Yellowstone National Park, 1988: A 25th Anniversary Retrospective

In 1988 in Yellowstone National Park the fire season was very bad from the drought. Yellowstone was fencing at the time. All  the years before it was not that bad because the park let about 235 fires burn all by themselves from their fire policy and only about 15 were larger than 100 acres. In 1988 the fire season was predictable and when the rain fell the park received higher rainfall. By June everything was already dry and the fuels like trees, grass and small shrubs were just adding on to make things worse for the fire season. By the start of early summer thunderstorms came but only came with lighting and no rain and from then on fire season began. By July 15th, only 18,307 acres had burned in the entire Yellowstone but within a week, fires within the park alone encompassed nearly 99,000 acres, and by the end of the month, dry fuels and high winds combined to make the larger fires nearly uncontrollable. On Saturday August 20th after winds pushed the fire across more than 150,000 acres they named it Black saturday because of that. A total of 248 fires started in the greater Yellowstone area in 1988 45 of those were in Yellowstone National Park. Despite widespread misconceptions that all fires were initially allowed to burn, only 25 of the total were; of these, 22 began inside the park. In the end, seven major fires were responsible for more than 95 percent of the burned acreage. Five of those fires were ignited outside the park, and three of them were human-caused fires that firefighters attempted to control from the beginning.

What the Amazon rainforest tells is about globalization In this article they are talking about the amazon rainforest and what it is facing with the current globalization and deforestation. The reason I chose to read this article is because Amazon has lost about 20% of its forest from deforestation and for agricultural purposes and to me it plays a big role because I know some forests are getting the same thing y people moving into the area and cutting down trees for either lumber firewood or more and to clear the area so they can have more of what they want and i feel like that would be commercialization. In the Amazon many parts of the continent are losing their forest for agricultural purposes because as it says in the article “ Agriculture has, since ancient times, been the primary cause of deforestation. Europe’s fields were once primeval forests too. But, in our modern era, the demands for agricultural goods are no longer confined to domestic needs. Demand for Brazilian soy or beef is now, to a large degree, a factor of demand in the US or China. It is a factor of globalization”. To me this means that the Brazilians are cutting down more and more land and will continue because the people there need the soy and beef for food and more and they are the providers of the foods.