Land of Fire

Guest: Gary Ferguson, Author of “Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West” The season for wildfires has arrived and risk is high across Nevada and the northern California. This may be surprising considering the wet winter the west coast had last year from all the rain and flooding, but ironically, that’s exactly why the fire risk is higher as we head into these hot dry months. It turns out that all the rain caused wild grasses to grow like wildfire in the Spring, and now they’re drying out, making the perfect tinder for wildfires.    The story of fires in the west is full of such contradictions. Here’s another—and this is a really big one—wildfires are burning hotter and faster than ever before precisely because we’ve spent the last 50 years trying to prevent them from catching.