I'd just been discussing the general failure of moralisingpathologies (disease, mental health, personal failings, and more, when I saw the same attitute had been applied to wildfire and forestry management:
[F]ire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. [Bernhard Eduard] Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals.”
You don't solve systems problems by punishing or torturing them. You address specific mechanisms, risk factors, transmmission vectors, and feedbacks.
The other is thinking of wildfire as similar to an epidemic:
To me, Fire is the other contagion. Wildfires can be described as a kind of infection! But fire is a lot like a virus. It's not alive, but it depends on the living world to spread.
Both seem useful models to apply elsewhere.