[canofbars]

Australian firefighers have said that every time they do controlled burns they receive mountains of complaints about smoke or about how hot debris burned holes in their garden shade. Also how the weather now leaves less and less time where burns can be safely done.

[Ma8ee]

And the longer you wait the harder it is to do safely.

[pvaldes]

We should invent a magic machine and call it wood chipper, or branch shredder or something like that

But, not. Fire. Fire is a lot of fun. We need to send more CO2 to the air ASAP. How could we renounce to the lovely smell of barbecues?.

[salawat]

The wood chipper really only shuffles the problem around, and doesn't provide the ecological boon that many West Coast species are dependent upon.

After all, that debris has to get moved somewhere, or it is just more fuel. Further, what are you running the wood chipper with? Where are you getting it from? How are the people doing the work getting there?

Planned/properly engineered burns just work, and the only reason they stopped was an accumulation of humanity that refused to adapt to the ecological needs of their environment to an excessive degree.

I'll concede we're now in the territory of arguing what constitutes "excessive" degree, which to me is any cessation of activity that tends to increase ecological stability over time, rendering an area unfit or overly risky for human population or sustainable economic/ecological value extraction. I'm generally open to a lot of pro-environmental policies as long as knock-on effects are generally counted into the equation, but your wood chipper idea falls foul of A) seeming to glance over them with little scrutiny, B) not taking into account the ecology of the area.

It really does sound like a fundamentally people driven problem.