Land Managers Can’t Burn the West Fast Enough
The West will have many more summers like this past one. Extreme heat waves, wind events, and droughts will make severe, destructive fires an inevitability. The air will be choked with smoke from July to October, and tens of thousands of people will likely be displaced by wildfires in the next decade. For all of humanity’s attempts at setting boundaries between our spaces and wild ones, every summer proves that the two are irreversibly interwoven.
The calls for better management of the lands where fire and human settlement meet are intensifying. Some western landscapes haven’t seen fire at regular, natural intervals , leaving them congested with overgrown brush and bug-ridden trees. Politicians are always happy to talk about “better forest management”—most recently, Mike Pence briefly mentioned it during the vice-presidential debate, as a solution to severe wildfires. Meanwhile, fire managers and ecologists continue to beg for resources to complete more forest-management projects. And politicians, national media, and fire
