I appreciate the interest that these fires have gotten but people are missing the bigger picture.
I have an education in natural resource management and have spent a number of years fighting fire. Yes, the weather conditions are what made these fires so explosive and fast-moving. These types of events are tragic due to loss of life, property, and economic impacts.
I have been preaching to anyone that will listen, we live in a wildfire world governed by Agee's paradox...which states " by suppressing wildfire we have created a fire favorable environment". This means that through our firefighting over the last 100 years we have allowed unprecedented build-up of fire fuel in the forest. So when fires start they grow much larger and faster into uncontrollable monsters. Now you factor in climate change into that equation and you get unprecedented fire behavior.
If you look at the history of wild land fire fighting, it started with a noteable series of events in 1910 called the big burn. Our current level of fires occurring right now are on a scale on par with or greater than that event.
To conclude, rather than blaming climate change or domestic terrorists, we need to change our overall forest management through conscientious voting to change how we manage our country's public land.
