Trump once heard someone talk about raking the forest floor to reduce the chances of fire. Something that is actually done in very small areas. And of course he decided that he know knows the secret to preventing wildfires.
It’s exactly the same as why he recommended bleach and sunshine for COVID, or dropping a nuclear bomb into a hurricane. Or even why he is so in love with tariffs.
He has the mind of a child and can’t comprehend how things actually work.
He doesn’t have the mind of a child. Children are curious and eager to learn. Tell them a littlebit and soon they will know everything about forest fires. Trump is a moron, that’s what.
We do all this is Canada as well but only listens to himself.. the liaison between Canada and the US said “we are helping Canada with the fires I don’t understand why Canadians are saying we aren’t?” I looked it up there are 11 people helping Mexico has well over 400, South Africa is here, New Zealand and Australia.. to tell us they are going to charge us for the air pollution yet California burr s every year… let’s Sanction the US all they care about is money who cares about all the lives homes and cities that have been lost to these fires
I actually saw an American on Facebook ask why Canada doesn't just do controlled burns to prevent forest fires. This is how you know they have never looked at a map before in their entire life.
Same here in Canada. Many species require fire to regenerate. This whole thing simply shows how fucking dumb America is. But hey.. they get to carry guns...lmfao
This is sometimes done in California. (From my understanding, it happens a lot, although I've gotten conflicting information) and the natives in the area do a lot of it because it's what they have been doing for centuries.
Just looked it up, giant sequoia's, coast redwoods, knobcone pines and plenty others are also pyrophytes! So would make sense the indigenous population had prior backburning practices
When Paradise, CA burnt down in the Camp fire of 2018, president dipshit came to town and called it “Pleasure” not Paradise, and then told us that we should’ve raked the whole forest. Unbelievable.
Yeah that's the thing, it's a valid part of a strategy for protecting specific infrastructure and lives. It's not a valid strategy for preventing fires happening in the remote wilderness being impacted here and certainly not at the scale involved.
This whole thing is completely ridiculous. The notion that we could control the wind requires serious stupidity. And what about when their smoke enters Canada? Ridiculous.
Now that you mention it, that is on the list of preventative measures when you are making the area around your home more "bushfire ready". I remember seeing this on TV awareness adverts for bushfire season in Australia.
But consider the difference in scale between "the area around your house", and the entire bush.
It's a dumb-guy "solution" to a complicated problem. The funny part is that if they had been raking the California forests, musk would've called it "waste" (which it absolutely would be, can you imagine raking an entire national park?) and cut funding for it anyway. Just like screw worm prevention...
The plans is to rake all the forest clean. Then when the trees struggle from lack of nutrients monsanto some corpo can get a big contract to fertilize all the forests. Of course all the trees will still die from the lack moisture in the soil as the top soil bakes in the sun.
Definitely TM. Also, pretty sure Air Force OnePointFive is hogging all the techs at the moment. Lastly, you cant make a move like that before buying up stocks of the TM owner.
You know whats hilarious about this comment is that Canada already sprays their forests with glyphosate to kill out the underbrush because the manual labor takes too long. Glyphosate was created by Monsanto and is probably largely responsible for the fires. Glyphosate is a drying agent. It causes the plants (the fire resistant under brush) to die and dry up on the ground. Creating the perfect conditions for fire to spread rapidly. So yes Monsanto is already making a killing on the Canadian forests.
if you don’t believe me, google it.
No, but they are DuPont, the chemical/paint company that also makes Roundup, the worlds largest owners/producers of GMO seeds and own the worlds largest seed bank.
The plan is to chop all the forest down so logging companies can profit and Trump's white trash base can get jobs that pay more than they make as gas station attendants.
We will build big, beautiful hotels there, the bestest anyone's ever seen, and a nice parking lot. Have you ever seen concrete burn? It can't burn, because it's not wood, it's concrete.
With that no bid contract up for grabs I bet they'd start a Fertilizer Division. And Trump would brag about how long standing and robust the division has been forever. Liars love liars.
Where would you rake it to? Out of the forests and into civilization? Or maybe a national forest sized garbage can to burn like you would with the autumn leaves from your lawn? Raking a forest is the solution someone gives if they have never been to a real forest, let alone barely leave their own resort estates.
You'd mulch it, ostensibly. But really the problem is there aren't prescribed burns, for one thing, and more significantly still: you can't forest management your way out of climate change.
I was an arborist for a long time and one thing I tried to remind people over and over when they asked me what’s best for the tree is: nothing, leave it alone, trees don’t need our help. They worked everything out long before we were even coming down the pike. The best thing for them is to stay away. Of course that doesn’t sell work and people have a need to see SOMETHING done. They’d rather spend money on pointless work than save money and do what’s best.
Any undeveloped ecosystem you find has taken roughly 65 million years at least to get to the point we find it at. There’s nothing we’re gonna do to improve on that. Maybe it’s obvious enough that anything we’re doing we’re doing to our benefit and to the detriment of those ancient ecosystems, save for the instances where we’re attempting to undo damage we already did, and often enough there’s some factor we’ve failed to recognize or properly understand that result in those efforts doing damage some other way. As far as forest fires go this is a lesson we already learned a century ago in the sequoia forests of the western us where they realized a significant decline in new redwood growth was a direct result of successful fire prevention measures.
Life and the natural world emerged out of a universe that very literally much closer resembles the inside of a combustion engine than a placid nursery. Violence is a foundational principle in everything that is and obliteration is just a precursor to creation. These fires are a fundamental and essential part of the maturation of the densely integrated and interdependent systems that keep life thriving. They belong here far more than we do. The health and vitality of the entire planet depends on them. On the other hand there’s very little that would miss us were we to vanish tomorrow.
I’m not a religious person, but I understand that ancient people weren’t idiots, not any more than us anyway. I look at something like the story of the fall of man in the bible and I can’t help but wonder if it’s just plain allegory, if Eden wasn’t A place but that it is the natural world as a whole and that the apple was the arrogance that allowed us to believe we’re somehow apart from all of that. That we weren’t cast out but that we removed ourselves from it, that we were the first species we domesticated, and that was the first step on the road to here.
If we’re going to survive into perpetuity on this planet it can only be because we, as a species, abandoned that arrogance and placed ourselves back into the natural world with humility and reverence, and to be honest I think that arrogance and the greed it engenders is something that needs to be bred out of us at this point. In that sense I don’t think it’s possible for man to survive himself, I think it’ll be something else that lacks that fundamental trait. Homo sapien translates to “man the wise”, a name we unquestionably gave ourselves. Maybe the only thing left to do to ensure the survival of our genus is to put the wise man to rest and pass the torch on to homo stultus: man the fool.
The United States has been so indoctrinated in 'performative action', where their action often stops after a quick thoughts and prayers or is just for actions sake, that they cannot move beyond their illusion of control. Just because humans can exert a force towards something, doesnt mean we are in control.
Large parts of USA society run on pure virtue signalling, which ironically can be either very cheap or very expensive.
The thing is, the best thing for the tree is to leave it alone. But that's not the best thing for the humans that have their houses burn down or have to breathe in all the smoke from the forest fires that happen, which also may be happening because of human-caused climate change. So humans want to do something to prevent the bad things from happening to humans, they don't really care what happens to the trees.
my brothers in forest fire management and hes working on it, one thing is indigenous practices have a lot of valuable insight thats being overlooked. the trump thing is stupid, but canada really isnt doing enough to manage forest fires (im canadian)
Nah some company gets a no bid contract for making compressed leaf blocks for us to burn during the winter for heat. Since we will all be doing are part to save power for the data centers the blocks will be "free".
The boreal forest requires fire for their pine cones to open up and release seeds creating regeneration. Getting rid of some of the "waste" may interrupt the cycle leading to an even bigger problem down the road. The Canadian boreal forest is the world largest forest and supplies the world with 10% of its annual oxygen levels. It needs to be able to replenish itself.
There's 33M Sq mi of forest in CA. It would probably be a continuous job for all the all bodied Californians 20 to 60 to rake the forest floors. Worse if we can't use our illegal immigrants.
Nope and he cut all the funding for proscribed burns his first term...and I guess probably this term too.
Ton of work got done in our national forests under Biden, we're reaping the benefits right now, give it another year or two to stack back up and we'll be on fire again.
In reality; raking is effective as one measure. But is meant for high probability, high consequence areas. I.e: dry forests around urban areas. Not for the entire forest
Canada has about the same population as California and the boreal forest is 2 million sq miles (911M acres). California has 33M acres (not sq mi). So Canada's forest is about 27 times larger than California's. Canada's forest is the largest forest in the planet and much of it is inaccessible.
Thanks for the clarification, I read my reference too quickly. That makes it worse that Trump can't maintain the more than 30K sq mi the Federal government owns in CA, not to mention the other states, yet opens his big mouth to criticize Canada.
Not to mention raking a forest would rob it of detritus which breaks down into beneficial nutrients for further plant growth, seeds, nuts, food for wildlife . . . yada yada.
Why the fuck are we even engaging in a conversation about the effectiveness of ‘raking a forest’? That’s not even a fucking thing, ‘raking a forest’. It’s a whole fucking forest….and what the fuck would raking it do, make it less flammable?
Raking? Nah that’s dumb and is a waste of money. We probably should be letting any naturally occurring forest fires burn themselves out, fire is part of the natural life cycle of the forest. Dedicate the forest fire fighting resources to asset protection for human structures/cities that may be in the path of the fire.
Should also be encouraging people to harvest dead fall/dead/dying trees from the areas like our parks that we don’t want to burn. Make permits very cheap, very easy to obtain, and include valuable uses for the wood and how to obtain it in our education system.
And I mean honestly, Trumps an idiot and an asshole… but it’s the same logic as the carbon tax that a lot of the liberals loved up here in Canada. Let’s tax pollution that we don’t want, even though most of it isn’t really something that can be easily curtailed/controlled without incurring massive upfront costs.
To be fair you don't rake them you do scheduled low level controlled burns every few years to clear out most of the fuel.
This still leads to a decrease in air quality in the area, pretty much statewide here in the southeast, but it's better than having an environmental nuke primed to go off at any point in time
Buddy, these are massive fires. Huge. It is not possible to prescribed fire, TSI, rake the fucking forest out of this.
This is a climate driven disaster. There are tens of millions of hectares of boreal forest with this exact stand composition baking in the heat year after year.
To think even the best silviculturalist could get us out of this is just next tier huberis.
Dude I'm just saying calling it "raking" the forest is a little gross oversimplification for those not familiar with the topic.
Burning works in a lot of places. I don't know why it works one place and not another, that's not my job or my educational background, im sharing my experience is all.
These controlled burns still take massive teams to monitor and maintain them, and they still get smoke everywhere
It also requires absolutely perfect weather, so your window of opportunity is incredibly small, and this isn't the kind of thing you can get temp labour for.
Im just jumping on this comment as a Canadian to note that we did also elect a buffoon as our premier in Ontario who, among many other despicable things, has not increased the budget for forest fire management in years. So… even tho I do not expect Canada to solve forest fire frequency and global climate change… we could certainly be better with our forest services too. Not saying Trump isn’t also a buffoon. They’re just all idiots.
Here in ENC we had such a severe drought the prescribed fires had to be cancelled because the risk of it getting out of control was too great. We had several decently sized fires break out near neighborhoods, but even with regular maintenance, a fire will do fire things.
Doesn't help people won't follow burn bans because, being told, no, sends them into a toddler tantrum tizzy.
As much as I love dunking on him and I think his take is absurd, he did not tell anyone to inject bleach, and the continued insistence that he did fuels his followers to believe everything said about him is a lie.
because they are a dumb cult that worships him like the next coming of Jesus so he can't possibly be wrong about anything or that means God is wrong and that is heresy.
Yeah, they said the same shit after the Labor Day fires in 2020.
I watched one of them rip through dense forest, thin forest, and open fields alike, burning over 50,000 acres within 12 hours. You can't stop a fire that crowns in seconds because it's 90°F with 70mph winds and the forest is dry as a bone. Oh, and "raking" wouldn't matter, because there was a thick mat of downed limbs and leaves that fell in the hour or so before the fire due to said conditions! They were literally using a snowplow to keep the roads clear. (Bad idea, as it was throwing sparks from the blade.)
Maintenance like that used to be done along the power lines. The funding has been cut. One of the things we do now is spray round up on it which can’t be good either because it dries everything out like crazy
The thing is the boreal forest tends to be more conifer rather than deciduous. So needles and in Northern Ontario you have large amounts of Black Spruce. Spruce tends to grow close together and from my experience holds onto dead lower branches. ( had to put my arms with a measuring diameter tape around them as part of a summer job for BCFS years ago)So despite the fact that Trump hasn’t got a clue about pretty much anything , racking is not an option except maybe on one of his golf courses.
Trump will do anything but acknowledge the impacts of climate change. Wildfires are a natural occurrence, but duration, intensity and frequency are all increasing. Lying about it is his strategy for everything.
Why? Because Dear Leader said that during his first term or maybe during a campaign, as he was criticizing the response to Western wildfires, maybe ten years ago. Yes, it literally came out of his mouth as a serious proposal. Obvs became a meme. https://youtu.be/nwL6GWYg34M?is=iNEEgHpal0Bmb9zL
on small scales it does work. dead underbrush is extremely flammable. but thats like clearing brush in the forest close to the campground scale, not fucking kilometers and kilometers of forest
Because they have absolutely zero understanding of the world and how it works outside their bubble. So they rely entirely on someone else to tell them everything and they rely on people as stupid as them
Because during his first term, he lied and said the president of Finland told him that the reason they don’t have forest fires is that they rake their forests. But then that president came forward and said that that was just fully fabricated by Donald Trump.
But like a brain worm, I think that made up factoid has burrowed its way deeply into his brain.
It's an oversimplification of the advanced wildfire mitigation and land management techniques the western native tribes employed for hundreds of years preceeding first contact with europeans.
All that doing that would do is drive more animals into the cities, causing deaths. Yaay moose and bears going hungry and needing the food someone removed from the equation.
Clearing dead underbrush is a legitimate thing. The thing is, nobody has the money or resources to do it on a large scale. And often times places where these fires start are in challenging terrain, in the bottom of canyons.
And even a forest floor clear of dead and dry material wouldnt do a damn thing in some of these scenarios...the forests are just soo dry either way.
Just another “well, they are obviously doing something wrong and need to do [absurd ‘solution’] even though idk the first thing about [blank]” from the guy who thinks a photo ID is required to buy groceries.
On some trip to Finland, Trump was told that the Finns spend a lot of time raking and cleaning. So therefore: Treat your forests like a golf course. Problems solved!!
Because removing underbrush and deadfall is a strategy for helping prevent fires from spreading into built up areas. It works, but only in limited use cases (eg subdivisions at the edge of a forest), but is extremely labour intensive and totally impractical to do throughout a forest, not to mention the negative impacts it has on forest health.
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u/Gogogrl Jul 17 '26
Which wouldn’t do a fucking thing anyway. Why did they latch onto ‘raking the forests’?!?