Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead

I don’t know whether I’d turn to MIT for ideas in Western land management. Looking on the MIT website, there was a 2013 report on fire management practices from their Engineering Systems group, and a 2015 press release describing the dissolving of their Engineering Systems group. There is a 2019 high-level article on applying risk management techniques by folks who took Sloan Management courses (not MIT staff), but the 2020 MIT blurb about the research was more about how great the MIT management courses the authors took were than any concrete contribution to land management by MIT.

I’m guessing there is a lot of cringing going on in forestry schools in the West when MIT of all places publishes a high-visibility article on forestry and fire management that has a title that includes “Here’s what California needs to do instead.” Perhaps someone with actual subject matter expertise on this well-studied topic could comment on whether the article’s content is as oversimplified and naive as one would assume it would be.