[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