It may very well be the case that your region is experiencing unusual fires, but citing a decade of experience with that land to make that point is pretty ridic

It may very well be the case that your region is experiencing unusual fires, but citing a decade of experience with that land to make that point is pretty ridiculous. A decade is nothing, even a century of consideration is just the bare minimum. Ideally you should be able to look at records going back hundreds if not thousands of years and when those records are lacking (the case in much of the New World), geological evidence is important. People thinking one lifetime of experience is significant is how you get people living in the PNW who think wildfires are a new aberration in the past 10 years because 15 to 50 years ago there was relatively little smoke.. but if you read accounts from people 150 years ago they all say the summers were insufferably very smokey. In Europe and Asia communities have much longer memories for these sort of things, for instance warnings about droughts and tsunamis hundreds of years ago. But in America people think 10 years is an eternity. The old joke has a lot of truth; in America people think 100 years is a long time, while in Europe people think 100 miles is a long distance.