“Now that’s as if the pine cones would not release there seeds without wildfires.”
Actually, that’s true. Much of Yellowstone is covered with lodgepole pine that have what are called serrotinous cones. They require the heat of a forest fire to open the cone and release the seed. During the big Yellowstone fires the pundits were moaning that the park had been ruined for generations - today most of it is green with re-growth. That doesn’t hold true for other species and it also assumes the fire isn’t so hot that it totally nukes the place.
So what? Those forests consist of twenty year old trees on 8-24" centers ready to blow up again. The areas that did not burn actually look considerably better from the standpoint of understory species richness, soil, and drought stress.
The whole Park is an absolute mess from the standpoint of forest and game management. Whole fields of exotics dominate the northern landscape. 95% of the aspen are gone and they will not replace themselves. The elk were starving to death until the fire got the willow going again, but then they brought in wolves and now the elk are in even worse shape. The beaver have left. Soon, the wolves will turn on the bison, as was shown in Canada, it's only a matter of time. As soon as the wolves get hungry enough, they'll start eating each other until somebody does something.
Natural regulation does not work, because "nature" is not self-optimizing. The faulty assumption is that the historic apex predators (humans) are not part of the "natural" system. IOW, typical control freaks.
I live in central Idaho. We have millions of acres of federal forest land in central Idaho that looks like it’s been used for a nuclear weapons test site. Millions of acres of bare, quartz lined rocks and bleached white snags. A perfect solar oven. Without protection for the vital nutrients in our forest’s soil, critical habitat for all plants, animals, and fish species is destroyed because of insane bureaucracy and obscene litigation.
That is what we have going on in the the Oregon forests. We are saving the spotted owl to be eaten by the Bard owl and since they are not "managed", they all burn eventually and now the environmentalists and the Governor will not let us cut the burned trees. It has been said the CO2 output by a half million acre of rotting burnt trees is equivalent to an entire year of all the CO2 emissions of every car in the country!!
So when fire comes through these burnt out, not harvested high fuel areas it will put a thick glass sheen on the ground that will inhibit growth of anything for decades, thus the term "nukes the place."
Think very carefully about what you said. If only forest fires could cause pine cones from lodgepole pines to open up, I doubt seriously they would have spread over the West if they were solely and completely dependent upon wild fires. I’ve been to areas that haven’t had a forest fire in decades and they are covered with “young” lodgepole pines.