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[–]MarkJefferson 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Controlled burns need to happen more often anyway. All this fire suppression year after year is causing unnatural levels of fuel build-up on the forest floor that is a disaster waiting to happen.

And in the end, climate change will be used as an all encompassing excuse for all bad local/regional environmental practices in Forestry, Agriculture, Mining, Industry, and Municipalities.

As an aside, Forests will never be a good permanent carbon sink. At least not within human time-frames. Not unless all that biomass suddenly fell into bogs and fossilized. They are meant to burn down and grow and burn down and grow again(with some old growth sticking around for longer periods). They are good for a lot of other things though. Natural windbreaks, reducing flooding and increasing the renewal rate of groundwater by improving the porosity and moisture retention of the soil, cleaning the air, etc. Which is why it's good to have as much forest coverage as practical. But people need to get over this popular romanticized myth of them never moving or evolving/changing.