Not an expert either but thinning is obviously very expensive. But in a thinned forest you can now safely have controlled or uncontrolled burns without a catastrophe.
In many unthinned woods you cannot have a fire since it would escalate into a conflagration. The woods in Bryce for example where I got this lecture. I don't recall the exact numbers but before fire control Bryce woods had 100 trees and acre and after fire control it now has 1000 trees an acre. A fire today would reduce the whole place to ashes and kill everything alive there. Those numbers are 100% extracted from air by me but the real numbers were just as startling.
The 100/trees forest could burn and did burn without killing the forest. The 1000/tree woods can never be allowed to burn since a fire would be so hot it would kill the trees and sterilize the soil.
However now they are stuck to convert 1000/tree to 100/tree is very very costly without using heavy equipment that is destructive itself. You have to send men in to cut down trees and brush tree by tree and the downfall has to be dragged out and removed. We are talking billions of dollars and the environmentalists would be fighting it in courts tree by tree. They are doing some but not enough.
