The History of Fire in the West

There's still less fire in the West than there was 100, 200, 300, 500,000 years ago. We were very effective at suppressing fires for a long time in the Western US. And basically what's happened is only recently have we sort of lost our handle on our ability to put out fires. In many forests and particularly in these frequent fire forests or dry forest systems that used to burn really frequently, they haven't burned in a century or more. That's not a natural kind of fire for this system.

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