The coffers of wildland fire-fighting agencies are depleted in places like Colorado, even as property-damage figures are hitting record highs. That's partly because more and more people are building houses in the high-risk wildland-urban interface.

Sudden aspen decline, a disease that has killed many aspens in the mountain West, seems to be slowing enough that some stands can hold their own.

"New government data show forests play a key role in offsetting U.S. industrial emissions, but the ability of Western lands to sequester carbon is shrinking as the planet warms."

The American chestnut, which was virtually wiped out by an exotic blight, may be making a comeback.
 

"A proposal to designate more than 300,000 acres of wilderness in central Idaho appears to be in a political tailspin, dashing hopes among wilderness advocates that the Gem State could soon resolve a decades-long debate over management of its public lands."

"A coalition of nine land trusts says it will reach a five-year goal of protecting 50,000 acres in Western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains."

Despite some bad wildfires, the 2010 fire season overall has been less severe than many recent years.

"A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to revise a Bush administration recovery plan for the threatened northern spotted owl, and the agency said today it intends to release a draft of the revision next week."

"Wildfires have cost Russia 300 billion dollars in forest loss, environmentalists said on Thursday, explaining the scale of the disaster by Vladimir Putin's 'absurd' changes to forestry law."

"Rainwater channeled by logging roads into rivers and streams is pollution and can be regulated under the Clean Water Act. That was the decision today from the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a case involving the Tillamook State Forest."

As archetypal as a scene from Grimm's tales, the 580-square-mile Bialowieza Forest, said to be the last remaining stand of primeval forest in all of Europe, is being logged.

"A federal judge has ruled that the federal Forest Service’s plan for using fire retardant to fight wildfires violates the law because it does not ensure protections for threatened and endangered species of fish and other animals."

The Firestone company, the second largest employer in Liberia, is so powerful in that country that the people there have little recourse when they complain that it is poisoning their water. Firestone's massive rubber plantation there was set up with help from the U.S. government in the 1920s. Firestone is now owned by the giant Bridgestone Americas, a Japanese company.

"A tiny insect is literally sucking the life out of hemlock trees in the Eastern United States. The hemlock wooly adelgid was first spotted in Virginia in the 1950s. Since then it's hit roughly half the hemlocks from Georgia to Massachusetts."

"Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today renewed for another year a policy giving himself sole power to approve logging or road projects on tens of millions of forested acres while the Obama administration decides how to handle the controversial Clinton-era roadless rule."