For example - in So. California, forests had perhaps 200 trees per acre, when a natural loading was 40 - 50 trees per acre before forest management and agressive fire-fighting was employed. Allowing lumber companies the rights to thin down to perhaps 80 - 100 trees per acre allows them to make a profit sufficient to require additional controls on the lumbering process.
It might even be beneficial to create zones where tree loading is thinned to 20 - 30 trees per acre as a more natural fire break to slow the spread of a massive fire from regions of high loading.
But dead wood on the ground is not the major fuel contributor that you suggest. After a few months with rain - the dead wood starts decaying. It quickly absorbs moisture and is far less significant to any fire than the live trees (or the diseased trees that are dying or dead, but still standing).
But Ecko-wackos would rather have a forest burn down "naturally" than allow any logging company from making a profit. (And when a logging company makes a profit, it means lumber for various projects - more jobs, more convenience for people ... good ol' capitalism, etc. ... and Ecko-wackos might be "Earth First" - but also "People Last".
Mike
I fully agree that the old policy of "no fires whatsoever" was harmful, and that its effects need some kind of action to be alleviated. I also agree that this necessarily includes the cutting and removal of trees. My question is whether the cutting and removal operation that the logging companies will execute is optimal for ending up with a healthy forest as well as a healthy profit. Digging up the forests with a bunch of logging roads, stripping out the healthiest of trees and leaving the most diseased ones standing, preferentially removing some species over another, leaving piles of logging waste, etc., is not the way to create a healthy forest.
But dead wood on the ground is not the major fuel contributor that you suggest.
The people in charge of cleaning up the Superior National Forest and the BWCAW after the 1999 blowdown seem to have a different opinion on this matter. So would the people who had to clean up the Boy Scout camp I take my Troop to after we let some loggers in to thin out the forest and they rewarded us by leaving piles and piles of branches around. We had to clean those out before they caught fire and started the whole camp up.
One of the areas that caught on fire in California was a forest where an infestation of beetles had killed off a large number of trees. The infestation had left the trees apparently uneconomic for harvest, so they were still standing, dead, when the fires came. No "tree huggers" were standing in the way of their removal, and they've been known to be a fire hazard to the local inhabitants for a few years. But there wsa no money for cleaning those up.
Conservationists don't stand in the way of making forests healthy, even when that involves tree cutting. What they stand in the way of is having the logging companies do it in ways that are at odds with maintaining the forests to the purposes for which they were set aside, which was not as tree farms for logging companies but as wilderness areas, game refuges, hunting and fishing recreational areas, watershed protection, etc.
But dead wood on the ground is not the major fuel contributor that you suggest. After a few months with rain - the dead wood starts decaying. It quickly absorbs moisture and is far less significant to any fire than the live trees (or the diseased trees that are dying or dead, but still standing).
Decay mechanics are highly situational. In Southern California it is so dry that decay can be fairly slow unless insects get into the wood to break down the structure. Bark beetles aren't enough; it takes termites. Some organic material on the ground helps get a groudcover going because of moisture retention and shade, but a good many of those need fire to germinate as well as to clear pathogens and grasses.
I haven't done it in that area, so I can't call myself an expert, but I'd hazard a guess that (where it hasn't burned) they are better off pulling most of the logs after thinning (except for some needed to serve as trash dams and water breaks), chipping the slash, waiting a year while they nail every weed they can find, and then patch burning in late spring (after the surface has dried but before the vegetation moisture content has dropped). It's an intensive process and can take almost daily monitoring for weeds. Grazing might help in places both for weed control, soil structure, and plant nutrition.
Seriously, weeds are that important. If they get away from you it gets horribly expensive (and possibly futile) to try to stop them. Typically, what I have seen is that after a fire the enviros get all excited about the native plant bloom, they ignore the weeds and try to prevent anybody from using an herbicide, and then the weeds get going and take over. Then the greenies wail about the disaster, not seeing that it was their own failure to recognize the system as it is, as opposed to how they would wish it to be.