…“If you think about the trajectory that we’re on right now, with more and more people wanting to live in the woods, with a warming climate, and a lot of fuel buildup from past management practices, it’s a tinderbox,” says Ray Rasker PhD, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based research firm specializing in land management issues of the western states. “The conversation needs to move on from suppression to preventing these fires from happening.”
The really alarming part, Rasker says, is that only 16 percent of the high fire risk land in the US currently has homes on it, meaning that the other 84 percent is still open for future development…