Reporting on the ecology of these fires, NBC's Anne Thompson yesterday in her Our Planet feature made a halfhearted case for blaming global warming. Now CBS' John Blackstone, too, offered half a nod to climate change, before zeroing in on a century-old policy of forest management: refusing to let fires burn. "We are now in the Age of the Megafire…throughout the west, fires have been burning bigger, hotter, faster." He pointed back to Yellowstone National Park in 1988 as the first such megafire: "Decades of putting out every fire left the Park unnaturally thick with trees and debris." Yet the knowledge that burning is sound practice conflicts with increased homebuilding in forests and wild lands--"homes surrounded by vegetation ready to explode."
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