Hacker News Reader

Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

General reminder that fires are a part of the natural order of things, and if anything we've put too much effort into suppressing them.

Fire allows new growth, cuts down on disease, and gives the soil access to nutrients.

It also consumes fuel, meaning subsequent burns won't be as large. When you tamp down all naturally occurring fires, you set yourself up for an out of control blaze later on.

View on HN

> General reminder that fires are a part of the natural order of things, and if anything we've put too much effort into suppressing them.

This appears to be a case of the naturalistic fallacy. Additionally, the article cites that the predicted cause of the fires is decreased moisture content in the fuel, not abundance of the fuel due to firefighting efforts.

It's also relatively accepted in US forestry research, as far as I'm aware. The policy (starting almost a century ago) of "put out every fire asap" worked for a few decades with increasing difficulty, but now many fires are simply uncontrollable and much more intense due to the increase in ground debris that would have normally been burned off far earlier. Oh, and that means that now we get crown fires instead of ground fires, killing trees that would have survived a smaller fire. Hooray?

This page [0] gives a decent overview of the US history in my opinion.

In short - no fires may be better than some weak fires, for certain utility functions. Unfortunately, no fires + time + not cleaning forests = huge fires, which are far worse than either.

0: https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...

The article is about European forestry research. There's no indication here that those researchers aren't intimately familiar with US forestry research; however, they did provide a causal explanation for these fires (i.e. climate change) and did not indicate that any further causes needed to be identified.

Again, what you're saying, while possibly true and if true probably accounted for, isn't necessarily relevant, as climate change by itself is a sufficient explanation of this phenomenon.

Did you read the link at the bottom of the article? "Human activity responsible for 96% of wildfires around mediterranean basin"

https://www.euronews.com/2019/07/05/human-activity-responsib...

I don't know how well we could generalize this - but IIRC that's likely the case with this summer's fires in Siberia too; couldn't find much about wildfire causes in the US though.

Saying "fire is good" doesn't strike me as much better than "fire is bad". Surely there are sustainable rates and unsustainable rates.

No fire would be great, but isn't possible

a very small amount of fire is bad, because it also isn't possible, it leads to large fire later which is bad

too much fire is bad because obviously fire is bad

Goldilocks just right fire is good

That sounds sensible, but what would a natural fire be caused by?

A droplet of water focusing the sunlight onto a point below it is the only thing I can think of, but then there is cooling water right on top of it, and as soon as that begins to evaporate the focus also disappears.

Edit: ah yes of course, lightning. Thanks everyone.

Lightning is a major natural cause.

Lightning, I guess

Lightning usually

Maybe in remote lands like in Australia but not in a overpopulated and exploited region like Europe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com