As the smoke clears from the Los Angeles wildfires, the enormous human and economic costs of living in a fire-prone landscape come into view. These fires — fueled by extreme heat, parched vegetation and high winds — claimed 29 lives, destroyed more than 16,000 homes and businesses, incinerated irreplaceable things and left vast burn scars across the region.
And the devastation does not stop once the flames are out. In the coming months, heavy rains will likely trigger mudslides and debris flows, damaging more homes and roads, filling reservoirs with sediment and causing further destruction.
For Utahns, the devastation in LA should be a sobering reminder that we, too, live in a fire-prone landscape and must do more to prepare for inevitable fires of the future.
For decades, we in the West have operated under the delusion that we can prevent all wildfires. That strategy has backfired, for the simple reason that if western forests don’t burn, they just keep growing and become overloaded with dead wood and underbrush. So when a fire ignites — whether by lightning, mismanaged campfire, fireworks or faulty power lines — the intensity is far greater than it would have been under a natural fire regime.
There’s a hard truth we need to face: There is no fire-free future in Utah. Some landscapes, particularly our ponderosa pine and dry mixed-conifer forests, would be far healthier if we let them burn more often. Frequent, low-intensity fires clear out underbrush, recycle nutrients and create more resilient ecosystems. Indigenous communities understood this for centuries, using prescribed burns to maintain healthy landscapes.
Instead of resisting fire at all costs, we should be asking how we can learn to live with it. Here’s how:
Stop building in high-risk areas. The simplest and most effective way to reduce fire damage is to stop putting people and infrastructure in harm’s way. Continued development in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) — the zone where human development meets wildland vegetation — has made firefighting more dangerous and exceedingly expensive, raised insurance costs and put lives at risk. To move us in a better direction, cities and counties would have to resist the allure of building in these often beautiful, but fire-prone areas. This means better zoning policies, fire-smart building codes and an end to the pattern of building homes in risky areas and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill when disaster strikes.
Transition off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Climate change is intensifying droughts and wildfires. Warming caused by burning fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — is drying out vegetation earlier in the season and creating longer, hotter fire seasons. We have known this for decades, yet 2024 had the highest rate of fossil fuel emissions in history. Utah cannot single-handedly solve the global carbon pollution problem, but rather than blindly pursuing the fantasy of perpetual exponential growth in energy consumption and dragging our heels clinging to fossil fuels, we could be a leader in developing the energy solutions of the future. The laws of physics that control wildfires don’t care about our politics. It’s up to us to ensure our politics align with reality. Continued denialism and delays will worsen the conditions that fuel megafires.
Empower agencies and build public-private partnerships. Our federal, state and local agencies need more flexibility and resources to manage forests and fire risk proactively. Right now, excessive bureaucracy and liability concerns often hinder necessary conservation, prescribed burns and forest management efforts. Stronger public-private partnerships could help alleviate these barriers by facilitating land owners, conservation groups and local governments to work together on proactive landscape-scale solutions. Additionally, we must invest in more comprehensive risk assessments to identify the most vulnerable areas and direct resources accordingly.
The fires in LA are not an aberration, they are a lesson written in smoke and ruin, one that we in Utah would do well to heed. Wildfire risk is not going away, and waiting until disaster strikes is a losing strategy. Living with fire demands more than isolated quick fixes — it requires big-picture wisdom.
Wisdom involves making hard choices and exercising restraint. A wiser future in the fire-prone Western U.S. means restricting development in risky areas, reducing overall energy consumption and eliminating fossil fuels as soon as feasible, and empowering the institutions that manage and regulate our forests and communities.
Failure remains an option — it’s the one we are stubbornly choosing now. But if we seize the opportunity, Utah could emerge as a leader in wildfire resilience — a state that learns from the past and builds a safer, wiser future in this beautiful and highly flammable landscape we call home.
In the end, it’s not the land or nature of fire that must change. It is us.
(Patrick Belmont) Patrick Belmont is a professor in the Department of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University.
Patrick Belmont is a professor in the Department of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University. His research program spans hydrology, geomorphology and climate science with recent projects focusing on wildfire impacts on fish and water resources, climate change implications for multi-use management of public lands, and climate change risks for ski resorts in Utah.
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