[madaxe_again]

The Landes Forest is a human disturbance.

The whole damned thing was planted in the 1850s as an enormous pine plantation.

Same thing as drives wildfires in Portugal - maritime pine (and in Portugal’s case eucalyptus). Vast, dense, barely managed pyrophytic monocultures. The problem isn’t poorly managed forest, it’s the forest, period - it shouldn’t be there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landes_forest

[swiftcoder]

Yes, the same problem exists in the north of Spain. They long ago cut down native forests to plant vines and farm cattle, but once that ceased to be profitable they replanted it all in monoculture pine and eucalyptus.

Where native forest (oak, chestnut, hazel, etc) remains, we don't have major fires. They are finally experimenting with planting firebreaks of native species in some areas, which has been quite effective at halting the spread of fires. But realistically, we need a huge government investment to get rid of this monoculture entirely.

[kergonath]

> Where native forest (oak, chestnut, hazel, etc) remains, we don't have major fires.

Not really. It helps, but it is not a perfect solution. It did not prevent the massive wildfire near Fontainebleau, for example.

[swiftcoder]

> It did not prevent the massive wildfire near Fontainebleau, for example.

That's a pretty great example in the opposite direction, as Fontainebleau today only contains isolated pockets of protected old-growth, and the rest has been systematically converted over the last ~150 years to highly flammable pine trees...

[jcattle]

Yes, I'm well aware that Landes naturally should be an extensive sandy marsh.

With how natural forest disturbances are more and more starting to affect the plantation, it proves to be seen what the response will be.

The thing is that it is an incredibly productive forest (only in terms of biomass). So now there's a bunch of capital riding on it which will have a vested interest to keep it productive.

[Arodex]

>Yes, I'm well aware that Landes naturally should be an extensive sandy marsh.

No, it shouldn't. It used to be a forest but was cut down by firewood and sheep grazing.

Stop with the "return to nature" fallacy. With how things are going, even "natural" forests are going to burn down.

[jcattle]

Ah, I thought that was the main vegetation present beforehand? What kind of forest was it before it was cut down?

[Arodex]

A mixed forest with oak, beech and the like, as you can find higher north. But that was during the middle ages' European "little ice age", when the winters were much colder, and the Thames and the Netherlands froze over. That's also likely the reason why the forest was cut so much to feed fires.

https://daily.jstor.org/climate-canvasses-of-the-little-ice-...

[yubblegum]

As an aside, N. III's reign seems to have been overall something of a disaster for the French.

[othello]

To be fair, that's more the Third Republic's verdict than what recent historians have concluded. For sure, Sedan was a catastrophe and the Mexican adventure was worse, but the two decades in between gave France the railway build-out, Haussmann's Paris, the creation of modern investment banks, and even universal male suffrage, which the Republic then kept ([1], [2] & [3]).

In this particular instance, everybody in this thread seems to be forgetting the region where the fires are currently raging used to be very unsanitary swamps before the pine forests were planted. These older wetlands were a major source of disease and misery for the local population. The reason why they only planted pines were because the soil there is poor & acidic. Nothing else grows really. Now of course, this needs to be rethought in the light of climate change, but it wasn't a stupid idea at the time.

[1] The unlikely triumph of Napoleon III, https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/the-unlikely-triumph-of-...

[2] Napoleon III and the Second Empire, https://www.routledge.com/Napoleon-III-and-the-Second-Empire...

[3] The People's Emperor, https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571361304-the-peoples-em...

[yubblegum]

Thanks. Always good to have a more complete and balanced picture.

I did in fact recently read about the infrastructure works in France (and elsewhere) during that era. (Great read so far: Liaquat Ahamed's 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World)

[kergonath]

It’s more nuanced. He massively helped with industrialisation, for example. He was doing ok in his liberal years. But he had different phases and some were better than others.

[iberator]

wow amazing comment. awesome rebuttal or whatever you spell it