Fire suppression leads to distortion as malinvestment continues, causing extensive overgrowth, as if there were more available resources than there really are. The forester fools the forest into reacting to a more benign, resource-laden environment for growth. The artificial environment of fire suppression collapses all the intertemporal strategies in the forest, as even the conifer’s is morphed into a fight for immediate survival (an effect we will see again in Chapter 7). The irony, then, is that this eternal Garden of Eden mirage prompts only a desperate head-to-head mad dash to the
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