No matter how much open space there is, it is never enough for environmental extremists, who will make political trouble if anyone is allowed to break up those miles and miles of solid vegetation with buildings, even though pavement and masonry don’t burn.
In other words, government preserves all the conditions for wildfires and subsidizes people who live in their path.
Not everybody wants to live on Trantor and the people local to the wildfires discussed in the article lived alongside and with them for 70,000 years sans parking lots.
On this matter Sowell appears to be unqualified, uninformed, and worse than an idiot.
Are you against controlled burns?
see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKdZpRbzMk
et al. - I've spent much of the past month and a half on tender watch during harvest in an Australian summer - we had one day with 14 spot fires from lightning strikes just a few weeks past.
Detaching from Sowell is an excellent idea.
Your inital point was correct though, wildfires are politicized.
The Australian Black Summer, the season that went viral across the globe, was heavily pounced upon by News Corp. et al to push a contra AGW climate change narrative .. which was staggering to watch unfold in the face of data to the contrary.
The general point is true, though. If you go past seeing wildfires as boogiemen and instead view them as allocation issues, they become more solvable.