In places like California, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southern United States, wildfires are an unavoidable reality.

Wildfires can cause damage to property and human life, but they have many beneficial effects on native vegetation (植被), animals, and ecosystems that have evolved with fires. The forests, including pine barrens, lodgepole pine forests and many more, require fires to reproduce because the trees in the forest are adapted to only produce seeds following a major fire event. Therefore, without them many of these forest types would decline.

A fire renews the watershed (集水区) in ways including, but not limited to, recycling of nutrients, increasing food sources for fish in streams, supplement to stream­side vegetation, spread of fire-adapted plants, etc. not to mention renewal of the soil chemistry which is vital to the forest and the watershed. The basis is that of someone who has studied wildfires and streams since the 1988 Yellowstone wildfires. The science backs up how natural wildfires can be favorable through research publication after publication.

It’s like “resetting the clock” on the ecosystem, allowing the forest to function smoothly all over again for another 200 years. By the way, a stand burning fire such as the Yellowstone fires of 1988 also results in the landscape of younger forest mends which act to reduce the spread of future wildfires and can stop a major wildfire in its tracks.

The bottom line is that we may need today’s natural wildfires to prevent more serious catastrophic fire events in the future. That lesson was learned in Yellowstone in 1988 which was a year of disastrous large­scale fires after more than 50 years of fire suppression (压制).