Christopher Jones

“To live better with fire, we need to adapt to fire” is a thought paradigm many fire community leaders and people have or are adopting to address their wildland-urban interface issues. The 2017 wildfire season again demonstrated the urgency in which communities need to adapt to fire in order to live better in the communities we call home.  …Nearly all forests and woodlands in the western states evolved with wildfire as a crucial part of their ecology. Twentieth-century forest management, however, centered on a fire suppression policy (in response to uncontrollable wildfire events during the late 19th and early 20th centuries). …To tie this back to the modern wildfire situation, western wildfires have gotten to such an environmental point that the technological advances of the 20th century that made wildfire suppression so successful for so long have been overwhelmed.