Native Americans routinely did their own control burns in many areas for millennia. Where I came from, actually growing up with Indians, they'd set the low country on fire just before they migrated to the high country during the summer. That would keep the meadows open for sake of deer or their own use. Lower California scrubland contains a lot of brush genetically engineered to want to burn every forty years or so. Up higher, lightning fires would clean out the older lodgepole pine groves, creating new meadows, and regenerating the cycle. The pine beetles mostly died off during the cold winters. Now winters are warmer, and the only thing that kills off the beetle infestations is catastrophic wildfire. And unwise clearcut logging operations resulting in monoculture forests only made the situation worse, as did the ban on local control burns for sake of improving air quality, which obviously backfired. But the terrain in general is far too steep, remote, and vast to clean up all the downfall.
I've lived through several giant forest fires, fought fires, and now am so sensitized to wood smoke I can't even tolerate fireplaces. I have taken many photo of the results of forest fires. But going out shooting, much less "plein air" (cough, cough) painting them, just sounds nuts to me. Let the newspapers and TV types do that. I've seen fires leap a half mile at a time, and hot ashfall raining down thirty miles from the front. The last fire near my old residence, right in the bottom of the second deepest canyon on the continent, sent up the highest non-volcanic thermal cloud in recorded history (about 75,000 high with four known fire tornadoes going on inside it at the same time). That smoke went clear across the continent to NYC, and some of it even to western Europe.
As for Smokey the Bear's role in all of this.... Well, how come a bear who can't even drive is always the first one to the fire? And the reason Smokey isn't seen anymore is that he's serving a life sentence for serial arson. Turns out, he not only carried a shovel, but a gas can and book of matches. And when I was growing up, that's what certain Forest Service officials would get some local bum to do, often bribing them with nothing more than a pack of cheap beer, since they'd get double pay radioing commands to firefighters on the front afterwards. Nowadays, our forest fires are just too highly investigated to let something like that happen again. Nut case arsonists are another thing entirely. Several of them were arrested in this area last year; and yes, a number of homes were lost.
