I just want to say that I live in the northwest and disagree with your analysis.
The problem today is mis-blaming the wrong cause. This is like victim blaming. So the real culprit here is a century of forest mismanagement and clearcutting which led to massive fires. Combined with global warming (warm winters which don't kill beetles) and free trade which allows pests free passage everywhere. But you blame environmentalists.
Because of that, your prescription for more logging and thinning will likely have the opposite effect of what's intended. You'll apply a tech and market solution to a problem of natural collapse and human culture. Which will have unintended consequences and cause a further domino effect of negative impacts to the natural world. Note that this is why we will likely not solve global warming through technology, nor any of the 100+ other catastrophes comprising this Anthropocene extinction.
The real answer is along the lines of changing our culture so that logging is no longer required. We could grow hemp or any number of better natural fibers. We could stop interfering with the food chain, for example by not endlessly fighting the reintroduction of wolves. But these types of answers are a lot of work and take decades and don't appeal to ego.
We have to ask ourselves: if we're serious about preventing the loss of our forests, are we willing to leave the trees where they fall for no financial gain? Are we willing to leave oil in the ground to prevent global warming? Will we aid countries being assaulted who have nothing to pay us with? Will we help children to eat whose parents are on drugs? And so on. Or will we rationalize and whatabout and fail to do what's right for people we disagree with, and do just exactly the wrong thing. Our failure to act outside of ego is what will ultimately destroy the planet.
For what it's worth, I don't entirely disagree with you, as I was just on a trip to Yellowstone for the first time in 25 years after the fires tore through in the 90s. The new 6 inch diameter trees are beautiful but packed too closely together and will need to be thinned. It will be interesting to see how that plays out (nature vs nurture), and it could provide a sustainable model for other forests.
I would suggest following the science then, if you think interrupting evolutionary natural events, such as fires, is a "good thing".
> We have to ask ourselves: if we're serious about preventing the loss of our forests, are we willing to leave the trees where they fall for no financial gain?
You need to ask yourself: Are you willing to let the forest burn, so natural events can take place?
Let me give you a story so we aren't talking past one another.
The Snake River plain where I live in Idaho used to be covered by a 10 foot tall sagebrush forest and edible plants like camas. A network of streams allowed one to walk and rarely be far from water. There were large herds of deer, antelope, sage grouse, mountain lions, fish, you name it.
Then the cattle ranchers came a century and a half ago after the Civil War. Within 3 years, they had grazed off all of the land near the town where I grew up. Sheep herders also caused massive loss of vegetation. The land went from lush and sustainable to a cheatgrass desert that never recovered.
So what happened? Well, midwest grasslands form a deep network of roots that grows back, even when the grass is stripped to the ground by animals or fire. But high desert grass is bunchgrass, where grass forms clumps in order to survive periods of draught. Once a clump is gone, it takes decades to regrow. Deer are browsers and eat leaves, while antelope may graze but have formed a symbiotic relationship where the herd only survives if it doesn't overgraze. But cows are grazers that completely strip whatever grass they're eating, while also damaging the delicate desert soil due to their weight. Cows simply aren't compatible with a bunchgrass ecosystem.
Once the grass was gone, the streams quickly eroded and the water table fell 6 feet, drying out the entire landscape. And that was that.
Without knowing anything about Germany's situation, I can look at the destruction caused by the introduction of a single pest and know that the forest was not healthy to begin with. Maybe it was cut centuries ago so is not an old-growth forest. Maybe the natural predators have all been killed. More likely, there are deep structural problems in the soil, like the forest is lacking an immune system, and the temperature is not what the forest evolved to survive in. Pests are like mold growing on an old piece of bread, a symptom not a cause.
Comments like yours that blame the people working to heal the trauma, rather than the people who inflicted the trauma, raise the level of ignorance in the world. I don't think that was your intention, so my intention here is not to criticize you. You are just looking for practical solutions to an impractical problem. That is why your solutions simply will not work in the manner you expect.
But you triggered me, so let me explain why. The people who came to Idaho in the 1800s were escaping persecution after they lost the Civil War. They brought a southern colonial culture which ignored brutality against the other if it was for a greater good, like providing a high quality of life to kin. That was the cultural driving force behind the extermination of Native Americans. If the land was damaged in the process, so be it.
Today we still live with the aftermath of that. It's the part that can't be said. It's critical race theory. It's why everything is broken. Its why America is falling apart. It's what our next election is about.
But I can't possibly explain the context of my environmentalist understanding in a single quip. So I play the loser in my community, even when I am not wrong. I was bullied by children of ranchers, whose families were the pillars of the community. They will never, ever, admit that they desertified southern Idaho. They will always project their image as "stewards of the land". Never mind that they destroyed our heritage and forced us into a narrow provincial way of life. That's crumbling anyway, as their unsustainable philosophy destroyed the natural resources which used to sustain our state's economy.
Nobody's going to read this, but if the few who do come away with a different perspective, then maybe it was worth it. I find myself on the losing end of so many conversations on HN and elsewhere that I'm not sure it's worth it anymore to try here. We all need to try harder. We all need to dig deeper and do better. It can't just be a handful of environmentalists.
I hate to see a forest burn as much as the next person. But please understand that I simply cannot give you a simple answer to your question of whether we should let forests burn so that natural events can take place. We're so far past that, that simple solutions are in fact the problem.
The problem today is mis-blaming the wrong cause. This is like victim blaming. So the real culprit here is a century of forest mismanagement and clearcutting which led to massive fires. Combined with global warming (warm winters which don't kill beetles) and free trade which allows pests free passage everywhere. But you blame environmentalists.
Because of that, your prescription for more logging and thinning will likely have the opposite effect of what's intended. You'll apply a tech and market solution to a problem of natural collapse and human culture. Which will have unintended consequences and cause a further domino effect of negative impacts to the natural world. Note that this is why we will likely not solve global warming through technology, nor any of the 100+ other catastrophes comprising this Anthropocene extinction.
The real answer is along the lines of changing our culture so that logging is no longer required. We could grow hemp or any number of better natural fibers. We could stop interfering with the food chain, for example by not endlessly fighting the reintroduction of wolves. But these types of answers are a lot of work and take decades and don't appeal to ego.
We have to ask ourselves: if we're serious about preventing the loss of our forests, are we willing to leave the trees where they fall for no financial gain? Are we willing to leave oil in the ground to prevent global warming? Will we aid countries being assaulted who have nothing to pay us with? Will we help children to eat whose parents are on drugs? And so on. Or will we rationalize and whatabout and fail to do what's right for people we disagree with, and do just exactly the wrong thing. Our failure to act outside of ego is what will ultimately destroy the planet.
For what it's worth, I don't entirely disagree with you, as I was just on a trip to Yellowstone for the first time in 25 years after the fires tore through in the 90s. The new 6 inch diameter trees are beautiful but packed too closely together and will need to be thinned. It will be interesting to see how that plays out (nature vs nurture), and it could provide a sustainable model for other forests.