Wildfires, large and small, have been an essential part of Western landscapes for millennia. And now a growing body of research is showing how most of the traditional fire-control methods we have been employing for nearly a century — like logging dense forests to thin them and removing dead trees so that the fire can’t spread — can actually be counterproductive and ecologically damaging. How so? To explain that and to talk about how we can, and must, learn to coexist better with wildfires, Show host and Earth Island Journal editor, Maureen Nandini Mitra, talks with Chad Hanson, wildfire ecologist and director of John Muir Project – a nonprofit that that uses science and legal means to push for ecological management of federal forestlands and Maya Khosla, a biologist and environmental filmmaker who has been documenting birds in the California Rim Fire Area since 2014.

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