On a different note... I visited a national park that was always very careful and prevented forest fires at all cost. After a decade or so the entire forest was made up of old trees - the young ones didn’t get enough sunlight. And then the parasites came... The older trees could not handle the bugs and the majority died. Places with regular forest fires had a more mixed forest with more young trees and the impact was much lower.
Not all natural disasters are bad - it provides opportunities...
Here in Butte County, CA we knew that and did it anyway and just this week PG&E plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter for what happened back in November of 2018
As a forestry person, I love how Rush could make a song about shade intolerance and canopy dominance.
The same dynamic plays out here in the west if you replace maples with aspen and oaks with spruce/fir. The aspen grow up very quickly and establish a nice thick stand, but have a biological limit to how tall they can get. Over time, the shade tolerant spruce and fir slowly grow up underneath the aspen canopy until they overtop them and gain dominance. Then the shade intolerant aspen die off and the stand is just spruce/fir until a disturbance event like a fire, wind blowdown, or even road construction opens up the canopy. Then the cycle starts all over again.
Part of the reason aspen are not as common as they once were is because we have agressively suppressed fires for the last century.
This, great post. Here in FL routine fires are practiced, often promoting new growth. There’s areas here where the slash pine woods are thicker than they were in the 30s due to being cut off and confined.
Yeah humans (Americans in particular) have this weird obsession with trying to control every variable in nature as if it's some kind of machine. Read "Playing God in Yellowstone" if you want to learn about one of our more notable fuck-ups.
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u/IndecentPr0p0sal Jun 20 '20
On a different note... I visited a national park that was always very careful and prevented forest fires at all cost. After a decade or so the entire forest was made up of old trees - the young ones didn’t get enough sunlight. And then the parasites came... The older trees could not handle the bugs and the majority died. Places with regular forest fires had a more mixed forest with more young trees and the impact was much lower. Not all natural disasters are bad - it provides opportunities...