By the 1980s, when we stopped putting out every forest fire, we realized what we’d done: Now when fires started, they had all the fuel they needed to burn more extensively. Plus, they were exacerbated by the hotter, drier conditions attributed to climate change. “If you talk to folks who fought fires even 30 or 40 years ago, a 20,000-acre fire was a big deal,” Schweizer said. “They’re pretty standard now.”

Some residents of West Yellowstone, particularly those whose houses are within a couple of miles from the fires, have been outspokenly critical of the park system for not being more proactive about its firefighting, in part because memories of past conflagrations still linger. When dozens of fires broke out in Yellowstone in the summer of 1988, park policy was finally aligning with the pro-fire science, so naturally occurring fires in wilderness areas were allowed to burn themselves out as long as they didn’t threaten any people or buildings. But the region was in the middle of a persistent, severe drought, and the fires quickly got out of hand: 28 years ago this week, howling winds churned several separate blazes into a firestorm that gobbled up more than 150,000 acres of parkland in a single day, an event that’s now known as Black Saturday. When the 9,600 firefighters brought in to battle the blaze weren’t enough, the government called in six Army and Marine Corps battalions to assist. On September 8, for the first time in its history, Yellowstone was closed to visitors. The fires weren’t completely put out until November, and by that point, they had burned more than 1.1 million acres (three-quarters of that within the park) and cost $120 million. The massive effort expended on fighting the fires was also largely futile, the park’s then-fire suppression specialist Rick Gale concluded afterward : “Although politically unfeasible, the best use of suppression resources for most of the summer of 1988, except for structural fire protection, would have been to send them home until the weather abated, extreme fire behavior subsided, and some sort of effective suppression action could have been taken.”

In 2009, the government released a new wildland fire management policy that advocates neither full suppression nor letting natural fires burn completely uncontained. Instead, second only to protecting the safety of firefighters and the public, the goal is “to help achieve ecosystem sustainability, including its interrelated ecological, economic, and social components.” Those “social components” would be the houses, businesses, and tourist attractions that are embedded within our so-called wilderness. The subtext of the 2009 report is the understanding that we can’t treat forest fires as fully natural because we have very little wilderness left that is actually untouched by human development. Between 1990 and 2000, 60 percent of all new housing units in the United States were built in what the forest service calls “the wildland-urban interface,” or places where human habitation “meet or intermingle with” undeveloped wildland. That’s only going to increase as baby boomers retire, often to places with attractive natural amenities. When officials decide which fires to suppress (and how aggressively to do so), they are increasingly having to take people into account. The expansion of the wildland-urban interface is one reason the costs of firefighting have skyrocketed in recent years, as firefighters have to strategically deploy resources to protect rural homes.

Americans want to live (and vacation) in natural places. But they aren’t necessarily prepared to deal with the consequences of nature itself.

This has been evident in residents’ reactions to the fires. A few miles north of West Yellowstone, at a spot where the road opens up to provide an excellent view of the plume of smoke hanging over the park, someone has tagged a highway sign: “NPS SUCKS! SMOKEY SEZ PUT OUT THE FIRES.” Residents of West Yellowstone and its environs are not only anxious that the fire will change course and gobble up the town, but also frustrated that even if things go exactly according to plan and the fire burns itself out over the next few weeks, the smoke and bad press will put a damper on the tourist season—a crucial revenue source for the town.