| 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. |