Overgrown forests and increasingly destructive wildfires are the legacy of more than a century of fire suppression policy in California. Historically, state laws held people liable for damages if they started a fire that burned out of control.But a new California law will remove the liability risk for private citizens and Indigenous people who set controlled burns, which are low-intensity fires proven to prevent catastrophic blazes. The law marks a paradigm shift in the United States, where in the pre-settler era, Indigenous people regularly set small fires to take care of the landscape.US federal policy, however, viewed all fires as dangerous and made it a priority to extinguish them, allowing forests to grow dense, with more fuel for wildfires. Today, climate change is drying out those forests and contributing to longer wildfire seasons.
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