[olivermarks]

We really have to get back on track with controlled burns after the environmentalist 'save all trees' experiment that started in the 1960's has put us in the position we are in now.

Canada used to have many controlled burns throughout last century until the last quarter - Nova Scotia is a typical example (1979 paper):

https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x79-031

California is dangerously behind on forestry and therefore fire management compared to earlier decades. Fuel has to be removed or fire and smoke will cause massive damage and have a very serious psychological and economic impact.

Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...

There are no saw mills left in Northern California and strict rules about not cutting trees down. Wood is imported from Canada at massive expense, driving up the cost of housing. we seem to have lost the plot a bit here.

[akiselev]

The problem is that Canada is covered in peatlands. Once they dry out, controlled burns can ignite peat several meters deep and release one of the biggest carbon stores on the planet.

See what happened with the Russian wildfires in 2010 [1] - this is a consequence of climate change and unfortunately many of the old fire prevention strategies won't work with Canadian peatland drying out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires

[zamadatix]

Won't that happen whether or not these fires are controlled or uncontrolled, at this point?

[akiselev]

Yes but the point of controlled burns in California (for example) is that they eliminate fuel as the ecosystem gets drier. In peatlands, controlled burns instead make more fuel available by drying out the peat, causing a death spiral.

[Solvency]

So, what do you do?

[akiselev]

In Canada?

Invest in indoor hockey rinks.

[citrin_ru]

Fire breaks to stop fire before it gets too big?

[vkou]

Do nothing and push the problem to the next generation. I may be dead before I'll need to worry about it.

[2devnull]

How much you want to spend?

[christophilus]

Yep.

[gibspaulding]

> Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago.

I've been thinking about this lately. My wife and I were reading about a study of an old growth oak - hickory forest in the eastern US which without human intervention is slowly transitioning to maple - beach forests. Presumably this is because it is no longer experiencing the burns it would have historically.

This transition is generally considered problematic since oak hickory forests supposedly support more biodiversity (and conveniently more profitable timber harvests).

But this all raises the question for me - how did this all work before any human intervention?

What's the natural rate of forest fires? We have species (such as giant sequoia) that seem to require fires, so they must have happened, but they must have been quite rare. Would there have been a truely horrible fire caused by lightning every 1000 years? Or perhaps would the megafauna that went extinct around the time native Americans arrived have played a similar role in clearing out underbrush while foraging?

Does anyone know of studies on this?

[sparker72678]

In the arid American West, at least, lightning caused fires are extremely common. Historically these forests were significantly less dense than they are after 100 years of human fire suppression, which meant less available fuel, and slower burning, “cooler” fires typically.

Here’s an article that talks about a few papers and some research as this relates to Arizona forests: https://azdailysun.com/news/local/setting-the-record-of-ariz...

[pixl97]

I'm on my cell so im not going to be a good help with info on this, but lighting induced fires are actually very common. So you're not talking every 1000 years, but closer to 10 or so. This leads to a much more patchwork design in the forests that leads to natural fire breaks.

[2devnull]

How could that explain places where lightening never or rarely occurs (coastal California)? I can’t think of any lightning sparked fires until a year or two ago. (Inland areas and the sierras obviously do get more lightening.)

[cmrdporcupine]

In the northeast / midwest / great lakes basin, mastodons definitely helped clear underbrush, from what I've read. Not sure how common they were through the eastern woodlands, but they were definitely here (and likely hunted to extinction). You can see plants that have historical adaptation to their form of browsing; black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) has spikes along its younger, more tender branches that don't effectively deter deer but would be nasty on a trunk, for example.

First nations here also did controlled burns to open cultivation for maize agriculture and to encourage open grazing areas for deer.

Regardless, the forests that are burning in this case causing smoke in the northeast are quite far north, in Northern Quebec mostly, in what is boreal forest; pine & spruce mainly, on thin granite soils (Canadian shield).

[wefarrell]

I know that human expansion has decreased the number of large predators, which has increased the number of dear, who eat more young trees. If they have a preference for one type of tree over another that will certainly change the composition of the forest.

[seadan83]

Certain areas burn with differing frequencies (naturally).

Eg, coast range burns every few centuries while cascades and sierras it is more like every other year.

Sorry for no references, so please have a large grain of salt with those stated frequencies. IIRC those are the tight order of magnitude. Though, we are also talking much smaller fires compared to the mega blades we see today that kills everything rather than rejuvenates. These fires today burn everything and down to 4 feet under the soil. It's a different beast.

[lost_tourist]

Isn't like 99% of old growth forest in the eastern USA pretty much chopped down? I wouldn't think the trees now are much more than 30-50 years old.

[Kaibeezy]

  beech
  truly
  deer
  lightning

Sorry, was bugging me. Better now.

[ArlenBales]

I think population growth is the main factor for why prescribed burns of forests have dwindled. We have cities and towns that have expanded into forests and high-risk fire areas. Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).

[r00fus]

> Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).

They will move out when they can’t insure their properties anymore. [1] Note the refusal to cover properties isn’t a blanket withdrawal; I got a call from State Farm just last week - but I live in a major metro.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/california-insurance-mar...

[tick_tock_tick]

I mean that's only happening because California made it illegal to charge the real risk adjusted price for insurance. The companies weren't going to start losing money on every home in CA so they are leaving.

[r00fus]

I think there was another HN thread the other day saying this is how CA can depopulate the risk-prone regions - CA refuses real risk pricing yet carriers refuse uncovered risk, so high risk areas become depopulated as they can't be insured, and thus, not in compliance with loan requirements.

Once this is accomplished (as ugly as it might be for the residents) then you can possibly do some forest management and fire control.

This same thing is playing out in FL, but over there the insurance commission isn't as stringent so insurers are just flat out not paying claims.

[AnthonyMouse]

How does that actually get people to stop living there?

Suppose you can't get insurance and you can't get a mortgage without insurance. The house still exists. Its value will crash. But having crashed, now someone can afford to buy it without a loan. Meanwhile there is still a massive housing shortage, so somebody will.

And that's the thing that caused this, and the only way out of it. You have to build enough housing in the areas that aren't in the direct path of wildfires that nobody is being forced by those high prices into the housing that is.

[r00fus]

A house without any neighbors, in a bankrupt city or unincorporated area that's also a food desert sounds like a non-starter to 99% of the people on the plant.

Meanwhile CA also recently revamped how local regulators are allowed to regulate things like more duplexes and multiplexes in all residential areas.

[today20201014]

> California made it illegal to charge the real risk adjusted price for insurance

I'd like to know more about this. Do you have a reference?

[bird_in_bush]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_California_Proposition_...

[quickthrowman]

California is a great example of direct democracy being a terrible idea in most cases.

[version_five]

That may be true in California. In northern Canada there are very few populated places, I believe these are mostly in complete wilderness

[olivermarks]

Environmental fashion became obsessed with trees as 'the lungs of the planet' despite ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.

We have been conditioned to believe humans are destroying the fragile planet but ironically the reality is that we are increasingly irresponsible stewards of it, flying in the face of thousands of years of evidence.

[sampo]

> ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.

This is not true.

Ocean photosynthesis produces about 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, but ocean respiration also consumes about the same amount. The oceans are about oxygen neutral. Same goes for the other 50%, but in land ecosystems.

https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-t...

[olivermarks]

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankto...

[morsch]

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html

[olivermarks]

'Phytoplankton are responsible for most of the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean. Carbon dioxide is consumed during photosynthesis, and the carbon is incorporated in the phytoplankton, just as carbon is stored in the wood and leaves of a tree'.

The air we breathe is processed by Phytoplankton

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Phytoplankton#:~:....

[TheOtherHobbes]

We're killing the phytoplankton too.

https://medium.com/climate-conscious/how-the-loss-of-phytopl...

[DayDollar]

Well, that plancton will die off, when the oceans get accidic.. so it will be the trees only in the long run.

[maxerickson]

A higher percentage of the global population lives in urban areas than pretty much any time before. Population growth isn't causing sprawl.

[midoridensha]

It is in the US, where the "urban" label is applied to suburban and exurban places.

[maxerickson]

It's not really population pressure causing that though, at least not exclusively. It's a relatively small number of people that think they want a particular sort of lifestyle. Net migration patterns more or less have people moving out of low population counties and into high population counties.

[EatingWithForks]

My understanding is that this isn't due to a lack of controlled burns but actually due to an unseasonally warm winter not killing bugs that attack and kill trees, leaving an excessive amount of dead wood to burn this year. No amount of controlled burning of the years before would prevent a lot of dead trees this year making for kindling.

[carabiner]

It's everything. Natives used to practice controlled burns to sustain habitability. Observe parallels to three sisters agriculture. Then as their populations were eradicated these methods were lost.

[seadan83]

Indeed. Though modern fire suppression is a huge factor. AFAIK fire suppression became industrialized following world war II (bomber type planes able to deploy large amounts of water, better radios and respirators). Even today, the mandate for fire suppression (in at least WA state) is all fires are to be put out within 24 hours. There are a few "let it burn" examples I'm aware of in CA

[secondcoming]

burning woodland has happened all over the world for centuries. It’s not a mystical skill or anything

[AlecSchueler]

Surprised this point wasn't higher up. I'm starting to see this everywhere, dry grass, yellow leaves, dead trees. Growing up in Ireland I never saw anything but green but it's become visibly more lifeless year on year since around 2017.

[dmix]

You’ve had warm winters every year since 2017 in Ireland? What about El Nina and the usual trends?

[AlecSchueler]

Yes, every year since 2016 has been above average and the average temperature has increased with every decade since the 1850s.

[xattt]

Specific to Atlantic Canada, there is a lot of felled trees turning to kindling after Hurricane Fiona last September.

[petsfed]

I know that's an issue along the continental divide, where the Pine Bark beetle is wrecking the forests (and the absence of sustained temperatures below -20F that kill off the beetle). Is that an issue in California?

[dontupvoteme]

What's the shelf life on DDT? Half joking.

[M4v3R]

There’s actually stuff being done about preventing Wildfires in the US, controlled burns being of these things, creating “fuel breaks” (gaps that prevent fire from progressing) is another, and there’s a LOT more. But a lot of time that’s not enough and the reason for that is like with every other government effort - bureaucracy and endless paperwork. It can take months before a project can even start because the forest management has to compile all the necessary paperwork. But they are really passionate about doing this to prevent as many wildfires as possible.

Source: I currently work for a startup that makes software that shortens the time necessary to prepare this paperwork which potentially could cut the time it takes in half or more.

[fragmede]

fascinating. what about the paperwork makes it take so long? is it the coordination between all the relevant agencies and landowners?

[M4v3R]

You have to gather a lot of information and answer dozens of questions before you start a project. In the planning phase you have to do scoping, make a public notice, consult the local communities, take wildlife, insects, wetlands, native tribes and many more things into account (which require gathering all sorts of data from national databases). There are multiple people inside a National Forest’s office that are working on all this.

Then the other hard part is gathering all this data from all the people in one place and writing documents that will be published or submitted to various government agencies. This process is at the moment manual and extremely time consuming (because it’s basically an email back and forth that can take weeks or months). And that’s only the planning phase.

The app I’m working on tries to automate as much as possible both the data gathering part and the document preparation part, letting multiple people collaborate together to create necessary paperwork. This drastically cuts on the time needed to complete the planning phase and thus lets them do more projects in the same amount of time.

[putnambr]

This is hearsay, but folks in Colorado tend to complain about federal air quality guidelines prohibiting controlled burns during the times of the year that it makes sense to do a controlled burn. During the winter, air quality guidelines dictate you can't exceed a certain amount of wood smoke in an area for example. NEPA studies might be another.

[adgjlsfhk1]

the fact that if you do a controlled burn badly, it's a forest fire that kills people and does 10s of millions in property damage

[fragmede]

that doesn't explain why the paperwork takes so long at all.

[mfb]

"no saw mills left in Northern California" - eh? This is just one company's sawmills (they are hiring): https://www.spi-ind.com/Operations/SawmillOperations

[kurthr]

Yeah, and there are lots of smaller ones. Some in Santa Cruz (Big Creek) and Sonoma (Cazadero). It's nice be able to get local lumber and the pricing is often better.

Part of the problem is that people built next to the logging areas since they're so quiet and pretty with relatively good roads. That really makes it hard to do controlled burns. And people moved there for the trees so they don't want you to cut them down.

[ajross]

I don't know what that poster was talking about either. Even if CA were to outlaw lumber milling in the north of the state, the rest of the PNW produces enough for the continent already. There's plenty of wood in the deep blue queer tree-hugging west coast. The USA is a huge exporter of the crop, actually.

[George83728]

> the deep blue queer tree-hugging west coast.

I take it you haven't spent much time out in the sticks of Oregon or Washington.

[local_crmdgeon]

That's true about Oregon and Washington but NOT California. It's also why you don't see wildfires to nearly the same extent in the Northeast or South - we cut our trees.

[dendrite9]

All three have different topography and climates from the NE or the South. I don't understand why people think what works in one type of forest will just work in another. The trees are different, the climate is different, the weather is different.

There have been big fires in Oregon and Washington in recent years as well, not just in California. And the Tillamook Burn was big, but that was a long time ago.

[tracerbulletx]

The reason you don't see wildfires is because its like 1000% times wetter east of the Mississippi.

[olivermarks]

THE IMPACT OF CALIFORNIA’S CHANGING

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ON

TIMBER HARVEST PLANNING COSTS

(2005)

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Sierra is processing imported lumber mostly

https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestManagement#:~:text=....

[mfb]

I'd be interested to see the data re: "processing imported lumber mostly". Statewide back in 2016, California timber harvest was 1,572 MMBF; wood processing facilities received 1,483 MMBF; 11.5 MMBF flowed into California from other states; 99.7 MMBF flowed out of California for processing out of state or export according to https://www.bber.umt.edu/pubs/forest/fidacs/CA2016%20Fact%20...

[RC_ITR]

It's amazing the things people believe with no evidence (and then get massive amounts of upvotes for!).

Look at a map of northern California and you see that the landscape is dominated by a checkerboard pattern of logging/no-logging (the most efficient way to maintain a forest and create firebreaks, even if that wasn't the original intent and people are trying their damndest to break the system).

https://eros.usgs.gov/media-gallery/earthshot/checkerboard-p...

https://www.truckeedonnerlandtrust.org/sierra-nevada-checker...

[ajross]

This is almost exactly backwards. "Controlled burns" are the workaround, not the solution. Timber land naturally burns regularly, but we started fighting those fires in the last century to protect the lumber industry. The problem then becomes, a few decades later, that you have a forest filled with dead branches and snags that would have burned, piecewise, over decades, but didn't. Now eventually something gets out of control and you have a fire anyway, except that now it's much (much) larger than it would have been naturally.

So the workaround becomes creating corridors of excess-fuel-free forest via "controlled burns". But that's not the fix! The problem was preexisting.

[olivermarks]

I know people in the Sierra foothills who used to work in the logging industry until the bureaucrats made it impossible. I also know people in the same area who are fire fighters. When loggers used to find diseased trees they would isolate them by felling all the surrounding trees so they wouldn't infect them and spread. This practice was outlawed by the academic bureaucrats and is one of the reasons for the subsequent severe spread of dying trees that are the large scale fire fuel we see today.

At this point in history there is illegal logging going on to create fire breaks around properties, such are the state restrictions on trees. We have lost sight of the forestry management practices that worked with nature, not against it.

[lamontcg]

Climate change has also caused the spread of bark beetles, killing forests in BC and Alberta.

[swader999]

And their provincial governments both cut the helicopter rapid attack crews in the last few years

[barbazoo]

Surely the much dryer/warmer weather due to climate change has something to do with it, no?

[S201]

OP did not say that climate change was not a factor. Both of these are contributing factors.

I will second the point about lack of controlled burns and logging absolutely being a problem. Look at photos of western forests from the late 1800s and you'll see that we have far more trees now than a century ago. Here's an example of Yosemite valley: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda.... A century of fire suppression and climate change have proved to be a dangerous combination. One of these is easier to correct though if we could get past the idea that every tree must be saved at all costs.

[pharrington]

OP didn't even mention climate change in the post, and previously has explicitly denied that climate change is a problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166197

[timeon]

OP was just shifting the focus while blaming "environmentalists".

[zitterbewegung]

From the core assumption that there would be more dry days doesn’t change the fact that you will encounter more ferocious wildfires (actually if we had less dry days we would encounter even more ferocious wildfires because of less burns in general when you think about it).

[swader999]

Hotter climate is supposed to create more rain is it not?

[mcdonje]

The effects of climate change are different in different regions. And the types of weather patterns that deliver more precipitation to some regions could be quite different from what the local wildlife has adapted to.

[bariumbitmap]

California already has a pretty good prescribed burn program, but it needs to be expanded, in part because the climate is significantly different today than it was a hundred years ago. There are some obstacles to prescribed burns: smoke inhalation is a public health hazard, firefighters need to be paid, private landowners are worried about liability, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of California is federal land, and the U.S. Forest Service does not have funding to perform prescribed burns.

The private sector hasn't solved the problem either, in part because a lot of the fuel isn't desirable timber. Californians who are serious about this issue should lobby their federal and state representatives.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05997-w

> Our results show that California and Oregon are the only severe-risk US states to conduct prescribed fire programs that are impactful at reducing wildfire risks, while other southeastern states such as Florida maintain fire-healthy ecosystems with very extensive prescribed fire programs. Our study suggests that states that have impactful prescribed fire programs (like California) should increase their scale of operation, while states that burn prescribed fires with no impact (like Nevada) should change the way prescribed burning is planned and conducted.

> California has historically resisted prescribed burning to control their already big smoke problem

> There are various reasons preventing California from conducting more Rx [prescribed burns], including lack of enough firefighters and 57% of land being owned by the Federal Government which lacks the funds to conduct Rx, especially after recent budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0451-7

> Academics warned that the financial incentives offered by mechanical thinning may be elusive, given the high ratio of thinning to merchantable timber in many locations. Legislative staff and analysts criticized the traditional forestry model of removing large-diameter, valuable trees and leaving smaller, less valuable and more flammable biomass.

[iisan7]

There's one consideration missing from your list though, which is the fact that controlled burning is way more risky now than ever before, due to the immense fuel build up. The reduced frequency of controlled burns has contributed to making them much harder to implement. Hard to put the cat back in the bag at this point.

[JohnMakin]

Almost all of California wildfire fuel is dense brush, not trees.

[thepasswordis]

That dense brush, to people in forest management, is referred to as "fuel loading". It's like the tinder that you would use to start a larger bonfire.

The brush ends up being the thing that starts massive forest fires.

[dredmorbius]

This is a seriously misinformed comment.

Total fire suppression dates to the early 20th century, not the 1960s. It was driven largely by the forest / wood products industry, not environmentalists. Formal adoption of "the 10 am rule" (all fires must be suppressed by 10 am the following morning) was in 1935. Formal adoption of prescribed burns by the USFS was in 1978.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.g...>

California has had numerous controlled-burn projects for decades. They are limited in scope, and opposed, usually by local residents and businesses, for ... somewhat understandable reasons, though in the long run more-frequent controlled burns are better than the megafires of the past few decades.

Genocide of the indigenous North American population, especially in California, was transacted first by Spanish and Mexican missionaries, then by Americans, both private citizens and government agents (mostly military), and was largely completed by 1873.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide>

The US Forest Service was not organised until 1905. Its antecedents date only as far back as 1875, after the dates given above for the California genocide.

Yes, controlled burns would help with some of California's wildfire issues, but evidence from elsewhere, including Canada and Siberia in which total fire suppression was never policy or effectively achieve, recent history suggests that megafires are not strictly dependent on overgrowth and fuel accumulation. Regions of California such as Santa Barbara experience recurring fires over the same terrain at intervals of a decade or two, suggesting that even short-term fuel-load accumulation is sufficient to give rise to huge and uncontrollable fires which intrude well into the urban region, and are not limited to remote bush or the urban-wildland interface. See particularly the 2017 Tubbs Fire which obliterated a Santa Rosa neighbourhood, and Thomas Fire, also 2017, which reached downtown Ventura.

[TheOtherHobbes]

This is literally not being able to see the wood for the tress.

Controlled burns won't fix the fact that the Sea Surface Temperature anomalies are in the region of 2C in some areas.

Or that the 2m Temp Anomalies are of the order of 6-10C across most of the US and large parts of Russia.

Neither of those is going to make future fires less likely, controlled or otherwise.

https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=ssta...

[_fizz_buzz_]

It is pretty scary to see how people are in denial in this thread. I would also prefer if there was an easy solution like controlled fires to this, but physics doesn't care what I prefer. We need to get global warming under control. There is simply no way around it.

[downWidOutaFite]

It's environmentalists fault! (ignore how much we're overheating the planet)

[lxgr]

There is no contradiction between the statements “global warming is a serious problem” and “preventing wildfires completely has some disadvantages vs. controlled burns”.

[downWidOutaFite]

When people start talking about how much smarter "indigenous practices" were I can smell the own-the-libs bullshit even above the burning forests.

Prescribed burns aren't going to stop these forests from dying out over the next 50 years.

[swader999]

They aren't going to die out. Forested land is increasing and has since the 50's.

Source: https://www.fao.org/3/X4995e/X4995e.htm A snapshot of current conditions is as follows:

After two centuries of decline, the area of US forestland stabilized in about 1920 and has since increased slightly. The forest area of the US is about two-thirds what it was in 1600. The area consumed by wildfire each year has fallen 90 percent; it was between eight and twenty million hectares (20-50 million acres) in the early 1900s and is between one and two million hectares (2-5 million acres) today. Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997 forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.

[downWidOutaFite]

It's not lumber farms that are dying

[swader999]

I've had four species in my bags on a lot of blocks.

[quickthrower2]

Living in Australia through the 2019 bushfires (finished by 2 weeks of rain just as Covid19 incubated), I love the sweet sweet smell of a controlled burn that is reducing the load for that next dry summer.

[infamouscow]

The law of unintended consequences is called a law for a reason.

Opting to finger point and use misdirection to avoid the inescapable fact this is primarily the fault of the environmentalists paradoxically harms environmental causes even more.

[downWidOutaFite]

> this is primarily the fault of the environmentalists

Congrats, you got your story that makes you feel good about your ideological beliefs

[infamouscow]

These are matters of fact.

Nobody wants to live in a toxic environment or leave one for their children. There might be disagreement about how to solve these problems and what those problems are, but you're conflating several things.

Whining and complaining like a petulant child because people disagree with your approach isn't going to help the environment at all. It does raise questions about the underlying motives and the legitimacy of solutions that can't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

[throwbadubadu]

But there is a lot wrong with blaming "preventing wildfires" on "those environmentalists" and making that the sole root cause of this problem, which it isn't too much at all. Contributing, but far from root cause.

Controlled burns btw also easier quickly said then done...

[olivermarks]

@ixgr Exactly. Thank you.

[tick_tock_tick]

I mean it literally is their fault; kind of funny in a ironic way but mostly just sad.

[bparsons]

Canada does lots of controlled burns.

The forests are on fire because it has barely rained in most parts of the country since April.

[swader999]

Yes and they cut the rapid attack helicopter crews in BC and Alberta. Also, the fires there started in a short window when vegetation hadn't started growing yet and there was old dry winter grass everywhere.

[seadan83]

Agree with your points, though your premise is incorrect. Fire suppression started in the 30s [1] and became industrialized following WWII

[1] https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...

[uoaei]

Wasn't the environmentalists of the 60s but the environmentalists of the early 1900s (John Muir and ilk) who thought they knew better than the native peoples how to preserve the dignity and beauty of natural spaces. We're just now coming back around to acknowledging indigenous land practices that have been the standard on this continent for millenia.

[perrygeo]

Both environmentalists and early American naturalists have one common weak spot in their world view; they view humans as fundamentally distinct from nature. Nature is somehow both profane and awe inspiring compared to the "rational" human world. In that view, we need to preserve the wilderness (somewhere "out there") for aesthetic/spiritual/resource management reasons.

From the indigenous viewpoint, there is little distinction; humans are part of the physical/natural world, same as a mountain lion or a worm, albeit a very powerful part capable of wielding great power and thus responsibility. There is no concept of wilderness.

It's worth over-emphasizing that the indigenous viewpoint in North America was sustainable (and was actually sustained) for thousands of years. The modern industrial culture of bipolar consumption/reverence of wilderness is showing severe signs of overshoot after a couple hundred years. That's not to say that indigenous land practices are more ethical or wise... merely that they've been proven more effective by the test of time.

[seadan83]

I guess also worth mentioning, modern forestry uses tree farms and has been for a while. Those tree farms burn differently than natural forest and are super dense. Getting more logging into the mix, or more wood mills is not necessarily a solution due to second order effects (more tree farms)

[_fizz_buzz_]

That sounds like wishful thinking that there is an easy solution for this. Controlled burns can help, but the real issue is that global warming makes areas dryer and the vegetation there is not adapted for the dryer/warmer conditions. We have to tackle more seriously the elephant in the room.

[webnrrd2k]

”Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years"

Not to be snarky, but I think that they were uncontrolled burns... Once they started there was no Native American Fire Department to put them out, they just burned until they wefe done.

[jmull]

Yeah, the real problem we need to solve here is too much environmentalism.

The silver lining, I guess, is that it won’t be a profoundly unfortunate tragedy. As a species, we’ll have really earned the ultimate Darwin award.

[throwbadubadu]

Come on...multiple posts claim that here, but I really miss the environmentalist campaigns who drove that fire policies?! References? Please look it up, we didn't know better, and it was wrong but quite natural for the peak of the civilization that we are (/s) to fight and prevent fires. The subtone here that "it was the environmentalists" is really hilarious and shocking at the same time.. lol.

Blame everything bad on the environmentalists, ignore the rest we all did and still do, and just let nature rule! Hehe..

Especially, as while totally agree and true that it is right that this was the wrong approach, the denial that this is currently maybe only 10% of the problem is also funny. We lost nature, just wait it out and let it go its natural way here now until most is burned down and then desertificated, which will inevitably come. No more fire problems, just some others then..

[micromacrofoot]

sure, but it’s hard to ignore that wildfires in many places dropped when everyone was staying hone during the pandemic, it’s very much a multifaceted issue (and usually it’s underbrush catching fire and burning, not trees)

[gerbilly]

Are you seriously suggesting that the indigenous were practising controlled burns over millions of hectares of boreal forest?

I find this 'sweep your floors' meme a bit of an oddity:

1. It involves conservatives casting native americans in a good light. Who's going to argue with that?

2. It contains a false epiphany which just feels right (the solution to forest fires is...fires)

3. It contains a grain of truth. Native americans did perform controlled burns, and in the NW they did take care of salmon streams etc, but not on a scale that would prevent today's wildfires.

It's a classic diversion from climate change, and our terrible 'foresty' practices of cutting down forests and planting monocrops of high resin species all packed together and calling it reforestation and finally, spraying entire valleys with roundup (often where indigenous people live of course)

[pookha]

There was something like 10 times more hectares being burned as far back as 1850. https://www.publish.csiro.au/WF/WF22090

We've effectively stopped this with modern fire suppression techniques and have fewer managed burns...Parks Canada only had 12 last year. And here's a story where they ran out of funding and had to defer burns:

https://www.rmoutlook.com/local-news/parks-canada-prescribed...

Not good. I think you can focus on climate change while at the same time have a conservationist approach.

[tinyplanet-o]

Most of the "environmentalists" I know are deeply in favor of controlled burns. At a national level, the Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns).

And the timber companies are definitely not involved in any prescribed burning efforts (don't want to lose out on all that inventory).

[thepasswordis]

>Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns).

This is comically false. The USFS absolutely engages in controlled burns.

[karaterobot]

No, this is incorrect.

The USFS does a lot of controlled burns, and has done them for a long time. Not sure where you heard otherwise: it's a significant part of what they do.

They briefly paused doing them last year after a controlled burn got out of control in New Mexico, resulting in a high-profile wildfire. But that's only evidence that they were already doing them. Anyway, after updating their policies, they resumed prescribed burns later that year.

[pharrington]

You are lying. Don't deliberately spread disinformation. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire

[dredmorbius]

USFS adopted prescribed burns in 1978.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236104>

[pvaldes]

Again, it does not matter. Open your eyes

This is environmental crime. And when there is a crime, there is a benefit for criminals. Saying that if we burn some, here and there, the criminals will stop, is like saying that if we paint the banks in a nice pastel tone and put a banner asking politely not to rob, the bank robbers will agree to stop and go away.

Europe tried that in the past repeatedly. It didn't worked. Even worse, the trend is increasing among farmers manipulated by extreme European political currents that overlap extensively the Putin and Trump speeches. Places of Europe that never had a problem with wildfires started to burn since a couple of years. We hear political parties trow the first stone and claim that environmental laws are unfair. Just one week later, the place burns down magically. Is environmental boycott, and will not stop until we stop them or remove the benefits.

Either we wake up and strike back, or we accept that the extinction whirl will be much closer than we expected, and much faster than we can adapt.