Fanning the Flames
“It’s the legacy of forest mismanagement that is fueling the wildfires, along with climate change, which is the ultimate driver,” says Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE).
Fighting fire with fire
"More people means more pressure to suppress wildfires early and often to protect homes, and more barriers to the kind of regular prescribed burning that many parts of California needs," says Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
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The scale of the fires and the rate at which they burn make them more dangerous than ever, said Ingalsbee, who has been working with wildfires since the 1980s. “The scale of activity and the incredible speed at which these fires are spreading is beyond what anyone alive today has ever experienced,” he said. “It is clear that this is climate change. The future is now.”
Climate change focus obscures complexities of wildfires
Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildland firefighter and executive director of the Eugene, Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said “the science is pretty clear there’s no single cause of what’s going on,” though he sees climate change as the primary driver. “It’s why we’ve seen so many big fires on land simultaneously,” he said. “But it’s also an issue of forest management. Not the lack of forest management, but the legacy of forest management.”