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I think a lot of people in the fire world would agree that this is probably the gnarliest day that the US has seen in a VERY long time in terms of fire behavior and the sheer amount of communities/infrastructure destroyed and threatened.
Almost every western state has red flag warnings today, wind switches in both California and Washington have contributed to enormous growth of both human and lightning caused fires, and entire towns have been burned over in eastern Washington and Oregon.
Amidst it all are numerous vehicle burnovers and shelter deployments—18 in the last four days, which is more than the last five summers combined—and injuries amongst those working on the line.
People up and down the West coast are dealing with the kind of air that makes you wake up feeling like you smoked a pack of Marlboros. Straight up—it's so unhealthy that you'll be smoking a pack a day just by being outside in it.
Meanwhile, I have friends evacuating all over the place, from California to Central Oregon to Eastern Washington, and almost all of them are posting *ways they can help others in their communities* while also evacuating themselves.
This all to say—I'm always on my high horse about using good fires to prevent bad ones. But only talking about good fire and how we can utilize it to prevent this shitshow overlooks the mess of our current reality.
Our path out of this is going to necessarily require more summers like this. It's going to be a massive transition. It's going to take decades. There's zero easy fix for it. We can't rake, cut, log, graze or burn our way out of this.
What is becoming abundantly clear is that we're going to have to start thinking about fire year round, we're going to have to reconsider where we live, we're going to have to make some sacrifices, and we're going to need to reassess our relationship with our landscapes.
Every other relationship in our lives takes active, conscious and (most importantly) continual effort, so why would our relationship with fire—and the wild spaces where we coexist with it—be any different?
