Ruh-roh, no deviation from the global warming cult allowed.

Humans are so destructive--it's times like these when I wonder why we were created in the first place.

Proposal:
1. Let timber industry pull out dead or nearly-dead trees by helicopter for free from public lands.
2. Start up a good healthy biomass industry (wood pellet stoves and water heaters).
3. ?
4. Profit.

Road to hell paved with good intentions. And in this case hell is a fire inferno.

@2: Intelligent design gone wrong?

@2, Maybe if there weren't so many of us the earth would manage better.

@6 certainly the anti-green revolution crowd is working towards that end. Get rid of the GMO's and pesticides and start living with the same agriculture we had back in the 1800's. And let the famines begin!!

@5: You have to admit, we humans are indeed the most self-serving (instant gratification, baby!) and destructive creatures on this planet. My evolutionary question is: would the Earth be better off if humans hadn't been created at all?
@6: That's why I chose to remain childless, and to leave a smaller carbon footprint. Agreed: 8 billion people is too many, and now the Earth has no choice but to rebel through extreme climate change and weather patterns.

The reality is that there does not exist a way out of our dilemma absent massive subsidies. The timber industry limps along on paper-thin margins as it is, how in the world can they be enlisted in clearing out small, unmarketable biomass? The one biomass-generator I am aware of in Washington operates at a loss. The timber industry as it exists now in the real world is dependent on uniform trees, grown en masse in accessible terrain. And this is with lumber prices coming down off record highs. Helicopter-type operations are niche applications for specimen trees. Even the tower operations for steep slopes are getting to be a rare bird indeed. It's all feller-bunchers nowadays.
There is no money in thinning and pruning, it is difficult, labor-intensive and hard on equipment. Whenever I do see a crew out (on DNR land exclusively, it is uneconomic for private landowners) they are exclusively Spanish-speaking-ie it is tough grunt work that you can't get white guys to do anymore.
So my hope is we could at some point disabuse ourselves of this fairy-tale that unleashing 'market forces' can restore healthy forests. That is just code for restoring the wildly unsustainable harvest rates of the 70's and 80's. Make no mistake- advocates of increased logging are entirely cynical and don't give a damn about forests- they just want the logs, and not the small ones mind you.
So sure, let's all the stakeholders come together and craft some management plans that address forest health. And that will include controlled fires and removing material and harvested patches. But don't think it will be cheap- expect some sticker shock because it HAS to be subsidized.

@8: Your evolutionary question is inherently incongruous because it has a form of the verb 'create'.

@10:

Not in the least, as the genus-species "homo sapiens" was created as the offspring of previous genus-species, most notably H.heidelbergensis, which in turn was created as the offspring of H.antessesor, which was created from offspring of H.erectus and so-on; all of them created from counter-successive forebearers, which is of course one of the particular mechanisms encompassed in evolutionary theory . In fact, it may shock you to know that modern homo sapiens themselves create offspring all the time - just look around.

“Humans are so destructive--it's times like these when I wonder why we were created in the first place.”

So you can live lives of untold comfort and ease for at least 78.5 years and sit at a computer and bitch about it.

@10: Oh, I meant "create" in the intelligent design or biblical sense. So sorry for the confusion.

@9 Excellent comment. Thank you.

Perhaps a carbon tax going to biomass subsidies?

@4: From what I've observed, the road to hell is being paved by ill-intentioned RepubliKKKans.
@10 & @13: Have another cinnamon roll, sugarlips.
@11 COMTE; Thank you and bless you once again.
@12: Who's bitching? I'm not--just stating some facts. At least I'm not contributing to the Earth's currently unsustainable human population. Has anyone noticed that fewer millennials are having children? My guess is that they're worried about the future of generations past their own, and with good reason.

@16: The earth does have societies with less than a 2.5% fertility rate. That should make your day.

@11

The DNA evidence suggests H. Heidelbergensis diverged from the H.Sapiens lineage about half a million years before anatomically modern H. Sapiens appeared. There was some later interbreeding between these branches as H. Sapiens migrated out of Africa and wiped out H. Heidelbergensis. This is why present-day H. Sapiens has a much smaller percentage of H. Heidelbergensis genes (less than 3%), than you would expect to see if H. Sapiens had evolved directly from H. Heidelbergensis ~300k years ago-- but still more than expected for an ancestral divergence 700-800k years ago.

The last common ancestor of H. Sapiens and H. Heidelbergensis was almost certainly H. Ergaster (i.e. late H. Erectus in Africa). To date, scientists have not successfully DNA-sequenced H. Erectus/Ergaster, but it's quite likely only a matter of time and luck before our direct H. Erectus ancestry is confirmed.

H. Antecessor is a contested name, with many scientists suggesting that the (few) specimens so described should be classified instead as H. Erectus or early H. Heidelbergensis, especially in light of the age and physiological variance of fossils fairly recently discovered at the Dmanisi site.

@16

American birth rates have been declining slightly for the past ten years, and are now roughly where they were in the '80s... but overall, the trend has been essentially flat since the end of the Baby Boom: www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db60.htm

Worldwide the broad trend is birth rates remaining low in rich countries, declining rapidly in developing nations, and remaining high in poor countries. The inverse holds for life expectancy, perhaps unsurprisingly.

@13:

Except of course no one else even mentioned so-called "intelligent design" until you decided to ham-handedly bring it up...

“Has anyone noticed that fewer millennials are having children”

Illegal immigration and third world birth rates will more than make up for their inability to figure out what their genitals are for and what gender they are.

“At least I'm not contributing to the Earth's currently unsustainable human population.”

Why not be a real trooper and ask mommy for a retro-abortion for Christmas this year?

Katie Herzog ran a similar article except her take on it makes this article seem like it is full of crap. Or does your article make hers full of crap. They can't both be correct. To her credit, she included some low hanging fruit generic insults to the Republicans. The kind that aren't really clever. Eli Sanders had one with very few opinions but mentioned record amount of fires. Is Charles Mudede going to do one next saying the fires are racist? Or did I miss his already? Which article is the one to believe?

@20, @21- WE have a choice. We can keep breeding like rabbits and absolutely NOTHING that we affect on Earth will improve, resources will become scarcer, and the gain in standard of living that have been made will ultimately stop. Or we can accept that the planet can't support another few billion of us and start working on reducing our growth rate. Yes, it does make me happy that there are countries with less than a 2.5% fertility rate. Should be more of them. With any luck all of them would hit this benchmark. Anyone who is concerned about illegal immigration (or legal immigration for that matter) ought to be concerned about overcrowding and resource scarcity in the countries from which people are emigrating. My guess is that if there was enough food/space/water/etc. to go around in their home countries, a lot fewer would be coming here.