Wildfires needn't be the bane of our existence

Posted January 2021

By Andy Tran

Cub Reporter

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be able to prevent forest fires? We can prevent forest fires and other events harming nature. We can do many things to help prevent forest fires.

We can help to prevent forest fires by doing something as simple as cleaning up after ourselves when we go camping. Forest fires can be prevented by removing flammable waste that we leave behind when we exit the forest. You could be leaving something not healthy for animals or things that could cause forest fires. Many forest fires come from campers leaving stuff behind that somehow gets ignited and then the fire happens. Too many fires also happen when campers don't put out their campfires properly. Many kids and adults go camping and try to extinguish the campfire, but they end up not doing that, leaving the flame there, potentially causing a fire. Too many campers just assume since its taken out of their vision the fire is extinguished.

Another major cause forest fires is lit cigarettes. Most smokers just drop cigarettes and don't step on them to put them out. They leave them there, assuming they're going to be fine—until they end up slowly causing a hug forest fire. We can also try to prevent this by encouraging smokers to put out their own cigarettes and other things, like matches, that use a flame.

Most large forest fires are caused by natural means. There's not too many ways to prevent these fires, but one way is to cut down trees that are near volcanoes, so that if a volcano erupts it can't set fire to them. This task would take very long to do, but it's better than a forest fire. We can't prevent lightning from striking and causing forest fires, but we can slightly predict volcano eruptions, so we should do that.

To prevent forest fires from spreading, we should construct fire stations nearer forests. The forest fire fighting team stationed near forests can decrease the chance of large fires from spreading. Of course this would be kinda hard to have people do this because fires are always random. They are more common near cities. but this could also prevent more forest fires from getting huge. This will most likely not become a thing, but asking forest rangers visit campsites more often will help, because most forest fires are from campers left on their own, not supervised.

That's how we should deal with forest fires. We should try to prevent them more if we can. Forest fires are a very big problem that we have had for many generations. If we can start to prevent them, then the future for us will look very bright.