Is the West doomed to burn? More like destined, wildfire experts say

When Steven Griego began fighting wildfires in 2009, the ones that he and his crew considered “big” would burn around 30,000 acres.

In those early years, Griego, the supervisor of the Rio Grande Wildland fire fighting crew of the New Mexico Forestry Division, would point out different areas around his hometown of Mora to his wife, Leticia, that would be hardest to fight if wildfire ever reached the Sangre de Cristo Mountains around Santa Fe.

While riding their ATVs, Griego would say, “If we get a fire right here … it’s gonna get big.” Then they’d drive somewhere else and he’d say, “If we got a fire there, it’s going to be tough.”

Leticia did not realize how prescient her husband’s concerns were.

Come early April of 2022, the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire burned nearly 350,000 acres across Taos, San Miguel and Mora counties in northern New Mexico. The fire burned through June and was the biggest in the state’s history, destroying an area 100 square miles larger than the city of Los Angeles. Damages were estimated to cost approximately $5 billion. Griego spent around 50 days fighting the fire and evacuating locals — his family and friends included.

“You had told me about all those places, that it was going to be tough fighting, and it all burnt at one time,” Griego remembers Leticia saying to him. “It wasn’t just like, ‘OK, a fire here, a fire there.’ It was all at once, and it was gone.”

Griego’s used to fighting hundreds of fires a year — the West burns often — but the vast majority never make the news, in part because of the valiant efforts of firefighters. But over the last 16 years, his understanding of wildfires’ potential scale has changed considerably.

Just this month, he sent a crew to fight the Buck Fire, which burned nearly 60,000 acres near New Mexico’s Gila National Forest. These days, that’s business as usual. Now the “big” fires are the ones greater than 300,000 acres.

“That’s tenfold what it used to be, and that’s a big fire,” Griego said. “But then you look out towards California, a little bit further west, and we’re hitting a million acres out there,” he said. “It’s like, where is it gonna stop?”

‘The West is going to burn’

So far this year, 33,552 wildfires have burned 1.7 million acres in the U.S., according to the National Interagency Fire Center. As of this publishing, there are 69 large fires receiving “full suppression” treatment across 8 states in the West. Fourteen states — 7 in the West — have red-flag warnings from the National Weather Service, which means there’s an “increased risk” of wildfire with the potential for rapid growth. Over the northern border in Canada, over 10 million acres have burned since the start of the year — 347% of a “normal” year — with at least 65 fires that are deemed “out of control.”

Utah just put in place statewide Stage 1 fire restrictions, preventing the use of campfires, fireworks, shooting and metalworking — all in advance of Independence Day celebrations. Federal land managers in the state also have restrictions across most major regions. All while at least two large wildfires are burning.

The France Canyon fire has now burned over 32,000 acres, and is at 15% containment. The Forsythe Fire in Washington County, Utah, destroyed 14 homes so far. While its total acreage of 11,500 plus acres is not breaking records, as of this weekend it’s 26% contained. Although, for most of last week it was 0% contained — which is just another way of saying out of control.

It’s dispassionate, but none of this is particularly surprising in 2025. Wildfires are not unfamiliar. After the world witnessed what happened to Los Angeles, Maui, or any other of the many large scale wildfire disasters of the past several years, even the truly big ones are no longer unexpected.

Also, fire has just always been a part of the North American landscape. Which is part of the answer to Griego’s question: wildfires aren’t going to stop.

“As practitioners, we don’t see (wildfire) as doom,” said Casey Teske, the wildland fire science and ecology program lead for the National Park Service’s Wildland Fire Program. “We know that we’re on a landscape where the plants and vegetation, the trees, the grass, the shrubs, that’s part of their lifecycle process. So, is it doomed to burn? I prefer ‘destined’ to ‘doom.’ The West is going to burn. Fire’s part of the process.”

Other wildfire professionals even celebrate its presence, grateful that our landscapes have a built in system to rejuvenate.

Is (the West) doomed to burn? I prefer ‘destined’ to ‘doom’. The West is going to burn. Fire’s part of the process.”

—  Casey Teske, the wildland fire science lead for the National Park Service’s Wildland Fire Program

“Yes — most of the West is destined to burn and there would be, maybe, an excited exclamation point on that sentence,” said Greg Dillon, the director of the Fire Modeling Institute for the U.S. Forest Service and one of the architects of the Wildfire Risk to Communities interactive website. “We’re not doomed to it — it’s an exciting element of the ecosystems of North America.”

It’s within those ecosystems, however, where more and more people in the West are building homes and communities that are not intended to rejuvenate after cyclical destruction. And while the number of fires per year has stayed stable, the size of those fires has been increasing. That’s caused by a kaleidoscope of factors — changing weather, invasive vegetation species and a wide variety of human actions.

But experts and wildfire fighters agree that there are things that can be done to mitigate their spread, keep families and communities more safe and even address underlying causes. It requires not just practical action, but coming to terms with the existential threat of living with the pervasive, “act of God” level of risk that wildfires pose.

Part of that process requires individuals and communities to reframe how they understand it — both as just a regular part of life in the West, and also something that has the potential to change depending on the choices people make both separately and together.

“It is the new baseline, but really only if we do nothing,” said Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist and wildfire expert at Yale’s School of the Environment. “Doing nothing is not a neutral choice.”

How should we think about it?

Dillon’s and Teske’s perspective regarding wildfire owes to the fact that it’s a necessary and beneficial part of the West’s ecological nature. It clears overgrowth, kills diseases and, while doing so, adds nutrients to soil which, in turn, spurs new life and fosters greater biodiversity. This phoenix-like regeneration is just another one of the earth’s ineffable, beautiful complexities.

North American landscapes have also been burning in some form or another for millennia, said Jason Fallon, the branch chief of Wildland Fire for the National Park Service Division of Fire and Aviation. Not only is that pattern unlikely to stop, it’s also “always constantly changing.”

Fallon takes umbrage with the framing of “doom” or “destiny,” as the potential for a negative connotation skews how someone might understand or define the problems of wildfire before the conversation even begins.

In his estimation, fire is only good or bad depending on where and how it is burning. For example, fire on our stove that’s cooking dinner, or in our engines powering our car’s movement, is a good, unthreatening force. But where the fire is burning can quickly change our perception. “It’s OK if the fire’s inside the engine,” Fallon said. “If it’s in the seat next to me, that’s not good.”

But the forests, deserts and grasslands of the West are natural locations for fire. In those landscapes, it has a natural and good existence, Fallon said. That dichotomy, of fire being both good and bad depending on where and when, is a better way to frame it, he suggested.

“There’s a duality to wildland fire where in some cases it can be a great tool and highly beneficial to the landscape, and in other cases, it can have severe negative consequences,” Fallon said.

“It’s highly dynamic. So there’s a lot of things we can’t control and we don’t know exactly when and exactly how this chain of events is going to occur. The best thing we can do is be prepared and give ourselves lots of options for whatever that situation is.”

What we can do to prepare

Wildfire “is a natural ecological process, just like rain and snow and wind,” Dillon, from the U.S. Forest Service, said. “It’s something that our society has vilified because obviously it can cause damage. But what we need to learn to do as a society is embrace it.”

The website that Dillon manages, Wildfire Risk to Communities, is a thorough guide for how individuals, communities and leaders can practically address the threats of wildfire. It is very similar to Utah’s Fire Sense program. Teske and Fallon both said it is the best reference for those seeking to protect their property and communities from the risk of wildfire.

“I don’t want to see people’s homes lost, lives lost. I don’t want to see property burned up,” Dillon added. “So, how do we as a society adapt to understanding that fire is something that we do have to live with but manage our own environment — our built environment, the places that we live and work — in a way that they can be resilient and a wildfire event doesn’t have to be a human disaster.”

The site offers a search function so visitors can assess their own communities’ wildfire risk as well as detailed advice on ways to reduce it. Those include the way people build a “defensible space” around their home.

The idea is to create breaks between shrubs, decks, fences or other items that could easily ignite and subsequently set the house itself on fire. One can also remove those things entirely. Within that defensible space, the site has advice about building materials, venting, fuel storage, landscaping and, moving outward again, even suggestions for things a homeowner can do to trees up to a 100 feet away.

When the site launched in 2020, Dillon himself, who lives in Missoula, Montana, began making the updates that he suggested homeowners do on the website to his own home. Before he started, however, a colleague noticed over a Zoom call some Juniper trees — one of the most flammable trees in the West — in his backyard. That was a catalyst for his own action. Along with a few neighbors, Dillon got a chainsaw and started landscaping.

But the site also has recommendations for how communities and town leaders can implement wildfire codes, build evacuation routes and plan for wildfire eventualities, too. That is because, while it’s important for individuals to do what they can to manage their own property, it is mostly a society level issue, Dillon said.

“If you just have one or two people in a neighborhood doing all the things you’re supposed to do and the rest of the people choose not to do any mitigation that’s probably not enough,” Dillon said. “You need to address it as a community issue so that an entire neighborhood — an entire community — works to make themselves more fire resilient."

He points out how massive urban fires were a major issue before regulations like general fire codes and sprinkler ordinances were put in place. With a little collective spirit, communities in areas where towns and wild spaces intersect — the “wildland-urban interfaces” that are ubiquitous in the West, colloquially referred to as “woo-EE’s” — can also limit the damage of wildfires.

Making those kinds of decisions for yourself or your community is hard and not everyone has the appetite for it. Teske referenced a study done after the Oakland Hills Fire of 1991, in Berkeley, California, to illustrate how different people react when faced with the threat of wildfire.

Those who lost their homes, rebuilt them in the same way because their insurance covered it. Those whose homes were spared and who also avoided a close call, did not make any updates to their home at all.

“But if you were in that almost-had-my-home-burned (category), you did everything — took the wood pile away, tried to put up the most fire resilient sideboards and everything," Teske said. “That human factors piece is really part of it.”

Which is why Teske thinks it so important for people to discuss what can be done to mitigate wildfires spread — because those that know are often willing to do whatever it takes to spare their property and persons from the damage that can come from doing nothing.

Echoing Dillon’s sentiments, she said that by communicating and understanding these dangers, “communities and the planning commissions have to accept part of their responsibility to help make their communities safe as well. ”

How a changing planet has changed wildfire

For most of North America, what used to be a “wildfire season” correlated to the summer months, is now a wildfire year. Since the 1970s, Teske said that the average length of the planet’s fire season has increased by one month, but within the U.S. it’s now 84 days longer.

In addition to that, Griego’s anecdotal experience from fighting wildfire in New Mexico is not isolated either. According to Teske, the fires themselves are, in fact, getting larger too.

“The numbers are relatively stable in terms of the number of fires,” per year, Teske said. “It’s actually the size that is increasing. The area burn is increasing on an annual basis. That trend is up.”

The simple truth that wildfire is a natural process obfuscates part of wildfire’s story in the West. Wildfire may be normal for western landscapes, but like a lot of things on Earth, its nature is complicated by human presence and our lifestyle choices.

“It is the new base line, but really only if we do nothing. Doing nothing is not a neutral choice.”

—  Jennifer Marlon, senior research scientist and wildfire expert at Yale’s School of the Environment

So aside from whether or not wildfire regulations are put into place or how well a homeowner builds a defensible space around their property, there are choices we make with regards to where homes are built and what level of seriousness we give to concerns of climate change that can also mitigate the scale and spread of wildfire.

“People don’t realize that we’re building communities right up against these forests that are designed to survive fire and to burn,” Marlon, the Yale researcher, said. “But our homes are not designed that way.”

As such, Marlon said, now is a time for action. In addition to making a defensible space and packing a to-go bag, she said, “We need to start raising the question at every town meeting, every planning meeting, every zoning meeting, how is this development, new building, soccer field or whatever making our community safer? How is it going to help our community survive when the fire comes?”

“Because the fire is going to come. It’s just a matter of when and where exactly, but yes there’s going to be more severe fires in the future,” she said. “This is not going to slow down anytime soon.”

There are many reasons for that. Teske and Fallon described the pervasive amount of invasive grasses that are quicker to burn. Marlon referenced a growing population of people who use fire all the time in their day-to-day lives (cooking, driving, heating and, also, the Fourth of July is this week) living adjacent to ignitable landscapes. She mentioned that, as the world has gotten hotter, there is a demonstrable increase in the amount of lightning, the strikes of which often ignite wildfire.

Griego described how New Mexico’s droughts have constantly made conditions ripe for wildfire, too. The relative humidity was so low before the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire that they had 37 red flag days in a row, something he had never seen before. The vast majority of the 30% of the U.S. currently under drought conditions are in the southwest part of the country.

Also, there’s a vast body of scientific evidence linking human-caused climate change driven by fossil fuel emissions to more extreme weather events and rising temperatures.

John Vaillant wrote "Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World‚" which detailed the connections between society’s dependence on fossil fuels and the growing scale of wildfire disasters. He thinks it’s folly to ignore the relationship between burning fossil fuels and massive wildfire.

“We have agency here,” he said. Even if we are dependent on fossil fuels today, “it is morally lazy to just throw up our hands and say, ‘well, there’s nothing we can do.’”

Vaillant explained that Texas, the largest producer of fossil fuels in the country, is also a leader of renewable energy development. This suggests to him that it’s more than possible to limit fossil fuels production and subsequently lower the risk of greater, larger wildfires.

If we do decide to do nothing — something Marlon said was no longer neutral — then we are just subjecting ourselves to more fires, more floods, and more suffering, she suggested.

“We used to have a billion-dollar disaster every three to four months in this country, now we have one every two weeks,” she said. “How are we going to handle the insurance crisis? Everybody should check their policy. A lot of them are renewing in a month or two. Your bill is going to go up. And that’s not just inflation or the Ukraine war, that’s actually climate change.”

A stark reminder

Griego keeps a visual diary of the more memorable fires he has fought in the form of a full sleeve of tattoos along his left arm. He has images of trees burning, portraits of some of his crew but he also memorialized a scary reminder of a home that he was not able to save.

During one wildfire fight, Griego could clearly see the entire frame of a house in silhouette through the engulfing flames. It was exactly the kind of disaster he fights to prevent. They’re all a reminder of his lifestyle, and what is at stake when he does this kind of work.

As parting advice, Griego mentioned that he and fire crews often have to deal with those who don’t evacuate when the order was given, or don’t want to evacuate even when the fire is burning in their neighborhood. When people don’t take the warnings seriously — he remembered someone who needed help changing a flat tire in the midst of a burning maelstrom — they complicate the fight.

“You’re holding us up from doing our job. If you would’ve listened to us two, three days ago to evacuate your house and not last minute, we’d have good access in there. ‘Egress’ is what we call it — a way in, a way out," Griego said.

Part of knowing that the landscape of the West is destined to burn and that there are things we can do to mitigate our risks, is trusting the evacuation order when it comes.

“We’re telling you something. We’re telling it to you from professional experience. We’re not telling you because we want you to leave your home,” Griego said. “You need to leave your home.”