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Editorial: Wildfire crisis requires major shift in strategy

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We face a wildfire crisis.

With nature and man having conspired in recent decades to create the optimum conditions for hell on Earth, it's time for a new American game plan to prevent wildfires.

And because it appears it likely will take a long time to implement any plan that would seriously alter conditions on the ground, we're also going to need a new battle plan for fighting blazes - blazes that are no longer just burning up prime forests or grasslands but also consuming lives and billions of dollars in property.

New Mexicans, in particular, would do well to heed the warnings offered by the recent devastating wildfires that scarred Southern California.

As a state, we need to alter our behavior and acknowledge the reality that wildfires are a part of nature and that when we set the stage for the most extreme ones, we are ill-equipped to counter them.

Our congressional delegation should join those from other Western states in calling for a Western wildfire summit, in which federal, state and local officials can assess the threats and develop realistic public policies that reflect them.

That's in part because the Land of Enchantment - like a number of other Western states - has a very similar ecosystem to Southern California's. This alone makes it extremely vulnerable to sweeping and devastating wildfires in similarly dry and windy conditions. But there are many other crucial factors, including:

Like Southern California, New Mexico and many other Western states have allowed people and developers to invade the urban-wild land interface, placing residents and structures at extreme risk when wildfires strike.

Decades of wildfire suppression, in forests in particular, have left many national forests in prime ignition condition - in some cases with 40 to 60 years of dead fuel on the ground.

Even though automatic fire suppression - the Smoky Bear mentality that all fires are bad and should be snuffed - has been widely discredited, government policy continues to reflect it, charges a recent study of Southwestern wildfires by the Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians.

Climate change in some areas also might be compounding wildfire problems with more-intense droughts and winds, increasing the odds that any given wildfire will be extreme.

Insurance companies are beginning to limit or eliminate wildfire coverage from policies in vulnerable areas or even entire states, such as New Mexico.

One of our key wildfire fighting resources, state National Guard and Reserve military units, often are deployed these days in Iraq or Afghanistan, and are no longer as readily available to battle wildfires.

Given these circumstances, even existing wildfire fighting units scattered across the country might not be properly manned or equipped to respond to the most extreme wildfires.

The bottom line is that that wildfire equation has dramatically changed over the last two decades, from the wildfires that ravaged Yellowstone National Park in 1988 to those that burned Los Alamos and much of Arizona early this decade, to those that humbled much of Southern California last month. Yet our response to them, largely, has not changed much.

What will it take for the federal government and the states to get truly serious about the increasing threat of wildfires - and to develop and implement national and local strategies and policies to cope with them?