"As much of the American West gets warmer and drier, wildfire season is getting longer, busier, and more frightening. But fire, unlike other natural hazards, is still widely considered an enemy to be defeated, rather than a fact of life that must be accepted. As Max Moritz, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of a review paper published today in Nature, puts it, “To reduce flood damage, we make floodplain maps. To reduce earthquake damage, we form earthquake commissions. When it comes to fire, we hand everything over to the firefighters.”

A key UC Berkeley research station located 56 miles east of Sacramento was under threat from the massive King fire until wind and firefighters redirected the blaze this weekend.