But when they hit rock bottom and were ready to quit, they'd encourage one another with a rallying cry: "Let's go make a forest!" 

Planting neat rows of black spruces was great for the logging industry: the even spacing guaranteed that when the trees matured, they could be easily reaped, with ample space between each near-identical tree for massive shears to operate. But that same monocropped, evenly spaced "forest" was also optimized to burn.

It burned. 

8/