Wildfire behavior in the 21st century is unlike anything we've seen before. Our forests are overcrowded, overstocked, and riddled with climate-driven drought—creating the perfect storm for megafires.
About American Forest Fires: The Untold Story: Are government policies and bureaucracy the REAL fire starters in America? Are answers to a major crisis staring us in the face? Learn what brought us to this point, and the innovative solutions which could keep disaster from setting nature ablaze.
This clip comes from Season 1, Episode 2: "Jump Into the Fire"
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00:00So a healthy forest would not be so crowded with juniper or any other understory vegetation.
00:10This particular forest has missed at least four fire cycles, so it hasn't burned in about 100 years.
00:20All of these small trees here would be regularly cleared out by a low intensity ground fire.
00:26You know, in the past century, there's been less fire here than since the last ice age, you know, 13 to 15,000 years ago.
00:35There's never been a time like that before, and so we're starting to see wildfire behavior that there's no historic record of.
00:43That are throwing up 40,000-foot pyrocumulonimbus clouds that are starting lightning fires 70 miles away.
00:49What you have now from a period where you were suppressing fires and you're really aggressive with how you suppress fires, the result of that is an overcrowded, overstocked forest.
01:05And when you couple that with climate change and climate-driven drought, what you have are conditions out on the landscape that we're trying to combat today.
01:14In many parts of the West, trees that historically would have been removed by regular low-level control burns are now growing so thick they endanger otherwise fire-resistant trees.
