Understanding Wildfire in the Twenty-First Century: The Return of Disaster Fires

Wildfires across the American West are growing in size, duration, and cost. Understandably, incidents like the 2018 Camp Fire garnered significant media and political attention, underscoring the importance of wildfire science and management and its implications for the future. In doing so, ecologists and journalists have given conflagrations like the Camp Fire a new name: "megafires." What has been missing from the analysis and coverage of the Camp Fire and others like it is context. Where do such massive wildfires sit in a historical background? Are they something new? Something old? Do they follow a pattern? Taken in such a context, the Camp Fire is actually not a new type of fire, but rather a return to the past when massive wildfires dominated the western states and many more acres burned annually. To understand the Camp Fire and other blazes like it, we need to travel like the characters in Robert Zemeckis's 1985 movie Back to the Future in order to better understand the present and chart a course for the future.