
Underpaid firefighters, overstretched budgets: The U.S. isn’t prepared for fires fueled by climate change
“We as society and our political institutions have this very ingrained assumption that we can be saved from wildfires through proper treatment of the forest,” said Kimiko Barrett, who studies wildfire and community resilience at Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based environmental think tank.
“But given the severity of climate change and the scale at which fires are occurring,” she added, “how long are we going to continue to try that, without bringing in the role of human decisions?”