On January 7th, the Palisades Fire broke out in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, propelled by the Santa Ana winds.

As of this writing, at least eleven are dead and thousands of structures have been destroyed. The devastation is the latest tragic reminder of how decades of policy decisions have transformed our relationship with fire. Step into a national forest today, and you’ll find a landscape far removed from what early twentieth century Americans might have recognized. Dense, unhealthy forests stretch for miles, many untouched by fire for generations. These conditions are the legacy of nearly a century of fire suppression policies. Over the past forty years, wildfires have moved out of the wilderness and into our backyards, becoming a fixture of life in the West.

Throughout the last weeks of August 1910, numerous small fires dotted northern Idaho and western Montana. As hurricane-force winds swept the areas, the small fires became firestorms. The conflagrations raged across more than three million acres, claimed at least eighty-six lives, and destroyed several towns in two short days. Dubbed thereafter “The Great Fire of 1910,” the disaster cemented the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) as chiefly an agency for the control and management of wildfires.

Beginning in 1911, the USFS adopted an aggressive fire suppression policy to remove fire from federal forests to protect valuable timber and natural resources. Over the next hundred years, the agency developed elite firefighting crews and military-grade equipment to combat flames on the ground and from the air. Yet, as forest fires were extinguished, fuels like dead wood and undergrowth accumulated unchecked. By suppressing natural fires, forests became overgrown and primed for more destructive blazes. [1]