How Fire, Once a Friend of Forests, Became a Destroyer | Hacker News Reader

How Fire, Once a Friend of Forests, Became a Destroyer

news.nationalgeographic.com

30 pointsDrScump23 comments

Having been a wild land firefighter. I can attest that the public perception also plays a factor into this. I live in a city that is close to many large national forests. We yearly get large amount of smoke were I live. Every time this happens there is a large public outcry about the quality of the air. The forest service is extremely sensitive to public discontent. So they attempt to put the fires out as quickly as possible.

This year we had a slow burning fire that was the perfect type of fire that you would let burn till the first rains come. It eats up the undergrowth but stays out of the canopy. But the amount of smoke in our valley caused such an uproar, that the forest service brought in massive amounts of resources to put the fire out quickly instead of letting in burn itself out.

As long as the public doesn't want to be bothered by the side effects of fire, then the forest service will continue to be forced to put fire out in ways that may not be the most beneficial for the forests.

I'd just like to add that meddling humans putting out fires makes things worse. If we kept our fingers out of her machine, nature would do a fine job managing the forests herself using periodic smaller fires to clear out underbrush. When that happens, the big ones are fewer and less severe.

Maybe we should just protect towns and leave the rest to the expert.

no one is forced, its all political by 'look at me im doing something' types

I used to attend a private school bordering RMNP where we did a lot of outreach work with the park and surrounding community. Including, a significant amount of wildfire mitigation work.

I couldn't agree more with your statements. Wildfire mitigation is extremely labor-intensive and -- in the bigger picture -- not very useful. Controlled burning in a 'healthy' ecosystem can have a much greater positive impact.

I get really upset by the persistent culture of 'environmental do-gooders' that have no clue how biological ecosystems work. Such people put way too much value on (animal and plant) life and conveniently ignore the limitations of sustainability in natural ecosystems.

I don't really have an answer to fix it. The problem isn't that we don't have the ability to mitigate massive natural disasters. It's that people can't see beyond their vanity enough to realize that natural environments don't exist to perpetuate life. 'Healthy' ecosystems have constant cycles of destruction and renewal. Our influence has been the greatest negative influence on that process.

Of course fires are 'bad' - if you're a bear or a deer. Fires are adaptive for the organisms that produce them, that is, pine forests, which use fire as part of their natural ecological cycle (by filling the forest up with fire-promoting oils and dry tinder) to wipe out competition and proliferate.

We only have a problem with this because we still live on the ground. If we lived in airships, like I've been suggesting all along, then forest fires would become a wonderful natural spectacle, and people would pilot their airships to the Rockies for the summer just to catch a view.

Big wildfires would still be a threat to airships. I'd imagine that piloting a ship in the near vicinity of such a fire might be dangerous, because it will have some sort of effect (I admit I'm not entirely sure what sort) on the airspace above and around it. But maybe you can view it from a distance.

omg this is hilarious

Everyone living in airships, really?

Hydrogen is the second most abundant element in the universe..

Also absurdly flammable -- the Hindenburg was flying on hydrogen. I certainly wouldn't want to be in a hydrogen-filled airship floating above a forest fire!

(Helium would work better, but I think it gets pretty expensive.)

You don't need a gas. Just use fixed-frame volumes made of, say, graphene layers and fill it with vacuum. As long as your frame can hold the required force, no problem. There might even be metallic foams that do the trick.

The main reason fire became a destroyer in two of Arizona's biggest fires, was mostly due to freshly-degreed-environmentalists pushing policy decisions based more on theory than on practical on the ground facts, and dismissing local knowledge of the forest. In this case, they refused to allow thinning out of the forest by loggers in certain areas (not talking about clear cut) and did only the tiniest of controlled burns. The result: a forest full of material ready to go up in flames all at once.

I admit I didn't believe my grandpa when he said it would happen, but when it did I immediately recognized the truth in his words.

Is there any evidence that logging helps prevent or reduce the effects of forest fires? Forests have evolved over thousands of years to tolerate fires without any logging at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/opinion/more-logging-wont-...

I thought the bigger problem (aside from unusually dry weather in many places) was decades of aggressively fighting fires rather than letting them burn (which is a natural part of forests). The growth of housing into rural forest land exacerbates the problem since fire protection agencies need to make the choice between letting houses burn or letting a forest burn to prevent an even bigger fire the next time.

Maybe it is different in the West, but a "good" fire is one that burns through the undergrowth and only scorches healthy trees. I see them regularly here in the southeast.

The problem is that if you go without fire for too long, when it does finally burn it will be so hot that it'll burn up even healthy trees.

So, I am not an expert, but I can easily imagine that logging (and the side effects of logging) would have a beneficial effect, because there isn't as much fuel to burn, but that wouldn't be necessary if we'd had controlled burns all the time.

(NB that the linked opinion article claims that is not the case - but that's the logic.)

I'm not seeing much discussion either about the massive old-growth deforestation our country underwent the last few hundred years. I can't believe that's not a contributing factor either.

Laurisilva shows that this is only a phase. In the end forests create enough water and stop being easily flammable. This means more water, more rain and more money for people, but requires lots of time, and respect.

One paragraph of this, in particular, was a revelation:

"The science of forestry grew up in temperate Europe — France and Germany particularly — and there, unlike most parts of the world, there's no natural basis for fire. Fire was seen as a human problem, caused by people, and that attitude was exported to foresters in the United States."

A bit of a side issue but "By 1978, so did the Forest Service. It was like watching the Berlin Wall come down."

Can you say something at a specific time was like watching something else that would not happen for a decade?

You can fathom even before the berlin wall came down, what a sea change the wall coming down would mean.

The Yellowstone fires of 1988 were a big deal at the time (much hand wringing), but the park has coped:

   Not long after the fires ended, plant and tree species
   quickly reestablished themselves, and natural plant
   regeneration has been highly successful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988

Proactively thinning selective regions of forests and controlled burns seem to be the route forward to prevent (rather than react to) large-scale fires.

This short video from MinuteEarth, while not going into much detail, does have a lot of good references

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX1xnWPSjKg

Thinning forests and controlled burns are incredibly resource intensive and costly. Executing a controlled burn is hard, the weather, the crew and the equipment have to cooperate.

As somebody who has had hands-on experience doing fire mitigation work. Calling the work 'labor intensive' is a severe understatement. Especially, in remote areas.

The problem partly has do to with the lack of zoning laws in forested regions. People build wherever they want, usually in locations that are extremely difficult to protect from wildfires.

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