…. Government’s bureaucratic land management policies are largely responsible. By reducing the occurrence of low-intensity fires that would normally burn off underbrush and dead trees on the forest floor, government-managed forests can accumulate fuel that turns wildfires into destructive conflagrations. Aggressive fire suppression was the prevailing policy of federal and state governments for more than a century. Though foresters better understand the role of fire than they once did, the poor management decisions from the past will take decades to undo.

Some governments have been particularly slow to act, and they often get in the way of private efforts. In the wake of devastating wildfires in California, it became clear that Gavin Newsom’s administration had done more to hinder wildfire prevention than to promote it. As journalist Steven Greenhut wrote in the Orange County Register in 2025,

[California] clears maybe 125,000 acres of brush from its 19 million acres of forest (plus another 14 million that are federally owned). The state requires multiple lengthy approvals for forest clearing projects and impedes property owners who want to fire-harden their homes.

Private land has fared better, when owners are given freedom to act. In 2021, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon burned more than 400,000 acres. The fire provided a natural experiment in managing forests for fire resilience, as it moved from the Fremont-Winema National Forest to the Nature Conservancy’s Sycan Marsh Preserve. Unlike the Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy had managed their land through thinning and prescribed burns. The wildfire quickly went from 200-foot flames on federal land to a lower-intensity ground fire on the well-managed private land, sparing trees and providing an island of intact forest. …

The Wildfire Calculation Problem

The problems with bureaucracy have long been understood, even if they have not been appreciated by those who look to government to manage land. As Ludwig von Mises showed over a century ago, government intervention displaces the market process and thereby deprives us of reliable cost and benefit information derived from demonstrated human preferences.

By replacing private property with government control, we subject land to mismanagement and destruction. Government bureaucrats have no way to determine the costs inflicted or benefits achieved .by fire, whether for the purposes of deciding how much land to treat with a prescribed burn, which acres need to be treated first, or how many resources to devote to fire suppression in the event of a wildfire.Political objectives take over from rational management, as land use is dictated by interest groups and power brokers in government. The best path forward is not to tweak some bureaucratic procedure or increase federal budgets for prescribed burns or replace an official who allowed a fire to get out of control. It is to return land to private ownership.