On Fri, 16 Aug 2002 16:23:22 -0700 (PDT), you wrote: >Agreed it is a "hard to say" kind of thing, but we do fight forest >fires now. Perhaps the rate of tree destruction by fire has been >lessened enough to make it true.
Now that you mention it, I saw a show examing some of the present issues in the forest fire-fighting debate, and one of them pointed out that "too many" trees now exist, per unit area, in areas where fire has been prevented, and that this is not at all natural, that it effects which species flourish and so forth, and that it of course could lead to even worse fires if-when the area does finally succumb. The numbers were pretty big. You know, if you had x number of trees per acre 100 years ago, the number is some multiple of x now, in the show I was watching, in the forest the guy was in. I don't recall the multiple, but it could have been 2 or 3 x or more. jl
