These fires breeze through quickly and do little permanent damage. Without occasional natural fires, the forest becomes the stage for a raging inferno. There are other benefits to regular small fires. They speed up the process of recycling dead plant material into nutrients for the soil. Many kinds of pines have cones that only fire can pop open, releasing the seeds inside.
Prairie grasses have buds underground that spring up quickly after a fire.
All this new growth is food for wildlife. Forest managers allow them to burn, or even deliberately set them, in parts of the United States. In other parts of the U.S., however, and especially in neighborhoods that border wildlands, many people view any fire as bad. They put them out. Often they resist prescribed burning, arguing that heavy smoke from fires causes air pollution and health problems and that the danger of a prescribed fire getting out of control and burning homes is too great.