The New American
Forest fires in the American West have been quite destructive for decades, enhanced by cyclical droughts, pine beetle infestation, tree-hugging environmentalists, and poor forest and land management by federal and state government. This has led to questioning how best we can save our forests and return them to a more natural and healthy condition that will benefit man and wildlife alike.
Last month, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a “free market environmentalism” nonprofit, released a publication entitled Burn Back Better: How Western States Can Encourage Prescribed Fire on Private Lands, which recommends immediate policy changes to address the growing wildfire crisis in the western U.S.
According to the report’s introduction:
For millennia, Indigenous communities managed forests in the American West with fire to produce a range of environmental and cultural benefits. This long history of cultural burning combined with frequent lightning produced fire-adapted forests, woodlands, and savannas. For more than a century, however, the federal government and states pursued an aggressive policy of fire suppression that effectively removed fire from the landscape. While this policy has mostly been abandoned, its effects linger in the form of overgrown forests, policy barriers, and cultural obstacles to restoring beneficial low-intensity fires at the scale needed to improve forest resilience and reduce wildfire risks.
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