The American West is burning. This maze provides kindling.

Wildfire season is here, and it’s already ugly. More than 2.5 million acres have burned nationwide this year — nearly double the 10-year average for this point in the calendar — with the most dangerous months still ahead. Much of the western United States just experienced one of the region’s driest winters, leaving forests and other vegetation unusually parched as summer begins. In Wyoming, lightning ignited the largest May wildfire ever recorded in Bridger-Teton National Forest. In California, an 18,000-acre wildfire burned one-third of Santa Rosa Island and threatened the extinction of six plants only found there.

But weather is only part of the story. Across much of the West, decades of fire suppression and insufficient management have left many forests unnaturally dense and overloaded with fuels, creating conditions that allow fires to burn larger, hotter and more destructively.

Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Post (Paywalled)

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Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.