We now know absolutely that we cannot prevent wildfires, and firefighters cannot stop and put out all wildfires. Decades of Smokey Bear propaganda that conditioned people to wrongly fear all forest fires is now being amplified by the valid fear of climate change, and the specter that people are powerless in the face of climate-driven megafires. The despair and disempowerment known as “climate doomism” is expressing itself in a kind of wildfire doomism that wrongly believes there is nothing we can do to avoid catastrophe.
But we are not powerless.