[dools0007world]

Inaccessible Wilderness? Are there really houses I see being evacuated and/or hosed down in the California fires? Can’t be. My eyes are lying. The news people have it all wrong. Those areas are far too remote for human habitation.

At best your argument is specious. Are you really telling me that no forest fire management is better than some forest fire management?

[Inyo-Mono]

My only comment was that most of the forests here in California, unlike Germany, are in remote wilderness areas that are difficult to reach in the 14,000 foot high Sierra Nevada range. Even the U.S. Forest Service is not allowed to bring any kind of motorized vehicles into the wilderness, so clean up by hand crews would be nearly impossible as the poster was suggesting. Fire is the only way that these forests can be cleared.

In fact, as we have every Summer, a huge fire was raging in the mountains for two months. They had to let it burn because they was no way to reach it to fight it. The houses you see on the news are of course near heavily developed areas. I am a firm believer in cleaning up the underbrush and removing too many trees as a forest management tool, but fire is really the only way to do it here.