Managing Fire Regimes Before They Manage Us

For most of the last century, the dominant wildfire strategy was suppression — put every fire out, as fast as possible. The unintended result: decades of accumulated fuel load in forests that evolved to burn regularly and lightly. When a fire does break out in that landscape, it burns far hotter and far more destructively than it would have a century ago.

Bringing fire back, deliberately

Reintroducing controlled, seasonal burns — timed to weather conditions, fuel moisture, and community proximity — is one of the most effective tools available for reducing that accumulated risk. Done well, a prescribed burn clears out the low-lying fuel that feeds catastrophic fires, without threatening the mature canopy or nearby structures.

• Burns scheduled around weather windows that keep them controlled and low-intensity
• Fuel-load reduction focused on the areas closest to at-risk communities
• Coordination with local fire services so controlled burns build, not compete with, emergency response capacity

None of this eliminates wildfire risk entirely — no single tool does. But a landscape that's been deliberately, regularly burned behaves very differently in a bad fire year than one that's been left to accumulate fuel for decades.