Are California’s wildfires really “disasters”—or just something natural?

“California forests are fire-adapted, which means they need fire to thrive,” says Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor of fire science at the University of California, Merced. “Precolonization, much of California’s forest would burn every five to 20 years.”

What we’re seeing now is the reintroduction of fire to forests that haven’t been allowed to burn for more than a century. These megablazes, Kolden says, are “doing the work that fire has done for millennia—taking out a lot of old dead material, thinning out the forest naturally and reinitiating that biogeochemical cycle that breaks down all the vegetation and returns those nutrients to the soil.”