It’s totally our fault. Our forest and wildfire management is shit.

Just one of the bullshit things we did:

Canada has a policy where lumber companies have to plant enough trees to replace, factoring in natural death, all the trees they log. However, some species of tree are worth more money than others. So they cut down diverse forests to plant one, maybe two species: pine and spruce.

Thing is, there are pine beetles and there are spruce beetles that kill the trees by burrowing holes through the bark. They suddenly had a whole lot more of their favorite trees so there were suddenly a whole lot more beetles. Big sections of forests died at once with the beetles then so overpopulated they spread to healthier, more diverse sections of the forest to kill the pine and spruce there, too.

You can guess what happens to a forest full of dead wood.