The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" (or rather knowingly ignored) until the issue appears at scales as small as the home village, which in terms of the US government means the front and back yard of the white house or similar.

These people are living in parallel societies, where they are completely detached from the reality for many people living in the country. And that is not merely a problem in the US.

> The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" [...]

... while an offshore wind farm was once in DT's sight in Scotland.

These damn arsonists are really going for it this year, huh?

The coordination between them is amazing - being able to pull this off in multiple European countries, the US and Canada at the same time.

That will not change their minds. They already demolished a bunch of the White House.

Nearly all of those are forests that are supposed to burn every year or two. Check with a forester knowledgeable in your specific area because there is no universal truth here. However the generalization that all forests in North America need to burn regularly for good health is true even though there are exceptions.

I am a small scale forester (hundreds to thousands of acres). Supposed to burn is ... complicated and not necessarily true. Many forests in the PNW have had indigenous Americans burn them regularly because it improves forest health. These fires were typically kept small and well maintained to avoid damage to the trees. White settlers put a stop to this practice, and natural fires were considerably less common than anthropogenic ones in some regions.

So it might be correct to say that fires can be healthy for forests, but "supposed to" is more difficult to assert.

I just finished limbing, brush clearing, and preparing burn piles from a section of my forest because removing fuel is good, but most forests in America are young planted forests. They have smaller trees, less diversity, higher than typical density, and small trees that can cause fires to climb to crowns (where they then become deleterious rather than helpful.)

If we were to return to indigenous practices of regular burning, we would likely see healthier forests. But I'm not sure we'd see as much timber production from them. Since that's what most forests are held for... I don't see practices moving away from trying to maximize timber while minimizing cost any time soon.

Thanks for that complexity. I've posted brought the same thing and all the responses have been "no, fire is bad" from people who obviously have no idea what they are talking about.

I'm standing by my claims. However understand that I am in no way contradicting anything you said.

Indigenous practice resulted in the deforestation of the American West so a lot of forests in Oregon and Washington are new growth.

All forests in the American west, barring a few relatively small parks, are new growth. Predominantly from settlers cutting them down.

Indigenous practices changed which trees grew, for instance the Gary oak was much more prevalent in areas they tended. But old growth was predominantly removed by settlers.

Nope. The woods in Oregon (Willamette Valley) and WA were planted and/or allowed to grow by settlers. There are true old growths along the coast and higher up the mountains.

If you want to specifically hike through the old-growth forests, Olympic Peninsula in WA is the best option.

Humans were modifying the Earth on the continent-wide scale long before the industrial age.

Yes, in the Wilamette Valley the indigenous folks maintained Gary Oaks and prevented other trees from growing there. This was open oak savannah, and when the settlers came in they took the land and turned it to agricultural land. What they couldn't plant on, they ignored, and other tree species moved in to land that was previously managed to grow Gary oaks.

I'm a PNW native, you don't need to tell me about the small sliver of old growth we still have in the Olympics.

> Yes, in the Wilamette Valley the indigenous folks maintained Gary Oaks and prevented other trees from growing there.

Yes, and that's a fancy way of saying "used periodic burns" to remove the vegetation to make the land more hospitable for grazers. Meaning more animals to hunt, this was arguably a form of agriculture and also served to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.

> I'm a PNW native, you don't need to tell me about the small sliver of old growth we still have in the Olympics.

Then you should actually learn about the history, and not its Disneyified version.

You keep saying things that agree with me, smugly insisting I don't understand. You are very confusing to converse with.

You’re arguing against someone who said “there should never be forrest fires”, but that person doesn’t exist.

Not only do those people exist, they have successfully passed policy in California and elsewhere hamstringing their ability to do prescribed burns.

Well, at the very least, they don't exist in this thread.

There are a lot of such people. The whole Smokey the bear thing was trying to teach people that for decades.

Even if we agree that natural forest fires are good, Smokey the bear is entirely reasonable. Nobody needs to go starting more fires due to negligence.

I'm saying it doesn't matter. If the forest is getting the regular burning it needs anyway someone lighting an additional fire at a different time isn't going to make any difference.

Not that you shouldn't be careful, you can get yourself hurt in a natural fire (but it shouldn't be such a large fire that it kills you). Leave no trace should be your goal. Even if fire itself is something that doesn't matter, there are lots of other parts of leave no trace that that will also result in less fires.

It's pretty reasonable to think that a person-caused fire will be way worse than a natural fire, since the people ones will be distributed far closer to other people-things, like houses and other people.