[amalcon]

California is not the problem here. A policy of controlled burns is not tenable anywhere in the United States right now, because we've spent so long fighting wildfires in order to protect the logging industry. The problem is that we've had almost eighty years of Smokey Bear telling people that wildfires are always bad.

It took the catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988 to even make the current Yellowstone policy possible. That policy is to allow a naturally caused fire to continue until it threatens humans or buildings, but to stamp out human caused fires with extreme prejudice. This obviously makes no sense -- the forest does not care a bit whether the fire was started by a lightning strike or by a campfire -- but it's the only thing that is politically tenable.

Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming. It's not a California problem; the problem is a national population that's been misled about what constitutes good forest management. We need controlled burns, building bans in large areas of forest, and judicious use of eminent domain to purchase properties in forest areas so that they can be permitted to burn.