Fire was a regular tool in everyone in North America's toolkit, indigenous or otherwise, and not something white people were too stupid to figure out.
The speed with which this fire ripped through was no joke, as an example:
https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/awbrey-hall-fire-20-...
And the city got lucky because the wind was out of the NW, rather than from the west, which might have driven it straight into the city.
> I live in a place with a huge national forest just to the west
?
I think the urban sprawl is more to blame here. It's not that we as a society have forgotten about controlled burning or we've become so 'weak' and 'librul' that we don't do what needs to be done. There is a risk here (for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_Canyon/Hermits_Peak_Fire) and nobody wants to take responsibility over something which may cause immediate deaths or loses of property vs something which may or may not happen in the future. Sure, it's kicking the can down the road but who exactly is to blame for cities built right next to forests?
I have a huge issue with bringing up controlled burning as it is ALWAYS used as an argument against the obvious human created climate change. 'Hey, just burn the forest fuel from time to time, no big deal', etc..
I share the same view with you. But we are the minority, just FYI. I've expressed these sentiments in public and every single time I've been labeled a tree hugging commie.
This event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_hea... radicalized me.
If property rights cause us to kill the planet we're on because we're too stubborn to revisit that set of assumptions and maybe tweak them so we can save all of our lives, then IMO we rightly deserve the incredibly stupid demise we will suffer.
Yes, it is outrageous that we can't directly apply the same policies and methods considering we have the same level of urbanization, population, industrial and economic requirements and private property laws /s