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When this comes up I always recommend this lecture by Stephen Pyne at the Long Now Foundation a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zP7MD2y7T8 http
by cameldrv 5y ago
When this comes up I always recommend this lecture by Stephen Pyne at the Long Now Foundation a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zP7MD2y7T8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zP7MD2y7T8
He goes into the very interesting history of fire in the Western U.S. and California and how the Native Americans used fire to transform the landscape over centuries. When Europeans took over, they did not understand these practices or the reasons for them. It was as if they had acquired a complex machine that required regular maintenance, but had no instruction manual to perform it.
Instead, they imported European (specifically German) fire/forest management practices, which do not work in the Western U.S. In Europe, when a tree falls, moisture allows the tree to rot and release its energy slowly. This makes suppression a long-term viable strategy. In much of the Western U.S. though, when a tree falls, it just sits there until it burns. Here, the suppression strategy is just putting off an inevitable release of energy, and every year the amount of energy increases.
The real tragedy in this is that this situation is leading to the loss of trees that are over a thousand years old, that could survive countless smaller fires, but not one enormous one.
- ehnto 5y agoIt's the same in Australia and the indigenous here are nomadic and still use wildfire to their advantage and to the betterment of the land. The western settlers here also use fire regularly to cut down on fuel load in the forests, we call them controlled burns and they're mostly done by volunteer firefighters. They essentially have a slow burning firefront walk through the forest floor to burn up the brush which emulates a natural wildfire. Big wildfires like we are seeing take out huge swaths of land in Aus and California are the consequence of excessive fuel load build up thanks to human intervention. Of course climate change will contribute by making the conditions required for wildfire more common but the root of the severity lies elsewhere for now.
- biofox 5y agoIt seems like such a waste of energy. Is it possible to harvest the dry brush material and burn it for power generation?
- cameldrv 5y agoI've thought quite a few times that some sort of robotic or semi-automated brush clearing system could be an interesting startup. In principle I don't see why you couldn't cut stuff, grab it, throw it in a wood chipper, and haul it out of the forest. The devil is always in the details though and I have no idea what all is involved in operating in the forest or the economics, legality, and politics of it.
- diggernet 5y agoAustralia is nuts. You even have birds that deliberately spread wildfire. https://blog.nature.org/science/2018/01/12/australian-firehawk-raptors-intentionally-spread-wildfires/ https://blog.nature.org/science/2018/01/12/australian-fireha...