Re:America in flames
by ambicapter on Friday September 11, 2015 @11:34AM
(#10204249)
Well, fires have been happening for a long time, so long that some species have adapted to it (pine cones only opening up and releasing seeds when exposed to high heat being one of them), so I can only assume that the ecosystem has learned to deal with it.
Usually we define "good" for the environment to be the state it would be in without human interference.
The Great Oxygenation wiped out most life on Earth, which sounds like a bad thing. But clearing out so many species leaves the way for an evolutionary boom to fill all the new niches. So... we can't really even say that mass extinctions are bad.
Just because forest fires occur naturally, and would spread naturally without human intervention, does that necessarily mean they are beneficial for the earth?
If humans didn't try to put out forest fires, and perhaps by chance many lightning strikes caused fires all across the northern west coast within a small timeframe, would this still be a net positive for the ecosytem?
I don't know enough about the equilibrium.