"According to the California Forestry Association, tree density in the Sierra Nevada is too high when compared with the region’s historical rates, creating an elevated fire hazard. It estimates there was an average of 40 trees per acre in the Sierras roughly 150 years ago but puts that number today at hundreds of trees per acre [...] The U.S. Forest Service estimates that California has 129 million dead trees, most in the central and southern Sierras. Insects and drought are to blame for the high numbers."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/03/california-timber-firms-mayb...
But California makes this incredibly costly and difficult to do, even on private land. You need to submit 500 pages of paperwork for each cut, and the state has been notorious in dragging its heels to approve these harvesting plans.
In terms of the fascination with "old growth", an old growth tree is just a tree of a certain diameter, and these tend to survive forest fires.
Really the problem in California is that a lot of people from the East Coast have moved here and decided that forests were some precious resource that needs to be preserved as in Maine, rather than the dangerous pest that trees are in arid climates.
They just never got the memo that California is not New England and the role played by trees in our ecosystem is very different. California needs trees like Australia needs rabbits.
And so now we have 130 million dead trees, ready to kill hundreds of people, cause billions in property damage, and destroy air quality in the state, just so people can preserve these unscientific romantic notions of "preserving forests", when our top public policy priority should be to reduce the amount of land covered by forests back to safe levels.
