California's Wildfires Didn't Have to Be So Bad

Warming temperatures and a historic drought made Northern California's Valley fire faster to spread and harder to fight. But the bigger culprit, sadly but thankfully, was something under human control: forest mismanagement.

There are five times as many trees per acre in this area today as there were 150 years ago, and the underbrush is twice as thick, according to Scott Stephens, a wildland resource scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. If smaller wildfires had been allowed to burn 20 years ago, the forest wouldn't have grown so dense, and today's flames wouldn't have had the fuel to reach the canopy, consume the treetops and send embers flying, spreading the blaze and resulting in three deaths and the loss of some 600 houses.