Sharing

One of my objectives in doing this blog is to share. This morning's web prowl serves as an excellent ample and for that reason I will take you along with me on the first real trek of the day going beyond my normal routine.

It starts in my in box where I found the daily offering from the NYT. I usually just note the headlines but today I was attracted to this item:

Rethinking Fire Policy in the Tinderbox Zone
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/us/28threat.html?th&emc=th

This section caught my eye :

“California has lost 1.5 million acres in the last four years,” said Richard A. Minnich, a professor of earth sciences who teaches fire ecology at the University of California, Riverside. “When do we declare the policy a failure?”

Fire-management experts like Professor Minnich, who has compared fire histories in San Diego County and Baja California in Mexico, say the message is clear: Mexico has smaller fires that burn out naturally, regularly clearing out combustible underbrush and causing relatively little destruction because the cycle is still natural. California has giant ones because its longtime policies of fire suppression — in which the government has kept fires from their normal cycle — has created huge pockets of fuel that erupt into conflagrations that must be fought.

What were they doing in Baja to remove that underbrush? I though Minnich might a paper available on that very subject so I Googled him. As an aside, in different circumstances I might have used Vivisimo as the search enging. The Earth Sciences link gains a much better return than the faculty link as is usually the case.

On the department page I found he had nine articles with links and and six without. Thinking the title bespoke the focus I was seeking, I picked Minnich, R.A. 2006, "California climate and fire weather". Fire in California's ecosystems (N.G. Sugihara, J.W. VanWagtendonk, K.E Shaffer, Joann Fites-Kaufman and A.E.Thode (eds.). University of California Press.

GRRRRR. That takes me to a .pdf file and those kick this copy and paste'ers ass. It does offer, however, an informative primer on weather with a concentration on the forces at work in forming California's climate. I still needed, however, to find a linkable source...

Which took me to a site definitely worth saving, Conservation Biology. From there, and I do not recall how that happened, I ended up at AGORRA and that produced the link I wish to share, perhaps the motherlode of all techno links... Link.

Alas, good news and bad news. To access those 1,132 journals you have to be registered. The good news is that you can arrange with a school library to dig through all that material. The bad news is that the US does not appear to be a participant in the program. I immediately wonder why. Such a tease!