It's clear that there's a catastrophic problem that's developed, and continues to accellerate, with wildfire incidence and severity in North America. And that past forestry practices have all but certainly contributed.
Starting over 20 years ago, the number and scale of fire scars I'd see whilst travelling through the Western US began impressing itself on me sharply. On one trip I'd headed out of Boise on state routes 21 and 75, through the Sawtooth Wilderness, and hit a fire scar that was over 20 miles long. I continued through to Yellowstone where the decade-plus scars of the 1988 conflagration there, one of the most severe in the US at the time, were still sharply visible, along with stands of unburnt, but clearly dead trees, on the mountainsides (beetle infestation I believe). There was still plenty of fuel.
Other portions of that trip brought me through other fire scars, as well as terrain that would burn over the next several years (some of these immediately adjacent or twice-burned ground). One of my road stops ended up being a command-centre for firefighting efforts. That made news of the subsequent burns far more visceral.
Some years later, I had a long road-trip talk with a retired US Forestry worker who gave the story of how mismanagement was fueling current burns --- this now nearly a decade and a half ago itself. I think about that conversation often.
But wildfire is an increasing problem around the world, including in locations which have not to the best of my knowledge been subject to total fire suppression, including large regions of Siberia, ablaze now, burning for months, and quite possibly the continuation of what have become annual fires errupting for much of the past decade. The regions are simply too remote for the type of suppression the US and Canada have practiced.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/08/05/siberia-feels-the-...
And much of the terrain I've seen burned isn't exactly "forest". It might have some trees, but is more scrubland. Whether or not that is also subject to overaccumulation of fuel load I'm not certain, but it's the type of terrain that would burn regardless ... and yet, still seems to be burning more frequently and more intensely than before.
I've also driven through forests (part of the region now on fire in California, in 2015), and despite years of backpacking and rural trips, feeling very uncomfortable over just how painfully dry and primed for ignition that portion of the trip, made late in the year with hot dry weather and months of no precipitation, felt. The Camp Fire followed within a couple of years, and the Dixie fire is literally burning up the path I'd blazed. Forestry management is part of that, but bone-dry dust, pine needles, shrubs, and trees take more than just misguided foresters.