How to manage forest to prevent fires is known. They just don’t do it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/22/science/how-a-forest-stopped-a-fire-in-its-tracks.html
How a Forest Stopped a Fire in Its Tracks
By JAMES GORMAN
Published: July 22, 2003
SUSANVILLE, Calif.— Where the fire came through Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest last September, the ground is ash and the trees are charcoal. Black and gray are the colors, lightened only by small mounds of red dust at the base of some of the charred trunks — the leavings of bark beetles — and flecks of green where new growth pokes above the ash.
Through the tall, ravaged columns, however, a living pine forest is visible. And as visitors inspecting the fire damage walk toward the living forest, they come to an abrupt transition.
September’s blaze was named the Cone Fire, for the hill where it was first thought to have begun. It burned 2,000 acres of Lassen National Forest, and 1,600 of those were in Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest, a 10,000-acre area within Lassen set up in 1934 for ecological study by the Forest Service.
When the Cone Fire swept through these woods it came to a patch of forest that was different from the rest, and stopped dead, like a mime at an invisible wall. What stopped the fire was an experimental plot that had been selectively logged to thin it, and had been burned in controlled fashion. The result was an open forest, much the way it might have been 500 years ago when regular forest fires swept through the high dry country and no one tried to stop them.
‘’It just stopped,’’ Carl N. Skinner said, looking satisfied but almost surprised. Mr. Skinner, a geographer with the Forest Service at the Redding Silviculture Laboratory in Redding, Calif., and Dr. Steve Zack, a conservation scientist with the North American Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, along with other Forest Service colleagues, are showing a reporter the results of an accidental experiment that still impresses them each time they visit it.
‘’Night and day,’’ Dr. Zack said.
‘’If we hadn’t treated this it would have just blown right through this area,’’ Mr. Skinner said.
Excerpt more at link
2003 - that was way back when you could still publish truth in a US newspaper without 10,000 Twitterbots screaming for your head.
Even the natives managed forest better than that “genius Governor”
According this article, the Natives were quite apt to manage the forests to great results. Unfortunately they caught European diseases and mostly died out well before US settlers ever show up in the West. So, when the settlers finally showed up, the forests were already unmanaged for a while (like for 200 years)!
I guess the fires are caused by smallpox!?