At lunch today, I heard a couple talking about the wildfires burning in Southern California. The man was telling his companion that fires are only going to become worse and more costly to fight because of the conditions that have been allowed to develop in the forests, through a combination of reduced logging and the neglect of thinning projects that would reduce forest fires' size, ferocity and cost. He mentioned that a couple of hundred years ago, the Indians took measures into their own hands to keep the size and impact of fires manageable -- if a couple of years went by without a major fire, they would set one themselves before the conditions got so bad that the resulting blaze would be overwhelming.

The situation is further compounded, a Sacramento Bee article reports, by the fact that more and more people are moving into forested regions, making it impossible to let wildfires burn themselves out and risky to stage controlled burns.

I drove past the Day fire in the Los Padres National Forest, which as of Monday had burned about 134,000 acres, or nearly 210 square miles, since Labor Day. I was on my way to Disneyland with my daughter. Long before we became aware of the fire (it was only a few days old at that time), we could smell the smoke, and the ash in the air caused the full moon to rise red over the mountains. Then we drove past the flames, on hill and in ravines along I-5.

The costs of fighting these forest fires are growing. The Bee article says: "If current patterns hold, 2006 will become the most costly year ever, exceeding the $1.27 billion spent in 2002."

Is there something we should be doing differently to keep these costs down?