The best graphic I've seen on the wildfire crisis comes from National Public Radio, which just seems wrong

It's like when you learn that one of the biggest stars of the golden age of radio was a ventriloquist. 

This All Things Considered story was part of a superb series on the rise of Western mega-fires and the pictures below do a great job driving home the central point of this discussion, a point which is straightforward and is agreed upon by all the experts and yet which still manages to evade most of the journalists covering this issue. 

Good

Bad

The wildfire crisis is not that we are having too many fires -- we're actually having too few -- but that we're having too many bad fires and not enough good ones. The lack of the latter is the primary cause for the growing frequency of the former.

Barring imminent loss of life, our policy should be to do everything we can to promote conditions for good fires then let them burn. That has always been a difficult call, but building more houses in these areas makes it much harder. This doesn't mean we should or even can stop building in wildland-urban interfaces, but it mean we have to get serious about where we prioritize development.