"Being better at fighting fires, though, is not enough."

Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses and trees and between properties. All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.

I see none of this happening at a proper scale in my country (Portugal). So of course every summer we se huge forest fires. Lives lost, ecosystems destroyed. Next year it happens again...

It's only going to get worse.

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s_dev 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

>They must be regularly cleaned

People keep reiterating this probably because Trump keeps reiterating but it just sounds ridiculous.

How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there. A dead tree is actually an ecosystem of fungi and insects. Cleaning it may make it more fire prone as broken sticks and leaves shield the ground from the sun allowing the soil to hold on to moisture a little longer. There is plenty of room for nuance here.

I would need to listen to actual experts on this, the correct solution is probably something akin to resorting wetlands and beavers which act as fantastic self maintaining fire breaks.

However when you suggest things like this you see the actual issues pop up, local farmers protest and others using NIMBY laws to block so they get payouts.

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BurningFrog 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Prescribed burns are a good way to clean forests!

Burn the debris every 10-20 years rather than let it accumulate and become unstoppable disaster fires once a century.

This tends to be very hard hard to do in a democratic system though. People really don't like their forests burning.

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czinck 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Prescribed burns are a good tool, but they're not a silver bullet. Because of the decades without fires, there's so much debris that fires burn incredibly hot, so you either need people to go in and thin the debris (this is actually a thing they do, as ridiculous as "cleaning the forest" sounds), or deal with the extra damage and risk of a very hot fire. Then you need a decent amount of personnel to make sure the fire doesn't get out of hand (and they regularly do), and do it when the weather is right (wet season, low winds). A prescribed burn is still a forest fire, with all the risks, it's just one that's started at a time and place we control.

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illiac786 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I find it ironic to discuss how burning forests is going to help fight the consequences of… too much CO2?

	▲	margalabargala 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The wood in forests is part of the short term carbon cycle. It does not meaningfully affect global warming. The amount of carbon released in a forest fire is miniscule compared to what humans release.

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mayama 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there.

Cleaning is huge financial burden and has questionable outcome. Only extreme solution I can think of is fireblocks if situation gets worse which could worsen climate change by clearing trees. Divide forest in to grids, building roads wide enough to fire from spreading. Fill roads up with gravel or concrete to stop fires from spreading. Climate activists would never allow such plan to be implemented.

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scarecrowbob 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, it is a bit dumb to talk about "cleaning" forests. Or at least I've never heard anyone who spouted that line who I thought had any understanding of the situation. Mostly they are just salty that the forests aren't actually profitable for logging, but they can't say it like that.

Like a lot of things in the US, the resources are "there" for this stuff, because it's a lot of individual labor instead of something that can be turned into a massive payoff for a couple of "investors" there's no "market incentive" so nothing will be done.

For context, I live on 40 unimproved acres in CO, and much of my spring and late fall is spent moving downed wood and cutting down thickets of gamble oak.

That is a lot of work, and I hope (over the next decade) to eventually get it somewhat under control. The idea is to not have, for instance, a dead tree leaning up against a living tree and to try and tamp down or increase the space between the floor and the first couple of branches in the trees. I also collect up wood for heating in the winter (better to burn it to stay warm than to lt it go in an eventual wild fire.

This is a lot of strenuous work, and not just because I have some love and respect for the situation of all the individual flora and fauna that populate this chunk of land. I've know several wildland firefighters here and they are doing similar things in a hurry out in the hills with hand tools. Because you can't get large equipment around to do the work- there aren't roads in a lot of these places.

It'll all probably burn at some point, anyhow.

But I try because at least in the couple of acres where I actually live I might be able to get the underbrush cleared so a fire could be fought.

But the idea of setting it on fire is prepostrous- I might as well set the shack where I live on fire while i am at it.

That more or less scales up.

The process of mitigating wildire (usually done on a line near an active fire) is largely a bunch of 25 year olds with shovels and chainsaws.

I am all for that work- I'd much rather have them doing that than geraing up to go to Iran or Cuba or wherever.

But hey, the ecology of this place is fucked. My ancestors destroyed the megagfauna to prevent folks from subsisting off of the concentration camps/ reservations. The folks who are still "into" that racist, genocidal, ecocidal project aren't going to do anything to fix it; they'd rather burn their own houses down first.

	▲	Nervhq 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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lofaszvanitt 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think most of the fires are in manmade forests, where puffer space is nonexistent.

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raffael_de 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

being good at fighting fires is part of the problem as that allows people to keep natural limited area fires from happen regularly and then eventually you get one huge fire.

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Carrok 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> All this work must be done in the winter and everything must be prepared for the summer. Every year. Everywhere.

Good luck doing any work in the winter in places like, oh say, the Rocky Mountains.

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bluGill 3 days ago | parent [-]

Every forest has different needs. OP is in Portugal, I don't know much about forest there, but the plan seems reasonable for there. The Rocky Mountains need a different plan, but it isn't much different.

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mrspuratic 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Portugal has about 10% forested land, of which an estimated 25% is non-native eucalyptus (an active pyrophyte), and over 50% in some areas. I've seen the aftermath of eucalyptus forest fires while travelling through Alentejo.

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Carrok 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Portugal is 35k square miles. The Rockies are 300k square miles, much of it, notably, is mountainous.

I do not think “cleaning” it is going to work, so I’m curious what this “not much different” plan looks like.

	▲	bluGill 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		See a forester. I would not assume the entire Rockies need the same plan. In general I would say start fires near towns, and let fires that start elsewhere burn.

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Arodex 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And what is you suggestion for the lack of rain everywhere?

https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...

Making your forests "fireproof" isn't going to save you from desertification.