Review shows that large destructive fires are infrequent in India, most being low-intensity fires that burn only the ground vegetation in their respective ecosystems.
While large destructive fires are unacceptable in regions with extensive encroachment by communities, they are mandatory in a region such as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, if it is to be maintained in a natural manner.
Remnants of large, destructive forest fires can be found across Croatia, and for a moment it looks as if the entire hill could go up in flames.
But Jon Keeley of the U.S. Geological Survey's Western Ecological Research Center in Three Rivers, California, who studies the dense, evergreen brushlands, or chaparral, in southern and central California, doubted whether the prevention philosophy had really led to larger, more destructive fires in the region.
The study determined that trees between 100 and 300 years old are perishing "en masse" because of a deadly combination of large destructive events like forest fires, and other, more incremental factors like drought, high temperatures, logging and insect attack.
With each passing year, though, it becomes clearer, at least to those whose interests lie in not fighting ever-larger and more destructive fires, that this is the only sensible course of action.
Swain said the intrusion of wildfires into populated urban areas "used to be really rare historically, but has been happening with alarming frequency recently". Combined with the effects of climate change, that factor is leading the trend toward larger and more destructive fires in California, he said.
This regular clearing of fuel actually makes the largest and most destructive fires less likely to break out.
Each year, thousands of immigrants work as wildland firefighters, plying the trade at a time when extreme weather is producing larger and more destructive fires in the West.
The wildfire which has already burned approximately 106-square-miles, is the third largest fire as well as the most destructive fire in Colorado state history, having burned at least 189 homes so far.
The Pacific margin of Central America is a subduction zone that regularly generates large destructive earthquakes and tsunamis part of the so-called "Ring of Fire" that rims the Pacific.
