[bell-cot]

> We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.

I'm thinking that mother nature generally plants trees at far higher than 2X density.

[anon84873628]

Rather than piling on downvotes, I will respond to the valid question implied here.

Nature does plant trees densely. But most of them don't make it to maturity when the "natural" rhythm of wildfires is allowed to proceed.

Likewise the composition of species in the ecosystem also changes when the fire is suppressed.

[amacneil]

With natural wildfire the Sierras would look a lot less dense than they do today:

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...

> For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn whole hillsides at once, or sit smoldering in the underbrush for months.

> The result is approximately 60 square miles of forest that look remarkably different from other parts of the Sierra Nevada: Instead of dense, wall-to-wall tree cover — the outcome of more than a century of fire suppression — the landscape is broken up by patches of grassland, shrubland and wet meadows filled with wildflowers more abundant than in other parts of the forest. These gaps in the canopy are often punctuated by the blackened husks of burned trunks or the fresh green of young pines.