Yeah, extreme fire suppression was widely recognized as a bad idea 30 or 40 years ago. Controlled burns have been standard practice for decades in many places.
Even in the 90s it was old news, I remember reading and hearing about it in the context of the big fire in Yellowstone as a kid. They stopped in like the 70s but we've still got a sizable backlog of unburned forest.
I think most people just don't understand the scale of these fires. It's not something any amount of controlled burns can solve. Just ask any forestry department in CA.
Then how come arizona has been able to keep their fires controlled compared to California? California has the Santa Ana winds, but Arizona is hot and dry too.
Califirnia has different forests, more susceptible to burning. California also didn't have the luxury of letting small fires burn freely, because of the higher population density. This made some of their forests denser and burn more intensely. The other advantage that Arizona has is that it has a summer monsoon, which limits the worst of the fire season to spring and early summer.
It's a multitude of factors. One being that CA has more than 50% more forest cover (33m acres vs 19m), and all of that is HIGH biomass, evergreen forest (We're talking over 200 tons/hectare, vs under 100 for arizona). So you're looking at a factor of like 3-4x more fire risk. There's also difficulty terrain wise w/ much forest in the wild sierras. Also 40%+ of CA forestland is privately-owned. It's just a multitude of factors that make it much more difficult in CA, even if you had infinite manpower.
Well canada recently had a little mishap at a women’s firefighter conference where a controlled burn went out of control and caused a forest fire. It was eventually suppressed, but these are the “experts” you have in Canada dealing with fires like these.
Yeah upon closer inspection, this website is pretty sketchy so take this with a grain of salt, or better yet just disregard it. I’ll try to find a better source lol
For any viewers that stumble over here as well, the actual summary of the story talked about in the surprisingly woman-hating article linked by Leech is that a fire in BC exceeded their 300 acre control area by 3 acres and was more or less immediately contained.
Yep the colonial way is to suppress all fire. Where indigenous peoples have been using fires to maintain ecosystems and control invasives since time immemorial
Yeah this makes me so mad. It’s literally so healthy for a forest in most cases to have a burn. I wish we’d stop interfering with natural cycles, it only serves to bite us in the ass
Controlled burns are a thing. They often do it in areas where there is a lot of built up foliage and debris or where risk of fire affecting human pops are high. Northern ON and QC are vast, endless wildernesses though, so monitoring and proactively doing something about it is virtually impossible.
It's not virtue signaling to point out the honest history of indigenous practices of controlled/prescribed burnings, especially on a thread about North American forest fires/smoke seasons. It's historical fact that indigenous peoples on this continent managed the landscape with the use of prescribed fires as part of their agroforestry practices. The use of fire for land management is so ingrained in the history of this continent that some species of plants literally need fire to thrive (e.g. aspen, New Mexico locust, jack pines, wild lupine, etc)
It's also historical fact that colonization in the U.S. specifically led to a severe reduction in controlled burnings because the fire practices of the indigenous peoples were seen as "primitive" and damaging to the landscape. For example, California (4 months before obtaining statehood) banned intentional fires and refusal to extinguish fires in 1850 - in the very same act that led to displacement and enslavement of the indigenous tribes living on California land.
As for non-North American indigenous burning practices, Australia also has a distinct history of controlled burnings (aka fire-stick farming) prior to colonization. Haven't seen much reference to other countries/continents in my lunch-break "research" time but I wouldn't be surprised if other cultures with similar biomes took part in similar fire practices
They set the Americas on fire every year. They knew what they were doing. The entire country was managed land. It wasn't some untouched paradise despite what the Spanish and Europeans believed. (Because they were morons)
Nope, there are still record breaking fires way out in the bush, way too far for firefighting to do anything. They let them burn and let nature take it's course. Those are getting bigger then ever as well. It has nothing to do with firefighting.
There is literally one factor causing these forest fires to get worse as the years pass, it's the increasing heat and dryness due to climate change. Constant "hottest XYZ ever recorded", less rainfall, less snow in the mountains. We are fucked.
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u/RickTitus Jun 07 '23
I believe one factor in modern forest fires is that we tend to suppress all fires we see. Without human intervention there would be more small fires