We still aren’t doing enough to prevent the next devastating wildfire

At the start of last year, ash and smoke consumed the skies over Los Angeles. Homes,  businesses and entire neighborhoods went up in flames, and 31 lives were tragically lost. It’s been over a year since we promised to never forget the victims or the lives uprooted, yet families are still fighting every day to recover from the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires. 

This isn’t a tragedy confined by state lines; it’s a crisis across the entire American West, as fire seasons continue to lengthen and intensify. In 2025, Utah faced its highest fire activity since 2020, with nearly 165,000 acres of land scorched — a staggering number that exceeds the 2022, 2023 and 2024 fire seasons combined.

We must chart a better path forward. While the smoke of last year’s catastrophes has cleared, the threat of the next megafire has only grown, and we still haven’t done enough to prepare for it. Our wildfire prevention and suppression policy remains stuck in the past. 

To begin, we must stop viewing megafires as seasonal or regional nuisances and start treating them as the urgent, year-round crises they are. Wildfires are the single greatest threat to America’s forests, and a vicious driver of the very environmental crisis that fuels them. Consider the scale: greenhouse gases produced by California’s 2020 wildfires alone offset 20 years of the state’s emission reductions. This creates a catastrophic feedback loop: carbon from fires accelerates extreme heat and drought, which in turn creates the parched, tinderbox conditions for even larger megafires. 

And this isn’t just an environmental........

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