Tornado Alley (PROG)

[DesertDrifter]

The non-new tech issue is that light ground fires are often ecologically beneficial, and how many ecosystems developed in the west. The bad part is that they are easy to put out, which they do, so the areas are not "treated" with light fire.

The other bad part is that if one keeps putting out the easy to suppress ones, the fuel builds up until you get a high intensity fire that kills the overstory (and anything else in its way) and are extremely hard to put out. (witness ca fires the last few years)

Getting the vegetation back to mimic frequent light fires is very expensive, so the money gets spent putting out the subdivision burners instead. Another problem is Clinton's northwest forest plan... I am a clinton supporter but the effect of his compromise from the 90's is that a lot of land was set aside for habitat purposes (owls, marbled murrelets, red tree voles) and the end result is we protected those forests to death. If one looks at a map of the "late successional reserves", it is easy to see where they burned super hot and defeated the purpose of protecting the habitat for those species. Coffee sequence initiated.