[kibwen]

Re: "popular narrative", I think this is just unfamiliarity with the source material. The unintentionally-disastrous fire management policies of the 1900s have been widely known since at least the Yellowstone Fire of 1988 catapulted forest fires into the public eye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988#Fire...

The problem is that nobody wants to acknowledge that fire is a necessary and constructive part of the ecosystem. So they build their homes in wildfire zones and support policies that suppress fires until the pot boils over and the fire turns from constructive to utterly destructive.

[s1artibartfast]

The science goes back far further than that. Scientists were advocating for natural burns in the 1930s, when the Roy Headley, chief of fire control for the Natural Forest Service, wanted to allow burns but was overruled.

[kibwen]

Indeed, I was trying to refer to broader understanding outside of the scientific establishment. It should be noted that the Yellowstone Fire of 1988 was actually a success of proper fire management techniques established in the decades prior; if those hadn't been in place, then the fires of 1988 would have been even worse. But to the public at the time who were uninitiated to the idea of the constructive power of regular forest fires, and facing the prospect of losing their most impressive national monument to fire, and after being inundated with decades of Smokey The Bear, it's no surprise that there was outrage at the forest management for allowing any fires to happen, despite their necessity (and eventual inevitability).