How exceptional have the recent fire seasons been in the West?

What we’re seeing now is something that we haven’t seen in the last 100 years. Fire is behaving in ways that are unpredictable and pretty frightening. There are a lot of reasons for it. We live in a part of the continent from California right up to Alaska that has really experienced most of what climate change offers: a lot of dry, hot weather, which produces very dry forests, and the hotter it gets, the more lightning you get.

Have forestry practices like tree planting after harvests contributed?

By simply replanting a merchantable piece of lumber, you’re making a complex ecosystem a lot more simplistic, and it’s just not good for it.

What you get in natural regeneration, say, in coniferous forests, you have the aspen shoots coming right back. They call the aspen “the asbestos tree.” They’re not easily ignited, especially when they’re young. They hold a lot of moisture in, so they don’t burn as well.

In Fort McMurray, one of the flaws of the fire suppression strategy was they had some really old vegetation maps. They thought that they had this big stand of aspen in between Fort McMurray and the fire front that would slow the fire.

How effective are we at putting out forest fires?

Once the fire gets to a certain size, say, a thousand hectares, and it’s being driven by wind and hot weather, there’s really nothing firefighters can do to put it out. They can steer a fire away, maybe, from buildings and communities. They can maybe slow a fire. But really, in the end Mother Nature has got to come in and put some moisture on those fires.

We need to give them the resources they need to keep people safe. But to think that they’re going to be able to put out fires — there’s just no way.

Then what should we be doing?

Too much attention is now focused on fighting these fires, rather than dealing with future fires. The problem right now with urban planning is that we don’t incorporate the threat of wildfire. Ninety-six percent of the communities in this country are vulnerable in some way to wildfire.

We subsidize people who want to buy an electric car to deal with climate change. Maybe we should have a program in place that makes homes and communities more resilient. Like, say, if you replace a cedar roof with a steel roof, you get a rebate. The cost of suppression and recovery is becoming so high that something’s got to be done. We can’t just keep opening the government’s wallet to bail people out year after year after year.