that, in many ways, led directly to the summer of 2015, which may well go down as the most destructive fire season in history.

In Washington state, fire covers nearly 500 square miles, and smoke is in the air as far east as Chicago. On Aug. 19, Washington Governor Jay Inslee asked for a federal disaster declaration, which he got two days later. There are so many blazes all across the Western U.S. that there aren’t enough firefighters to fight them. The National Guard has been called up, as have active-duty soldiers trained in 24 hours for the fire line. Canada has sent firefighters to help. So have Australia and New Zealand, and still there aren’t enough. An unprecedented 32,000 men and women are struggling to control the flames,today.” Since then, he’s been the chief of a helicopter fire crew, worked in varying command capacities in six different National Forests, received a master’s in forestry, and fought fires in Greece and Indonesia. After 45 years in the Forest Service, he most likes to talk about the years before he moved to D.C. in 2001.

While he was working in Arizona’s Apache National Forest during the 1970s, three fires popped up and burned 100 acres, each in one hot summer day. “Folks were atwitter” about the destruction, Harbour says. Forty years later, in 2011, the Wallow Fire tore across 500,000 acres of the Apache National Forest in a month. “I’ve seen in my career, in the same location, the difference between three fires of a hundred acres and