Wildfire season is heating up. Spring moisture has dissipated and afternoon thunderstorms are becoming more common. The time for prescribed fire has passed; now we’ll spend the summer protecting the vegetation we have and idly debating the value of thinning and/or burning it intentionally.

Firefighters will risk their lives to keep wildland fires away from structures, some of them built in indefensible locations. The owners of those buildings can do their part to keep both their buildings and the firefighters safe by taking some common-sense precautions: cutting back brush, keeping vegetation green, and making sure water is available if a fire does break out.

Beyond that, though, there are two roles that citizens of the West can play in managing fire.

First, they can educate themselves about fire’s place in an ecosystem. We will never eliminate wildfires, nor is that an appropriate goal. Our mastery of the environment is far from total.

In a rain forest, dead vegetation rots; in a desert, it waits. For all the years between catastrophic fires, it builds up, until finally, a lightning strike (or, rarely, a human-caused event) returns ashes to ashes and nutrients to the soil to begin a new cycle. It’s been ever thus, and it won’t change in our lifetime. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with that process. The presence of humans is what makes it problematic.

Knowing that, we alternately suppress fire and light controlled burns in an attempt to use fire for our own ends. Sometimes that works; often the wind kicks up and fans the flames. Sometimes firefighters can knock them back down; sometimes they end up burning considerably more than anyone had intended. It happens every year, and no one should be surprised that it’s happening this year, daily, across the entire western United States. We might win some of the battles, but we almost always lose the big ones.

Second, once we acknowledge the primacy of that process — that the West should and will burn, no matter what we do — we can, in our interfering human way, attempt to moderate it so that it doesn’t cost us property and lives. Perhaps the most useful long-term contribution citizens can make is to advocate a sensible fire policy that addresses, realistically, ways in which risk can be reduced. A comprehensive program of prescribed fire that crosses agency boundaries and even fencelines between public and private property, and that is enforced consistently rather than reacting to the changing political climate and falling by the wayside in times when the memory of large fires has dimmed, would be considerable progress.

Yet that’s not particularly likely, because modern humans like to believe that the few years when they inhabit or even visit a heavily wooded area should be time out of time, and the "beauty of the environment," unnatural though it may be, should be preserved for them to enjoy.