The US Forest Service planned to increase burning to prevent wildfires. Will a pause on prescribed fire instead bring more delays?

Headed into the fall, the U.S. government is at a crossroads, navigating how to increase its use of controlled fire while handling the public relations nightmare that results from the minuscule percentage—0.16 percent—of those burns that go awry. Today, the agency is stuck between decades of poor land management that it must reverse, which most foresters and firefighters say requires the increasing use of prescribed burns, and climate-primed, tinderbox forests and grasslands that can quickly erupt with uncontrollable wildfires. Right now, wildfires are burning across the West—two of six active wildfires in Oregon have already burned more than 100,000 acres each, while in Idaho firefighters don’t expect to contain a fire sparked in July until the end of October.