California's wildfires didn't have to be so bad

In addition to warming temperatures and historic drought making the Northern California Valley fires faster and harder to fight, the bigger culprit was something under human control: forest mismanagement, reports the Bloomberg View in an editorial.

According to Scott Stephens, a wildland resource scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, "If smaller wildfires had been allowed to burn 20 years ago, the forest wouldn't have grown so dense, and today's flames wouldn't have had the fuel to reach the canopy, spreading the blaze and resulting in three deaths and the loss of some 600 houses."

Over the next decade, most of the 155 national forests will be required to update their plans for fire management.