Living among wildfire smoke is also not new, especially in the Northwest as settlements formed in the drainages and valleys of mountains where smoke tends to pool. During the big fires—1865, when a million acres burned from the Olympics to the Sierras, the Tillamook cycle, which burned from 1933 until 1951 in a series of reburns—smoke was endemic to the Pacific Northwest. In the 1880s, smoke was reportedly so thick through the summer and fall seasons that geological survey crews in the Cascades had to abandon their work.
Yet today Washington State has more homes in fire-prone wildland areas—known as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI—than anywhere else in the country. There is estimated to be a 40 percent increase in homes in the WUI between 2001 and 2030, with no sign of such development abating, despite the megafires. New developments have no mandatory review procedures to assess wildfire risk. The Okanogan County Comprehensive Plan on managing growth, for example, released just after the Carlton Complex fires in 2014, didn’t include a single concrete guideline or requirement. Instead, it is up to each individual property owner to reduce risk on their own land.
As a result, state and federal firefighters have to actively suppress fires—not merely manage them—in order to save homes (which they do with remarkable and laudable precision). This suppression leaves forests overly dense and ready to burn while the increased presence of people also makes fires much more likely: in the dry tinderbox of southern California, for instance, 95 percent of fires are started by human activity.
The reigning ethos of development is, of course, private property: let people do what they like on their own land. There is a byzantine patchwork of environmental regulations and land usage laws at the county, state, and federal level, but these are largely geared toward managing growth rather than suppressing it. “I’m not real big on over-regulating people,” Andy Hover, one of the current Okanogan County Commissioners, said in the middle of this year’s fire season. “Rules and regulations are kind of like—well, is that really what we want?”
Whether or not “we” really want rules and regulations in the West is the historically vexed question that has driven the development of the West since colonial settlement. Despite its mythic ethos of self-reliance, independence, and rugged autonomy, a massive influx of federal funds and intervention has always been necessary for non-Native settlers to live in the West. The federal government funded decades of military campaigns and genocidal wars against indigenous people to clear the land. Federal land grants of over 100 million acres, tax incentives, and government loans all helped build the transcontinental railroads, which both opened the West to increased settlement and built the power of banks and finance on Wall Street. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered free land to white farmers if they agreed to “improve” it for five years; and the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887 broke up the grants of reservation land initially sanctioned for Native Americans. One name for this, popularized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, is the frontier thesis; another is manifest destiny. Yet another is imperialism. Its legacy continues in the approach to western housing developments today: what was once held in common is nominally and culturally understood as the preserve of the individual yet underwritten by the federal government.
Today, more than half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget goes to fighting wildfires and, increasingly, keeping them away from people’s private property.