Comments

1
Forest fires restart certain species and make salmonid's happy.
2
I'm sure all those people living outside the cities in their scenic forested lots will be happy to pay some extra taxes to help prevent forest fires, right?
3

Bush...Bush...didn't he appoint Justice Roberts as Chief of the Supreme Court.

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4
oh fuck, what a dumbass to bring bush into this. look, genius, people were highgrading forests (going after the big trees) long before dubya, or his grandfather for that matter, were even born.
5
Forest fires aren't necessarily a bad thing. They provide a process to cleanup and restart a forest when it gets too old to survive. It also seems especially stupid to try to stop forest fires in a diseased forest. Fire prevention often only increases the fuel load and increases the overall size of the fires. If it saves human life, fine. Otherwise we need to get used to allowing our forests to burn.
6
There's a difference between your run-of-the-mill forest fires that clear out brush and fertilize the soil and what you are possibly dealing with during pine-beatle epidemics. When you have large portions of forest with dead, dry timber it burns so hot that it removes all usable nutrients, essentially scorching the earth of all new growth for decades. Thinning up dead trees and underbrush helps to do what forest fires do naturally without the risk of total destruction.
7
Ugh, always the same public trend with the environment, if somethings good, taking it to the extreme is obviously the best. In the 20th century it was "No fire at all" and apparently in the 21st the average person has gotten it through their head that fire can be good, so it's "Fire in all situations, even if it's so intense it tops the crowns of the trees and kills them". Get the same thing with California brushland all the time. You have to repeatedly explain why entire mountainsides being reduced to an ashen wasteland is actually a bad thing even if occasional fire is good.

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