Aidan Risberg - Fighting Fire With Fire (to have a cliché title)
A handful of blog posts ago, all of us (or at least most of us) read about wildfires in California, and how they are such a volatile danger. It only takes a spark on a dry day to birth an inferno that engulfs homes and forests alike. Obviously, this is an issue that is taken very seriously by anyone who puts value in not being on fire. However, one of the better solutions happens to be more counter-intuitive: light the forest on fire on purpose. This is obviously over simplified, so let me explain. A controlled burn takes all of the positive after effects of a wildfire on our terms. Skilled firefighters and park rangers can keep it contained exactly in the area they want, and can provide immense benefits to the environment. After a fire, many resources (such as carbon or nutrients)formerly locked away in dead plant matter are released into the surrounding environment. If you remember our discussion of Yellowstone, a few years after the devastating 1988 wildfire, everything was b