Comment by jwlake
Comment by jwlake 9 days ago
If they stopped funding that completely it would halt the problem. Fire is part of nature.
Comment by jwlake 9 days ago
If they stopped funding that completely it would halt the problem. Fire is part of nature.
No my point is stop overfunding firefighting. Over fund forest management.
At the risk of being an idiot, is the problem firefighting? Is the problem that we're continuing a losing battle? That, even when we had proper forest management, the costs were still shifting towards firefighting? Warming making everything drier on average?
In the end though the only one we're truly hurting is ourselves and our desired life style when it burns out of control.
Firefighting makes the next fire worse. You need to have a theory that doesn't involve more expensive fire fighting every time someone builds a new house. This is general means defending towns and letting the mountainside burn.
Your point of stopping fire suppression has something to it.
Though, 3 issues I see with complete disengagement: (1) there are whole towns that would burn down, avoidably so if some fires were not suppressed
(2) modern fires are rangers and turn the landscape into Savannah. This is not necessary. Healthy forests would be fire resistant and more fires could just run their course (in other words, not suppressing fires can lead to CA forests being removed)
(3) kinda related to (2), the wet/dry seasons creates a lot of burnabke grasses and bushes that pop up. Prescribed burns would tamp that down, giving forests more time to age and be fire resistant
Fire is part of nature, but many of these fires are caused by target shooters, OHV users, and even from home construction. It doesn't make sense to take torches to the forest and then claim it's fine because fire is natural.
Fire is going to happen. The more you prevent fire the bigger the fire becomes when it does happen.
Fire is going to happen to a certain level, given a certain evironment. Again, if people show up and start burning everything around them, fires that would not have happened at all will burn valuable places. I don't need to have preventative fires wash through my living room to maintain an acceptable level of destruction; I just don't do things that will burn down my house inside.
Removing the human-caused fires from the picture will reduce the number of fires but the fuel will still be there, the fires that remain will be bigger.
So is death. Interestingly we've responded by trying to minimize it where rational. Part of preventing fire is preventing death. Fires also shut down roads which can be a major problem where alternative routes don't exist.
A wholesale "do not prescribed burn" is not sensible. Determining which areas are high and low value and then concentrating what resources you have on the highest value areas is.