I mean the forest service has been doing controlled burns for at least decades if not more, there are a few exceptions in reserved “old growth forests” but those are small in comparison with the entirety of federal forests, is this tweet talking about a very specific location like Yosemite?
There’s a TED talk on the web somewhere explaining that forest fires in the US have been steadily getting worse...because there haven’t been enough natural forest fires. They got too good at stopping them, which now means there’s too many trees, and when forest fires DO happen they are now much larger and often unstoppable
We've gone through the exact same loop here in Australia. Aboriginals used to controlled burn. Now we know how important it is.
Despite this - it's a lot harder to control burn these days with so many houses in the bush - while back pre colonisation you could have just let a fire off and not worried too much about it. So it's not a silver bullet
Darksidedrive on August 27th, 2020 at 22:43 UTC »
I mean the forest service has been doing controlled burns for at least decades if not more, there are a few exceptions in reserved “old growth forests” but those are small in comparison with the entirety of federal forests, is this tweet talking about a very specific location like Yosemite?
HyperionRedwood on August 27th, 2020 at 23:09 UTC »
There’s a TED talk on the web somewhere explaining that forest fires in the US have been steadily getting worse...because there haven’t been enough natural forest fires. They got too good at stopping them, which now means there’s too many trees, and when forest fires DO happen they are now much larger and often unstoppable
GeoffreyGeoffson on August 27th, 2020 at 23:25 UTC »
We've gone through the exact same loop here in Australia. Aboriginals used to controlled burn. Now we know how important it is.
Despite this - it's a lot harder to control burn these days with so many houses in the bush - while back pre colonisation you could have just let a fire off and not worried too much about it. So it's not a silver bullet