In regard to wildfires, they are indeed a part of the natural process of regemeration, not just out west, but anywhere drought normally occurs. Many of these species are so adapted to this that their seeds will not germinate unless they land on bare soil, and several conifer species have serotinous cones—that is, they remain closed until sufficient heat melts the resin and opens them to disseminate. Fire is a critical part of forest health. If you travel many western states, you’ll see nothing but green until you get to the other side of the mounain pass, only to find almost every tree on the other side completely dead from pine bark beetle. These dead trees sitting in a mostly arid ecosystem are destined to catch fire, which results in widespread clearing of the hillsides for regeneration. As ugly as we might think forestry clearcutting can appear in such areas, it actually mimics nature’s own process by creating a bare site for native species to regenerate.
As a Forestry graduate, there was a saying we had back in college: “even doing nothing is a management plan.“ Whether humans clear a hillside for harvesting or leave it be, eventually that stand of trees has the potential for this very thing. Sometimes even worse, invasive species (both non-native and exotic) take hold, which might flourish for a time, but then succumb to an extreme weather condition, like drought or cold, killing them off, leaving fuel for the next big fire. The thing is, fire is great at cleaning out a forest of these invasive species that are not accustomed to this existence, so afterward, the forest returns in a much healthier state. The complecation of all this is that humans have settled in these areas, putting lives at risk. This makes managing fire impacts in such forests more difficult. If you live out west, it’s best to think of it as all flamable, eventually, anyway.
I don’t know if the situation is any better, but back in college, I remember reading something about Great Sequoia National Park. These massive trees are over 1000 years old, even though their native landscape is ripe for forest fires. They have extremely thick bark, which protects them from ground fires, and the flamible canopy is so far above that it does not catch fire when the normal ground fires occurred in dry years. The problem now is that fire suppression allowed fir trees to come up in the understory, and those trees are now tall enough that if they happen to catch fire, it could potentially reach the canopies of the sequoias. Our intervention in something we perceived as bad might actually jeopardize trees that managed to live about 1500 years without our help.
Sorry for the long story! None of that is to take away from the sufferings of people when wildfires occur.
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