Forest fires are natural and important. By doing it in a controlled fashion, you limit the damage an unplanned fire can cause. I’ve seen forestry people do it. They had a truck with a literal fuckin flamethrower on the back just driving by and torching brush on the side of the road and letting it spread.
Strange. I wonder if this is the same as “hunters need to hunt deers because we have no wolves”.
Normally trees die and stay there, etc. I never heard that natural old growth forests need wild fires.
It depends on the forest, but there are fire adapted forests that benefit from fire. We’ve completely changed the understory by suppressing fire, meaning the succession of the forest is totally different now. Also many non-native invasive plants, that aren’t fire adapted, are thriving and blocking sunlight to native seedlings. The lack of fire has also made the tick problem worse.
BTW I should mention, when the forest burns often (once every 6-10 years), then you get “good” fires. Fires which are less than a meter tall and quickly move through the leaf litter and scrub layer. Trees are left intact, nutrients are recycled into the soil, new growth of fire-adapted species returns quickly.
If you don’t get frequent fires all that stuff builds up, and in fifty years you get a total conflagration that climbs into the overstory and creates a raging inferno. This is what you see on the news. These are bad and can completely destroy a forest for decades or even centuries.
