The wildland-urban interface (that's what I've heard foresters call it, also "WUI") is a problem, and it's amplified by the fact that the US Forest Service and

The wildland-urban interface (that's what I've heard foresters call it, also "WUI") is a problem, and it's amplified by the fact that the US Forest Service and various state foresters will more or less subsidize those people living in the WUI. They nearly have a blank check. Rather than having some sort of extra tax or additional insurance requirement for living in the WUI, the USFS simply lobbies for (and usually receives) more money every year. Even though there is this WUI problem, there's also the problem of past poor forest management, where fuel coats the bottom layer of many forests in the West. The forests are denser than the natural equilibrium, and they are primed to become wildfires because so much fuel has built up. That's a serious problem even without encroaching the WUI. It's a complex problem, though various jurisdictions could probably implement more controlled burns than happen today and make the entire ecosystem a bit stronger. I worry about the places where poor management leads wildfires to be so hot that they essentially sterilize the soil, preventing quick regrowth. At scale, that makes climate change worse.