America is losing its war against wildfire
Grist · LC · trust 37/100
This story was co-published with RE:PUBLIC Lands Media , an independent, non-profit news organization covering public lands.
Dan Dallas had defended these communities before. The little towns on the Karuk tribal land are nestled in a gorge along the Klamath River, amidst a million-acre wilderness of Northern California conifer and hardwood that makes up the Six Rivers National Forest. This time, August 2023, a fusillade of lightning strikes had ignited the web of steep canyons south of the town of Orleans in two dozen places, and as the fires expanded, they merged.
As an incident commander for the U.S. Forest Service, Dallas wasn’t called up until fires got big. On the drive from Colorado, he considered the recent experiences that had begun to trouble him.
“I’d been to multiple places, two, even three, sometimes four times,” he remembered in a recent interview. On each fire, he’d followed the Forest Service playbook. Keep the fire small. Contain it quickly. Box it in by throwing hardware at it, bulldozing the ridgetops and dropping fire retardant slurry or water from planes and helicopters. Don’t light the fuse on a megafire that could reach the nearest town. But he was starting to realize: Even if you don’t light the fuse, you still have the bomb.
“Finally, I figured out all I’m doing is deferring risk to this place,” said Dallas, whose day job is director of renewable resources for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region. “I’m going to come back and protect it again.”
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When he got to the Six Rivers, he found the local forest supervisor and the Karuk Tribe had been percolating the same idea he had. It had rained in those mountains, and the conditions were mild. Fog was rolling in from the coast in the mornings, settling in the canyon bottoms. “It actually had gone from being fire weather to basically prescribed fire season,” Dallas remembered.
What if, instead of tearing up the Six Rivers to attack this fire, they allowed it to creep along the forest floor as long as they could? There’d be less fuel to burn the next time a fire came through, and it wouldn’t burn as hot even if the weather was bad. Fifty thousand acres of fire; fifty thousand acres less fuel to burn next summer.
The strategy was a success , but a fleeting one. The opportunities to let wildfire do its job are being increasingly extinguished by hotter, drier conditions that last longer throughout the year. The Trump administration has also returned to “full suppression” — shutting down every fire, even when it doesn’t threaten human life and property — after three decades of federal policy that, at least on paper, encouraged a friendlier approach to wildfire.
The problem with putting out all fires, said Dallas, is the same one that troubled him on that drive to California. You’re leaving fuel there that could stoke the next megafire you can’t manage, or even stop. “We keep going back to the same places, and it’s more often that the fires are more severe,” Dallas said.
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Over the past decade, so-called megafires — characterized not only by their size, often bigger than 100,000 acres, but by their severity, speed, and impact — have become more common. They now account for the bulk of the money spent on firefighting, with the federal government spending 10 times more on suppressing wildfires than it did 30 years ago.
This summer’s fire conditions have already been extreme. Nearly 73 percent of the Intermountain West is experiencing severe to exceptional drought, with temperatures breaking records across the country. Add to that last winter’s meager snowpack, which has left forests ready to burn. So far in 2026, the U.S. government has reported more than 53,000 wildfires that have burned over 8 million acres — about 3 million acres more than average over the past decade.
The onslaught is straining firefighting resources, with many requests for help going unfulfilled. An August 11 memo from the National Multi-Agency Coordinating group, which handles logistics for firefighting across the federal government, warned that “resource availability remains critically low, with commitments approaching all-time peak levels.”
Wildland firefighting is increasingly facing an intractable reality: We’re stuck in a vicious cycle. A doom loop.
In 2013, the U.S. Forest Service quietly convened a panel of futurists to imagine the arc of wildfire over the coming decades. The group included luminaries in futures studies — the science of systematically gaming out distant outcomes — a couple of wildfire experts, and a science fiction writer.
Over three weeks of conference calls, the futurists grilled the wildfire experts — John Phipps, a regional research station director who helped make national wildfire policy for the U.S. Forest Service, and Sarah McCaffrey, a social scientist with the agency who studied the human aspect of how it worked. Together, the group imagined possible trajectories for the American wildfire saga — carrying it forward beyond the scope of a presidential administration, longer than the span of any individual government career. Where, they asked, was all this really going?
They released their final report, “ Wildland Fire Management Futures: Insights from a Foresight Panel ,” in 2015. The one big takeaway: We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. “As conditions change over time,” the report reads, “the existing fire suppression approach will fail across the whole range of plausible future conditions.”
If we don’t change course, the futures panel wrote, “risk will continue to escalate until fuel-filled landscapes eventually reset catastrophically.” Translation: much of the West will burn. Today’s children will see forests converted to grass or shrublands in…
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