WMO to analyze climate impacts.

Climate extremes in 2024 killed at least 300 people in the region. The impacts are hitting countries already struggling with internal conflicts, and where the damage is under-insured and under-reported. In Sudan alone, flooding damaged more than 40 percent of the country’s farmland. 

But with 15 of the world’s most arid countries in the region, water scarcity is the top issue. Governments are investing in desalination, wastewater recycling and other measures to bolster water security, 

but the adaptation gap between risks and readiness is still widening.

The worst is ahead, Dashti said in a WMO statement, with climate models showing a “potential rise in average temperatures of up to 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century under high-emission scenarios.” The new report is important, she said, because it “empowers the region to prepare for tomorrow’s climate realities.”

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Paul Andersen):

November 15, 2025

As generous and readily available as local land grants were, the Roaring Fork Valley was small potatoes compared with enormous public land grants that mark vast Western landscapes today and could foreshadow a similar trend if the political powers that be in Washington take on the directives and intentions of the current Trump administration.

“… a shady world of back-room deals, special interests and cronyism.”

— Erica Rosenberg, Western Lands Project

The future of federal public lands lies in the hands of the U.S. Congress as empowered by the American public. Whatever winds of influence and ideology blow through Washington also stir across vast acreages of American lands in the public domain of the commons.

In Aspen, Pitkin County and the greater Roaring Fork Valley, land giveaways have been many, although nothing near the scale of the decades preceding Aspen’s founding when, throughout the American West, land grants were excessive and often rife with fraud and scandal. By the time Aspen was settled in the 1880s, the outrages of earlier land grants had received pushback by a concerned public and were acted upon by congressional oversight that ended the most egregious giveaways.

Still, plenty of public land was doled out regionally to mining interests, homesteaders, railroads, schools, churches and others for what today seem like absurdly low valuations. An Aspen Journalism analysis conducted by Data Editor Laurine Lassalle of records available through the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), General Land Office and Pitkin County turned up 1,175 patents issued in Pitkin County between 1880 and 1900. Information below is based on a further review of 97 of those patents. 

For example, Roaring Fork Valley rancher Fred Light (1856-1931) filed for 160 acres of public lands in 1883 and, in 1886, paid $200 when the patent was approved. Light bought the land under a federal provision that invited homesteaders to file for patent under the 1820 Sale Cash Entry Act. The price was $1.25 per acre, about $40 per acre in today’s dollars.

Light’s “Box L Ranch,” in the Capitol Creek Valley, grew by additional acquisitions, including Light’s purchase of his wife’s family’s nearby ranch. A tribute written about Light as a civic leader recounted the profitability and size of his holdings. “Owning and operating with skill and success one of the finest ranches in Pitkin County, which is of ample size, comprising nine hundred and forty acres, and sufficiently fertile and productive to yield abundantly of cereals and hay and liberally support large numbers of cattle and horses. Frederick Light, of near Snow Mass, is so situated that he may laugh adversity to scorn and feel secure of an expanding and substantial prosperity during the remainder of his days.”

Light’s former homestead has, of course, escalated in value since his ownership. Today, the average value per acre in the Capitol Creek Valley is $69,000 for agricultural properties and $171,500 for agricultural/residential, according to an analysis of Pitkin County Assessor’s Office records. 

Under a different federal land grant program, mining claims were granted to anyone who could prove that a property was economically viable, a stipulation of the Mining Law of 1872. Under this law, which is still on the books and widely considered antiquated, miners paid $5 per acre for both surface and mineral rights. Filers would often accrue multiple claims, as did a number of local partnerships from the early 1880s in Aspen’s first acquired mineral patents.

In 1884, a partnership of 10 individuals — including Josiah Deane, Aspen’s first lawyer and later patriarch of the T-Lazy-7 Ranch on Maroon Creek — was issued a patent on 4.49 acres for a mineral lode called “Mountain Ranger,” located near Little Annie Basin on the backside of Aspen Mountain. They paid $22.45 on the location claim first filed in 1881, the year the city of Aspen was incorporated with Deane’s legal guidance.

In 1884, a six-way partnership filed for a patent on a 5.85-acre mineral patent claim named “Grand Prize,” for which they paid $29.25. The partnership included David R.C. Brown and Henry “Grandpap” Cowenhoven, two of Aspen’s founding fathers who had arrived here in the summer of 1880 by wagons over Taylor Pass — the first wagons to enter the Roaring Fork Valley.

Brown is recorded in another partnership filed in 1887 with three others for the “Monongahila,” a mineral lode of 8.31 acres for which they paid $41.55. Brown and Cowenhoven partnered again in 1889 with four others on a claim called “Idlewild” of 13.04 acres for which they paid $65.20. Brown and Cowenhoven (sometimes in the name of Cowenhoven’s wife, Margaret, and Brown’s wife, Catherine, the daughter of the Cowenhovens’) appear in numerous entries, attributing to sound investments that made them Aspen’s first self-made millionaires.

Another Aspen namesake, Henry Tourtelotte, also appears in a number of entries, establishing patents on claims named “Tanner,” “Buckhorn,” “Castle” and “Silver Bell.” Many of these claim names are familiar today as mountain peaks, ski runs and campgrounds. Another local mining scion, Horace Augustus Warner (HAW) Tabor, shows up in many records associated with Montezuma Basin and the Montezuma claim, a mine he owned that remains visible today at a nosebleed altitude high above Castle Creek. Tabor, known as “The Silver King of Leadville,” brought his entrepreneurial reputation to Aspen along with an opera singer named Baby Doe with whom he had a notorious love affair.

Prominent founding Aspenites David Hyman and Jerome B. Wheeler are also listed in numerous patent entries as among the earliest investors in Aspen mining claims such as “Mose,” “Little Maggie,” “Dolly Dot,” “Morning Star,” “Little Nell,” “Alaska,” “Siberia” and “Durant.” Hyman and Wheeler represented Eastern capital, which was essential to Aspen’s development and which enabled the nascent city to sustain ore production years before the city’s two railroads ran tracks to Aspen and gave it economic viability. Hyman was a prominent lawyer from Cincinnati and was Aspen’s first major mining investor. Wheeler, for whom the Hotel Jerome and the Wheeler Opera House are named, was married into the Macy family wealth, owners of New York City’s first department store.

The Smuggler Mining Co., whose name still marks the mountain and open space playground bounding Aspen to the east, shows patents that provided access and ownership to one of Aspen’s richest silver mines. It was from the Smuggler Mine in 1893 that the largest-ever nugget of almost-pure silver, weighing more than 1,800 pounds, was broken into three pieces so it could be extracted and paraded on a horse-drawn wagon through the thriving city at the verge of the Silver Crash of 1893 when silver was demonetized and the U.S. currency shifted to the gold standard, abruptly and dramatically curtailing Aspen’s thriving mining industry.

Today, historic patented mining claims hold far-different valuations, not for industrial mining potential, but as real estate valued as high-end properties in Aspen’s resort economy. For what the records show as “mines” in Aspen, the valuation goes from an historic low of $4.50 per acre to $500,000 per acre today.

The Denver & Rio Grande Western (D&RGW) and the Colorado Midland built their tracks to Aspen from Leadville, surmounting the Continental Divide on trestles, through tunnels and around winding switchbacks, the construction of which required monumental physical labor. Those rights-of-way remain public thoroughfares today as the Rio Grande Trail (D&RGW) and Highway 82 (Colorado Midland).

The railroads were granted swaths of public lands as an incentive to build tracks and open the West to resource development. Roaring Fork commerce served silver mining and agriculture for which two competing railroads laid tracks over and through the mountains. Unlike earlier railroad ventures in the U.S. that brought commerce and trade to the nation and received vast land grants, Aspen’s two local railroads were granted only their rights-of-way, which still added up to considerable acreage, albeit linear and confined to specific corridors.

Cashing out the commons

As generous and readily available as local land grants were, the Roaring Fork Valley was small potatoes compared with enormous public land grants that mark vast Western landscapes today and could foreshadow a similar trend if the political powers that be in Washington take on the directives and intentions of the current Trump administration.

In a comprehensive 2009 report published by the Western Lands Project, “Carving Up the Commons: Congress & Our Public Lands,” its author, Janine Blaeloch, lays out the history of public land divestitures and describes the many ways public lands can become privatized, something the Trump administration has been applying as a means of capitalizing on extractive national assets. This is not the first time a Republican administration has attempted to commoditize the commons.

“Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, famously proposed during Reagan’s presidency (1981-1989) that public lands be sold to pay down the federal deficit,” Blaeloch wrote. “The Bush administration’s (2001-2009) budget for 2007 called for the sale of $800 million worth of U.S. Forest Service lands over five years and $182 million in public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the same time period.

“These periodic high-profile, sweeping, ideologically driven land disposal schemes gain the public’s attention because they are so over the top. What the public is largely not aware of is the fact that smaller scale disposal schemes are being enacted every day — often by the same politicians who declaim their love for the environment and public land.”

Legislative initiatives are receiving strong encouragement from the current Trump administration to parcel and sell off, trade or otherwise divest national public lands and put them into private hands, severing existing protections, means of preservation and ultimately public access. Although such current directives may lead to a new precedent of commoditization, they are part of a long and controversial history.

On April 23, historian and blog phenomenon Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her daily “Letters From an American” a warning that the Department of Agriculture (which administers the U.S. Forest Service) and the Bureau of Land Management (which is under the Department of the Interior) have been gearing up for a wholesale liquidation of the American commons.

“Today,” wrote Cox Richardson, “the White House under President Donald J. Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that the White House champions ‘opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas and critical mineral extraction.’”

Cox Richardson pointed out that, in fact, public lands already benefit the nation by generating billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism. 

“Since the 1970s,” she wrote, “the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use.

“Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s Western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals.” 

The conservative political agenda outlined in Project 2025, she noted, calls for a giveaway to oil and gas and mining interests by “opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made it clear in his January confirmation hearings, Cox Richardson wrote, “that he sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue, referring to them as ‘America’s balance sheet.’”

“We’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” Burgum said, as quoted by Cox Richardson, “but we never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals. The Interior Department has got close to 500 million acres of surface, 700 million acres of subsurface, and over 2 billion acres of offshore. That’s the balance sheet of America. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand … what [is] our assets: $100 trillion, $200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”

Bipartisan support for public lands

The Trump-era initiative to monetize public lands hit a roadblock, however, after bipartisan support for public lands overwhelmed the direction Burgum and the Trump administration had fomented both as an ongoing policy directive and as described in the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill, which was voted in by Congress and signed into law by the president July 4.

A draft version of that bill had called for selling 0.5% to 0.75% of  U.S. Forest Service and BLM lands in 11 Western states and for selling 0.25% to 0.5% of BLM lands within 5 miles of the border of a U.S. population center.

“A proposal to sell federal public lands,” Caitlyn Kim on Colorado Public Radio News reported June 29, “has officially been taken out of the Republicans’ spending and tax bill after facing strong pushback from hunters, fishermen, outdoor recreation users and, most importantly, Republicans in the U.S. Senate and House.”

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the chief elected Republican advocate for the sell-off, announced the removal of the public lands divestiture from the bill, blaming the decision on the budget reconciliation process and explaining that he could not get a safeguard to guarantee that the land would be sold only to American families.

CPR News reported that Lee “said he continues to believe the federal government ‘owns far too much land’ that he said is mismanaged and that ‘massive swaths of the West are being locked away from the people who live there.’ He indicated that he wasn’t giving up altogether, adding that he would work with President Donald Trump to ‘put underutilized federal land to work for American families.’”

However, according to the CPR report, “the decision [to delete public-land sales] also came after other Senate Republicans from the West said they opposed the idea and would offer an amendment to get it taken out of the bill. Five House Republicans also said they would vote against the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill if it remained in.”

Colorado lawmakers celebrated the removal of public-land sales from the GOP bill as a defining endorsement for the value most Americans feel toward protecting the American commons. Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) wrote on social media: “The American people — and our public lands — have won!”

CPR News reported that Neguse and Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.) had issued a joint statement opposing public-land sales in an acknowledgment of unity for protecting a key American legacy that crosses the aisles of Congress. “Republican or Democrat — representing red, purple or blue districts — one sentiment continues to ring true: Public lands are not for sale.”

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) wrote on social media: “This is a huge victory for Colorado and the West. Thank you to everyone who made their voice heard and fought back against this dangerous provision. America’s public lands belong to all of us.”

“Protecting public lands is the most nonpartisan issue in the country,” Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited, said in a statement quoted by CPR News. “This is certainly not the first attempt to privatize or transfer our public lands, and it won’t be the last. We must stay vigilant and defend the places we love to fish, hike, hunt and explore.”

Taking a stand on the land

Despite this most recent halt of public land sales, the threat is far from over, warns Blaeloch, whose 20-year advocacy mission before the Western Lands Project ceded its role to Wild Earth Guardians in 2016 was to “scrutinize public land trades, sales, giveaways and any project that would cede public land, and their impacts on habitat and wildlife, natural resources, land use and communities. The goal of Western Lands Project is to keep public lands public.”

“We are about to return to the Golden Age of land acquisitions for private benefit,” Blaeloch said in an Aspen Journalism interview in April. In her focused role as public lands defender, Blaeloch said, “We realized that the Forest Service and BLM conduct hundreds of land deals every year, mostly without public involvement. I like clarity and transparency, and I thought it was unfair that deals were being made without the public interest.”

Erica Rosenberg, a former president of Western Lands Project, concludes in the introduction to Blaeloch’s report: “Congressional processes threaten to trade away, sell or give away our public land heritage — piece by piece — through a shady world of back-room deals, special interests and cronyism.”

So, Blaeloch, digging into her background as a career environmental planner, has pushed back with the goal of making federal land management agencies accountable by tracking land deals, educating the public at the grassroots, and also by educating Congress on what has long been a veiled aspect of American land use on the federal level.

Free land for railroad and lumber industries 

Blaeloch’s report for the Western Lands Project stated that the most opportune era in U.S. history for collusion in acquiring public lands dirt cheap or at no cost at all took place from the mid-1800s up to the early 1900s through manipulative deals benefitting large railroad interests and the fast-growing lumber industry.

“Between 1850 and 1870,” writes Blaeloch, “the federal government granted 131 million acres of public land to railroad corporations as incentive for westward expansion. These railroad land grants comprised one of the largest categories of public land disposal in U.S. history, after cash sale, homestead grants to individuals, and grants to the states for education and other purposes.”

For example, Blaeloch reports, “the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was to construct its line from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Tacoma, Washington, was granted 38.9 million acres, including 9.6 million acres in Washington state. Several other land grants were added to what would more than a century later become the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad, for an additional total of more than 47 million acres.”

These generous railroad land grants were typically given in alternating square miles extending out from the railroad lines and forming a “checkerboard” land-ownership pattern of public/private land that is still visible on many maps and to anyone who chances to gaze out the window of an airplane while flying over the clear-cut forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Land giveaways to railroads were originally intended to encourage Western settlement as the American frontier expanded. It was assumed that land along the railroad lines would become desirable, enabling the railroads and federal government to capitalize by selling their alternating public/private parcels to settlers who would benefit from nearby rail service.

“In fact,” writes Blaeloch, “the railroads kept much of their grant land, and the federal government designated many of its checkerboards as national forest. Nearly all of the railroad land ‘grants’ were in fact intended to be temporary transfers of public land that the railroads were supposed to sell in turn to ‘actual settlers’ to raise money for railroad construction.” 

Some railroad companies kept their land grants even though they failed to build, and some transferred former public lands and the wealth they generated to cronies, including elected officials.

“By 1870,” writes Blaeloch, “the public had grown disgusted with the scandals and waste flowing from the railroad land grants, and this particular brand of public land giveaway ceased. By this time, too, the public was increasingly concerned about having reached the limits of free land and resources, and there was great controversy around the rapid liquidation of the country’s forests.”

By the end of the 19th century, the debate between forest preservation and utilitarian wise use was at full pitch. Preservation was strongly advocated by Sierra Club founder John Muir and his disciples. Utilitarian wise use was advocated by Gifford Pinchot, the country’s first Forest Service chief under President Theodore Roosevelt. Timber and mining industries actively lobbied for Pinchot’s view of the land as commodity, countering Muir’s view of the natural landscape as a necessary and valid public benefit.

Despoiling the garden

In his 1982 book, “Westward in Eden: The Public Lands and the Conservation Movement,” author William K. Wyant, a former Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, raises, as a popular conception, the idea of the land as ultimately exploitable: “The American has usually seen real estate as expendable,” he writes. “It is something of which there is assumed to be plenty more … somewhere else.”

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, writes Wyant, the Republican mandate was to shrink government and its influences, and to cut regulations on industry. This afforded a propitious launch of the Sagebrush Rebellion, which advocated shifting federal lands in the West to the states. “The United States had at the outset an incomparable Garden of Eden to dress and keep, as the Old Testament phrases it,” wrote Wyant. “Its husbandry has been at sometimes profligate, greedy and short-sighted and at other times blessed with extraordinary vision.”

Wyant idealistically describes the continental United States as a vast and pristine wilderness, “a domain of incredible richness — virgin forests, great rivers, the prairies and high plains, the shining Rockies, the arid and sandy wastes and the golden Pacific shore. The early settlers found it majestic and unspoiled, and they plunged into it, defiant of restraints.”

But without restraints, the commons suffered immeasurable abuse and exploitation, as a statement from Pinchot made clear in the early 20th century: “Outside the tropics, American forests were the richest and most productive on Earth, and the best able to repay good management. But nobody had begun to manage any part of them with an eye to the future. On the contrary, the greatest, the swiftest, the most efficient and the most appalling wave of forest destruction in human history was then swelling to its climax in the United States; and the American people were glad of it.”

Rapacious companies such as logging giant Weyerhaeuser saw forested public lands not as cathedrals, as did Muir, but as wood lots. By 1974, cites Wyant, Weyerhaeuser owned outright more than 5.5 million acres, a holding bigger than the state of Massachusetts.

U.S. Sen. Gale McGee (1915-92) who served in Congress from 1959 to 1977 as one of the last Democrats to hail from Wyoming, in testimony in 1971, said, “Today, the once-great forests of our nation have been depleted to the point that would shame Paul 

Bunyan. It is time to cease measuring the value of our public forests on the scale of board-feet of timber.”

Vast land giveaways were enabled by the 1862 Railroad Act, writes Wyant, when a number of private railroad companies were allocated $65 million in federal loans and handed a total 110 million acres of public domain. In 1864, an even more generous provision was made when the Northern Pacific Railroad, then building a 2,128-mile line from St. Paul to Tacoma received millions of acres of public lands, including about one-fourth of the state of North Dakota and 15% of Montana.

This largesse was coupled with political influence from railroad magnates who lobbied Congress for more land. Support for outrageous public behests also came from politicians who favored rail subsidies in exchange for locating lines in cities and towns that benefitted their constituents in blatant acts of patronage. Industry and business were in on the take at the expense of the commons.

“All in all,” writes Wyant, “Congress gave to the railroads an area nearly twice the size of Colorado and one-third as large as Alaska.” Another gift of the commons came to the railroads in the Forest Management Act of 1897, which allowed land-holders within newly designated and protected forest reserves to exchange, acre-for-acre, their holdings for lands that were outside the reserves.

Under this act, writes Wyant, rail barons were permitted to swap millions of acres of mountainous, desert, cutover or otherwise useless land for “in lieu” timber acreage of far greater value. The railroads then made deals with lumber companies by not only selling their holdings, but transporting for a profit the timber that was harvested from them. Loggers and railroads latched onto the mutual benefits of collusion in the exploitation of public lands, with no evident moral, ethical or ecological considerations.

After a hue and cry of protest from rising ranks of conservationists, the “in lieu” provision was repealed in 1905. However, eight years of rampant profiteering had already privatized huge chunks of the commons.

“In addition to the scars on the land,” writes Blaeloch, “the behavior pattern, too, was carried forward, and the companies established a paradigm that brought them enormous profits at the expense of the public interest, neatly disguised as ‘win-win’ deals. It is a pattern that shows itself time and again in land deals driven by politics, privilege and greed.”

A regional comparison is necessary to grasp the scale of land acquisitions by logging companies: The White River National Forest covers 2.3 million acres, one of the largest forests in the United States. The Emmerson family, which owns and operates Sierra Pacific Industries, a family legacy company since 1949 that logs usable lumber after forest fires and sells it to lumber retailers, owns 2.4 million acres in three Western states: California, Oregon and Washington. How did one family carve out of the American commons acreage greater than the largest national forest in Colorado? Timber.

Still, Wyant surmises, rising ranks of professional and educated conservationists have achieved national influence in the aftermath of public lands feeding frenzies. “An impressive machinery for the defense of the environment and public lands has been built,” he concludes. “Until it is more firmly in place and has the steady acceptance of the American people, we shall owe a heavy debt to the corporal’s guard of environmental lawyers and professional conservationists who man the ramparts while others sleep.”

Click the link to read the release on the University of California San Diego website:

November 03, 2025

A new University of California San Diego study uncovers a hidden driver of global crop vulnerability: the origin of rainfall itself.

Published in Nature Sustainability, the research traces atmospheric moisture back to its source—whether it evaporated from the ocean or from land surfaces such as soil, lakes and forests. When the sun heats these surfaces, water turns into vapor, rises into the atmosphere, and later falls again as rain.

Ocean-sourced moisture travels long distances on global winds, often through large-scale weather systems such as atmospheric rivers, monsoons, and tropical storms. In contrast, land-sourced moisture—often called recycled rainfall—comes from water that evaporates nearby soils and vegetation, feeding local storms. The study finds that this balance between oceanic and terrestrial (land) sources strongly influences a region’s drought risk and crop productivity.

“Our work reframes drought risk—it’s not just about how much it rains, but where that rain comes from,” said Yan Jiang, the study’s lead author and postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego with a joint appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Understanding the origin of rainfall and whether it comes from oceanic or land sources, gives policymakers and farmers a new tool to predict and mitigate drought stress before it happens.”

A New Way to Forecast Drought Risk

Using nearly two decades of satellite data, Jiang and co-author Jennifer Burney of Stanford University measured how much of the world’s rainfall comes from land-based evaporation. They discovered that when more than about one-third of rainfall originates from land, croplands are significantly more vulnerable to drought, soil moisture loss and yield declines – likely because ocean-sourced systems tend to deliver heavier rainfall, while land-sourced systems tend to deliver less reliable showers, increasing the chance of water deficits during critical crop growth stages.

This insight provides a new way for farmers and policymakers to identify which regions are most at risk — and to plan accordingly.

“For farmers in areas that rely heavily on land-originating moisture — like parts of the Midwest or eastern Africa — local water availability becomes the deciding factor for crop success,” Jiang explained. “Changes in soil moisture or deforestation can have immediate, cascading impacts on yields.”

Two Global Hotspots: The U.S. Midwest and East Africa

The study highlights two striking hotspots of vulnerability: the U.S. Midwest and tropical East Africa.

In the Midwest, Jiang notes, droughts have become more frequent and intense in recent years — even in one of the world’s most productive and technologically advanced farming regions.

“Our findings suggest that the Midwest’s high reliance on land-sourced moisture, from surrounding soil and vegetation, could amplify droughts through what we call ‘rainfall feedback loops,’” Jiang said. “When the land dries out, it reduces evaporation, which in turn reduces future rainfall—creating a self-reinforcing drought cycle.”

Because this region is also a major supplier to global grain markets, disruptions there have ripple effects far beyond U.S. borders. Jiang suggests that Midwestern producers may need to pay closer attention to soil moisture management, irrigation efficiency and timing of planting to avoid compounding drought stress.

In contrast, East Africa faces a more precarious but still reversible situation. Rapid cropland expansion and loss of surrounding rainforests threaten to undermine the very moisture sources that sustain rainfall in the region.

“This creates a dangerous conflict,” Jiang said. “Farmers are clearing forests to grow more crops, but those forests help generate the rainfall that the crops depend on. If that moisture source disappears, local food security will be at greater risk.”

However, Jiang sees opportunity as well as risk:

“Eastern Africa is on the front line of change, but there is still time to act. Smarter land management — like conserving forests and restoring vegetation — can protect rainfall and sustain agricultural growth.”

Forests as Rainmakers

The research underscores that forests and natural ecosystems are crucial allies in farming. Forests release vast amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere through evaporation and transpiration (when plants produce moisture), effectively seeding the clouds that bring rain to nearby croplands.

“Upland forests are like natural rainmakers,” Jiang said. “Protecting these ecosystems isn’t just about biodiversity—it’s about sustaining agriculture.”

A Tool for Smarter Land and Water Management

Jiang’s research provides a new scientific framework connecting land management, rainfall patterns and crop planning — a relationship that could become central to future drought resilience strategies.

The study’s novel satellite-based mapping technique could help governments and farmers identify where to invest in irrigation infrastructure, soil water storage and forest conservation to maintain reliable rainfall.

Read the full paper, “Crop water origins and hydroclimate vulnerability of global croplands.”

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Tik Root):

October 27, 2025

The city of Clyde sits about two hours west of Fort Worth on the plains of north Texas. It gets its water from a lake by the same name a few miles away. Starting in 2022, scorching weather caused its levels to drop farther and farther. Within a year, officials had declared a water conservation emergency, and on August 1 of last year, they raised the warning level again. That meant residents rationing their spigot use even more tightly, especially lawn irrigation. The restrictions weren’t, however, the worst news that day: The city also missed two debt payments.

Municipal bond defaults of any kind are extraordinarily rare, let alone those linked to a changing climate. But with about 4,000 residents and an annual budget of under $10 million, Clyde has never had room to absorb surprises. So when poor financial planning collided with the prolonged dry spell, the city found itself stretched beyond its limits.

The drought meant that Clyde sold millions of gallons less water, even as it imported more of it from neighboring Abilene, at about $1,200 per day. Worse, as the ground dried, it cracked, destroying a sewer main and bursting another quarter-million dollar hole in the town budget. Within days of Clyde missing its payments, rating agency Standard & Poor’s slashed the city’s bond ratings, which limited its ability to borrow more money. Within weeks, officials had hiked taxes and water rates to help staunch the financial bleeding.

“There’s more to a drought than just the cost of water,” said Rodger Brown, who was mayor at the time and is now interim city manager. “It tanks your credibility.”

Drought, of course, isn’t the only climate-driven disaster hitting places like Clyde. Hurricanes, floods, and fires are bankrupting cities across America. After flames ripped through Paradise, California, in 2018, the town’s redevelopment agency defaulted on some of its obligations. Naples, Florida, resorted to selling $11 million in bonds to rebuild its pier after Hurricane Ian in 2022. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had a harder time raising money after massive fires swept the city. Kerr County, Texas, is in the midst of raising taxes after devastating floods in July. 

Each episode underscores how climate shocks once seen as exceptional are now straining local budgets. But drought may be the most insidious of these threats. Compared to other types of disasters, it often hits everyone in a community, affects large areas, and can last months, if not years. There are also fewer defenses and relatively limited government assistance. Experts worry that drought could ultimately prove an enormous risk to the $4 trillion municipal bond market that underwrites everything from roads and schools to the water running through millions of taps.

“I personally think this is a dark horse in the conversation right now,” said Evan Kodra, the head of climate research for the financial data company Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE. “It should be a bigger deal.”

---

This year alone has seen droughts in at least 43 states, from Vermont to California, affecting 125 million people. And ICE projects that more of the currently outstanding municipal debt will be located in areas prone to drought by 2040 than hurricanes, floods, and wildfires combined. The financial effects of prolonged water woes can mount in ways not seen in one-off events, said Jeremy Porter, the chief economist at First Street Foundation, a nonprofit climate research firm.  

“Drought is one of those things, if there is an impact, there’s a step-function impact,” he said. “You just don’t have the capacity to cover the risk.” 

Projected severe drought in 2055

Average weeks per year in severe drought conditions

30-year change in drought risk

Increase in severe drought weeks from current conditions to 2055

Droughts are particularly difficult for cities to guard against. While building codes and insurance discounts can encourage homeowners to raise their houses, use wind-resistant shingles, or clear brush to slow fires, the options for making sure people have enough water are far more limited without curbing development. 

Also unlike with its headline-grabbing cousins, drought has a much weaker federal safety net when something does go wrong. The Department of Agriculture offers some aid to farmers, but there’s little funding for individuals or municipalities. The Federal Emergency Management Agency hasn’t issued a drought-related emergency or disaster declaration in the United States since 1993, despite states requesting aid. “There is no adapting to drought,” said Porter. “The federal government is probably not going to come in.” 

As the planet warms, the dry conditions that sent Clyde into the financial abyss are only set to become more frequent and more intense. Intercontinental Exchange researchers found that even in a “best-case” climate scenario, drought, heat stress, and water stress will place billions of dollars of municipal bonds at risk by 2040. Under a worst-case situation, that number could reach hundreds of billions. While Clyde’s default was relatively tiny, municipal debt is the bedrock of everything from hedge funds to retirement accounts, making a string of such events potentially catastrophic for the economy.

But well before dramatic rolling defaults, the financial pressures of drought will likely alter daily life in many regions. That’s already the reality for one community in Arizona, where the rush for water has turned into a years-long financial and political standoff.

Rio Verde Foothills lies on the outskirts of Scottsdale. Residents there have been trucking water in from its larger neighbor ever since the unincorporated, “wildcat” development was founded in the early 2000s. The arrangement worked well until 2021, when a severe drought gripped the area, and Scottsdale decided it could no longer spare the dwindling resource. Cut-off residents of Rio Verde scrambled and eventually signed a $12 million contract with the state’s largest private water company, Epcor Utilities, to build a permanent supply line.

Three years later, though, the feud continues. Scottsdale agreed to keep providing water through the end of this year while Epcor Utilities built new infrastructure. But construction is months behind schedule and Scottsdale is sticking to its deadline — leaving the foothills once again facing a cutoff. (Epcor remains confident this won’t happen.) 

Even when the new line is connected, Rio Verde Foothills residents could see their water bills double or triple. Hikes like that are going to be a far wider concern across the West than outright disconnection, says Sara Fletcher, an environmental engineer at Stanford University who works on water scarcity issues. “Water prices are going up, and up, and up,” she said. “They are going to go up much faster than inflation for the past decade.” 

The irony of drought is that as people conserve water to combat it, there is less money for the utility, whose costs remain relatively fixed. That results in “drought surcharges,” or other fees, for customers. [ed. emphasis mine] It’s a cycle that was on full display in Clyde. 

By August 2023, the wave of aridity that hit West Texas had stretched for months, and officials in Clyde declared a stage 2 water emergency, which targets a 20 percent decrease in demand. By the following year they raised it to stage 3, or a 30 percent decline — one step below mandatory rationing. The measures worked, but at a cost. “Water sales are one of the main things that a city, almost any city, has,” said Brown. “That’s big for a city’s revenue generation.”

According to Clyde’s financial statements, it sold 7 million gallons less in 2023 than the year prior. It also had to import water from nearby Abilene at a premium of around $3 per thousand gallons. While Brown didn’t know exactly how much Clyde bought, he said it wasn’t as much as in some previous droughts but still significant. The bigger blow came when the parched ground split, shifted, and ruptured a major sewer line. The roughly $250,000 repair bill turned the cracks in the town’s finances into crevasses.

“You can’t have people out here without the services. So we had to fix it,” he said. These new liabilities and dwindling income came on top of millions of dollars in debt that Clyde had amassed over the years, despite having kept taxes or utility prices relatively flat. It created what Brown called a “perfect storm.”

On August 1, 2024, the city missed two bond payments — one for $354,325, another for $308,400 — and filed a claim on its bond insurance to cover them. By the end of the year Clyde had failed to meet a total of $1.4 million in liabilities. Standard & Poor’s slashed the ratings of the bonds with missed payments from A- to D, and the city’s creditworthiness to B, moves that will raise future borrowing costs for the city. 

Outstanding debt

Current municipal bond debt by 2040 climate risk category, billions of dollars

While drought wasn’t the whole story, Brown called it a “significant reason” for Clyde’s woes. Whatever the cause, the fallout rippled quickly. The city council raised property taxes by 10 percent and tacked a $35 surcharge onto monthly utility bills. “We have people in this very room who have to decide already, do I buy medicine [or] do I buy groceries?” pleaded one person at a city council hearing. “This is reality in Clyde. You can’t raise their typical water bills any further.”

So far residents have absorbed the added costs, which has allowed the city to continue to operate. But the spiral from expensive, inaccessible, or nonexistent water could have been much worse. High bills can lead to compromises in daily life, whether that be letting parks wither or skipping showers. Over time, those inconveniences could make a town a less desirable place to live, which, in turn, might result in lower property values, a dwindling tax base, and, consequently, more financial troubles.

“If you don’t have water, if you don’t have a functioning city, there is a vicious cycle dynamic that could come into play,” said Kodra at Intercontinental Exchange. “Once your property tax base is decently lower than it was, then it’s harder to borrow money to dig out of that hole.”

Just for grins here’s a slideshow of early November US Drought Monitor maps for the past few years.

Ben Belton, Michigan State University and Leo Baldiga, Michigan State University

Drones have become integrated into everyday life over the past decade – in sectors as diverse as entertainment, health care and construction. They have also begun to transform the way people grow food.

In a new study published in the journal Science, we show that use of agricultural drones has spread extremely rapidly around the world. In our research as social scientists studying agriculture and rural development, we set out to document where agricultural drones have taken off around the world, what they are doing, and why they have traveled so far so fast. We also explored what these changes mean for farmers, the environment, the public and governments.

From toys to farm tools

Just a few years ago, agricultural drones were expensive, small and difficult to use, limiting their appeal to farmers. In contrast, today’s models can be flown immediately after purchase and carry loads weighing up to 220 pounds (100 kg) – the weight of two sacks of fertilizer.

Their prices vary from country to country due to taxes, tariffs and shipping costs. In the U.S., a drone owner can expect to spend US$20,000 to $30,000 for the same equipment that a farmer in China could buy for less than $10,000. However, most farmers hire service providers, small businesses that supply drones and pilots for a fee, making them easy and relatively affordable to use. https://www.youtube.com/embed/1_XkHEUIi5Q?wmode=transparent&start=0 A promotional video for the DJI Agras T100 agricultural drone, which can carry a maximum load of 220 pounds (100 kg).

Agricultural drones are now akin to flying tractors – multifunctional machines that can perform numerous tasks using different hardware attachments. Common uses for drones on farms include spraying crops, spreading fertilizer, sowing seeds, transporting produce, dispensing fish feeds, painting greenhouses, monitoring livestock locations and well-being, mapping field topography and drainage, and measuring crop health. This versatility makes drones valuable for growing numerous crops, on farms of all sizes.

Technological leapfrogging

We estimated the number of agricultural drones operating in some of the world’s leading agricultural countries by scouring online news and trade publications in many different languages. This effort revealed where agricultural drones have already taken off around the world.

Historically, most agricultural technology – tractors, for example – has spread from high-income countries to middle- and then lower-income ones over the course of many decades. Drones partially reversed and dramatically accelerated this pattern, diffusing first from East Asia to Southeast Asia, then to Latin America, and finally to North America and Europe. Their use in higher-income regions is more limited but is accelerating rapidly in the U.S.

China leads the world in agricultural drone manufacturing and adoption. In 2016, a Chinese company introduced the first agriculture-specific quadcopter model. There are now more than 250,000 agricultural drones reported to be in use there. Other middle-income countries have also been enthusiastic adopters. For instance, drones were used on 30% of Thailand’s farmland in 2023, up from almost none in 2019, mainly by spraying pesticides and spreading fertilizers.

In the U.S., the number of agricultural drones registered with the Federal Aviation Administration leaped from about 1,000 in January 2024 to around 5,500 in mid-2025. Industry reports suggest those numbers substantially underreport U.S. drone use because some owners seek to avoid the complex registration process. Agricultural drones in the U.S. are used mainly for spraying crops such as corn and soy, especially in areas that are difficult to reach with tractors or crop-dusting aircraft.

Safer, but not risk-free

In countries such as China, Thailand and Vietnam, millions of smallholder farmers have upgraded from the dangerous and tiring job of applying agrochemicals by hand with backpack sprayers to using some of the most cutting-edge technology in the world, often using the same models that are popular in the U.S.

Shifting from applying chemicals with backpack sprayers to drones substantially reduces the risk of direct exposure to toxins for farmers and farmworkers.

However, because drones usually spray from a height of at least 6 feet (2 meters), if used improperly, they can spread droplets containing pesticides or herbicides to neighboring farms, waterways or bystanders. That can damage crops and endanger people and nature.

Saving labor or displacing it?

Drones save farmers time and money. They reduce the need for smallholders – people who farm less than 5 acres (2 hectares), which account for 85% of farms globally – to do dangerous and tiring manual spraying and spreading work on their own farms. They also remove the need to hire workers to do the same.

By eliminating some of the last remaining physically demanding work in farming, drones may also help make agriculture more attractive to rural youth, who are often disillusioned with the drudgery of traditional farming. In addition, drones create new skilled employment opportunities in rural areas for pilots, many of whom are young people.

On the downside, using drones could displace workers who currently earn a living from crop spraying. For instance, according to one estimate from China, drones can cover between 10 and 25 acres (4 to 10 hectares) of farmland per hour when spraying pesticides. That is equivalent to the effort of between 30 and 100 workers spraying manually. Governments may need to find ways to help displaced workers find new jobs.

Sky’s the limit

Drones spray and spread fertilizers and seeds evenly and efficiently, so that less is wasted. They may also reduce damage to crops in the field and consume less energy than large farm machines such as tractors.

In combination, these factors may increase the amount of food that can be produced on each acre of land, while reducing the amount of resources needed to do so. This outcome is a holy grail for agricultural scientists, who refer to it as “sustainable intensification.”

However, much of the evidence so far on yield gains from drone-assisted farming is anecdotal, or based on small studies or industry reports.

The drone revolution is reshaping farming faster than almost any technology before it. In just five years, millions of farmers around the world have embraced drones. Early signs point to big benefits: greater efficiency, safer working conditions and improved rural livelihoods. But the full picture isn’t clear yet.

Ben Belton, Professor of International Development, Michigan State University and Leo Baldiga, Ph.D. Student in Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Click the link to access the report on the Wild For Good website:

Wild for Good is a call to action and, we hope, an inspiration for you to join us in work that future generations will thank us for. We highlight 10 landscapes that Wilderness Workshop is invested in for the long haul. They are places where we explore nature with our friends and families, float boats in the summer, and backcountry ski in the winter. They provide critical wildlife habitat and connectivity corridors, and safeguard ecosystems that are necessary for climate resilience. And they may be lost to us forever if we don’t rally for their protection.

There are many, many more lands in our region that must also be protected and conserved so that we have a vibrant wildlands network to sustain our human and natural communities – ranging from roadless areas to working lands. These 10 priority landscapes are anchors in that network, places we’ve identified as deserving of and needing durable protections to support the ecological vitality of the whole region. By creating and sustaining thriving ecosystems in our neck of the woods, we in turn sustain and contribute to healthier natural systems across the state of Colorado and the West.

Please join us in this important work. Together, our community can keep our treasured public lands and waters…Wild for Good.

Here’s the deep link to the report.

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Kari Dequine):

August 31, 2025

Every element that a wildfire needs in order to burn big, hot and fast converged in the northwestern corner of Colorado in early August.

Persistent daytime temperatures neared record highs. Winds gusted at 40 mph. Humidity levels hovered at about 2% — a percentage typically only seen in the Mojave Desert, said fire-behavior analyst Béla Harrington.  

After six months of scant precipitation, the soil and vegetative fuels were bone dry, ready to explode with any extraneous spark.

The hot, thirsty air had sucked nearly every bit of remaining moisture out of the grasses, shrubs and trees.

With extremely low fuel moisture content levels in all types of vegetation, “The live fuels act like dead fuels,” Harrington said. 

Between Aug. 6 and 9, the Lee and Elk fires near the town of Meeker scorched more than 100,000 acres.

By the time it was 95% contained on Aug. 31, the Lee Fire had become the state’s fourth largest fire in recorded history, with 138,844 acres burned. 

“It’s the drought,” Harrington said from the Incident Command Center on Aug. 18 in Meeker, referring to why the Lee fire grew so big and so fast. At one point, the fire jumped across Highway 13 and came within less than 2 miles of the western edge of the town. 

Had it not been for a change in wind direction that shifted the fire’s fury south toward Rifle — combined with the federal deployment of a massive amount of firefighting resources — the town may have faced a full evacuation.

On Aug. 11, the day before the larger region officially entered “exceptional drought” conditions, the Crosho fire started about 40 miles east of Meeker across the Flat Tops Wilderness, threatening the town of Yampa and ultimately burning more than 2,000 acres before it was declared fully contained Aug. 26.

Less than 30 miles to the south of the Crosho fire, lightning on Aug. 19 ignited the Derby fire on steep forested terrain, burning more than 5,700 acres near Dotsero. 

Colorado’s only current area of D4 drought — the highest designation on the U.S. Drought Monitor’s 0-4 scale — encompasses the footprints of the four fires as well as nearly all of Garfield County, much of Rio Blanco County, and pieces of Moffatt, Routt, Eagle, Pitkin, Gunnison, Delta and Mesa counties.

Over much of the region, the soil is parched, the grass is yellow and wilted leaves are already changing colors.

From Meeker, Harrington pointed to red, orange and yellow serviceberry bushes on the hillside. “That doesn’t usually happen until October,” he said.

The monsoon season, which typically brings precipitation to the region starting in mid-July, didn’t show up until the end of August, said Colorado State climatologist Russ Schumacher. Before the season’s arrival this year, there were hot days, little cloud cover and very low humidity.

Mary Flynn, a fire prevention officer with the White River National Forest, said early color changes usually signal tree stress. Trees and shrubs in the region are going into winter dormancy early because of the drought, she said. 

“With prolonged drought, trees are forced to conserve energy and resources. Lack of water will halt chlorophyll production and trigger leaf shedding to conserve water,” she said. “When a forest becomes severely impacted by drought, the small diameter plants, branches and grasses catch fire easily. Once the small diameter fuels are burning, fire spreads quickly to larger dry branches and plants. Once a fire is established, the resulting heat causes fire to spread even more quickly.”

In John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather, he writes, “The drier the fuel and the hotter the air, the more explosive the fires, the more intensely they burn, the harder they are to extinguish and the more likely they are to produce their own weather in the form of wind and pyrocumulus clouds, which can generate fire whirls, tornadoes and more lightning, resulting in yet more fires that will perpetuate themselves for as long as fuel and weather conditions allow.”  

On Aug. 9, the Lee fire created its own weather system, reaching above 30,000 feet with a pyrocumulus cloud. 

The Lee fire’s smoke cloud was so big, it shaded the nearby Elk fire, Harrington said, cooling the smaller fire and giving firefighters an advantage. Burning along the White River just east of the Lee fire, the Elk fire was fully contained Aug. 16 at 14,518 acres.

A D4 drought is expected about once in 50 years, said Schumacher. “It’s reserved for the most extreme drought conditions,” he said.

But parts of Colorado have entered into exceptional drought at least five times since 2000. 

“Based on tree-ring analysis, it has been determined that the American West is currently in the most severe drought of the past 1,200 years,” Vaillant writes in “Fire Weather.”

“Climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size and severity of wildfires across the western United States,” according to a 2023 study by Tzeidle Wasserman and Stephanie Mueller and published in Fire Ecology.

And the trends are by no means isolated to the American West. 

Canada set records in 2023 for its worst fire season and is currently experiencing its second-worst fire season in recorded history. 

The European Union is experiencing its worst wildfire season on record.

Good fire versus bad fire

Decades of excluding fire from the landscape inadvertently led to a mass buildup of fuel, said Angie Davlyn, executive director of the Roaring Fork Valley Wildfire Collaborative. Today, land managers are “doing great things to bring fire back in safe ways,” she said. However, Davlyn described this season’s drought conditions, when combined with the amount of “flammable stuff ready to ignite,” as “scary.”

Fire needs to be an essential part of the ecosystem, said Harrington. Some species of vegetation actually require heat in order to regenerate. Fire clears debris to make way for healthy new growth. “But you want low-intensity fire,” he said.

Schumacher said: “In the big picture, what we probably need is more fire on the landscape than less. But what we don’t want is really fast-growing, really intense fires. For one, they tend to be really hard to fight and raise the chance of approaching towns like Meeker or Rifle.”

Ecosystem recovery can also look different with higher-intensity fires, he said.

“When fires burn so hot and so intensely, they are not as healthy to the vegetation cycle regrowth,” he said. “When vegetation is scorched so completely, it takes a lot longer to come back,” and that creates conditions for invasive species such as fire-prone cheatgrass to infiltrate. “A really hot, intense, fast-moving fire can alter the ecosystem. That’s the difference.” 

Fire severity — which is the extent of damage to vegetation and soil — is determined after a fire and plays a key role in recovery. 

Drought can play a significant role in how fires affect ecosystems, according to a 2024 NASA analysis of 1,500 fires from 2014 to 2020 across the West. The research showed that “forests, grasslands and scrublands all struggle to recover from droughts that occur close in time with high-severity fires, which are becoming more common in the West,” writes Emily DeMarco, who is with NASA’s Earth Sciences Division. “That can lead to potentially lasting changes not only in the plant communities but also in local and regional water dynamics.”

Schumacher noted the increased fire risk after wetter years, when vegetation flourishes and grows dense.

“If it is dry, dry, dry all the time, the fuel never builds up, so you don’t have a lot of stuff to burn,” he said. “The amplification of extremes is a pretty common theme in what we can expect with a warmer climate.”

He also noted how wildfire burn scars increase the risk of flash flooding and mudslides, with vegetation killed and the topsoil layer turned hydrophobic, meaning it can’t absorb water. Schumacher pointed to the postfire mudslides that closed Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon the year after 2020’s Grizzly Creek fire, and deadly floods near Fort Collins two years after the Cameron Peak fire in 2020. 

On July 8 in Ruidoso, New Mexico, destructive and deadly flash floods swept through the town that had been devastated by two wildfires in 2024.

The late-August rains prompted flash-flood warnings near the Lee fire with mudslides reported in Rio Blanco County. Although some area roads were impacted, no damage or injuries were reported. 

Harrington said he had hope for renewed fertile pastures and healthy forage for deer and elk in at least some of the Lee fire’s footprint.

Bigger fires, longer seasons

A sign in Moffat County commemorates the 1988 “I Do” fire, which burned 15,000 acres and became, at that point, the state’s largest recorded fire. 

The brutal fire season of 2002 brought many larger fires, including the Hayman fire, which became the largest ever in Colorado, at 137,760 acres. Then, in a single drought-fueled fire season in 2020, the Hayman was pushed to fourth place by the Cameron Peak fire (208,913 acres), the East Troublesome fire (193,812 acres) and the Pine Gulch fire (139,007 acres).

Sixteen of the state’s largest 20 fires have occurred since 2008.

“Fire has always been a part of the landscape in the Western U.S.,” Schumacher said. “But these really big destructive fires are a relatively new phenomenon in western Colorado.”

Firefighter helicopter pilot and Basalt resident Steve Cohen said that in his 25-year career, he has seen firsthand fires steadily increasing in size. It wasn’t that long ago, he said, that “we’d never heard of a 100,000-acre fire.” 

Cohen worked on the Lee, Elk and Crosho fires. Flying a six-seater A-Star helicopter, his duties include scoping out reports of smoke and transporting firefighters into and out of precarious terrain. Once he drops the crews, he takes the helicopter door off and sets up his neoprene bucket hanging at the end of a 100- to 150-foot cable, designed to scoop water from nearby ponds and lakes before dumping it on a fire.

Cohen also noted that many helicopter pilots are now required to work year-round contracts for what used to be a summer job. Thankfully grandfathered into his seasonal role, Cohen works as a ski patroller on Aspen Mountain in the winter.

Firefighters save the day

While towns, surrounding neighborhoods and ranches were largely spared the wrath of the four northwestern Colorado fires, the Lee fire destroyed 30 structures, as well as an unknown number of cattle that could not be evacuated in time. According to the incident response team, seven of the structures were homes or cabins and 23 were “outbuildings.” Oil-and-gas infrastructure is still being evaluated for damage.  

Eight structures were lost to the Elk fire, no structure was lost to the Crosho fire and one structure has been destroyed in the Derby fire, which was 6% contained as of Aug. 31.

The containment efforts by fire crews benefited significantly from the proximity of the fires to one another. When the Crosho and Derby fires ignited, abundant resources were already staged nearby, said Caleb Ashby, a Bureau of Land Management public affairs specialist with the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC).

Crews worked on the Lee fire round the clock — bringing in a large amount of federal resources also protecting critical oil-and-gas infrastructure located near the fire’s northwestern boundary, said Eric Coulter, a NIFC public information officer.

At the Lee fire’s peak, there were nearly 1,300 inhabitants of the Incident Command Center staged at the Rio Blanco Fairgrounds in Meeker.  

They utilized the most drones on any fire to date, Coulter said, including aircraft equipped with small “ping pong” balls filled with a chemical powder and then injected with glycol upon release, giving crews an aerial and overnight option to fight fire with fire in order to destroy fuel in the path of the fire and slow and control the burn. 

At the Crosho fire, the federal response was immediate, and the air show was impressive. Not long after smoke was first reported, four red and yellow “Super Scooper” planes skimmed the surface of nearby Stagecoach Reservoir, filling their massive bellies before emptying them onto the fire. 

Additional aircraft dropped countless loads of bright-pink retardant on the fire’s edges, while several different types of helicopters dumped water. Another plane flew high overhead, coordinating the whole show with military precision. 

On Aug. 14, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis declared a disaster emergency and authorized the National Guard to help with the fire response, primarily utilized on the larger Lee and Elk Fires.  

Rain fell on the Lee and Crosho fires on Aug. 15, helping turn the corner. 

In communities near the four fires, handmade signs hung on fences and buildings expressing gratitude to the firefighters. Without the fast and massive local and federal responses — and lucky weather breaks — outcomes could have undoubtedly been worse.

Limited resources 

The United States is currently at a Preparedness Level 4 (PL4), indicating that “national resources are heavily committed,” according to the NIFC. 

A PL5 — the highest level — indicates “national resources are heavily committed, and additional measures are taken to support geographic areas. Active geographic areas must take emergency measures to sustain incident operations.”

At a PL5, it is possible that fire-response teams can’t get the resources that they request, Ashby said, although, ideally, resources are available but need to be moved around more strategically with a focus on protecting “values.” 

​​“It is extremely impressive how fast we can move resources across the country to the folks who need them,” he said.

Still, “If we are at a PL5, resources are stretched extremely thin,” Ashby said. “Everyone is competing for the same resources.”

The values prioritized for protection include life, property, critical infrastructure and natural resources, Ashby said. With the critical fire weather conditions on display through most of August, the focus is on the initial attack. 

“If we can keep a fire small before it grows into a large fire, that saves a lot of resources,” he said.  

Collectively, the four fires surrounding the Flat Tops have cost the federal government about $65 million to fight, according to the most recent Incident Management Situation Reports. 

The Lee fire alone has a price tag of $29.1 million as of Aug. 31. And that has not even been the state’s most expensive fire. The Turner Gulch fire, in Mesa County, has an estimated cost of $39.8 million to the federal government as of Aug. 28. 

Ashby noted that these costs are just estimates at this time. Full costs include suppression repair, rehabilitation and local reimbursements, and they are not fully borne out until long after a fire has been extinguished. 

The forecast 

As fortuitous days of rain — heavy at times — fell on all four fires during the final week of August, it appeared that Mother Nature decided that the extremely drought-stricken corner of Colorado had had enough fire, for now.

The double-edged sword of precipitation also brought lightning and numerous new fire starts in the region, all of which were quickly contained.

Schumacher said he sees drought and fire comparisons to 2020, although he noted that the state’s second-biggest fire on record — East Troublesome — was ignited Oct. 14 of that year. 

“2020 was exceptional in how long fire conditions persisted,” he said. “It remains to be seen if we have fires continue into the fall.”

At this time, the forecast is tilted toward a warmer-than-average fall, Schumacher said.

“The key question now is: Are we going to get relief here later in August and September, and see the end of fire season at that point? Or will we go back to a warm and dry fall and see things happening later in the season like 2020?” 

Globally, 2025 is on track to become the second or third hottest year on record, behind 2024 and 2023.

Although there is only so much that humans can do in the face of bigger, hotter and faster fires, approximately 85% of wildfires nationwide are human-caused, according to the NIFC. 

Davlyn said about half of Colorado’s annual average of 2,500 wildfires are caused by lightning. 

Human-caused fires take resources away from lightning-caused fires, said Ashby. And although the late-August rains tempered the four fires and brought a collective sigh of relief from surrounding communities, “It’s not going to end this drought,” Davlyn said. “It’s not going to rehabilitate trees that have been in critical condition for months. It doesn’t work that instantaneously.”

Flynn echoed the need for continued vigilance. “This week’s moisture is providing much-needed relief on dry, stressed fuels in western Colorado,” she said. “But it may not be enough to significantly reduce fire danger moving into the fall.”