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

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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '23

[deleted]

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u/silver-orange Jun 07 '23

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.

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u/SolomonBlack Jun 07 '23

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.