I wonder how many fires as ruthless as the California one it will take for human to finally learn the lesson: let Nature rule.I am not an expert on fire management or on forest ecology . But even I know that Nature has its own way to reduce catastrophic fire: regularly having smaller fires to clear out combustible material.
Obviously that is not the current fire management plan, according to this NYT article. "California has giant ones (fire) because its longtime policies of fire suppression — in which the government has kept fires from their normal cycle — has created huge pockets of fuel that erupt into conflagrations that must be fought."
The sad part is that we have the knowledge but just cannot implement it. What are you going to do with the people whose property are within the danger zone? Kick them out? Buy them out? We just don't seem to be able to deal with these "transaction cost" issues.
Update: Fire suppression also releases more carbon, according to this Nature news.
2 comments:
I recently read this interesting article on bbc.com about how Australian aborigines are being employed to light fires for the purpose of fire control. The issue here is reducing Australia's carbon footprint... funny how market forces act making what is basically conservation and good housekeeping all of a sudden a priority for all the wrong reasons. Not that preventing global warming is bad, just I would have expected to see this being done for the sake of conservation.
Thanks for pointing me to the article! You're right, but that is the current political reality of the conservation arena: everything has to be linked to carbon/global warming, which is where media's attention and research funding go.
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