The blood is on hands of tree huggers who fight clearing of forests.
The blood of the trees (sap?) is on their hands. If they allowed or performed low intensity burns that remove the brush, the trees would be fine. They have existed that way for thousands of years. Some trees burned this past week were hundreds of years old and had been through many fires before settlement. But those were natural low intensity fires because there were no “brush huggers” letting the brush build up.
I bet fewer than 10% of the residents wanted the forests around Paradise “cleared” before the fire.
It turns out that many people like to live in forested areas.
Proper forest management would pretty much eliminate this kind of problem, as well as removing more CO2 from the air (new growth sucks up far more CO2 than mature forest).