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.
01:26We'll be right back to you next time.
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