Controlled burns. Indians used to light fires and burn out underbrush. Made the forest way better for hunting. And sometimes lightning caused fires grew huge and swept through large areas.
But today you can clean the forests very well by letting people cut firewood, by allowing selective logging, and by building good firebreaks in strategic locations.
In this day and age for a fire to sweep into town and burn 1500 homes is utter incompetence.
It’s not incompetence. It’s by design.
The Mescalero have been forbidden from taking proper care of the land by the BIA and BLM — specifically to make it impossible for houses to exist.
Next move is to make properties uninsurable and not able to be financed, so people surrender private land to the government and/or giant property developers.
Billionaires want private playgrounds and this is how they grab the land since Obama.
They did the same thing in Hawaii.