Think about 20+ years ago.
Yes, wildfires happened — but they were sporadic, unpredictable, and usually far from major population centers. They felt like rare, seasonal freak events, not an expected part of American life. Most people didn’t check air quality indexes before stepping outside. Skies didn’t glow orange over major cities. Fire season wasn’t a thing.
Fast forward to now, and that has completely changed.
🔥 A New Kind of Season
Over the past two decades, wildfires in the United States — especially across the West — have transformed from occasional disasters into a reliable annual occurrence. So reliable, in fact, that millions of people now anticipate them the same way Floridians track hurricanes or Midwesterners prepare for tornadoes. It’s on the calendar. It’s built into public policy. It’s normal — but it shouldn’t be.
We now live in a time where:
Entire towns like Paradise, CA were wiped off the map.
Orange skies shroud cities from San Francisco to Seattle, looked like something from a dystopian film.
Air Quality Index readings regularly surpass 500+ — a level so toxic it’s dangerous to even breathe outside, let alone work, exercise, or send your kids to school.
Fires rage for weeks at a time, displacing tens of thousands of people, overwhelming firefighters, and burning millions of acres of forest.
This isn't a fluke. It’s the new reality.
🌲 More Than Just Mismanagement
It’s become fashionable in some circles to blame California and other Western states for “bad land management” — and yes, decades of fire suppression have left forests overloaded with dry, flammable fuel. That’s real.
But it’s not the whole story.
Climate change has intensified everything. We’re seeing:
Historic droughts across the Southwest and West that turn entire ecosystems into tinderboxes.
Hotter, longer summers that dry vegetation out earlier and keep fire conditions going later into the year.
Wind patterns and lightning storms that spark fast-moving blazes that are nearly impossible to contain.
It’s not just about how forests are managed. It’s about how the planet is changing beneath us. Just like hurricanes have grown more intense and frequent with warmer oceans, fires are growing with a warmer, drier atmosphere. We’re living through it.
😷 The New Normal, But It Shouldn’t Be
This isn’t just a Western problem anymore. Fires now reach into Colorado, Texas, even parts of the Midwest and Northeast. And yet — unlike hurricane season, fire season doesn’t seem to earn the same national sympathy.
Why is that?
Why do we send thoughts and prayers to hurricane survivors, but ask wildfire evacuees why they chose to live there?
It’s a subtle but powerful sign of how we divide empathy by geography — or even politics. But disasters shouldn’t divide us. They should unite us.
📆 Fire Season Is Here to Stay
This is our new disaster season. It’s as real as hurricane season, tornado season, or flood season — and it’s time we treated it that way.
Not all of this is preventable. Not all of it is mismanagement. Much of it is climate reality. What we can control is how we respond — with awareness, preparation, funding, and compassion. Whether it’s Florida or California, the South or the Pacific Northwest, Americans are facing new extremes, and we’ll need each other to get through them.
Because fire season isn’t going away.
It’s just getting started.
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