Having once worked for Weyerhaeuser I can tell you their forest lands do NOT burn.
And their trees are worth billions and billions.
Living in the Ozarks, the only smoke we get here are from controlled burns in the national forests. The paper company forests never seem to burn.
Back in the 1950s-1960s, we used to get lots of wildfires from the trains throwing off sparks. When the railroad companies started properly maintaining the rights of way, the fires suddenly ceased. In the last thirty years, I’ve seen one near wildfire when the railroad workers were cutting up old rails and the local grass caught fire.
Today the most wildfires I’ve seen has been from idiots throwing live cigarettes out of car windows in late winter.
Meanwhile, north of the border in BC and Alberta they had just as big of a Mountain Pine Beetle problem as we did. However, they aggressively harvested Lodgepole Pine that was dead over the last 10 years. Now, many of the interior BC sawmills are back to sawing mostly green timber.
The ironic thing is that blue stained Ponderosa Pine boards are in big demand especially in the Colorado lumber market.
Pine boards with blue stain were always sold at a discount until about a year ago. Now, there is a niche market that wants this product.
The problem with harvesting dead timber is that it typically has bug holes, shake, more splits and rot. Therefore, the grade yield is not as good. Most sawmills do not want it. In Canada the government made the sawmills take it along with green timber. Much of the low grade dimension got shipped offshore to places like China. China buys a larger percentage of low grade to build pallets and crates to ship all that crap back here to Walmart, etc.