We love our forests…to a fault. Hidden beneath the spectacular green (and occasionally yellow) canopies that shroud our mountains lurks a dark and dangerous secret: there are too many trees, packed too densely together. There is too much deadfall and slash piled up beneath. There is an overabundance of shrubs, groundcover, and duff carpeting the forest floor. Our forests are being strangled by their own waste and byproducts.

The combination of forests choked with fuel, weather turbo-charged by climate change, and a regional mega-drought will spawn extreme wildfires for generations to come.

Extreme fires, a category distinct from most historical patterns, represent a new and costly risk. A new mentality is required to meet the urgency and scale of this crisis.

Forests evolved combustible solutions for these problems eons ago, but humans began disrupting the natural cycle of landscape cleansing back in 1910.

After a devastating series of fires known as the “Big Burn,” the US Forest Service (USFS) inaugurated a century during which fire suppression was the primary focus of forest management.

Today most of us understand how this approach played out: fire suppression, practiced at scale for over a century, helped create the deadly fuel loads that now lurk around us. Without the cleansing effects of frequent, smaller wildfires, our forests simply accumulated deferred combustion.

This is the wildfire paradox: fire suppression, even if it is highly effective, inevitably leads to ecologically significant wildfires with higher intensities and rapid growth that cannot be suppressed

Reseeding practices over the last fifty years were also based on flawed policies. This replaced clustered and diverse forest stands with grid-planted, single species tree plantations. Treating timber like corn was a logging-centric mentality that dominated forestry agencies until recently. Those practices degraded forest resilience and now contribute to the probability of extreme fires.

The continued segregation and oppression of indigenous Americans also compounded the impact of misguided forestry policies. Native people who practiced prescribed fire techniques to manage forests were removed from their homelands throughout the 19th century, and by the 1920s prescribed burns were criminalized.

To manage fires in an era of climate change, the area treated for fuels reduction needs to increase by an order of magnitude. Recent studies suggest that prescribed burning should take a prominent role, alongside forest thinning, in the crusade to reduce wildland fuel capacity.

It isn’t hard to imagine ways to turn wildland fuels reduction into a job-creating, year-round effort. USFS and state firefighting resources should be complemented by teams that devote half of their season to fuels reduction via controlled burns.

In addition, logging on public lands should be oriented away from clearcutting and focused on thinning. Because many stands are non-economic to thin using current technology, USFS and BLM should develop subsidy programs to provide adequate economic incentives for wildland fuel reduction at scale.

During our century of aggressive fire suppression, residential development also expanded steadily in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). As a result, the potential for hundreds of homes burning during a single fire is now a common scenario of extreme fires.

On the Colorado Front Range, three of the past four fire seasons have set state records in numbers of structures burned. The probability of firefighter and homeowner fatalities is also greater in WUI communities.

David Calkin and co-authors from the USFS Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula recently published a study based on the Fourmile Canyon fire outside Boulder, focusing on structure losses and how effective wildfire mitigation programs are at reducing them.

They point out that 3% of fires are responsible for 97% of all acreage burned. They acknowledge that modern firefighting techniques are effective under all but the most extreme weather conditions, but emphasize that those conditions are the 3% that create the largest fires.

Our inability to suppress wildfires under extreme weather and the fact that many homes are not destroyed even when exposed to extreme fires led Calkin and & Co. to suggest that reducing home ignition potential is an important component of reducing home destruction.

Home ignitions are primarily determined by conditions on private property. Thus, primary responsibility for preventing WUI home destruction lies with homeowners rather than public land managers.

Private landowners also need to engage in rigorous risk assessment actions on their own to reduce the ignition potential of their structures. In some cases that means a new roof or siding. In other cases it implies modifying landscaping.

Public land managers need to balance fire suppression efforts with fuel reduction programs. That includes massively expanding the use of prescribed burns, and prioritizing thinning and slash removal during commercial logging.

WUI communities need to expand local fuel reduction programs like Saws and Slaws, and engage with national risk planning organizations like CPAW (Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire).

It turns out, we all have role to play in adapting to the era of extreme wildfire.