Josh wrote: > 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
Well, I'll throw in my two cents worth. Back when I lived in Colorado (and that was most of my life), and when I was going to school at CU-Boulder, I noticed that in the old pictures from the 1870s-1890s that the first range of mountains in the Front Range seemed to have far fewer trees back then than now, in fact it seemed almost barren. That puzzled me a lot, but the more I've thought about it, it's probably that now any fires are put out as soon as possible or are well-controlled, whereas back then there weren't the resources or the people to put out fires up in the mountains. Also, in the late 1800s, there hadn't been enough time to grow very many trees past where the natural regime (or Native American -controlled) had been in effect. Chuck Hursch Larkspur, CA
