It's a fairly firmly established fact and widely understood as a major cause within firefighting and forest management circles, including the Forest Service, wh

It's a fairly firmly established fact and widely understood as a major cause within firefighting and forest management circles, including the Forest Service, who is largely responsible for such practices over the past century. The natural fire regime kept forests thinned and healthy with lots of relatively small and low intensity fires that would remove standing dead and the understory while largely keeping the healthy stands intact, with occasional pockets of higher intensity fire that would open up areas in the forest (creating meadows, etc.) and making for natural buffer zones and breaks in the fuel, which further reduced the spread of bigger fires, as well as keeping the forest healthier and reducing disease. Indigenous peoples in the Americas are very well known to have managed forests with prescribed fires for centuries, if not millennia, too. Climate change is definitely a factor for fires in the southwest as well, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wildfire_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wildfire_suppressio...