Let me give you a story so we aren't talking past one another.

The Snake River plain where I live in Idaho used to be covered by a 10 foot tall sagebrush forest and edible plants like camas. A network of streams allowed one to walk and rarely be far from water. There were large herds of deer, antelope, sage grouse, mountain lions, fish, you name it.

Then the cattle ranchers came a century and a half ago after the Civil War. Within 3 years, they had grazed off all of the land near the town where I grew up. Sheep herders also caused massive loss of vegetation. The land went from lush and sustainable to a cheatgrass desert that never recovered.

So what happened? Well, midwest grasslands form a deep network of roots that grows back, even when the grass is stripped to the ground by animals or fire. But high desert grass is bunchgrass, where grass forms clumps in order to survive periods of draught. Once a clump is gone, it takes decades to regrow. Deer are browsers and eat leaves, while antelope may graze but have formed a symbiotic relationship where the herd only survives if it doesn't overgraze. But cows are grazers that completely strip whatever grass they're eating, while also damaging the delicate desert soil due to their weight. Cows simply aren't compatible with a bunchgrass ecosystem.

Once the grass was gone, the streams quickly eroded and the water table fell 6 feet, drying out the entire landscape. And that was that.

Without knowing anything about Germany's situation, I can look at the destruction caused by the introduction of a single pest and know that the forest was not healthy to begin with. Maybe it was cut centuries ago so is not an old-growth forest. Maybe the natural predators have all been killed. More likely, there are deep structural problems in the soil, like the forest is lacking an immune system, and the temperature is not what the forest evolved to survive in. Pests are like mold growing on an old piece of bread, a symptom not a cause.

Comments like yours that blame the people working to heal the trauma, rather than the people who inflicted the trauma, raise the level of ignorance in the world. I don't think that was your intention, so my intention here is not to criticize you. You are just looking for practical solutions to an impractical problem. That is why your solutions simply will not work in the manner you expect.

But you triggered me, so let me explain why. The people who came to Idaho in the 1800s were escaping persecution after they lost the Civil War. They brought a southern colonial culture which ignored brutality against the other if it was for a greater good, like providing a high quality of life to kin. That was the cultural driving force behind the extermination of Native Americans. If the land was damaged in the process, so be it.

Today we still live with the aftermath of that. It's the part that can't be said. It's critical race theory. It's why everything is broken. Its why America is falling apart. It's what our next election is about.

But I can't possibly explain the context of my environmentalist understanding in a single quip. So I play the loser in my community, even when I am not wrong. I was bullied by children of ranchers, whose families were the pillars of the community. They will never, ever, admit that they desertified southern Idaho. They will always project their image as "stewards of the land". Never mind that they destroyed our heritage and forced us into a narrow provincial way of life. That's crumbling anyway, as their unsustainable philosophy destroyed the natural resources which used to sustain our state's economy.

Nobody's going to read this, but if the few who do come away with a different perspective, then maybe it was worth it. I find myself on the losing end of so many conversations on HN and elsewhere that I'm not sure it's worth it anymore to try here. We all need to try harder. We all need to dig deeper and do better. It can't just be a handful of environmentalists.

I hate to see a forest burn as much as the next person. But please understand that I simply cannot give you a simple answer to your question of whether we should let forests burn so that natural events can take place. We're so far past that, that simple solutions are in fact the problem.