Wildfires Got Better Before They Got Worse
America has a long history of forest fires. After decades of containment, they’re on the rise again.
One evening in 1861, Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, started a cooking fire along the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe that jumped to the surrounding forest. In his memoir Roughing It, Twain described how he retreated to his boat just offshore and watched the flames spread “till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava streams.”
It’s a reminder, if perhaps a somewhat embellished one, that giant wildfires of the sort tormenting California and other Western states this summer are not a new thing. Wildfires appear to have been far more widespread in the 19th and early 20th centuries than they are now. The National Interagency Fire Center cautions that its pre-1983 numbers aren’t entirely reliable, but its plot of acres burned since the 1920s is consistent with both anecdotal accounts and scientific research: One recent study of sedimentary charcoal concluded that wildfire incidence in the Western U.S. hit a 3,000-year low in the late 20th century.