Mastering fire with fire
This is the reality now while there's increasing wildfire activity, and we've done and tried our best to change nature to our liking. It's time that we start getting a grip on our own behavior and the way we live our lives, you know with these flammable buildings fueled by all this fossil fuel burning, and that's something that we can control. We can solve for those issues and those problems. Once we do that, once we protect communities from fire, then we can start talking about how to manage and restore ecosystems with fire.
The Bear Fire ‘smoldered for weeks,’ then destroyed a town. Was Forest Service slow to fight it?
But earlier this year federal officials announced that because of the risk of COVID-19 to firefighting crews, the Forest Service would revert back to fighting every fire that ignited to try to keep them small, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter who’s the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology. He said it didn’t matter. This year’s wildfire season left the Forest Service’s firefighting resources stretched so thin that they are having to “triage fires.” “There’s so much wildfire activity across the whole West Coast,” he said