Something to remember about the fires, if you’re in the mood, is that as long as we have no controlled burn strategy, fuel tends to increase, which means you would rather have a fire now than next year or the next.

So we need controlled burns. But that’s hard, because controlled burns sometimes turn into uncontrolled burns, and the public/media/law will try to assign blame in a way that we don’t for these fires that result from sins of omission.

Something else to remember is that these landscapes are supposed to burn. The peoples who have been here since time immemorial have always burned them carefully, and this place is full of plants and animals that expect gentle fires: redwoods, for example.

Fire by itself is not the problem here. Overdue fires, in fuel-heavy landscapes, in stressed ecosystems, in a changed climate, in places where people have houses, in an individualist society – that’s the disaster.

So the idea that California is not supposed to be on fire is complicated. It is supposed to be on fire, but not these fires. Think of it like seasonal floods on a floodplain v. catastrophic failures of the levees meant to stop them.

The Angloamerican picture of Californian “normals” is an impression of landscape in recovery from the genocide of the people who actively maintained it. I say this a lot because I think it’s important: the smokeless summers of 1950–2000 or so were an aberration. A problem, even.

A good read – with details like the fact that there used to be enough summer smoke to keep streams cool for fish – is this @susie_c story: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-prescribed-burns-california-native-americans