Pat Durland’s business card has an illustration on the back—a shrunken poster, really—labeled Fire’s Role in Nature. The scene is a gentle sagebrush valley with captions to explain what you’re looking at, but the type is tiny: whole paragraphs would fit into the space of a single word on this page. No matter, the big idea is explained by a circular red arrow.

A person wearing a yellow Nomex fire shirt and a helmet uses a drip torch to ignite a fire in the upper right corner. Its immediate aftermath, charred and black, stands below it, at about two o’clock. Coyotes sniff and prowl amid wildflowers in the greenup at four o’clock, and deer graze by a stream at seven. A tall tree borders the left side, where the eagle lands in it at eleven o’clock. At twelve, the circle breaks, and here you really have to squint. A smaller illustration is labeled No Fire and shows a pi–on and juniper dominated landscape, low, scrubby and out-competing the natural grasses. The fuel loads, the caption says, are heavy and cause severe fires and pose a great danger to firefighters and the public. Just below that illustration is another labeled Natural Fire Cycle. The card says this sagebrush landscape has adapted to burn on an interval of fifty to seventy-five years, and the tiny illustration shows a fire and the ecosystem’s return from it over that period. The vegetation gets progressively taller until it burns again. That’s the cycle. Grow, burn, grow again from the recycled nutrients. Nature figures itself out pretty neatly. It’s a simple message, so simple you can print it on a business card and give it to people. But it still has a lot of parts squeezed into a very small space. There’s a caveat from John Muir at the bottom of the card: “When you try to change any single thing, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

There are no houses or roads or politicians or timber companies or environmentalists or reporters on the card. No critical General Accounting Office reports, no environmental impact statements, no weather data. No fatigue-addled Hot Shot crews or urban escapees trading long commutes for solitude among the trees. Nobody’s eyes are dripping and nobody’s coughing. You can’t tell if that tiny little firefighter there on the card is sweating.

Nature may have it figured out, but we’re struggling to come to terms with the basics. Congress has appropriated an unprecedented amount of money this year to return vast federal wildlands to a fire-adapted state, but how it will happen hasn’t been figured out yet. Some say wildlands should be allowed to burn, that nature should take its course. That may be impractical, and even harmful, in wildlands where fire has been corralled by a century of suppression and where people push into the borders of nature’s domain.

Heat plus oxygen plus fuel equals fire. Hot Shots and smokejumpers call it the fire triangle. Your house, say, may be a leg of that triangle because it has a wood roof or you haven’t raked the pine needles from your yard, and if a wildfire comes along, it will burn. Durland is trying to fix that. A former smokejumper, Durland has spent part of a life fighting fires on the ground, with all the variables nature can sling at him. His job fighting fires now, he says, is a lot more complex and difficult because he’s dealing with people. He’s trying to attack one of the most vexing problems of wildland fire—the wildland-urban interface where people bump up against the roaring force of nature. The work is in schools and in community centers and in government buildings. There are pamphlets and booklets and websites and questions from reporters. The fire season for him, now, is year-round; the pressures of a hot or cold, big or small fire season buffered. During last year’s famous fire season, he logged only a few hours of overtime.

Durland is graying some but has kept his smokejumper leanness. Based in Boise, Idaho, at the National Interagency Fire Center, Durland is high on the flow chart of Bureau of Land Management fire gurus. He leads a community education program in fuels reduction, a federal program that tells people, among other things, to clean up their backyards. Again, it’s a simple message, and one that Congress has mandated under the National Fire Plan, the more than $2 billion package of fire money allocated this year in the wake of 2000’s hot fire season.

With money come rules, of course. Protect human life. Protect property and natural resources. Figure out how to fix the problems of a century of fire suppression. Don’t just study the problem, form a team, use the word proactive a lot and then realize that things have changed and the study you originally did isn’t valid anymore. Do something, Congress told the U.S. Forest Service in a critical 1999 General Accounting Office report, it’s getting hot out there.

Putting out fires this year will cost about $1.5 billion. Restoring and rehabilitating burned areas from last year adds up to $246 million. Reducing hazardous fuels amounts to a little more than $400 million. Community assistance programs will get about $145 million. Managing fire is a huge part of the agencies’ budgets—combined Forest Service, National Park Service and BLM budgets are about $7 billion. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs also manage a significant amount of land that burns, or has the potential to burn, every year. Fire-fighting (or fire management, as the new proactive fire lexicon of many in the agencies dictates) is an unusually collaborative affair between federal, state and local agencies. There are some squabbles and interagency fighting and turf, but when the big fires get going, the five federal land management agencies blur their lines of jurisdiction and take orders from NIFC’s Coordination Center.

The weather puts out a lot of fires. Firefighters mostly try to contain them by digging eighteen-inch-wide trenches down to mineral soil in strategic places in front of the fire. It’s backbreaking work, demanding legions of young, fit workers willing to check out of their lives for months on end to work shifts that last dozens of hours. A well-placed fire line often won’t stop a fire by itself, but it will buy time and give firefighters a chance to use other strategies like burning out the vegetation in the path of the fire so that it has less fuel and won’t get as hot. The line may contain a small fire so that firefighters can go in and throw dirt on it. It may direct a fire away from terrain or fuels that would accelerate the burn. But in the end, a fire line works to stall a fire long enough for the weather to change, maybe more humidity and less wind, so that the fire cools and crews can extinguish hot spots. If the fire is small, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be contained—fire crews are about 95 percent successful in putting out fires. This is the chess game of fire—put the crews and equipment in place, make smart moves, and conditions will eventually come around to control the fire. The game is played on mountainsides and grasslands thousands of times a year; it’s also played broadly at NIFC in the Coordination Center and more broadly still in Congress when budget time rolls around. The chess game is becoming increasingly difficult, though, as the fires are burning hotter in fuel-loaded landscapes, the result of nearly a century of playing the game too well.

It’s raining in Boise and you can almost watch the sere foothills above the city turn green. Fire in this desert is put off for a few days at least, the inch of late-spring rain a bonus after a drier-than-normal winter. The Coordination Center is darkened and subdued.

The room looks like Mission Control, or maybe Strategic Air Command, but there’s a pause in the action this day. Prescribed burning is finished for the spring. The Southwest had a good snowpack and its fire season has started coolly. There’s a fire or two in Northern California, one in Oregon. Wildfires are raging across Florida, but it’s not enough action to merit more than a few people pecking at computer terminals in the Coordination Room’s clustered cubicles. Each cluster represents a broad category of fire management—intelligence, equipment, aircraft, and crews and overhead. What’s burning, what’s available, who’s flying and who’s on the ground. Two white movie screens hang on one wall. A twenty-four-hour digital clock glows red on another wall. A bank of windows into the managers’ offices lines another wall. Some call NIFC the Pentagon of Fire. This is the war room.

Labeled “the moral equivalent of war” in another generation, wildland firefighting and its terms, organization and equipment have in many ways been derived from the military. Smokejumpers parachute to small fires to gain control in what’s called initial attack. Air tankers drop retardant like daring, low-flying bombers. Big firefights need sprawling temporary camps with all the infrastructure needed to serve the summer’s army. Most of the staff at NIFC has extensive firefighting experience. “It’s the pinnacle of many of these people’s careers,” says Mike Apicello, a public information officer at NIFC. There’s a subtle tension between those who have fought fire and those who work in fire management and have little on-the-ground experience. To some at NIFC, it sometimes feels like people who haven’t ever fought fire are having too much say about how to do it. Experience is spread thin and graying. Federal employees in wildland firefighting must retire by age fifty-five, and can retire with benefits after twenty years. Many opt out. Wildland firefighting can be a tough and dangerous life.

In 1996, the Coordination Center ran twenty-four hours a day from February to December. It was an unsung fire year, but in many ways the biggest that NIFC has dealt with in terms of number of fires and complexity of organizing the campaigns against them. That year’s fires taxed the system, but because there was no Yellowstone or South Canyon—no compelling story or “poetry,” says fire historian and ecologist Stephen Pyne—there was no rush the following year to fill the fire coffers. That season suffered the effects of a many-year downsizing of the Forest Service and fire budgets as a whole. This day in May, everybody will go home at a reasonable hour. Much of the equipment remains on the shelves in firefighting caches around the country, and most crews are training rather than responding.

In fact, this year there’s more equipment and thousands more people to organize and manage. In the 2000 election year, Congress found painful poetry in the Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico and the regionwide cloud from the Montana conflagrations. The huge appropriation to the five land management agencies had department heads scrambling to create new crews, find people to lead them and buy new equipment. Fuels management projects—prescribed burning and thinning work stalled for lack of funds—have been pulled from the shelves. The money will be spent mostly on fire suppression—a good system will get incrementally better, from one perspective.

What makes a good fire season depends on how you look at it. Good means hot and lots of assignments, if you work with fire on the ground. When things are burning, that legion of youth on the front lines racks up a lot of hours at time-and-a-half with hazard pay. There’s potential for lowly government wages to pay off, school tuition to be paid, adventurous off-season lifestyles to be bankrolled. It’s the constant balance between fatigue and greed, Neal Hitchcock, one of the Coordination Center managers, says. “Fatigue always wins.” And in the biggest fire years, it ends up that there aren’t enough people on the lines, and the system is overrun. That’s why funding on the scale of this year’s fire budget is such a bonanza. After years of downsizing, managing fire is important to politicians. So a big fire year is good in that respect, too. The agencies get funded, operations continue, grow, innovate. Of course if you live in the path of one of those fires, good becomes a wholly different thing. If you’re lucky, it’ll just be the smoke you have to deal with. Good in this circumstance is wet and cool, no fire. Good is another season where the firefighters have been successful in your neighboring forest.

But good in this respect is also bad. Our skill at putting out those fires, our enthusiastic legion of firefighters getting time-and-a-half with hazard pay, may only be putting off the inevitable, preserving fuel for an even more destructive wildfire next time. Such a fire burns so hot that it may take decades or more for a forest to recover. In the face of this kind of fire, firefighters can do little to save homes.

So fire is good, and fire is bad, depending on whom you quote and when you quote them. Right now, after decades of Smokey Bear marketing and aggressive fire suppression, fire is in vogue and fire is good. Fuels management and prescribed burning are the mandate from Congress. The culture will have to change, Durland says. But there’s less glory in fuels management: it’s scheduled and workers don’t get time-and-a-half with hazard pay. You don’t have to scramble tankers and drop smokejumpers on thinning projects. You don’t get to “slay the dragon,” Durland says. Fuels management kills it while it sleeps.

Fire is a natural process, one that we can release back into the wild and let nature take its course, the argument goes. That may be too simple.

“The problems that fire exclusion created aren’t solvable with fire alone,” Pyne says. “It’s not ecological pixie dust.”

Pyne, an Arizona State University professor and former Hot Shot, has written nine books about fire, his most recent about the 1910 Big Blowup that killed eighty-five people. It’s a compelling narrative, an account of a natural event that served as the moral poetry of fire for most of a century. Fire is intolerably destructive for a modern civilized nation, the former logic dictated. It seems simple-minded hubris, but how different is the current logic?

Fire is natural, a basic biological process. Fire across landscapes helps some organisms grow, adapt and repopulate. But fire runs into problems when it burns into land that hasn’t been managed for fire. Like a living organism, fire needs a healthy ecosystem to survive. “Fire will only work if it has the right habitat,” Pyne says. “If you have messed up forests, you have messed up fires.”

Durland’s business card shows just such a healthy ecosystem: the problem is that that ecosystem isn’t common anymore. There are tens of millions of acres of public land that aren’t healthy, according to the Forest Service. Different ecosystems are adapted to fire at different intervals, and none of the institutions for managing fire has been around long enough to see all of fire’s manifestations in the North American landscape. Fire suppression has warped the burn intervals, and returning ecosystems to their natural cycle won’t be easy. In fact, in many places it won’t be possible. Politics and the perception of what nature is and how fire works in wildlands will get in the way. “Reintroducing fire is like reintroducing wolves or grizzly bears,” Pyne says. “It’s getting the context right.”

The problem is compounded by people. The wildland-urban interface is jargon for the gamble that people have made with nature. “In Florida, they think about hurricanes. In Oklahoma, they think about tornadoes. In California, they think about earthquakes,” Durland says. “There’s no consciousness of fire danger.”

Federal land managers bear the brunt of criticism about wildland fires threatening homes at the edges of wild places they manage, but the real work that saves homes from burning is on private property. The area immediately around a home𤸼 feet—and the materials the home is constructed of will determine whether it burns. Build in the trees and you up the stakes in gambling with nature, rather like building a house on a spit of land where hurricanes have been known to make landfall. It’s personal responsibility at this level, Durland says, like wearing seat belts and not drinking and driving, and there’s not much that federal land managers can do it except warn homeowners of the danger. “It’s not the federal government’s place to tell people where to live,” Durland says. “But we would be at fault not to tell them what the risks are.”

Turn right on Bear Run Road off the main drag in Idaho City, let the wheels of your car crunch up the gravel road a few hundred yards and you’ll be in the wildland-urban interface west of town. Except you’ll be lucky because this patch of forest has been managed better than most in fire-prone areas around the country. Terry Teeter has worked in fire and fuels management out of the Idaho City office of the Boise National Forest for thirty years, an unusual tenure in a local office of the Forest Service.

Teeter will retire at the end of May. He doesn’t want to leave, but he’s reached mandatory retirement. He names a few others who, like him, must retire as well. Decades of fire sense will be lost as his generation leaves the woods. Experience will be spread thin, especially with all the new crews this year. They will have to learn fast. It’s a problem that congressional fire money won’t fix.

Continuing up the road, Teeter points out stands of trees in the Bear Run area that burned a year ago, two years, five years, ten years. He points out a grove of trees that he says he couldn’t crawl through twenty years ago. The trunks are about a foot in diameter and spaced well enough to walk through. He says the stand is still a little dense and will need some thinning. The crowns of fire-adapted ponderosa pines should be about sixteen feet apart, he says.

This is an experimental forest and training center for firefighters that has been heavily managed—thinned and burned—and is adapted well to fire. Farther up the road, on Boise Cascade land, the forest looks different. There are more small trees in the stand. These trees can be “ladders” to the crowns of the big trees, carrying fire to the forest canopy, where it is difficult and dangerous to fight. The priorities on this land are different: burns are suppressed and the hillside is managed for the maximum amount of marketable trees it can bear.

Still farther up the road is a brushy clearing where the top of the mountain burned intensely a decade ago. The brush is chest high, and old burned snags stick up here and there like hands reaching for help. This part of the forest won’t look like a forest for decades, Teeter says. The recovery has been slow because the fire burned so hot—this land wasn’t managed in the way that the lower part of Bear Run was. It’s the edge of a broad swath of Boise National Forest that faces the same problem. It’s not wild enough to let the natural cycle of fire completely return, but it’s too vast to continue to throw resources at it in the old way.

Teeter has seen the boom and bust of fire budgets and describes the cycle by tracing his hand through the air like he’s following the teeth of a saw.

“People like to think we’re in the modern age and we’ve got it down to a fine line, but we’ve still got a lot to learn,” Teeter says.