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Fire has a natural place in the ecosystem; it can be a very healthy thing. Take for example serotinous conifers. (“Serotinous” is a great Scrabble word, by the way.) The pine cones in serotinous conifers require some sort of event like a wildfire to open, drop their seeds and propagate the species.
Fire can also “clean up” a forest and make room for new and healthy plants and trees, so unless a town, power lines, utility plant, or another thing, which are also known as “values,” are threatened, the land management agencies may let a fire burn. This works very well in forests that are somewhere near the “healthy” range, but as any Boy Scout knows, the more fuel, the bigger the fire. So these days, it is not uncommon to get bigger and more destructive fires, which in turn make New Yorkers think that the world is coming to an end. //
Nitro Nora
3 hours ago
Correct, "climate change" has nothing to do with this. Back in the 1990's we had vast tracts of land that were hand planted by the USFS, hundreds of thousands of trees every year. Too big of an investment to let burn. "Prescribed burns" in these plantations were exactly that. Flame height and perimeter was predetermined. The days it was done were approved on a day-by-day basis by the air quality board in the County.
This way, we cleaned up the forest without losing our investment and with no catastrophic air quality disasters. Also, the clear cuts were designed to be fire breaks on a landscape scale. We also had wood cutting areas where people could take all the dead and downed wood on the forest floor. Thousands of people did that & it was a big help keeping the forest clean. And of course the cattle grazing permitees managed the cattle and that also helped keep the forest clean.
Then the "environmentalists" got their foot in the door and eventually took over the agency. After a few years of "doing it naturally," (basically hands off) we now get catastrophic fires almost annually. They have no clue.
Of course we would all like to have a "pristine" forest, but because humans have transformed the landscape with towns, farms, ranches, cities, highways and railroads, we can't allow these giant fires any more. We must take a pro-active management role to keep the forests healthy. The greenies don't have any idea how to manage forests on the landscape scale. The greenies have destroyed our forests. //
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oregon.gov%2Fodf%2Ffire%2Fdocuments%2Fodf-century-fire-history-chart.pdf
