Forest Fires · 3:27pm Sep 3rd, 2014
So I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in California.
See, forest fires are a thing that happens. They're important to the health of forests, and not just for clearing out detritus and deadwood. And given that ponies control all the other aspects of nature within Equestria, they'd also be the ones in charge of burns.
It's a more complicated question than it might seem at first. Fire increases herb and forb yields, but which herbs and forbs depends on when the burn happens. They're all going to be fall or spring, but when exactly is going to depend on the oak species and what exactly they're trying to grow in the forest. It's a matter of husbandry - even if ponies aren't actively foraging crops from the forests, they'll want a healthy ecosystem for all the other animals. Plus they clearly have a significant wood demand, and the best wood comes from robust forest ecosystems, so managing burns is going to be an incredibly delicate and important part of the weather / farming industry. What animals and insects you attract depends on your plants, which affects what other plants grow and spread, and so on.
It's no surprise we don't see any of this in the show - if nothing else, the Everfree doesn't conform to those rules and orchards aren't forests. But in other areas I'd expect some time around the Running of the Leaves or post-Winter-Wrapup you'd have Burn Days.
Interesting stuff. I'll have to keep that in mind in future, might make a good background for an OC or something. Chances are I'll do nothing with it, but thanks anyway.
I'd like to point out that while ponies do control the weather in populated areas, it's unlikely they have weather teams for every corner of the map. Likewise, even if we granted that somehow they do have every inch of sky under control, there are still things like dragons, salamanders, and even the ground itself erupting flame which can cause forest fires.
2424614 Oh certainly. It's pretty clear that there are still relatively wild areas of Equestria, but given the force-multipliers of special talents and magic it's also apparent there's going to be hundreds of thousands of acres of managed forest somewhere.
I'm not sure they'd do controlled burns. The thing is, we only just recently realized that forest fires are an important part of the ecosystem, and we're a good thousand or so years in the future from their world. More than likely, ponies wouldn't have any idea a huge blaze could have beneficial effects.
That said, Earth Ponies live and breath the land, so maybe they're more magically-attuned to the workings of nature than we ever were.
There's a cool story in the idea that some magical, elemental creature burns forests in their world, and everyone understandably assumes they're a menace.
2424655 Equestria is hard to peg for era because of schizo tech and magic.
Their health care seems to be about as good as ours, but they have trains from the 30's and no cars at all. Their government is run by a God-Queen (or three).
I'm not sure if I agree with the concept that we only recently realized fires were good for forests. Look at literature from the middle ages and fires were considered natural and good. The "Forest fires are bad" has only existed for the narrow gap of time when we could actually fight them...and then notice the effects. With ponies that could have happened far, far earlier. If at all, given the inherent understanding earth ponies seem to have.
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True, they probably would have gone through the same song and dance we did when they started putting out blazing fires with stormclouds.
Clearly the important questions are:
1) What does the Cutie Mark for burning down a forest look like?
2) Have the CMC ever tried to burn down the Everfree?
I believe "manage" would be a better term. I don't think they exert complete control over the natural cycles like that. Nowadays I see things like Winter Wrapup as mostly the ponies understanding the seasonal transitions and making sure that such transitions cause as little damage and disruption, both to themselves and to other plants and animals, as possible.
That being said, just like they seem to help bring the winter, I can see them managing forest fires to make sure they get as many of the positive effects of such fires while preventing as much of the negative ones as they can. Good call.
It was a pleasure to burn--it was just what his cutie mark was telling him.
2424657 The every-five-year salamander migration through Whitetail Woods is coming up, and Twilight has been researching for the last two weeks on a solution to the problem. Eventually when she shows it to her friends, Applejack and Fluttershy give her a tour of the woods to show why letting the salamanders burn the deadwood and dry grass is a good thing.
Yeah, here in Kansas, every spring we have a few newbie city folk who freak out that giant swatches of the pristine prairie go up in towering waves of fire that sweep across the ground, watched over by a couple dozen farmer types on four-wheelers who mostly don't even have water to squirt on the flames, but actually have drip torches to make even more fire. If grassland isn't burned every few years, the dead grass builds up until the next fire is far too hot and actually burns the grass roots, damaging the plants. Plus Eastern Red Cedar trees are pesky weeds, and move in. (but they burn like *torches* when the fire hits them, very impressive) With residue management and no-till, we don't see the post-harvest wheatfield burns any more (which were even more impressive, you can feel the heat from a mile away), but fire is still critical to keep a pasture healthy.
2424699 Obviously a burning tree. Other ponies would make far more sense to be on any fire team, such as Firelock, and of course lots of pegasi with cloud chunks for wet fire lines. I can't imagine any resident of Ponyville giving any of the CMC a drip torch and telling them, "Y'all go on out that way and lay down some fire."
2424662 Technically what we're dealing with here is "The minimal technology that will permit a certain plotline to be plausible. Plus toys." Mare Do Well showed that Ponyville had a dam with what appeared to be a power generating station, plus a construction crew putting together a high-rise building. Maretropolis showed an even deeper tech base (admittedly in comic form).
2424779 Honestly I think that'd make for a good, not-too-blatant-message ep.
And oh yeah, it's pretty clear that worldbuilding bends to current plot. The thing with the power dam and whatnot though - because of magic and cutie marks any piece of tech works as a one-off. A hydrothaumic dam might solely exist as a pet project for someone.
Hahaha this advert popped up on this blogpost.
i.imgur.com/vlZaXR9.jpg
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And puns. Don't forget the puns
(Specially when Discord is involved. A metal detector gate? A scooter? One of those days he will arrive in a freezing DeLorean that leaves a flame trail...)
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Does it? Their hospitals look a bit like ours but the amount of actual medicine going on is debatable and off-screen. We've seen casts and machines that measure... something. And given the existence of magic, for all we know treatments consist of unicorn doctors casting spells on patients (which admittedly, could be more effective than our health care).
Like you said, it's hard to estimate, which leaves any specific example pretty much up to the writer as fits the story's needs.
2425025 We have two instances of actual medical care. One is the feather flu or whatever in Hurricane Fluttershy. A virulent disease bad enough to confine ponies to bed was treated as a nuisance, rather than something to be afraid of. It's not until you get antibiotics that anyone would dismiss an epidemic.
The other one was when RD managed to injure her wing. She was fully healed in less than a week, and the hospital seemed to have all the usual amenities.
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Do they have anti-biotics? They weren't able to stop the Feather Flu from spreading to pretty much all the pegasi in town and it laid them up for days, which as far as we know is exactly how it progresses naturally, with minimal or no treatment.
Even if they do have 'antibiotics' are they drugs or spells?
And that's the thing about the hospital. The 'modern amenities' we see are things like lights and beds. We don't see anything in the way of treatments or even to indicate that Rainbow Dash doesn't just heal faster than humans from broken bones. But again, assuming she did get help, it doesn't mean medical technology was involved. They didn't talk about having to put pins in her or the like. If they helped at all it was just as likely magical in nature.
2425132 I'd say it doesn't matter whether the actual medical attention is magical or technological - so long as it provides similar rates of recovery, it's equivalent (...kind of. There's issues of supply and demand but, we'll say it's the same). And ask any epidemiologist - a disease that vectors quickly through a population and knocks them off their feet is something to be terrified of without modern medicine. Even if it's not antibiotics specifically, there's all sorts of palliative care that's needed.
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Treating it as a nuisance also at least implies good understandings of germ theory and epidemiology, which are relatively modern.
Assuming they don't rely on manual [1] or magical labor to clear brush & otherwise achieve the same results, I'd imagine that outside of places that it's desirable to burn every year, you'd see specialist teams who ride a circuit through a large territory, returning however frequently a particular area needs to be burned. Small, routine fires like burning ditches would probably be done by locals, but larger forestry operations would call for someone with a wildfire cutie mark to be in charge.
They would have much better control of their controlled burns than we do, what with their ability to make winds blow in the desired direction, start fires with lightning and deliver a downpour to put them out all on command. They could burn right up to thatched-roof houses & the edges of fields without significant risk.
[1] Perhaps it should be "oral", since they don't have hands and pick things up in their mouths?
2424699 in one of my fics they made a decent try. Even better this was the result of trying to completely immolate a portion of the wood. This is also why letting a pony who thinks it's okay for children to play with explosives, no mater how safe the explosives in question are, to more or less foalsit the crusaders.
I also realized that why I have a perfect explanation why nopony would have to do that, almost nopony knows that so it might still have to be a thing logically. Namely that like most things in Equestria earth pony is literal, and they're good with plants because they improve the soil just by walking around, and depending on the pony there is even a decent radius from the hooves.
Oh, finally one interesting thing to think about is depending on how important the heat lasting for a certain amount of time is, this could be very quick, just bam, one unicorn spell and the tree is supper hot, then collapses in a pile of ash.