But among the tributes and reminders of how wildland firefighters put their lives on the line to protect communities was the question from Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter and founder of the group Firefighters United For Safety, Ethics and Ecology: “Why were they attacking that fire in the first place?”
The reason is that the Trump administration has reinstated a full suppression strategy applied to every wildfire, resurrecting an almost 100-year-old debate over how to handle wildfires — a debate that science and long-standing indigenous practices had settled by the late 1970s. Combined with the establishment of the US Wildland Fire Service, such policies could cost more lives