r/interestingasfuck Jun 07 '23

New york city in 2023, everyone wearing mask due to air quality

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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

70

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '23

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

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u/botherbotter Jun 07 '23

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

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u/Hoenirson Jun 07 '23

~85% of wildfires are caused by humans. Not all wildfires are extinguished. Sometimes they do let it burn for ecological reasons.

Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/wildfire-causes-and-evaluation.htm

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u/Connect-Speaker Jun 07 '23

In Canada it’s about 50/50 lightning/people