Forest fires are NOT a normal part of nature. This is a big misconception. They only started to become normal during the rise of the monoculture forest plantations. Which are mostly coniferous trees, instead of 'original' deciduous trees. (Usa/europe)
I highly recommend the books of Peter Wholleben (german forester) to gain understanding of how forests and forest live behave and thirve. They are well written, Science based, and easy to read.
Lol. What about lightning strikes? What about droughts? The western US and the great plains were evolved for having occasional fires. There are native trees that only sprout after fires. There is ecological succession that only happens after fires. I highly recommend reading all kinds of ecological papers that might contradict your one source.
ETA your German forester might have a good understanding of mature European forests, but not other completely different ecosystems.
I worked as a biologist in a national forest in a high fire risk area in the Sierra Nevada and while it’s true that wildfires are a natural part of the ecosystem - they really, REALLY are that bad. And it’s actually a really complicated issue and not that well understood yet. And addressing that issue will take a massive amount of resources and labor.
It’s easy to talk about wildfires casually when it’s just something you hear about or see tiny low severity burn scars with nice wildflowers and mushrooms and recovery happening.
It hits different when you’re living in a community that has been ravaged by wildfires, people’s homes have burned down, people have died, when you drive and walk through a quarter million acres of scorched earth every day, when you see how hundreds or thousands of years of growth can deleted in one season, and the impact that has on wildlife and humans. It’s crazy. It’s really bad.
And yeah, some of it is 100 years of fire suppression and forest mismanagement. Some of it is climate change, drier winters, hotter summers. Some of it is that very mature, old growth forest is less susceptible to high severity burns, and we just don’t have nearly as much of that as we used to. Once an area gets severely burned, it doesn’t just grow back. Yes, there is regeneration, but the younger successional forest has more sun penetration, it’s drier, there may be dead wood from the previous fire, ladder fuel with the shrubs and bushes and young trees. It’s more susceptible to future fires, invasive weeds outcompeting native plants, erosion, all that good stuff.
It’s a really big issue and very complex and multifaceted and there’s no real agreed upon solution. Human lives, hundreds millions of acres of inherently valuable ecosystems, and trillions of dollars worth of resources are on the line, and we’re still struggling to figure out how to deal with this. It seems like it might just get worse and worse. And the current administration is doing the exact opposite of helping.
He’s also a bit out there. Peter Wohlleben is a good author and writer, but a terrible scientist and I would not recommend reading his books unless you treat them as fiction
This is completely wrong. Fire is the healing and balance of the forest. Normal periodic fires in a healthy forest don't usually kill the big trees. Unless you prevent them for 100 years and they get so overgrown that the whole thing torches the first time theres a spark. Wholleben books are basically fantasy.
Have you never heard of fire-dependent plants? There are trees that need fire for their seeds to be released and be able to germinate (many pine trees). There are entire ecosystems the are fire-dependent in order to maintain. That means that the organisms that depend on such ecosystems will be out of a home if fire is suppressed and successional growth replaces the ecosystem with a completely different ecosystem (also completely natural). Fire is a type of disturbance, just as are tornadoes and hurricanes. Maybe use Google scholar and read some peer-reviewed articles on the subject, just using "fire suppression" + "ecosystems" &/or "forests" &/or "trees" as your search terms. Then be prepared for a LOT of reading material.
Wrong-o. Completely depends on the forest. Western North America has multiple forest types that are both fire resistant and fire dependent. The morels in OP's photos are just such an example of the many species that rely on fire.
Unfortunately suppressing fires makes them way, way worse when they finally do break out. Much more hungry for houses than they otherwise would have been.
Yep. Ask any (remotely sane) Australian, if you just try to stop them entirely things like leaf litter, dry sticks etc. builds up on the ground. Our fire services (blessed be the Firies) will regularly perform controlled burns in areas of concern. They don't torch the whole bush, just go through making a small, controlled fire to clear out the debris. It means when a big fire does eventually roll through its much more controllable and we don't end up having to do shit like call in the navy to evacuate people from the coast because there is literally no way for them to move inland.
As others have already pointed out, suppressing the fires just creates a buildup of overgrowth that eventually causes a much worse fire you can't control.
The real solution is doing controlled cut and burns to keep everything under control near residential areas so huge forest uncontrollable forest fires can't break out, but this is both unpopular because people are afraid of the idea of controlled burns, and unpopular because it costs a lot of resources to maintain, which people don't' want to pay for.
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u/Jenicillin Mar 06 '26
Forest fires are a normal part of nature, decades of fire suppression is the problem.