[Marsymars]

And in other areas, e.g. Canada, "cost prohibitive" is underselling the magnitude of the logistical task of doing anything to the overwhelming majority of boreal forests. There's just so much forest, and no way to access most of it, that it's effectively impossible to do any forest management or anything about most fires. (Most fires don't come near population centres, so nothing need be done about them.)

[swiftcoder]

I wonder what happened to the sparse and/or nomadic populations that used to inhabit and manage such areas of forest across North America...

[Marsymars]

Cultural burns are infeasible for forest management at scale. Paywalled, but not too difficult to get access to: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-wildf...

"Prescribed burning to reduce fire hazards has been employed throughout large parts of Australia. Yet robust scientific evidence showing that it is effective is remarkably limited. In some places, prescribed burning can reduce fire severity and restrict fire spread for a few years, but afterwards the regrowing vegetation becomes more flammable – an increased fire-risk effect that can last for many decades."

"A sobering fact is that prescribed burning makes very little difference in extreme-fire weather – precisely the conditions when most houses are lost and people die. One of us (Prof. Lindenmayer) lived through many weeks of extensive prescribed burns around the town of Marysville in the Australian state of Victoria. Just months later, in February, 2009, the entire town was razed by wildfire; all but a few buildings were destroyed and 34 people died. "

"Whilst Australia’s First Nations used cultural fires for hunting, promoting food growth and clearing pathways, it was not used for asset protection. The areas they burned were small and very localized."

"The huge scale and often very high intensity of the prescribed burns now being lit are the polar opposite of how First Nations people burnt the land. These massive-scale burns have significant negative impacts on the environment, on human health, and on Australia’s wildlife. For instance, medical data quite clearly show that Australians are far more likely to die from respiratory problems linked with prescribed burning than they are to die in a wildfire."

"An important fact – from an analysis of ice cores – is that many megafires have occurred in Australia over the past 2,000 years, even though First Nations people were applying cultural burns."

"Beyond the issue of the questionable effectiveness of widespread prescribed burns, scientific studies in Australia show that forests that are logged and then regenerated are characterized by a pulse of elevated flammability that can last for 40 to 70 years.