Natural History Wanderings

The New York Times has an detailed opinion piece on how forest management and other factors have let to the catastrophic forest fires like we have been having in California. Here are a few excerpts:

Ecologists and forest experts attribute California’s destructive wildfires to decades of aggressive fire suppression, in addition to the increased population of fire-prone areas and hotter, drier conditions due to climate change.

Before Euro-American settlement in the 1800s, fires burned about 1.5 million acres of forest each year, on average, according to an analysis of fire return intervals

But between 1950 and 1999, fires burned just 57,000 acres on average each year under a sweeping fire-suppression policy. Forests that were once periodically cleared by less intense wildfires are now covered by “thick carpets of forest fuels,”

Read full article at Opinion | To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn – The New York Times