Forest Management and wildfires
These last few years, we all have heard of massive wildfires in various regions of the world.
In California, Australia, Portugal, the Amazon rainforest and even in places like Siberia, where we don’t imagine wildfires as a normal thing at all.
The size and scope of some wildfires these last few years have been increasing regularly, which makes it worrisome.
What many people may not know about wildfires is that they aren’t all the same.
When people think of wildfires, we imagine they are always bad. The less the better. And though that is a good rule of thumb, it isn’t perfect.
In some environments, of course, like rainforests, for example, wildfires should never happen. It’s a humid climate meant for incredibly dense vegetation to grow, and has been that way for millenia. Wildfires in those places occur now, because, for example in Brazil, farmers burn the woods to clean up space for plantations or grazing. So in this situation it is correct to think that the less wildfires the better, with the best possible outcome being no fires at all.
But in some other environments, wildfires have been naturally occurring through the millenia. Caused by lightning strikes for example.
Some forests have used fires to clean themselves. For example in some places in California or Portugal, this used to be the case. The trees let combustible material fall, making kind of a small combustible bed, which made it easy to burn, and when a lightning struck the ground, it ignited and very slowly and calmly, burned the floor of the forest, cleaning up that material, leaving the bigger trees untouched.
When the first settlers went to California, there were reports of people saying they could take the caravans through the woods, through the middle of the trees, because there was no big vegetation in the middle of them. That was what many of the natural forests of California looked like before human intervention.
There were even ritual burning of the forests in California, made by tribes of native people that lived with the land ,so they understood it.
Then, new policies had a new kind of intervention, which was fire suppression. It even outlawed these rituals. Meaning, people would try to stop all fires, even if it was just slowly burning the ground. Thinking of course that we were doing a good thing by stopping it.
What eventually happened is that vegetation grew so much that in many forests in the same places in California now, people can barely walk through the woods, because it is so dense, much less take a caravan through the middle of it.
That dense vegetation, when it ignites, creates incredibly powerful fires that reach the canopy and burn the bigger trees with them.
Another thing that’s happening is that fires like these, are also incredibly hot. Much hotter than it’s supposed to, so, the heat kills all native organisms in the soil, destroys the native seed banks and kills the older trees.
The result, as you know, is absolutely devastating. Getting to the point where even houses get engulfed by the fires and people die.
This way, wildfires become, not a cleaning process, but a destruction one, and terrifying at that.
Also we need to consider that humans now cause the large majority of ignitions, accidentally or not. Lightning isn’t the biggest cause anymore of course. And also, climate change makes for bigger, more intense and longer lasting wildfires.
So, not only climate change and human intervention would make it worse, but also, we are letting this incredibly powerful combustible vegetation grow so big that it creates what is essentially a time bomb in every forest of some regions that used to have naturally occurring small fires. We made for the worst possible outcome, and we see it on the news every summer.
Politicians should try to learn more about how the forests of the regions they take care of. How to manage them properly. Listen to the scientific community that studies each specific place, and apply policy accordingly. Some regions are clearly being mismanaged and some change would be welcome.
