The Hawk wrote:
pittmike wrote:
Out your fucking fires out up there already. Jesus, don't they have a Smokey The Bear program? There have to be moose and bear walking down main street to get out of the woods.
I heard on the news yesterday that 2-3 years ago, Trudeau was told that the forest in its country needed to be thinned out and brush and undergrowth removed as part of forest management. This opinion was made by experts familiar with wild fire prevention and forest management. The moron refused and the rest is history. The same ignorance has occurred in my state, california for decades.
Its remarkable and ironic that the opponents to this common sense action are the same people now who are moaning and groaning are the liberal environmental stupes and who are blaming these fires and air pollution on the catch all "climate change". There is a subculture within the environmental movement that advocates returning managed woodlands to unmanaged wildlands. Their motivation is to maximize forest carbon storage capacity by ending the use of management strategies that yield structural complexity (ie creating varied openings, different kinds of canopies, multiple growth stages, etc). Aside from increasing the likelihood of wildfires, this concept is idiotic on multiple levels:
1) Forests across the U.S. are under siege from introduced and range-shifting invasive species, the latter of which are expanding their growth areas due to climate change. Management is essential to promote forest resilience.
2) Forests serve as habitat for many different forms of wildlife. Invasive species, climate change, development and fragmentation are collectively undermining the ability of forests to maintain this ecological function. Loss of biodiversity is environmentally damaging in a wide range of areas.
3) Fires obviously negate carbon storage, so the increasingly popular "return to the wild" approach is inherently contradictory.
We need to manage forests to promote resiliency in the face of climate change and invasive species. Resilent forests are structurally complex, highly diverse at the species level, and are future-adapted to projected climate changes. None of this can happen on its own.
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.