We must ban your :elmofire: treats to prevent forest fires, pollution, lung cancer, other lung damage, littering, and injury.
The power company's malfunctioning equipment that starts 80% of forest fires, the cars that produce 75% of the pollution, the cigarettes that cause 90% of the lung cancer, the COVID giving everyone lung damage, the fast food packaging and vapes that make up almost all litter are all fine though. Tragic about those 5 people per year who get a booboo from forest fire embers, though.
Every year in British Columbia people breaking campfire regulations/bans cause preventable wildfires, damaging the nature we all enjoy, putting lives at risk, and diverting resources that might otherwise have gone to fighting naturally occurring wildfires.
IDK about the other arguments in this piece, but in states/provinces that are tinderboxes every summer I'm completely fine with campfire bans and I've always been able to enjoy camping without them.
The overwhelming majority of wildfires, more than 3/4, are caused by malfunctioning power infrastructure due to power companies being cheap about maintenance. The rest of human caused wildfires and forest fires are mostly caused by vehicles, with things like cigarette butts, campfires, controlled waste burns, or arson making up a comparatively tiny fraction of the causes of past fires.
It's sensible to restrict campfires outside of fire rings in droughts in sensitive areas, but ridiculous to propose that campfires should be banned or discouraged everywhere always, purely because they have a chance of doing damage somewhere sometimes.
This is the same crappy blame game thing as saying that we should ban people from taking showers in the southwest because of droughts, when the reality is that almost all of the water is going to irrigation for golf courses and extremely water intensive crops in the desert.
Where did you get that data from Washington State last year has the portion of wildfires caused by recreation/ceremony as roughly equal to that of power generation and transmission (both at roughly 7.5%) In Idaho from 1980 to 2007 Campfires were the most common human-caused source of wildfires. Even older nationwide data has smoking and campfires combined, as a greater cause of wildfires than equipment (6.7% vs 3.7%). In the Montane subregion of Alberta , campfires are the most common human cause of wildfires.
The number of wildfires caused by campfires are also suppressed by the fact that they are banned in the most fire-prone areas, take away those bans, and the count would probably increase a great deal.
I don't think campfires should be banned in areas where they pose little risk of starting a wildfire, but bans on them are not comparable to restricting showers. People need showers for basic hygiene. No camper or hiker should need to start a fire to enjoy their time outdoors, particularly when the risk of something going wrong is both entirely preventable and potentially enormous in consequences.
I was about to argue with you. Like, you're right, but I think I just found the treat I'm willing to be a treat guy about. Ngl I break fire bans every year, but I do it in clearings, build rings, put it out and only scatter ashes I can hold in my hands