Besides the obvious need to protect human life, aren’t forest fires actually healthy for the environment? A lot of plants regenerate stronger a few years after burns. There’s even numerous accounts of ancient civilizations burning crop fields for better growth.
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You’re right that fires can be very beneficial and healthy to a forest or ecosystem if they are relatively small and relatively regular — a small, regular fire clears out dead plants and undergrowth without damaging healthy trees or wiping out wildlife… but a fire that gets too hot or too large fire just burns everything from top to bottom and the forest can take decades to recover.
For a long time, the practice in North America was basically to fight fires at all costs. Part of this was a chauvinistic desire to “be more civilized” than the indigenous/first nations who regularly practiced burning, part of it was that fires threatened the colonial enterprises of mining, railroads, timber, etc., and part was just a normal human impulse to see a fire and want to put it out before it gets worse. This was bad for a lot of reasons, but it also left a lot of forests that are simply overgrown and riddled with decades and decades of fuel that otherwise would have burnt away — so now, when they burn, they tend to quickly move past healthy into just overwhelming and destructive.
Add in human expansion into more forested areas (this is especially bad in California) and climate change and you get a situation where forests are loaded with way more flammable material than they “ought” to have, they’re more likely to burn hot and fast due to drier conditions, and they are more likely to hit civilization because people keep moving into them.
That said, the Forest Service in the US has taken a much more “let natural burns happen” approach in the past decades, and it has helped improve the health of a lot of forests. The problem is given everything I said above, the window between “this is healthy so let it burn” and “its now out of control and threatening humans” is very small.
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