[nazca]

I'm glad our century+ of gross mismanaging our forests is getting more press. But I think we're still fighting deeply entrenched mindsets that fire is always bad. Across the west, our forests are fire-adapted and need to burn to be healthy, but we're still suppressing most fire and not doing nearly enough prescribed burning.

We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.

Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.

A good read is "The Big Burn" by Timothy Egan. It details how at its founding, the Forest Service knew the fire suppression regime they were creating was unhealthy. But it was the only politically possible path for them at the time.

[kurthr]

Well, once you've allowed hundreds of thousands of people to build houses there, which ones are you going to burn? Seriously, do something and they won't burn today. Do nothing and they burn. All over the pacific northwest there are millions of people who live in forested areas, which will burn without fire control.

You can do burns when things are wetter, but how many $Bs are you going to be liable for? Or you can just make the insurance unattainable.

[99_00]

>Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.

Forest management has become politicized. Massive blazes, homes destroyed, fire fighters dead are just props for political theater to push a political agenda.

[bell-cot]

> We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.

I'm thinking that mother nature generally plants trees at far higher than 2X density.

[anon84873628]

Rather than piling on downvotes, I will respond to the valid question implied here.

Nature does plant trees densely. But most of them don't make it to maturity when the "natural" rhythm of wildfires is allowed to proceed.

Likewise the composition of species in the ecosystem also changes when the fire is suppressed.

[amacneil]

With natural wildfire the Sierras would look a lot less dense than they do today:

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...

> For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn whole hillsides at once, or sit smoldering in the underbrush for months.

> The result is approximately 60 square miles of forest that look remarkably different from other parts of the Sierra Nevada: Instead of dense, wall-to-wall tree cover — the outcome of more than a century of fire suppression — the landscape is broken up by patches of grassland, shrubland and wet meadows filled with wildflowers more abundant than in other parts of the forest. These gaps in the canopy are often punctuated by the blackened husks of burned trunks or the fresh green of young pines.

[sesm]

It’s almost like we live in Elden Ring universe, where we didn’t let the tree burn when it should, and now we suffer dire consequences.