There is “fire” and there is “fire”. This is what so few realize. In a clean forest, there are fires, Yes!! Fires. They are a natural event and cleanse the forest.
In an unmaintained forest, CA & NV, with something like 190K acres of bark-beetle afflicted trees. This inevitably kills the trees in drought years because the trees cannot produce sap which would ordinarily kill the beetles. Takes a single digit number of weeks. There are hundreds of square miles of dead, dry trees. For years, the cry has been made to harvest these trees, which would furnish lumber, and to relieve the forest floor of the 2-3 feet of detritus the trees will drop in the process of dying. But the enviros have successfully blocked any new logging and especially the cutting of new roads into these areas because they believe it would permit/encourage new logging. Never mind that modern forest mgmt replants trees in vast qtys.
As a result, these forest are bone dry tinderboxes which when aflame produce extremely hot, cauterizing fires which kill everything. The phenom kills the seeds that trees normally drop during small fires. Then the rains come and wash away the topsoil and create erosion problems of various kinds. The land ends up dead, looking like a WW1 battlefield, for the better part of a decade. An ordinary fire in a modestly maintained forest is green carpeted and has saplings growing in a year.
But, the good news is that some day in the distant
future, you will be able to travel UNDER those burning
forests on the underground bullet train.
(Now under construction.) /s
At least until they discover some endangered earth worm.