[povertyworld]

I haven't been following this specific news story, but I remember from my environmental sociology class that fire prevention in forests eventually leads to unnatural states that are then prone to massive uncontainable fires. Have they been suppressing natural fire in this region for too long? If this fire is naturally burning, then isn't the best response to let it run its course unless human lives are threatened?

[pvaldes]

> Have they been suppressing natural fire in this region for too long?

This is confusing for many people, I know.

Ecosystems tend to increase its complexity with time. From lava field to savanna to forests. This is how it works. Life fills the gaps.

If untouched, forests aim for the higher state of organisation possible, the so called "climax": A big forest, with huge old trees. Plants accumulate water, big plants accumulate big water, plants make water also (Is a by-product of this respiration)...

...therefore the climax is a humid forest of some kind (a rainforest, a bamboo cloudforest, a laurisilva, a scottish caledonian rainforest, a sequoia forest)

A place full of spongy fungus and plants accumulating water, a place that creates its own climate and make rains that collect in streams and then in rivers for the people benefit. They do not need fire to work at all. Wildfires are scarce and self-contained events. Such places would need a lot of energy to start burning.

The young forest is vulnerable to fire. For decades the fire risk increases. This is that people remember, but sadly they do not see the second part. After a thousand years, the risk start decreasing and then the entire area is fire-proof. Wildfires stop often when reaching an old forest.

The tragedy is that before to reach this state of full healing, the forest is burned again BY MAN (>90% of wildfires are caused by man). Is called "necessary management" or "reducing the risk", but life does not need human management. Has evolved to sustain maximum amount of life possible. We need "Management" is another way to say we want "nature explotation". Is the "groundhog day" film with trees.

Nobody is trying to restore it and return the water to Mediterranean or to California because... it would need two or three human generations to show results and it would need much smarter humans.

[sambal]

I’d love to read more on this humid forest climax narrative from any credible sources, it sounds interesting and I don’t know anything about this sort of thing really, but at the same time it’s tripping my “just-so” sensors something heavy!

[pvaldes]

I bet that you will find plenty of credible sources if you study biology and learn some basic ecology (ecology as science, not as ideology). None of what I'm saying is a secret and is also easily verifiable empirically.

There are also parts of this science that deal with the study of stress in ecosystems. A low or medium source of stress can increase the biodiversity. A mix of healed and degraded ecosystems can provide habitats for different types of life beings. A big source of stress otherwise will distroy all the job done by time and simplify the ecosystem. Moreover, the damage can be so deep that the new state of organisation enters in a loop. The remain is just too flammable to advance and the only species surviving benefit from fire so they need fire to keep competitors at bay, germinate and survive. And they make fire creating flammable structures. Fire triggers water quiting the area and will distroy soil organic structure. Without water the future of the area enters in a reverse path, to savanna, then arid, finally desert. Is happening in California for example.

For climate change figthing purposes, the closer to the ecological climax, the better chance for long-term human survivorship.

Climate change will actively distroy climactic ecosystems also (more hurricans, etc), so the problem is more complicated that "just stop chopping trees and damaging coral reefs with tourist cruises". We can expect a lot of problems and extinction cascades in the future.

[FiatLuxDave]

A good book that talks about this effect, along with lots of interesting connections between thermodynamics and ecology, is "Into the cool" by Sagan and Schneider

[gleglegle]

The Amazon does not burn naturally. Fires there are man made to clear land for agriculture.

[kawera]

Agriculture and mining: https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/brazilian-gold-rush-destr...

[dna_polymerase]

Yes it does. Especially in the dry season, although those fires usually are less severe than those caused by humans.

[Misdicorl]

This is not true for rainforests afaik. There is no fire cycle like for the mountain forests of the US West

[chrisco255]

This is not true of the rainforests themselves, but the Amazon region is not 100% rainforest. It also has savannas and drier forests in parts of it (it's a massive region).

[sp332]

These are fires for agricultural land. They're much smaller than natural forest fires but many of them are set at once at the beginning of the season, so it's still a lot of forest on fire.