
How Fire, Once a Friend of Forests, Became a Destroyer - DrScump
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151122-wildfire-forest-service-firefighting-history-pyne-climate-ngbooktalk/
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Trisell
Having been a wild land firefighter. I can attest that the public perception
also plays a factor into this. I live in a city that is close to many large
national forests. We yearly get large amount of smoke were I live. Every time
this happens there is a large public outcry about the quality of the air. The
forest service is extremely sensitive to public discontent. So they attempt to
put the fires out as quickly as possible.

This year we had a slow burning fire that was the perfect type of fire that
you would let burn till the first rains come. It eats up the undergrowth but
stays out of the canopy. But the amount of smoke in our valley caused such an
uproar, that the forest service brought in massive amounts of resources to put
the fire out quickly instead of letting in burn itself out.

As long as the public doesn't want to be bothered by the side effects of fire,
then the forest service will continue to be forced to put fire out in ways
that may not be the most beneficial for the forests.

~~~
EvanPlaice
I used to attend a private school bordering RMNP where we did a lot of
outreach work with the park and surrounding community. Including, a
significant amount of wildfire mitigation work.

I couldn't agree more with your statements. Wildfire mitigation is extremely
labor-intensive and -- in the bigger picture -- not very useful. Controlled
burning in a 'healthy' ecosystem can have a much greater positive impact.

I get really upset by the persistent culture of 'environmental do-gooders'
that have no clue how biological ecosystems work. Such people put way too much
value on (animal and plant) life and conveniently ignore the limitations of
sustainability in natural ecosystems.

I don't really have an answer to fix it. The problem isn't that we don't have
the ability to mitigate massive natural disasters. It's that people can't see
beyond their vanity enough to realize that natural environments don't exist to
perpetuate life. 'Healthy' ecosystems have constant cycles of destruction and
renewal. Our influence has been the greatest negative influence on that
process.

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astazangasta
Of course fires are 'bad' \- if you're a bear or a deer. Fires are adaptive
for the organisms that produce them, that is, pine forests, which use fire as
part of their natural ecological cycle (by filling the forest up with fire-
promoting oils and dry tinder) to wipe out competition and proliferate.

We only have a problem with this because we still live on the ground. If we
lived in airships, like I've been suggesting all along, then forest fires
would become a wonderful natural spectacle, and people would pilot their
airships to the Rockies for the summer just to catch a view.

~~~
chadzawistowski
Everyone living in airships, really?

~~~
RogtamBar
Hydrogen is the second most abundant element in the universe..

~~~
clock_tower
Also absurdly flammable -- the Hindenburg was flying on hydrogen. I certainly
wouldn't want to be in a hydrogen-filled airship floating above a forest fire!

(Helium would work better, but I think it gets pretty expensive.)

~~~
astazangasta
You don't need a gas. Just use fixed-frame volumes made of, say, graphene
layers and fill it with vacuum. As long as your frame can hold the required
force, no problem. There might even be metallic foams that do the trick.

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arca_vorago
The main reason fire became a destroyer in two of Arizona's biggest fires, was
mostly due to freshly-degreed-environmentalists pushing policy decisions based
more on theory than on practical on the ground facts, and dismissing local
knowledge of the forest. In this case, they refused to allow thinning out of
the forest by loggers in certain areas (not talking about clear cut) and did
only the tiniest of controlled burns. The result: a forest full of material
ready to go up in flames all at once.

I admit I didn't believe my grandpa when he said it would happen, but when it
did I immediately recognized the truth in his words.

~~~
Johnny555
Is there any evidence that logging helps prevent or reduce the effects of
forest fires? Forests have evolved over thousands of years to tolerate fires
without any logging at all.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/opinion/more-logging-
wont-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/opinion/more-logging-wont-stop-
wildfires.html)

I thought the bigger problem (aside from unusually dry weather in many places)
was decades of aggressively fighting fires rather than letting them burn
(which is a natural part of forests). The growth of housing into rural forest
land exacerbates the problem since fire protection agencies need to make the
choice between letting houses burn or letting a forest burn to prevent an even
bigger fire the next time.

~~~
Amezarak
Maybe it is different in the West, but a "good" fire is one that burns through
the undergrowth and only scorches healthy trees. I see them regularly here in
the southeast.

The problem is that if you go without fire for too long, when it does finally
burn it will be so hot that it'll burn up even healthy trees.

So, I am not an expert, but I can easily imagine that logging (and the side
effects of logging) would have a beneficial effect, because there isn't as
much fuel to burn, but that wouldn't be necessary if we'd had controlled burns
all the time.

(NB that the linked opinion article claims that is not the case - but that's
the logic.)

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clock_tower
One paragraph of this, in particular, was a revelation:

"The science of forestry grew up in temperate Europe — France and Germany
particularly — and there, unlike most parts of the world, there's no natural
basis for fire. Fire was seen as a human problem, caused by people, and that
attitude was exported to foresters in the United States."

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HerpDerpLerp
A bit of a side issue but "By 1978, so did the Forest Service. It was like
watching the Berlin Wall come down."

Can you say something at a specific time was like watching something else that
would not happen for a decade?

~~~
Aloha
You can fathom even before the berlin wall came down, what a sea change the
wall coming down would mean.

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PhantomGremlin
The Yellowstone fires of 1988 were a big deal at the time (much hand
wringing), but the park has coped:

    
    
       Not long after the fires ended, plant and tree species
       quickly reestablished themselves, and natural plant
       regeneration has been highly successful.
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988)

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ramanan
Proactively thinning selective regions of forests and controlled burns seem to
be the route forward to prevent (rather than react to) large-scale fires.

This short video from MinuteEarth, while not going into much detail, does have
a lot of good references

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX1xnWPSjKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX1xnWPSjKg)

~~~
EvanPlaice
As somebody who has had hands-on experience doing fire mitigation work.
Calling the work 'labor intensive' is a severe understatement. Especially, in
remote areas.

The problem partly has do to with the lack of zoning laws in forested regions.
People build wherever they want, usually in locations that are extremely
difficult to protect from wildfires.

