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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dank" data-source="post: 183602" data-attributes="member: 2945">This is an easy chicken or egg question. Increased fire suppression created higher fuel loads which in turn causes more aggressive fires. Done. This hasn't been a linear trajectory either. The giant tracts of single aged timber stands created by human intervention became veritable petri dishes for pests to thrive in, thus the rise of the western pine beetle which in turn very rapidly turned millions of acres and trillions of board feet of living forest into match sticks in a matter of a decade.As a hunter, I wish there was significantly more logging. Hunting old burns and old logged areas is fantastic. Unfortunately, even if the feds didn't impose any of the early 90's regulations that industry would have still faced the challenges it ended up facing. It was not the government that put logging towns out of business, it was economics and technology. Mills got bigger and more efficient, equipment improved over time, cheap Canadian lumber hampered markets, significant production transition from western public lands to eastern private production, etc. From the 1950's to the 1990's, eastern timber growers more than doubled their production efficiency per acre. We simply can't log our forests into health as the economics will not allow it. The nation can't build enough houses or make enough coffee tables to allow for enough logs to be harvested to transform the forest. I go back to the statement that I think that logging for the most part is a great addition to the multiple use of our western lands. But we have to accept the limitations of the market. Your assertion that the feds disinterest in multiple use is to blame for wildfires is at best a hollow argument.</blockquote>

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