> IMO we need to burn more out west.

This addresses only a symptom (more extreme wildfires) and not the root issue: persistent drought / aridification amplified by climate change. To be resilient to the latter, we need to become dramatically more efficient in how we use water resources, especially in the food production pipeline.

The scales of water management that Native CA tribes were doing with their burns is not going to fix our water issues, since we use orders of magnitude more water than they ever did, both per capita and as a civilization.

At this point, prescribed burns are only a fuel management technique to minimize massive wildfires. They are not a realistic way to mitigate climate change driven aridification. It's not really clear that we can mitigate it - we just need to adapt to use water more efficiently.

The thing I think that would differ is the vegetation that would normally survive the fires would be able to flourish again after, e.g. some pine trees in California have pine cones that only disperse seeds during a fire (high temps).

After spending a lot of time in the Sierra Nevadas growing up, I really can see how a lot more trees are dying. A lot of it is that pine beetle wreaking havoc, but the number of standing dead trees is astounding. Old bike paths I used to fly down I now have to be careful on in case I round a corner and have a tree down; 20 years ago I just never had that cross my mind!

I do a lot of backpacking in the Sierras, and last year I went to Colorado for the first time. The number of trees there that are standing-dead from pine borer beetles is staggering. It looked to be about 1/3.

Yep, we'd manage to kill off a lot of the invasive species like eucalyptus, take a load off the water table for a few years. A chance to get ahead of things like the beetle blight that are dependent on early spring drought to kill native pine trees would be good.

I agree as well, we're creating a literal powder keg of a situation with the amount of dry brush that is left lying in unmanaged areas. I get that we have to protect the towns and cities, but we can't just keep pushing this situation out into the future. But I can also see that the larger and more mismanaged the eventual fire is, the more changes you can dictate to combat climate change, so I'm not sure if the wildfire problem is politically tenable.

We need infill housing as well. Controlled burns and housing forced into the wildland-urban interface won't mix.

What are "low-grade fires"?