On June 8, 2002, Terry Barton left home with a letter from her estranged husband and drove to the woods northwest of Colorado Springs, the wind gusting around her. Barton placed the letter in a fire ring, lit it, and watched it burn. The fire escaped the ring, and by the time she reported it and firefighters arrived, the blaze was uncontainable.

Colorado tried to put out the Hayman fire with air tankers, with helicopters, with fire engines and teams of professional firefighters. Then the wind picked up to 50 miles an hour. The Hayman fire burned 214 square miles and 600 structures over the next month. At the time, it was the largest fire in Colorado’s history. The courts found Barton guilty of arson, the wilful or malicious burning of property. She was sentenced to twelve years in prison and $42 million in restitution.

The Forest Service commissioned a case study, which set out to make sense of how the Hayman fire had become the most devastating in the state’s recorded history. It found that the fire was not the result of a simple spark. It owed its existence to decades of warnings that had gone unheeded.

The Hayman  fire came after four years of drought. By the time Barton burned the letter, the debris on the forest floor was the driest it had been in 30 years. And there was a lot of it. The pine needles, grasses, shrubs, and low hanging branches of the pines that the Hayman fire raged through were there because of decades of fire suppression.

Barton lit the match that started the fire, but it—and the megafires that have burned across the West in the last five years—implicate more people than Barton alone. A fire that big is not started by a single individual. Rather, it is the natural and predicted result of decades of decision making, ranging from misguided to criminal. The fire’s severity was the result of a century of fire suppression and a climate that is already 1.8 degrees fahrenheit hotter than it was before the industrial revolution.

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Before fire suppression became official policy in 1926, the woods where Barton burned the letter would have been considerably thinner. The granite domes that dot the land would have been visible through trees growing in small stands. A person could have walked through the open forest without struggling through brush and low hanging branches. The forest would have burned every 7 to 30 years, says Marin Chambers, a forest research associate at Colorado State who did her master’s thesis on the Hayman burn scar. This would have cleared out fuel and created natural firebreaks.

But in 2002, the embers of Barton’s letter found a different scene. Once the fire took hold in the pine needles and sticks that blanketed the forest floor, it quickly spread to the brush and small trees that had not been cleared by less intense fires. When it reached the treetops, there were no natural breaks in the forest  to slow the fire’s spread. The Hayman fire passed from crown to crown, toppling trees like dominoes.

The difference between 1920 and 2002 is the manifestation of what geographer Jennifer Marlon calls the “fire deficit.” “The fire deficit is the shortage of fire that we have, because we’ve excluded it,” Marlon says. “It’s the missing fire on the landscape.”

A lot of fire is missing. Marlon says the Little Ice Age, which began in the 1300s, is the only time over the last several thousand years that the West has experienced a comparable lack of fire. The firefighting policies of the last 100 years have recreated that shortfall, but in a climate that is considerably warmer and drier.

A 2007 study in Forest Ecology in Management estimates that before Europeans arrived in California, between 7,000 and 18,000 square miles  within the state’s current boundaries burned each year. Some of that was  due to natural causes like lightning strikes. Other fires were deliberately set by local tribes to open landscapes for foraging. “If you burn the landscape every five, seven, eight years, it prevents the catastrophic build up of fuel,” says Valentin Lopez, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun tribal band, whose ancestral territory covers much of the Santa Cruz area. “It also took care of our native plants, because a lot of them need fire to help them germinate.”

By burning different areas in different years, the Amah Mutsun helped foster a variety of plant life that in turn supported the tribe. The first year after a burn, the grasses would be abundant, important to a tribe that Lopez says sometimes depended on seeds for 40 percent of their diet. The second year would bring more shoots and young plant life, which in turn brought deer and elk. The Amah Mutsun made baskets with the bushes that came the third year after a burn, and structures with the young trees that grew before the land burned again.

“So we had a real rotation there. We would go through a landscape and continue that cycle,” Lopez says.

The cycle ended in 1791 when the Spanish established the mission of Santa Cruz on Amah Mutsun land. The Spanish saw fire as a threat to their property. If someone from the Amah Mutsun was caught setting a fire, they could be punished by death. Between 1950 and 1999, the area of land that burned each year in California  dropped to less than 400 square miles per year.

Fire was owed to the landscape. And, like in Colorado, that fire came to collect. On August 16, 2020, dry lightning struck an overgrown forest near Santa Cruz. The CZU Lightning Complex fire, as it was called, burned 134 square miles and 1,490 structures  in 36 days, and resulted in the death of one person.

“The fires did not have to happen. If we had traditional native land management, that fire would not have happened,” Lopez said. “And that's what we’re trying to get back to. So that we don’t have to experience that degree of fire again.”

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The same fire suppression occurred on public lands across the West. In an 1865 report advising Congress on how to manage Yosemite Valley, which had just been set aside for preservation, Fredrick Olmstead cited fires set by the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation as a danger to the landscape, because the fires had killed several trees and discolored picturesque rocks.

But the very meadows Olmstead fawns over in his report were maintained by the fires set by the Miwuk. In 2013, 148 years later, the National Park Service had begun allowing Yosemite to burn again, but the US Forest service had not. That year, the Rim Fire burned 401 square miles of forest service land and 11 homes, stretching to the edge of Yosemite Valley. At the time, it was the largest fire in the Sierra-Nevada’s recorded history. A federal grand jury indicted Keith Emerald, a local bow hunter whose campfire allegedly sparked the blaze, on the felony charge of setting fire to a forest.

Across the country, one of the  primary objectives cited in the forming of the national forests was fire suppression. Campaigning to create national forest reserves in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt said: “The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of forests by use. Forest protection is not an end in itself; it is a means to increase and depend upon them. The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity.” The Forest Reserve Use Book, issued in 1905,  described the protection of the nation's forest reserves from fire as one of its three duties. Rather than living ecosystems subject to natural cycles, the forests were seen as a collection of timber being saved for a later date.

In 1910, debris from trains bringing coal to Chicago sparked hundreds of small fires that then combined in ‘tornadic’ winds. Called The Great Fire, a forester at the time called the blaze “a veritable red demon from hell.” The fire burned 4,600 square miles in Idaho and Montana, killed 86 people, and cemented the idea that fire was something to be controlled.

In 1926, the US Forest Service set the goal of containing all fires at 10 acres or less to reduce the cost of fire suppression and the potential for loss. In 1935, the Forest Service upped the ante again with the ‘10 AM Policy.’ If a fire was not controlled in the first attack, enough resources were assigned to contain it by 10 AM the next day.

Over the years, scientists realized that fire suppression was, at best, a temporary measure.  Fire and Water, an influential  political science  book published in 1960, reported that the Forest Service had suppressed internal research that prescribed fire would benefit forest landscapes, but not much changed. In 1971, the USFS policy was to control 90 percent of fires at 10 acres or less. “We’ve actually known that this was a problem for decades, that you can’t put out all that fire and not pay for it,” Marlon said.

People are typically rewarded for putting out fires, says Courtney Schultz, director of the Public Lands Policy Group, a public lands policy think tank. For land managers, or elected officials worried about angry constituents, putting out fires can look a lot less risky than letting them burn out naturally, or carrying out prescribed burns. A 2005 Forest Service review found that in 99 percent of cases, prescribed burns resulted in no runaway wildfires or close calls, but that 1 percent can still inspire worry.

The problem, says Shultz, is that the consequences of putting out a fire might not be felt for decades. “There's this temporal mismatch between the challenges we face with fire,” she says, “and the immediate pressures that people feel in leadership positions.” Adding a log to a hundred-year-old pyre is not a criminal act. Dropping a match is.

Kat Morici spent seven years working in fire management in  Texas, California, and Montana with the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. For the most part, she says, her colleagues knew that there needed to be more fire on the landscape. What they were missing was political will.

Morici remembers one Montana fire in particular, mostly because of its insignificance. Wind speed was low, air moisture was high, and the weather forecast predicted rain. Morici thought the fire would have been out by the next day without any intervention. Instead, firefighters flew in on a helicopter and began digging a firebreak to contain it. “We just kept putting out fires. And we all knew that fire was a healthy part of the ecosystem,” she says. Still, Morici understands why the higher ups made the decision. If the forecast changed, and wind came instead of rain, the fire could have picked up. Someone might have lost their home.

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On November 12, 1982, Exxon Mobil circulated an internal memo reporting that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 340 ppm, an increase of 8 percent from 25 years earlier. Continued use of fossil fuels would cause devastating global warming, and stopping it was fundamentally at odds with their business model. “Mitigation of the ‘greenhouse effect’ would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion,” the report read. “There are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.” The memo stated that the effects of warming would likely become detectable by 1995, seven years before the Hayman fire.

Faced with a choice between maintaining a habitable planet and increasing shareholder profits, Exxon Mobil doubled down on fossil fuels. They sunk wells nearly 5,000 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico and drilled in arctic seas made more approachable by receding ice. With full knowledge that their business would make significant parts of the planet uninhabitable, Exxon Mobil funded a decades long misinformation campaign. Exxon Mobil, along with other oil and gas companies like Shell and BP, spent $1 billion lobbying against climate action between 2015 and 2019. Just 100 fossil fuel companies are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions since 1988.

Warming temperatures are making fire considerably more likely across the West, said Ho Yi Wan, an assistant professor at Humboldt State University who studies the impact of climate change on fire. While the changing climate affects each ecosystem differently, Wan says there has been a clear link between climate change and more destructive fires in the West since at least 2001. “Our fire season is longer now because of climate change,” Wan said. “It’s a game of probability. The longer the season, the more likely it is that you're going to have fire ignition. And when you do have fire, it's more likely that the fire will burn longer.”

Climate change also makes it harder to conduct prescribed burns safely, says Schultz.  “As we see the fire season extend longer into the spring and into the fall, it's getting harder to find the resources for prescribed fire,” she says. “It's very hard to get a prescribed fire crew together, because a lot of the time those people are going to be pulled onto wildland fire.”

Prescribed burns can reduce the fire deficit. But Wan says there is no substitute for stopping climate change as quickly and aggressively as possible. Instead, we need to do both. Fires will be a problem in a hotter, more arid West, even with the best forest management practices, but without real cuts in global emissions, they’ll become even worse. But world governments and corporations have done little to avert the coming crisis of which more frequent infernos are just one facet. In 1988, when the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change was formed, humans emitted 21 billion tons of carbon dioxide. In 2019, that number rose to 33 billion.

Exxon Mobil and its executives played an outsized role in creating the climate crisis. They have also made leaving the fire deficit unresolved more dangerous. In August 2020, the Pine Gulch Fire surpassed the Hayman and became the largest fire in Colorado’s history. The record would be short lived. In October, the Cameron Peak Fire reached 320 square miles, burning one and a half times the area of the Pine Gulch Fire which had only recently been extinguished.  Five of the six largest fires in California history started in August and September of 2020 alone, and fire season isn’t over yet.

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The courts sentenced Terry Barton to 12 years in prison and $42 million in restitution for a single mistake. Beginning in 2015, states, cities,  and groups of individuals have filed cases against oil companies to do the same. Two states, New York and California, have launched fraud investigations into Exxon Mobil over climate change, and 9 cities and counties have sued members of the oil and gas industry, seeking billions to help cover the tremendous costs of adapting to a warmer climate. Boulder, Colorado, sued Exxon Mobil in 2018, citing increased wildfire frequency.

Barton was a forester, and should have known better than to light a match in such extreme conditions. Oil and gas companies and their executives knew exactly what the consequences of their actions would be, and continued anyway. But rather than prison and restitution, the people who work at those companies continue to willfully create a world where megafires and orange skies come like changing leaves in fall, while they walk away with millions in annual bonuses.

Barton is responsible for starting the Hayman fire, but a system of forestry that protected property instead of ecosystems fanned the flames, while  governments and corporations that chose profits at the expense of a habitable world poured oil into a tinderbox that was already piled high.

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In 2011, the Las Conchas fire, sparked by a power line, burned 244 square miles, making it the then-largest fire in New Mexico’s history. The fire threatened both Los Alamos and the Santa Clara Pueblo reservation.

“To protect Los Alamos, the fire was diverted towards Santa Clara Pueblo reservation, and it destroyed our sacred lands,” says Lawrence Atencio, a firefighter with 10 years of experience with the Forest Service. “It’s been a devastation.”

For years, Atencio thought the Forest Service was burning too little land. Now he works to protect other communities from the same kind of destruction. He’s helping Valentin Lopez and the Amah Mutsun’s Native Stewardship Corps use cultural burns to return the forest to something like its pre-settlement state. Both Lopez and Atencio work in tandem with other tribes in the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network.

Indigenous leadership should be at the forefront of fire in the West, they say. After the most recent fires, Lopez thinks public opinion is shifting among his neighbors.

“They know these fires cannot continue the way they are,” Lopez said. “Many of them lost their houses, and they never want that to happen again.” 

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Nearly 20 years after the Hayman fire, Barton still owes $42.5 million to the state, half a million more than the cost of the fire. The interest is accumulating faster than her ability to pay.

With each year fire is denied to the landscape, the fuel stacks higher. With each year emissions rise, the forests get drier. And while we may continue to blame the people who will inevitably spark record breaking blazes, rather than those who created the conditions where a second of inattention can burn hundreds of square miles, we will all breathe the smoke.