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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

A major cause of the problem is that we put out the fires in the first place. The forest is supposed to burn. Left to its own devices it will burn periodically in small low intensity fires. If we put those out, fuel will build up until you get the massive wildfires we have now.

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That’s why you need forest rangers, isn’t it? (... I’m not really sure what this job is called in English.) If you don’t allow fires to clean out fallen, rotten or decrepit trees, you can have people that just walk the forest and clear them by hand. That doesn’t mean there won’t still be fires, of course, but they won’t be fatally bad unless you happen to be there at the time.

Then again, I’m thinking of a pine forest in a temperate climate, in which a fire of this kind doesn’t really harm the mature trees much. I think some other types just burn out instead and have a succession of ecosystems that restores the resulting patch from the literal (extremely fertile) ashes over the course of several decades. I’ve no idea where a California forest ranks on this scale, and while a forest may be completely fine with letting many square kilometres be completely razed and then heal over the course of a couple of centuries, as long as it happens rarely enough, humans will be understandably miffed.

I think you're seriously underestimating the sheer size of US National forests in California and the rest of the West coast. Wild fires have already burned well over a million acres in California and Oregon this year alone. How many people would it take to maintain an area that size? Now consider that a million acres is something like 3% of the area covered by national forests just in those two states.

I can tell you from first-hand experience that clearing and maintaining a forest is extremely hard work. I have about 4 acres of forest on my property and 3 years in I still haven't fully cleared all of the dead trees and branches. Granted it's not my full time job, but I would estimate that a single person is capable of maintaining tens to maybe hundreds of acres per year. That implies that preventing fires via full suppression + fuels reduction would require hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers to be effective.

I’m aware that North American forests are absolutely immense compared to everything I’ve ever seen. And yes, forest-keeping is hard labor (duh).

But there’s partly a question of involvement here: if you don’t meddle in the forest and don’t care to make it friendly to humans, it will (barring climate shifts that I’m in no way qualified to talk about) mostly take care of itself. It’s when you start allowing people inside and/or putting out small fires that you start having problems. So if you don’t have the necessary manpower, maybe don’t do that? Either take responsibility or leave it alone. You will still need firebreaks and people to walk them separating the two parts, though.

(Although given how much forest there is in the US compared in Europe, it would be foolish to expect to get by with a comparable amount of people, and a hundred thousand rangers, while undeniably very expensive and a lot of effort, does not fundamentally look like an unreasonable figure.)

It's called the Wildland Urban Interface, and unfortunately we've already built millions of houses here. Now we are paying the true cost of our foolishness.

Most houses will need 100 to 200 feet of cleared vegetation around them. Instead we love the look of large pine trees and brush right against our homes. The term is 'built to burn'

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

Sure - but that doesn’t help us now, as fuel has built up in many areas to the point fires are apocalyptic. The time to go that route would have been in the 50’s or latest 70’s.

It's a start at least.

But from the best and brightest in the world? People who put rovers on Mars but don't want to put a fire out that could destroy half of their state?

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