Reno Gazette Journal;  8/31/2011
Excerpt:    “When he left the Army, Iraq war veteran John Gallagher had little idea what he would do.  The infantryman had few job skills, couldn’t abide the idea of sitting behind a desk and would be entering a job market where veterans are unemployed at a rate of more than 13 percent.
“I wanted something to get me on my feet,” said Gallagher, 26.  On Wednesday, Gallagher was among a crew on a fire-scarred ridge at Lake Tahoe, toppling dead trees with a chain saw in an effort to restore land burned by the Angora Fire of 2007.
“We’re all excited to be a part of this,” Gallagher said of a pilot program he hopes will help secure him a job on a Hotshot firefighting crew…”

Read more at http://www.rgj.com/article/20110831/NEWS/110831064/Veterans-Green-Corps-program-offers-former-troops-chance-forest-jobs?odyssey=nav|head

Porterville Recorder; 8/26/2011
Excerpt:   “Local forest officials already knew what the Wallow Fire in Arizona so dramatically demonstrated recently: A treated forest does not burn as intensely or as quickly as one overgrown.
In the largest ever study of fuel treatment effectiveness, U.S. Forest Service researchers have found that intense thinning treatments that leave between 50 and 100 trees per acre are the most effective in reducing the probability of crown fires.”
To read more go to
http://www.recorderonline.com/news/forest-49880-study-acre.html