Comment by legitster
The US Forest Service used to deliver 12 billion board feet of lumber a year. The sale of this lumber helped fund the org and its mission. Environmental lawsuits from activists in the 90s drastically restricted the amount of logging being done on these lands and production dropped to a trickle.
(The Biden administration increased the amount of logging in the last few years from a historic low. But the goal is still only to log up to 4 billion board feet next year.)
While not a complete replacement for each other, prescribed burns are specifically more necessary now because of the lack of logging. And more importantly, these agencies are only collecting a fraction of the fees they once did to sustain their mission while having more unharvested forests to maintain.
Can you provide more evidence that logging suppressed the modern super fires?
It strikes me as implausible and unrelated: - fire fighting costs is now exponentially more AFAIK
- that revenue from the 90s might not have gone back to forests
- while billions of log feet sounds a lot, it might not be
- young forests burn, old forests are fire resistant. That logging creates young forests
- logging requires access. Places inaccessible will still burn and still be a problem
- fire breaks from logging only helps so much with santa anna style winds that blow embers very, very far
- logging does not remove undergrowth, per the article it creates a ladder situation where tree tops will combust
- old growth west coast forests are fire adapted and burns are necessary. Logging and suppression do not seem like the right solutions
- conditions have changed since the 90s. Different rainfall patterns, different cycle of draughts, 30 more years of fire suppression and combustible materials, and 30 more years of (hyper fast) climate change (significant changes have occurred in that minuscule amount of time)