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Comment by Florin_Andrei | Hacker News Reader

> The damage, when you see it up close, is stunning. You'll be driving along a highway and see miles, and miles, and miles of dead trees standing there, waiting to burn.

Is this a cyclical kind of thing, or does it seem to be unprecedented? I'm asking because I know nothing about this topic.

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It seems to be unprecedented, at least on the time scale of "middle-aged human". On geological time scales, you'd have to ask someone much older. :-)

edit: for a less flippant reply, a lot of folks don't realize that vast swathes of what we now consider dense forest were all logged to the ground from about 1800 to about 1930. That's what makes places like Sequoia National Park and Big Basin State Park and parts of Humboldt and Mendocino counties so unique -- they're the remnants of old growth forest, and it's a very different kind of forest.

So perhaps it's not right to talk about this in terms of the "health of the forest". Much of the current forest could die and be replaced by entirely new forest over the next hundred years.

A better question is, what kind of environment do we want to be able to enjoy during our lifetime? That environment is currently struggling.

I don't much care for hiking in burn scars and dealing with muddy places in the Winter, so I'm pretty interested in what's happening to the forests right now.

> I don't much care for hiking in burn scars and dealing with muddy places in the Winter, so I'm pretty interested in what's happening to the forests right now.

So I'm from Colorado and spend a decent amount of time in the mountains. I've read an argument that our over protection of the forest is potentially to blame for some of the problems right now. We do everything we can to protect it from forest fires, and now its being chocked out by dead trees and overgrowth. If this argument is wrong however I would like to understand it better.

Yeah, fwiw that argument has become pretty convincing to me too. I used to be staunchly opposed to any kind of forest management, and now I'm much less bothered by seeing a carefully-thinned forest area.

Manzanita is one of the bigger reasons (for me). I hate that damn plant with a fiery passion, and it's one of the first things in the sierra to come back and take over an area after it burns.

Well-managed forest areas tend to have much much less manzanita.

+1 to yucky manzanita. pollen stinks so bad.

only worthwhile thing they produce are the burls, but those are worthless for turning since they have a high likelihood of containing rocks.

They talked about that at Yosemite as well. Before they were driven out, the Ahwahnechee would periodically start fires that cleared out the undergrowth and made the valley much more open.

Here's a drawing from 1855 of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point by Thomas A. Ayres: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hampton/images/...

And here's one from Inspation Point in 2013 : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Yosemite...

The forest has become very dense which makes fires larger, more intense, and incredibly difficult to control. It also makes the forest more susceptible to pine beetle outbreaks (they spread faster when the trees are close), and that makes fires even more likely.

It's now the accepted understanding that past aggressive fire prevention contributed to giant burns. There's a lot of substance to that, and letting smaller burns happen and even introducing some controlled burns are considered part of good management practices now.

This is not all that's going on, though, in the Sierras and elsewhere. Other contributing factors:

1) Drought. Severe drought. Trees need water. There's less of it.

2) The heat. Higher average temperatures (climate change!) affect how living trees use/need moisture and how dead trees turn to tinder.

3) Where these don't kill, they stress, and things like the current bark beetle infestation epidemic happen: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-milne/pine-tree-deaths-p...

Fortunately, in the United States, we have several robust federal agencies dedicated to... wait. We massively cut funding to all of them years ago (http://wilderness.org/blog/sequestration-continues-threaten-... ). Largely under pressure of wild fantasies from the growing unhinged wing of the Republican party (which, let's hope, has reached its apotheosis in Trump) whose economics and governing philosophy are on par with their ability to recognize and admit science into a discussion of how we handle our environment.

So, yeah. Overprotection has been a problem. But prescribed burns have found their way into Forest Service philosophy (http://www.fs.fed.us/fire/management/rx.html ). And it's not going to solve the problem.

If only we were as able to let observant study and good stewardship guide us in other areas.

> 1) Drought. Severe drought. Trees need water. There's less of it.

Due to alfalfa, almond/pistachios, pastures, rice, corn, other field crops, vineyards, other truck crops, cotton, grain, and tomato, primarily, according to: http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows-not-almonds-...

I was surprised about alfalfa and pasture.

And "The cattle sector of the Brazilian Amazon, incentivized by the international beef and leather trades, has been responsible for about 80% of all deforestation in the region, or about 14% of the world's total annual deforestation, making it the world's largest single driver of deforestation."

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

Convince your friends not to eat as much meat, especially beef. It's bad for the environment.

Unless you believe rivers flow uphill into the mountains, farming has nothing to do with trees dying in the mountains. Salmon downstream in rivers have a complaint, trees upstream do not.

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