It's true you can drive right up to some of Northern California's giant redwood trees. But you can also walk up to them and enjoy the difference in scale between their majestic height and our rather insignificant elevation. Plenty of hiking trails exist, and John Soares lists them in a new book: Hike the Parks: Redwood National & State Parks .

We devote several segments of this week's Exchange to a one-year lookback to the Carr Fire and its ongoing effects in the Redding area. But JPR News has other avenues of approach to covering wildfire past and present. Exchange producer and reporter April Ehrlich has been working for months on collecting the individual stories of people who live in communities affected by wildfire.

It may seem like yesterday, but the Carr Fire destroyed all those homes in Redding a full year ago. The memory is fresh for many people because their homes are not yet rebuilt. But the area is continuing to recover from the devastation. Superior California Economic Development is one of a host of entities helping guide the post-fire recovery.

The drive to get people to eat food grown near their homes continues to produce new initiatives. The Oregon Farm Bureau, which already celebrated agricultural producers through "Oregon's Bounty," just added a new searchable directory to the online publication. One of the beneficiaries is the Nelsen family of the Illinois Valley. Maybe you saw their farm stand, advertising "Sweet Cron." The misspelling certainly draws attention.

Mummies and tetracycline. Not a combination you hear much about, but mummified bodies from the ancient world show traces of tetracycline. So we've had antibiotics for a very long time, just without knowing what they were or what they did. The trouble came with the constant use of antibiotics once we understood them; now we have bacteria that have developed immunity to antibiotics. These are the Superbugs of the title of Dr. Matt McCarthy's book. He is a physician and teacher and part of a trial

The last few fire seasons were hard on everybody who got caught in the smoke. And that was nearly everybody in our region, at some point in the summer. The impact is that much greater on people who already had breathing issues like COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Reporter Robin Epley at the Chico Enterprise-Record researched the issue for a podcast series called "Inhaled."

Summer flavors are in full swing, and some of the foods growing around us are beginning to ripen. We celebrate fruit in this month's edition of Savor, our food segment. Will Smith returns with tales of the care and preparation of stone fruits, including a recipe for grilled peaches with vanilla cream (below). And we get some tips on fruit preservation from the Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center.

The way we sometimes rail at one another, you'd think we lost sight of the fact that we're all human beings, all related. It often seems--particularly in political discussions--that people have suffered grievious harm from the words of another. And sometimes they have. Sarah Schulman steps carefully into this minefield in the book Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair .

One in five California schools showed lead in tests of drinking water this year. The state requires all K-12 schools to test and report by July 1st. The Environmental Working Group compiled the date from the state Water Resources Control Board. EWG points out that no lead exposure is considered safe.

Your town may begin to look different in the near future. A bill that became law in Oregon's recent legislative session changed the zoning of multiple-family homes; they can be built in more places now, including portions of town zoned for single-family homes only. The legislature passed the measure, but it's up to local planning departments to enforce the law. City of Medford Planning Director Matt Brinkley has had some time to research the effects, as has Robin Hostick, who holds the same