The wildfires in Northern California’s wine country have raged for a week. More than a dozen blazes have charred hundreds of thousands of acres, killed dozens of people with hundreds more missing, and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. The death toll, which as of Thursday had already made for the deadliest week in California wildfire history, is likely to swell when the missing are found. With the end nowhere in sight, the scale is numbing.

In the 20th century, such vast wildfires would have stood out. No more. “From the Rockies to the Pacific, the last 16 years have brought an astonishing 11 summers with more than a dozen so-called mega-fires, defined as a single burn engulfing more than 100,000 acres,” Gary Ferguson, author of “Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West,” wrote in July. “We’re living our lives, as will our children and our grandchildren, in a land of flames.”

This “new reality” demands a response. Because experts believe a key cause is hotter, dryer weather caused by climate change, political skirmishing could get in the way of needed changes due to Trump administration skepticism. That can’t happen. The risks require new and better fire policies.

The first and most obvious is changing perverse budget rules that require the federal government to defund programs that can limit wildfire risks when the costs of fighting wildfires eat up the budgets of the Forest Service and Interior Department, the main federal firefighting agencies. Mega-fires should be treated as national natural disasters and the response to these blazes should be funded accordingly — with congressional appropriations. In 1995, the Forest Service spent 16 percent of its budget fighting wildfires. In 2015, for the first time, it spent more than half its budget on firefighting — a figure which is projected to reach 67 percent by 2025.


Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, has more than 150 co-sponsors for a bill to end this budget practice. But because House Speaker Paul Ryan classifies Simpson’s bill as one that would increase spending, it’s stalled. This is absurd. Huge wildfires are natural disasters, and efforts to prevent them should not go unfunded because the blazes are increasing.

The second policy change should be revising laws to limit lawsuits — filed by environmentalists who loathe logging — that make it difficult to thin forests on federal land. The evidence is strong that private forests that are thinned are less vulnerable to wildfires, which is why The Nature Conservancy is using the tactic in Washington state.

The third policy change should be to end reflexive Forest Service attempts to try to snuff out every wildfire. Small blazes that aren’t a threat to public safety are healthy for the wilderness ecology. Suppressing them all makes mega-fires more likely because there is more underbrush and debris to burn.

The fourth policy change must happen at the local and state level. Given the higher fire risks, improved early warning systems are needed to get the word out to homeowners who live in remote wilderness areas. It’s been heartbreaking to discover how many Northern Californians, especially elderly retirees, were ambushed by flames early this week. As of late Thursday, the average age of those killed was 79.


Our nation can do better. Given the scope of the fire threat, this must not become yet another issue stalled by inertia and division in Washington.


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