Well the title is the question.
With ‘split’ I mean create some space between blocks where fire has nothing to travel to the next block to spread.
I imagine that actions like dropping water with helicopters would also be unnecessary since we could ‘give up’ a burning block and then the fire would be over.
Or am I too naive about it?
In: Earth Science
Other comments are covering how fire spreads, so I’ll add this.
Forests have specific and nuanced wildlife ecosystems. The species that thrive in a forest, need the forest to exist as it has.
For example, you may remember one of the first and most important legal challenges against logging of old-growth forests: *Northern Spotted Owl v. Hoden* (later *Northern Spotted Owl v. Lujan*).
Not to get into all of it, but, one thing that came about. Lumber argued that to protect the owl, they would only ‘clear-cut’ specific squares and as such the forest would look like a checkerboard. Wide swaths of empty nothing next to wide swaths of forests. But that didn’t work. The owls and other birds of prey need cover. They can’t hunt in open fields. Meanwhile the animals (who are prey) that live in cover are exposed in open fields. There are few species that live in old growth forests that can exist in a checkerboard of open fields. That’s just not how it works.
Point being, there are many factors at work here that have an influence on forest management. It’s not just preventing forest fires – which, I’ll add, is a natural part of forest health – but of course NOT fires due to habitat loss/climate change/assholes burning forests because they launched fireworks during a ‘gender-reveal’ party.
So you want to help stop the destruction of forests by destroying sections of forest to create space between them ?
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We already do this, and is very useful, but it sometimes is not enough. Maybe is enough distance for the wind to not be able to extend the flames themselves, but spare and small burning material can spread.
Fires spread across firebreaks due to wind. Plus, if you’re in the hills, when it rains, bare ground contributes to mudslides because the soil collapses since there is no vegetation holding it in place. The mudslides will take out huge numbers of trees.
Everyone has already mentioned fire breaks, but there is a little bit more too it. Even something as seemingly simple as a small gap in the forest often needs to be heavily assessed to ensure it isn’t damaging to protected species. Habitat fragmentation can cause a lot of issues, especially for large predators, and chopping up a forest could potentially do a lot more harm for what lives there than we expect.
Others have made good points that maintaining such a network of fire breaks would be expensive and resource-intensive.
Dividing forest habitat like this also creates what are known as *edge effects*, which can be ecologically devastating for some species. Many large animal and tree species require large tracts of dense forest to thrive. These forest edges create small, but potentially critical differences in climate and environment that can be detrimental to those “deep forest” species: for example, light, wind, and temperature can enter the forest horizontally, new species can establish themselves along the new edges and start to encroach into the forest and outcompete established species, and the breaks can hinder migration throughout the forest.
Lastly, fire is quite a beneficial process in many of Earth’s ecosystems. Humans have managed landscapes in a healthy way via fire for millennia. Over the last couple centuries, imported colonial forest management theories have called for an unhealthy level of fire suppression. As a result, fires in recent decades have been far more intense than they have been historically. Additionally, drought events are occurring with greater frequency, causing more frequent and intense fires than probably occurred historically, at least in North America.
If you walk through a forest for an hour and realize that you’ve seen a few acres out of 100’s of millions, you’ll begin to see how impossible it would be to even manage a single National Forest much less a state like California or Idaho. Besides, burn is necessary for forests. We just happen to place ourselves in danger.
Here in Colorado the answer is $$$. Not profitable to send people out to do the work and timber has no value
It’s also worth mentioning that, especially in pine forests, fire is part of the natural cycle. Many pine species’ pine cones won’t open and seed until there is a fire, helping ensure that the new growth won’t have a bunch of trees blocking the sun. If I remember correctly, part of the reason the 1988 Yellowstone fire was so bad (in addition to the drought that year) was because we had been too effective in putting out fires, meaning there was a lot of unmanaged undergrowth and dead tress, and not a lot of younger, healthier trees. once a fire got going, it took off. To this day, Montana and Wyoming forest service follow strict guidelines about which fires to fight and which to let burn.
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