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If you go by area burned over the last century, you aren't going to get the true picture. The means and methods of firefighting have improved a thousandfold over that time, so of course the area burned in wildfire will be radically less than back before the 1950s.
Still, there is an extremely obvious push against the people to believe that the only way to save our planet is to pay groups of psychopaths huge amounts of money. Putting your political defaults ahead of your sense can create this kind of logic. That's going to halt human contributions to prevailing conditions for certain.
Just not the way you think.
And the acres burned is going back up again since the agencies adopted the let-it-burn policy to "return our forests to a more natural condition". You guys have endured my caterwauling about this for years already. IT'S UNSAFE, and it kills fish and wildlife, and it depletes the soils so much it prevents regeneration. IT DOESN'T WORK.
Maybe, if humans had just logged the snot out of the planet once a hundred and fifty years ago, today's forests might be close back to natural conditions by now, but that's not what happened. We kept doing it. The soils are barely still up to the task of regeneration now. They're more apt to support fuels species than trees now.
The let-it-burn policy was NEVER about forest health. It's ALWAYS been about saving money. We see how that FISCAL policy is working out for us now.
pipe up any time....
