It just seems to me that there's no free lunch in this. We suppress the fire, we allow the trees to age, we get more bugs in the old-growth trees, and then they all die and there's a forest fire. I'm looking at this, thinking we're just suppressing the bugs so that the age of the trees gets higher so we're even more likely to have more bugs. It just seems as though the more we try to interfere with this process, we create a positive feedback loop that makes it more likely.
There's a lot of guilt associated with this, but just because we're causing climate change and we're creating this horrible problem, that doesn't mean that trying to address it the way we're addressing it is a good idea. It just seems that we're going to head to a new climate state, and maybe we should just be trying to plan and manage towards the new climate state rather than trying to protect something that simply doesn't exist. We're already 1.5°C beyond the climate that caused this forest to exist in the first place. I'm trying to wrap my head around why we're trying to protect the past that doesn't exist.