OpenKoder
Taking this opportunity, I want to say thank you for the regular reposts of my materials on Twitter)))
As for the question, I believe the reason is roughly the same as why far fewer people die in earthquakes in California than in Haiti. It is because of poverty, which in turn stems from the poor organization of society.
And I am not even talking about the size of the state, because it is difficult to say offhand in which country the state interferes more in people’s lives—Sweden or Russia, California or Haiti. Any society has as much state as it resisted poorly, and mainly in those areas where the resistance was particularly ineffective.
In Russia, the main strategy for resisting the state has always been flight; therefore, people here are effective at gathering something and using it quickly—be it mushrooms from a state forest or machinery from a state factory for scrap metal—while owning real estate is always a zone of vulnerability, so they don’t get attached to it and don’t take care of it. Who would take care of state forests, and why? Who would put out the fires, and why?
In Sweden, for example, you cannot flee from the state, and people had to cling to the land. As a result, the state there is more effective at collecting taxes, since everyone sits neatly in their places, everyone is counted, and everyone is accounted for. Life costs a pretty penny and is entirely scheduled, but the forests do not burn.
I have now moved to a country where, on the one hand, private property is reasonably well protected—and this is not so much because of the state as because those are the interests of society; it is profitable for people to sell it dearly to foreigners. On the other hand, state intervention is tolerated quite reluctantly, and quite often it puts on a brave face while playing a bad game, simply legalizing over time what people did for themselves at their own risk. Forests here still burn from time to time, but gradually there is less and less ownerless junk.
If we reason specifically about the forest, then to reduce the number of fires, it is very important that it is not just private, but also belongs to owners who are not too large. A large owner, at best, will make quarterly clearings, and if lucky, will also plow firebreaks. If very lucky, they will perform selective logging and remove deadwood. But generally, for them, the concentration of production and square-nest thinking is effective. But a small owner will live in the forest themselves and will build a paved road to their farmstead. Such a road will not only serve as a firebreak but will also allow all necessary equipment to be delivered almost instantaneously anywhere to put out a blaze. And since putting out the fire will be economically effective, it will be put out.
