Disastrous Forest Fires Loom

    The forest fire around Paradise, California, incinerated 153 thousand acres. But California charcoal deposits reveal that prehistoric wildfires destroyed between 4.5 and 11.9 million acres each year. An unattended forest grows until it’s choked with kindling. 
 

After a big burn in 1910, the U.S. Forest Service began managing its forests scientifically. Foresters designated surplus trees, and loggers who’d won at auctions removed them. 

This didn’t suit the environmentalists. To reduce man’s influence and let nature take its course, I presume, they pressured Congress in the 1970s to slow down the culling of trees. Timber harvesting declined sharply, and forest fires increased. 

Environmentalists blamed global warming for the fires. But it is primarily the forests owned by the government that burn, not the ones privately owned and scientifically managed. U.S. Representative Tom McClintock, of California, wrote, “It’s clever of the climate to decimate only the lands hamstrung by environmental laws.” 

Forest fires flood the atmosphere with CO2. Good forest management, in contrast, confines the carbon inside living trees or in the lumber from harvested trees. 

Know-it-all Congress, in its arrogance, directs the Forest Service how many trees it should cull each year. Too many, and the Service clear-cuts, as it has done in the past. Too few, as the Service is doing now, the danger of fire grows.  

A typical acre in the Sierra can support about 80 mature trees. The current density is over 300 trees. Nature will eventually take its course. Fire disasters loom.