Ryan Tompkins, a forester in California’s Gold Rush country, has been cursed with seeing his darkest predictions — those he thought would come true in the distant future — come to pass in his own lifetime.
“We’re seeing rates of ecological change in the forest we only used to talk about and write about,” he said. A University of California scientist, Tompkins is based in Quincy, a short drive down Highway 89 from Greenville. Or where Greenville used to be. Most of it burned to ash in the Dixie fire in 2021, the largest in state history.
