Yea I think that's it
Though I don't know the exact details on that w.r.t. controlled burns, because parts of the federal government are definitely very on board with controlled burns (like say the US Forest Service). I dunno what's going on there.
Though I don't know the exact details on that w.r.t. controlled burns, because parts of the federal government are definitely very on board with controlled burns (like say the US Forest Service). I dunno what's going on there.
I'll never forget my thoughts at the time: "Those PhD's are so smart, surely they are right and these old-timers are just being curmudgeonly"... then years later the forest went up and over 450,000 acres burned, and then not many years later, another roughly 538,000 acres went up.
It was then when I realized how my putting of academia on a pedestal was a major mistake, and then I went and apologized to my grandfather for being dismissive.
My terse summary is that the forest service likes to ship people around, so they aren't in their local forest, so they end up in ecosystems they don't understand as well as the locals but because of their tendency to look down their nose at the locals, they would dismiss knowledge that was trying to be given to them.
I love the forest service, don't get me wrong (much rather have that than BLM!!!) but there are some major flaws in the forest management bureaucracy. To their credit, those fires basically forced change on them because it became too obvious their previous methods were so wrong.
Where I live in Oregon, part of "why don't they do more?" is that there simply wasn't the money to do it, from what I understand, along with some of the other technical reasons mentioned in other comments.
You can see this for yourself by reading the laws and policy discussions that created the US National Forest system.
here's a study on how climate change is reducing the window for prescribed burns: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00993-1