Comment by dp-hackernews | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dp-hackernews | Hacker News Reader

Natural fires have been happening naturally for, what millions of years? All of the rest of nature seems to be able to cope with that, and even we've survived up until today...

The seas also get "polluted" by underwater volcanic vents, amongst other natural things, constantly...

It makes no sense to stand over a fire and inhale the smoke, or to drink the water from too close to those vents, but are we really trying to change the nature of the planet?

I mean, who's going to stop the sand from the Sahara Desert making it's way over to the UK for everything that breaths air to breath in, not to mention leaving a layer of red dust everywhere, especially on vehicles and the like, caught by the dew that happens naturally when the temperature changes.

Shouldn't the focus be more on what industry is doing to the air and water and soil, and what we seem to be inadvertently supporting with the present lifestyle?

> All of the rest of nature seems to be able to cope with that, and even we've survived up until today...

Extinctions are a very natural thing, too. Polio is natural. Smallpox was. Humans tend to want some control over the environment they live in.

> Shouldn't the focus be more on what industry is doing to the air and water and soil, and what we seem to be inadvertently supporting with the present lifestyle?

"Is the air clean" statistics should reflect if the air is clean, as a variety of decisions on ventilation, filtration, etc. rely on it. "Is the air polluted by humans" is a different question.

And that desire for control leads humans to suppress small fires, which then leads them to build settlements literally in the middle of the forest and to neglect trimming trees around power lines because fires are kept under control, until, because of drought caused by climate change it's not possible to keep them under control anymore, and then you get huge fires which cause pollution thousands of miles away (and the destruction of the settlements in the middle of the forest and also some which were previously thought at a safe distance)...

There is nothing natural about current levels of wildfire.

That said, global warming isn't the top cause of the problem, either. A century of fire suppression is.

>the sand from the Sahara Desert

Most people forget that the Sahara Desert is man-made. Back during the Cathigenian period, the southern Mediterranian was the breadbasket of Rome, and the land was verdant plains, antelope, hippos, rivers and streams everywhere.

So we killed it.

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