Fire is a natural part of the forest lifecycle. We shouldn't try to end it, we should build our housing and infrastructure to minimize the effects of fire on us.
There are fires, and there are megafires. They are NOT the same.
The Western landscapes are evolved for regular normal fires. But decades of fire suppression have left us with a massive amount of fuel, so now fires come with a heat and size that the landscape is not evolved to handle. So, for example, trees with thick bark designed to survive fires, instead succumb to the intense heat and burn.
Yes, we need to get back to having regular fires. But we also need to end the artificially created danger of megafires.
First, we are not the only players here, and second, the more care we take to keep the natural cycle as normal as possible, the better the natural system will take care of us.
Megafires are an entirely different kind of fire, and merely expecting and avoiding them is insufficient. Managing the forest a little bit, and using controlled fires both almost eliminates the danger of megafires, and reduces the damage of fires on the ecosystem and on the human systems. Just one paragraph in the article encapsulates that nicely.
Please re-think your human-centric approach to problems with nature. At least read this one paragraph.
>>In Southern Oregon in 2021, when the massive Bootleg Fire reached a 30,000-acre nature preserve managed by the Nature Conservancy, flames were shooting 200 feet in the air. But when the fire got to an area that had been carefully managed, it suddenly changed. The flames dropped down and moved more slowly. For years, researchers in the area had been testing different “treatments” for the forest, thinning out trees in some areas and conducting prescribed burns. When the fire came through, it demonstrated what worked: In photos taken a few months after the fire, trees were still alive in the area that had been both thinned and treated with controlled burns. Across a road, in an untreated area, nearly everything had burned. (When a fire is so extreme, it can also sterilize the soil in some cases, making it hard for any new trees to grow back.)
I remember when we had the huge wildfires in the Santa Cruz mountains in the 80s, and they said if they did the same practices afterwards as they had prior, there would be similar fires in 40 years. I don't live there anymore, but what are the fire prospects in the Santa Cruz mountains? It's about exactly the time those forestry guys said fires would become a thing again as I am pretty sure nothing was changed, and that even worse more risky housing was added.
I am not sure how complete the map is, but I suspect that the GP means the fires (such as the 1985 Lexington fire) further east mapped in red? Of those, I think I only see two meaningfully overlapped by newer fires (2009 and 2016 Loma fires overlapping 1985 Lexington, 2020 Park within the footprint of the 1985 Finley fire).
The Western landscapes are evolved for regular normal fires. But decades of fire suppression have left us with a massive amount of fuel, so now fires come with a heat and size that the landscape is not evolved to handle. So, for example, trees with thick bark designed to survive fires, instead succumb to the intense heat and burn.
Yes, we need to get back to having regular fires. But we also need to end the artificially created danger of megafires.