Ojai gardener, Alasdair Coyne, left the Japanese Mafia in the dirt in a high-stakes game to preserve what is now the Ventura River Preserve, owned by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy. By Kit Stolz On a hot summer day in the mid-1990s, the conservationist andprofessional gardener Alasdair Coyne, who emigrated to Ojai fromScotland as aContinue reading “Ojai’s Lorax: Alasdair Coyne”
Tag Archives: Thomas Fire
Flee or stay and defend? Rethinking evacuation from wildfire
News from around the Ojai Valley Thomas Fire dilemma: Stay or go? Residents, fire officials rethink evacuations Published: Friday, 22 March 2019 08:48 Photo provided by CAPS Media Firefighters try to save a house during the Thomas Fire. Kit Stolz, special to the Ojai Valley News On the night of Dec. 4, 2017, fueledContinue reading “Flee or stay and defend? Rethinking evacuation from wildfire”
Eating the Thomas Fire (sort of)
A little over a year ago the Thomas Fire, powered by the strongest Santa Ana winds in memory, roared through Upper Ojai on its way to surrounding all of Ojai, rampaging into Santa Barbara county, killing two people, destroying 1,000 structures, and burning over 200,000 acres of land. The fire visited our property on theContinue reading “Eating the Thomas Fire (sort of)”
Climate change hits ag in Ventura County
Proud to have published this story recently in a prominent Ventura County publication. With the help of Ben Hatchett of the Desert Research Institute, we showed I think that avocados, though now a substantial part of Ventura County agriculture, will in the not-too-distant future be a much more risky proposition…but that other crops, such asContinue reading “Climate change hits ag in Ventura County”
Thomas Fire (one year ago tonight)
The Thomas Fire began about five miles from our home near Thomas Aquinas College near Santa Paula on the night of December 4, 2017, a date Upper Ojai will never forget. In a bad twist of fate documented in my story in the Santa Barbara Independent a couple of weeks later, an electric transformer atContinue reading “Thomas Fire (one year ago tonight)”
speeding wildfires and their dark beauty
Forty-six years ago a young fire ecologist published a paper that for the first time found a math to usefully describe the behavior of wildfires in the west, as modified by slope and wind. It’s a remarkable achievement and was, according to Wildfire Today, a team effort led by a man named Dick Rothermel. Rothermel, Anderson,Continue reading “speeding wildfires and their dark beauty”
“The fire had me fully terrified” — T.C. Boyle on the Thomas Fire (and more)
For the Ojai Quarterly [pdf], yours truly had the opportunity to talk to T.C. Boyle about the Thomas fire, debris flows, climate change, and other scary realities of the 21st Century. The interview also motivated me to catch up on some past works of Boyle’s, and boy was that worth the reading. Check it out:Continue reading ““The fire had me fully terrified” — T.C. Boyle on the Thomas Fire (and more)”
The deep resilience of the redwood
A friend sent along an amazing and heartening story from the Washington Post, called Decoding the Redwoods. In short, to better understand the long-lived coast redwood, scientists in two different labs have been working to decode the species’ genome, which — astonishingly — is vastly larger than ours. The redwood genome project began in AprilContinue reading “The deep resilience of the redwood”
Home versus the Mountain
One of the acknowledged great non-fiction pieces of our time is John McPhee’s Los Angeles Against the Mountains, from l988, an uncanny and alarming foreshadowing of the disaster in Montecito this month. It’s one of those astonishingly thorough and appalling pieces of writing, almost beyond journalismn, and to my mind can hardly be overpraised (butContinue reading “Home versus the Mountain”
December 8th in Ojai, CA 2017
Picture from a photographer, Stuart Palley, who in the last couple of years has found a calling in documenting wildfire and the crews that fight it. The Thomas Fire has been an overwhelming event, plus it ate my office (and musician friend Taylor‘s studio and barn). Did publish a story about the start of theContinue reading “December 8th in Ojai, CA 2017”
Kit Stolz 