Dr. Pincetl quoted about wildfires in the West

For decades, wildfires in some areas of Baja California in Mexico have been left to burn, keeping the forests and chaparral thinned out. As a result, blazes there don’t burn as intensely, said Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. 

“The Mexicans haven’t been able to afford this kind of vast firefighting infrastructure that we have, and so they just let the fires burn. And you know what? They don’t have the catastrophic fires because they haven’t fought the fires. And they have low-intensity fires that were the norm in California before we decided to prevent burning,” Pincetl said.