Jack Ohman for August 05, 2021

The problem isn’t so much that, which is only in effect in SOME forest areas (mostly in the west), the PROBLEM is that the policy for far too long has been to keep ALL fires away from the trees. The only thing most of the current crop of forest science folk agree on is that the fire load in the forests NEEDS to be reduced. Prescribed burning is one of the choices, but brush hogging and hand-thinning are other options that may be better in particular circumstances.

Bottom line though: Climate is changed and changing… and the forests are not adapted to how hot and dry they are.

Better get raking those forests!

Forests NEED occasional fires to prosper, look it up in a real science source.

Maybe learn about forest management from the first nations??? They did a pretty good job before the Europeans showed up.

If Trump were still President, I could understand this lapse in Leadership, but Biden should know better.

Controlled burns do help, but with the drought, and the heat, these fires are unavoidable.

Pine Borer beetles are active longer due to climate change. With the additional active time they have killed hundreds of thousand pine trees in the western forests. Dead trees burn even easier and help feed the start and spread of massive fires.

GET OUT THE TRUMP RAKES!!!!

I don’t remember these fires at all when I was a kid.

Forests are complex communities about which we know little. I recommend the recent book “Finding the Mother Tree” by S. Simard for a detailed description of the structure of the forest of British Columbia. The interactions of all components of the forest, trees of various ages, the lower brush, the fungal communities and the various animals, all contribute to a mutually stable community, a community which man has not been helping survive.

We used to live in “Beautiful British Columbia.” Now it’s “Burned Up British Columbia.”

Are you okay, Jack?

What am I missing? There are burn policies for controlled burns; then policies for areas that can be contained but not forcibly extinguished. And then there’s the crap we’re seeing now caused either by reckless individuals and failed regulations on folks like PG&E.

Experts have been calling for this for literally 40-50 years.

You either have to clean the forest floor of deadwood and debris or you have to let nature take its course with fires. This ain’t rocket science.