‘Clean’ forests will not fix wildfire problem

Yet another letter telling us our wildfire problems will go away if we "clean" the forests.

Anyone that spouts that probably has never been in a forest. I encourage you to go to Backbone State Park, or Palisades, or any of our small wooded parks in Iowa. Walk through them and look up the side of the hills to the tangle and matter that exists in a healthy forest, and imagine the amount of physical labor it would take to clean, say five acres.

Imagine how you're going to get that material out. Where are you going to take it? What are you going to do with it once it arrives at the mythical destination? Now, multiply that by millions and millions of acres. Acres in rugged mountainous terrain with hillsides that go straight up at incredible angles. Millions of acres inaccessible to any motorized equipment. How many roads are you willing to build to reach all those areas? How much ecological damage are you willing to inflict to achieve this? And how many billions (trillions??) of dollars are you willing to spend to do it?

Ever since this was uttered by Donald Trump it has become another idiotic mantra of those who don't want to acknowledge, let alone wrestle with the reality and complexities of climate change. We're altering the world we live in whether you think so or not. Half-baked ideas do nothing to move any of us forward.

Jim White

Robins