00:00Starting with the onslaught of environmental legislation and protective policies,
00:08we now have millions of acres of wilderness areas, so nobody can go in there.
00:13That puts 70,000 forest products industry companies out of business.
00:18With fewer loggers in the woods, even less land area is actively managed each year.
00:24Once the loggers were gone, the fuel loads grew dramatically,
00:27and without fire to regularly clear them, the forests were reaching a breaking point.
00:33In 1987, we had 2,300 lightning strikes strike the west coast,
00:41and they started thousands of acres of fires.
00:46But in those days, there were loggers in the woods logging,
00:49and we probably put out three quarters of the fire.
00:53Then by 1990, they were saying, listen, we don't want to do any management.
00:59We started losing a lot of those natural fire cycles that cleared out,
01:04you know, a lot of the underbrush and those kinds of things.
01:07There's data that estimate that even back in the early part of the 1900s,
01:12somewhere between 30 and 50 million acres of land would burn every year.
01:17And then as we move into World War II and certainly past World War II,
01:23that number really falls off.
01:26Let me put this in perspective.
01:28You have the National Park Service.
01:30You have the National Wildlife Refuge Service.
01:32Forest Service is bigger than both the park system and the refuge system combined,
01:37like 193 million acres.
01:40It was set up to have forests managed.
01:44Tree cutting, businesses, et cetera, were foundational elements of the management.
01:50And that's changed over time as more and more preservation, hands-off philosophy.
01:59So ranging from smoking the bear, I mean, you got to put out every fire,
02:03to you can't cut a tree.
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