The disastrous Yellowstone fire of 1988 leads to the conclusion that 100 years of fire suppression—a zero-tolerance approach to stamp out even naturally occurring, low-intensity blazes—had made the forest dangerously prone to catastrophe. It becomes clear, then, that low-intensity blazes marshal the resources and oversee an orderly succession in the homeostatic forest, as evident in patterns of heterogeneity—conifers here and angiosperms there. The back and forth of a forest system seeking equilibrium avoids the dangerous overgrowth caused by everything trying to thrive all at once—extracting
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