[petre]

I always wondered about those dead forests in the US. Like why aren't they pruned or cleared up or and used for making cardboard or something useful rather than looking like a bleak wasteland? But the ones I saw were in Oregon which gets a decent amount of rainfall from what I know? Even more puzzling.

[rsj_hn]

Trees can die because of diseases in addition to droughts. But in California the main culprit is drought(1), and those droughts are not going to stop. It's an arid climate, prone to droughts, so if you don't cut the trees down during wet years, they will burn down during the dry years. So many decades of limiting clear cutting and controlled burns, combined with an unusually wet 20th Century, has turned the state into a tinderbox. It's estimated that the state would need to remove forests equal to the size of Maine to get back to a tinder load comparable to what it had prior to the arrival of settlers, when native americans routinely burned millions of acres each year in order to reduce the forest sizes. History will not look kindly on those who romanticized California's forests.

(1) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-californias-dr...