Last month, at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, two weeks before the sky turned red over much of California and Oregon, Donald Trump embarked on one of his trademark, off-the-cuff rants. This time, the topic was wildfires. “I see again the forest fires are starting," he said. "They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors; you gotta clean your forests—there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees, and they’re like, like, so flammable. You touch them and it goes up."  

The president’s comments—echoing remarks from last year in which he chided Californians for not “raking” their forests—were part of a conflagration of nonsense that raged through the conservative press about western fires. Rumors ran wild across right-wing social media sites that members of the group Antifa were stalking through Oregon forests like a shadowy arsonist army. The oozing pipe of right-wing slime, Breitbart, used the fires as a pretext to attack undocumented immigrants. Rather than reporting on the dozens of massive fires burning in Northern California, Breitbart writer Bob Price focused on a small wildfire outside of San Diego allegedly started by a Mexican man who had become lost while attempting to cross the border. The bit of disinformation that spread furthest through the conservative blogosphere was Trump’s assertion that environmentalists and liberal politicians were ultimately to blame for the blazes that, to date, have torched millions of acres across the West. “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it, because they don’t listen to us,” opined the president to hearty applause. 

In pandering to his base, Trump ignored the fact that the majority of California’s forests are managed by the federal government and that many of the blazes began in rural, solidly Republican congressional districts in the eastern and northern part of the state. Indeed, misinformation and outright lies have been as thick as the smoke in the aftermath of this year’s fires. As much as Republicans and their industry backers would like to reduce the issue of western wildfires to simplistic political talking points, the reality is far more complex and disturbing.  

A key driver of the increasing flammability of our forests is, ironically, firefighting itself. Decades of aggressive fire suppression over the past century has played an outsized role in the buildup of fuels throughout western forests. In the 1970s, the US Forest Service employed what was known as the “10-acre control plan,” which meant that it became official policy to extinguish fires before they grew any larger than that size. 

This approach to forest management stopped large fires in their tracks—for a time. But it also ignored basic ecology, namely the fact that fire is a necessary component in the life cycle of coniferous forests. Without low-intensity fires, small trees and scrub built up in the forest matrix. Over the years, massive swaths of western forests have turned to tinderboxes, and the resulting fires have become increasingly harder to control. 

Modern firefighting has thus become an arms race with nature. And it’s a competition we are sure to lose. Today’s firefighting tactics—which involve “attack” aircraft and vehicles, along with “strike teams” composed of hundreds of on-the-ground firefighters—have come to resemble military operations. As with actual warfare, the battles we are waging with wildfires come at tremendous cost. Fire suppression is today, by far, the largest line item in the Forest Service’s annual budget. In 1995, 16 percent of the USFS’s budget went to firefighting; a decade later, it was more than 50 percent.  

Republicans are quick to point an accusatory finger at environmental regulations, which, they say, have restricted logging and turned our forests into fiery death traps. Not surprisingly, they promote commercial logging as a way to prevent wildfires. Earlier this year, for example, the Trump administration announced a plan to ramp up logging on federal lands as a strategy to help communities reeling from the COVID-19 crisis. 

But the clearcut forestry promoted by Trump and the logging industry has been shown to greatly exacerbate fire behavior. In a report published earlier this year in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers from the University of Queensland found that commercial logging was a significant catalyst of the extreme fire activity last year in Australia that burned 46 million acres—an area roughly the size of the state of Washington—and destroyed nearly 6,000 buildings. Thirty-four people along with countless numbers of animals were killed. “Logging causes a rise in fuel loads, increases potential drying of wet forests and causes a decrease in forest height," said James Watson, the study’s lead author, in a press release. It also leaves in its wake massive quantities of woody debris that presents, said Watson, “an incredibly dangerous level of combustible material in seasonally dry landscapes.” This phenomenon was seen in the Bear Fire, east of Oroville, which ran through a patchwork of clearcuts in Plumas National Forest, expanding by nearly 250,000 acres in a single 24-hour span.  

Conservatives in rural counties also promote grazing, especially on public lands, as a way to reduce wildfire risk. Livestock, they say, consume dry grasses that can touch off forest fires. But this, too, flies in the face of science. Over the long-term, grazing actually increases fire risk because animals, in particular cows, are vectors of invasive grasses, the dreaded “fine fuels” that greatly increase fire risk. Of particular concern is Bromus tectorum, better known as cheatgrass, which has been spread by livestock over vast stretches of the American West. Cheatgrass, along with many other invasive species, are not only extremely flammable but also dispersed by fire, which means that they render one of the most potent tools available to land managers—prescribed fires—largely ineffective. As Rick Miller, a fire science professor from Oregon State University, told me last year after I visited deforested, cow-ravaged, cheatgrass-dominated landscapes in Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada while reporting for Sierra, “Fire will give you back what you had before, and then some. If you had cheatgrass before a burn, you’ll have a lot more of it afterward.” 

The invasive growth of cities and towns into the so-called wildland-urban interface has also added to the fire danger and made management more difficult. According to a recent Colorado State University report, 2.9 million people in Colorado—more than half the state’s population—now live in fire-prone areas. Another study found that nearly one in 10 Americans—the vast majority of them in the western US—live in areas “with significant potential for extreme wildfires.”  

To make matters worse, in California and other western states, hundreds of thousands of people living in the wildland-urban interface are served by a latticework of rickety above-ground electrical lines that have a tendency to blow down in high winds and be felled by falling trees. (In the small town on the central California coast where my father served as fire chief for nearly a decade, fallen wires were such a common occurrence that it was announced by dispatchers with a grim mnemonic: “Lines in the pines.”) According to one report, more than 1,500 fires in California were touched off by downed power lines between 2014 and 2017. California’s deadliest wildfire in recent years, the 2018 Camp Fire—which razed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people—was started after heavy winds blew down transmission lines managed by the state utility PG&E.  

Combine these factors with a warming, drying climate and the consequences, as we are seeing, can be disastrous. Rising temperatures have led to earlier snowmelt and drier forest soils, which have significantly lengthened fire season across most of the western US. In California, where wildland firefighters now battle blazes year-round, there seems to be no end at all. The atmospheric shifts have spawned strange new meteorological phenomena: red skies, “firenados,” dry lightning, and pyrocumulonibmus clouds—massive fire-generated thunderheads that tower tens of thousands of feet above the landscape.  

Fire historian and writer Stephen J. Pyne has given this flame-scarred era a well-deserved name: the Pyrocene. Since we can’t escape these blazes, we need a fundamental recalibration of our relationship to them—a recognition that fire is not a malign force to be defeated but a natural process that needs to be given a place on the land. Firefighting tactics should shift from a policy of outright suppression to one of strategic management. Some have suggested that the small-scale burning practiced by Indigenous peoples in the pre-European Americas could be implemented once again to reduce fuel load in landscapes. To alleviate conditions conducive to megafires, logging and grazing must be vastly scaled back in order to preserve forest ecosystems and prevent the spread of invasive weeds. Rather than investing hundreds of millions of dollars in fire suppression, funding should be allocated to ecological restoration as well as removing homes from the most dangerous reaches of the wildland-urban interface (akin to efforts underway in Houston to remove homes in floodplains).  

The most vital change, however, may be political—namely an exit from the rabidly anti-science and fiercely deregulatory era of the Trump administration. That antagonistic approach was on full display again, a few weeks after Trump's Pennsylvania rally, as he spoke with California officials in Sacramento. Scientists pleaded with the president to take the findings of climate resarch seriously. Trump in return offered nothing but scorn and disinformation. “I don’t think science knows,” he replied with a smirk. 

Science knows, Donald, even if you’re blowing smoke.

This article has been updated since publication.