[swarfield]

This really pissed me off. Half of the trees in RMNP were/are dead standing since the Park Service had put out all natural fires for a century and did not allow logging of the dead wood. We hit the point where the fuel situation is so bad that fires are no longer controllable, and the fires burn so much hotter that it permanently scars the land by burning seeds that usually would make it through just fine.

[e4e5]

Couldn't they remove some of the underbrush?

[exabrial]

This comment got downvoted but I think it's an important question.

Answer is: probably not, for the other reason stated. But it is sort of the wrong question too. Is underbrush removal the problem? Not really. There are a lot of things fire removes, besides underbrush, and restores to a natural state.

What we need to wrap our heads around is _fire is natural_; it's been here eons before humans walked the earth, and the native trees and forest have long evolved to take advantage of it.

The question we might ask instead is: why are so we so opposed to a natural process? Fire is definitely bad inside things like cities. However, a prescribed burn has enormous benefits that have been detailed in science literature ever since we noticed a decline in forests.

[e4e5]

Yeah I get that. But removing underbrush (ignoring the impossibility of the scale of it) would make controlled burns again possible.

Currently there's so much that any controlled burn would get out of control and turn into a real one. At least that's how I understood it

[brazzy]

I think you underestimate the scale of the problem by a few orders of magnitude.

That park is over a thousand square kilometers, mountainous, and with very few roads.