The fires burning in the Los Angeles area are a powerful example of why humans have learned to fear wildfire. Fires can level entire neighborhoods in an instant. They can destroy communities, torch pristine forests and choke even faraway cities with toxic smoke.

Over a century of fire suppression efforts have conditioned Americans to expect wildland firefighters to snuff out fires quickly, even as people build homes deeper into landscapes that regularly burn. But as the LA fires show, and as journalist Nick Mott and I explored in our book “This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Your Home, Yourself, and Your Community in the Age of Heat” and 2021 podcast “Fireline,” this expectation and our society’s relationship with wildfire need to change.

Over time, extensive fire suppression, home construction in high fire-risk areas and climate change have set the stage for the increasingly destructive wildfires we see today.

The legacy of fire suppression

The way the U.S. deals with wildfires today dates back to around 1910, when the Great Burn torched about 3 million acres across Washington, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia. After watching the fire’s swift and unstoppable spread, the fledgling U.S. Forest Service developed a military-style apparatus built to eradicate wildfire.

The U.S. got really good at putting out fires. So good that citizens grew to accept fire suppression as something the government simply does.

Today, state, federal and private firefighters deploy across the country when fires break out, along with tankers, bulldozers, helicopters and planes. The Forest Service touts a record of snuffing out 98% of wildfires before they burn 100 acres (40 hectares).

One consequence in a place like Los Angeles is that when a wildfire enters an urban environment, the public expects it to be put out before it causes much damage. But the nation’s wildland firefighting systems aren’t designed for that.

Wildland firefighting tactics, such as digging lines to stop a fire from spreading and steering fires toward natural fuel breaks, don’t work in dense neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades. Aerial water and retardant drops can’t happen when high winds make it unsafe to fly. At the same time, the region’s municipal firefighting forces and water systems weren’t designed for this sort of fire – a conflagration engulfing entire neighborhoods quickly overwhelms the system.

Long ago, Southern California’s scrub-forest ecosystems would periodically burn, limiting fuel for future fires. But aggressive fire suppression and inattention to urban overgrowth have left excessive, easy-to-ignite vegetation in many areas. It’s unclear, however, whether prescribed burning could have prevented this catastrophe.

This is primarily a people problem. People have built more homes and cities in fire-prone areas and done so with little regard for wildfire resilience. And the greenhouse gases released by decades of burning fossil fuels to run power plants, industries and vehicles have caused global temperatures to rise, compounding the threat.

Climate change and wildfires

The relationship between climate and wildfire is fairly simple: Higher temperatures lead to more fire. Higher temperatures increase moisture evaporation, drying out plants and soil and making them more likely to burn. When hot, dry winds are blowing, a spark in an already dry area can quickly blow up into dangerous wildfire.

Given the rise in global temperatures that the world has already experienced, much of the western U.S. is actually in a fire deficit because of the practice of suppressing most fires. That means that, based on historical data, we should expect far more fire than we’re actually seeing.

Fortunately, there are things everyone can do to break this cycle.

What fire managers can do

First, everyone can accept that firefighters can’t and shouldn’t put out every low-risk wildfire.

Remote fires that pose little threat to communities and property can breathe life into ecosystems. Frequent, natural fires can also help avoid catastrophic fires that occur when too much underbrush has built up for fuel. And they create fuel breaks on the landscape that could halt the advance of future flames.

Fire managers have advanced mapping technology that can help them decide when and where forests can burn safely. Thoughtful prescribed burning – meaning low-intensity fires intentionally set by professionals – can offer many of the same benefits as the flames that historically burned in forests and grasslands.

The Forest Service is aiming to ramp up its prescribed burning on more acres in more areas across the country. However, the agency struggles to train adequate staff and pay for the projects, and environmental reviews sometimes cause yearslong delays. Other groups offer beacons of hope. Indigenous groups across the country, for example, are returning fire to the landscape.

Adapting homes to fire risk

More than one-third of U.S. homes are in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface – the zone where houses and other structures intermingle with flammable vegetation. This zone now includes many urban areas where wildfire risk was not considered when their cities were developed.

The biggest risk to homes comes from burning embers blowing on the wind and landing in weak spots that can set a house ablaze. Those embers can ride high winds for multiple miles to nestle in dry leaves or pine needles clogging a gutter, a wood-shingle roof, or shrubs, trees and other flammable vegetation close to a structure.

Some of these vulnerabilities are easy to fix. Cleaning a home’s gutters or trimming back too-close vegetation requires little effort and tools already around the house.

Grant programs exist to help harden homes against wildfire. But enormous investment is needed to get the work done at the scale the fire risk requires. For example, nearly 1 million U.S. homes in wildfire-prone areas have highly combustible wooden roofs. Retrofitting those roofs will cost an estimated US$6 billion, but that investment could save lives and property and reduce wildfire management costs in the future.

Homeowners can look to resources such as Firewise USA to learn about the “home ignition zone.” It describes the types of vegetation and other flammable objects that become high risks at different distances from a structure and steps to make properties more fire resilient.

For example, homes should not have flammable plants, firewood, dried leaves or needles, or anything burnable, on or under decks and porches within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of the house. Between 5 and 30 feet (9 meters), grasses should be mowed short, and the tree canopy should be at least 10 feet (3 meters) from the structure.

The key takeaway is that homeowners must begin to view their homes as potential fuel for a wildfire.

Rebuilding right

A possible outcome of California’s devastating fires is that states and communities could enact forward-looking wildfire resilience policies. These can include developing zoning rules and regulations that require developers to build with fire-resistant materials and designs. Or they might prohibit building in areas where the risk is too high.

California’s move to fast-track reconstruction, if it isn’t planned with wildfire safety requirements, will just set up the state for more fire disasters. The International Wildland-Urban Interface Code, which provides guidance for safeguarding homes and communities from wildfire, has been adopted in jurisdictions in at least 24 states. California is not one of them.

Living in a world with wildfire

Prevention and suppression will always be critical pieces of wildfire strategy. Though promising new firefighting technologies are being developed, adapting to a fiery future means everyone has a role.

Educate yourself on how wildfire is managed in your area. Understand and address risks to your home and community. Help your neighbors. Advocate for better wildfire planning, policy and resources.

Living in a world where more wildfire is inevitable requires that everyone see themselves as part of solving the problem. It means we must accept that some fire is natural and essential and that some places we love might be too dangerous to protect.

This is an updated version of an article originally published Aug. 22, 2023.

Justin Angle, Professor of Marketing, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Little of the discussion that we’ve seen has focused on the impact on rural schools, which often depend more than urban ones on federal funding.

In fact, rural education often can seem like an afterthought to policymakers and scholars, who tend to design reforms aimed at urban and suburban areas, even though 20% of the nation’s students are educated in rural schools.

This lack of rural research and focus has perpetuated many myths and misconceptions about rural education that overlook the strengths and opportunities for students who attend rural schools.

As scholars who study rural education, we compiled a list of three facts about rural education accompanied by the myths that would help policymakers better design programs to support rural students.

1. Rural communities are becoming more diverse

There’s a myth that rural communities are overwhelmingly white. While it’s true that most rural counties are majority white, these communities are becoming increasingly diverse.

The share of people of color in rural communities climbed from 20% in 2010 to 24% in 2020, according to U.S. Census data. In addition, people of color make up a majority of residents in 10% of rural counties.

This is because while white people are leaving, people of color are moving in. From 2010 to 2020, over 2 million white people left rural communities, while more than 2 million people of color took their place. The number of rural people who identified as multiracial doubled to nearly 4 million over the same period, and all rural communities except those in Arizona saw an increase in their Latino population.

While the Black population in rural America shrank somewhat during the 2010s, it remains the case that the largest concentration of Black people outside of cities is in the rural South. In fact, 81% of Black people who don’t live in cities live in the South, a legacy of slavery and how generations of Africans were forcefully taken to work the land as free labor.

Without truly understanding who resides in these communities, educators and policymakers cannot adequately address students’ needs. Failure to do so widens opportunity gaps for rural students, particularly those who reside in the South.

2. Rural educators know how to succeed

Another myth is that rural communities lack the knowledge or resources to succeed in educating their youth.

As such, policymakers often fail to include rural communities’ cultural capital when they develop textbooks, teacher training plans and education policies. By cultural capital, we mean the knowledge, skills, education and advantages that people inherit and use to achieve success in society.

One glaring example is that rural communities are rarely represented in teaching materials and curricula, which frequently ignore their local knowledge, traditions and values. This creates a gap in students’ ability to see themselves in jobs and positions outside of their personal contexts. And it hampers teachers’ ability to leverage student strengths when teachers are unprepared to connect with their backgrounds.

State and federal education funding is another example of rural students’ cultural capital being overlooked. Too often, funding policies penalize rural schools for their smaller sizes by supporting the closure and consolidation of schools and overlooking their need for more money to account for lower revenue from local and property taxes. This results in a disruption of rural communities’ strong social cohesion and abandoned buildings that reduce economic opportunities.

Community initiatives and local programs provide important resources that larger urban districts might take for granted.

A new grant initiative at Michigan State University that all three of us are involved with aims to help change this. Focused on helping teachers better engage high school physics and chemistry students, the program is collaborating with two historically Black colleges and univerities in the rural South to provide rural students with access to more advanced science courses. By working with Alabama A&M University and Winston-Salem State University, it helps ensure local communities’ cultural capital are part of the program. It also seeks to pull together community partnerships to advance science access and learning in the South.

By redesigning policies to take advantage of rural cultural capital, communities and policymakers could unlock untapped potential within rural schools and enhance educational outcomes for all students regardless of where they live. We believe such policies could foster stronger connections between rural K-12 public schools and their surrounding communities, creating more relevant and engaging learning experiences for students.

3. Rural students are high achievers

A third myth is that rural students underachieve. As a result, their academic success is too often overlooked by researchers and educators.

In reality, students in rural areas meet the same measures of success as in urban ones – especially in the early years. For example, math and reading scores are higher in rural than nonrural schools before the third grade, according to the Center for School and Student Progress. After that, the higher scores begin to fade due to summer learning loss. After schools close over the summer, rural students are generally left with few formal summer learning opportunities, compared with those in more urban areas. There is a strong need for more state and federal money to increase access to summer learning opportunities.

Despite this widespread learning loss, graduation rates among rural students are higher than those of nonrural students.

But once again, policymakers fail these students, who have college-going rates that are lower than in urban areas.

Some of the most common factors contributing to this trend include limited access to transportation, the distance between students’ hometowns and colleges and universities, and lower awareness of financial aid opportunities. In addition, students in the rural South have less access than other students to advanced science courses like physics and chemistry, which can block postsecondary opportunities.

We believe debunking these and other myths and recognizing the diverse strengths of rural communities would help ensure that all students across the nation, including those in rural areas, can attain long-term educational and economic success.

Sheneka Williams, Professor and Department Chair of Educational Administration, Michigan State University; Darren Dubose, PhD Student in Education Administration, Michigan State University, and Kimberly Clarida, Postdoctoral Researcher in Educational Administration, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.