Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western megafires of today
This highlights one of the problems with pop culture and science.  Pop culture has a tendency to fixate on a small number of big problems or sexy technologies to the exclusion of all others.<p>e.g. If you bring up forestry management&#x27;s role in setting the stage for megafires, you will typically be labelled a climate change denier unless you go out of your way to address climate change first, as this article does.  Even then, you&#x27;ll likely be seen by many as &quot;minimizing the <i>real</i> problem&quot;.<p>Yes, climate change is a bigger problem, overall, than megafires, but past (and continuing) forestry practices are the larger part of the megafire problem.  Should we ignore small problems until the big ones are all solved?<p>Of course not.<p>The problem with pop culture is that it influences <i>everything</i>.  If you want to have any success with grant applications, finding ways to work in current pop-culture buzzwords in is essential.  Anyone trying to do research on forestry would be well advised to have &quot;climate change&quot; somewhere in their proposal even if it&#x27;s not important to their work at all.<p>If you want to get politicians to devote public funding to improving forestry practices, good luck!  There&#x27;s money for exploring the impact of climate change on forests, but not for improving forestry practices themselves.  At least, not until enough megafires make people look more carefully at the problem.<p>The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news.  It&#x27;s been known for decades.  It just wasn&#x27;t something that fit into pop culture narratives, so we&#x27;ve let things get worse and worse.<p>The next time you hear someone saying that X is an important part of a problem that climate change also affects, pay closer attention.  Don&#x27;t just dismiss that person as a climate change denier.  Make room for small problems as well as the big ones, because ignoring many small problems soon leads to big ones.