[pct-l] Forest fire policy

[elee at microsoft.com (Eric Lee (GAMES))]

Eric wrote:
>
Although not really trail discussion, I was hoping some of the others
might be able to shed some light on this for me. In the chapperal
areas around here, and the regions like it, everything is supposed to
burn every five years or so. It's just the way the desert does things.
Even certain seeds can only germinate when hit by flame, etc. Because
of the lack of moisture, rotting doesn't happen, so fire is the only
way to return dead material back to the soil.
>

I'm not a fire professional but I do have an interest in the subject and
have done some reading.  Opinions are pretty polarized and all over the
map, but I guess what you've described is current scientific consensus.
It's true not only for the desert chapperal but for most forests.

The problem is that we've created a catch-22 where we've aggressively
fought all fires for the last 70 years or so and now there's so much
fuel stacked up all over the place (and we've built suburbia so far into
the mountains) that every fire is a devastating scorched-earth explosion
so it's often too dangerous to let them burn.  So what do we do?  I
don't think there is a really good answer.

Yet another Eric