Wildfires in the West revive push to thin federal forests

Westerners are sick of it: the smoke, the evacuations, the moon turned burnt orange by soot, all driven by catastrophic wildfires by now so predictable that they practically have their own season. “The summers here are about a month and a half because the rest of the time is spent fighting forest fires,” said Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who was born and raised in Montana. Year in and year out, Mr. Zinke and other Republicans have sought to reduce the fire danger by thinning the overgrown federal forests, meeting with resistance every time from environmentalists, who insist the problem isn’t too many trees, it’s global warming. But 2017 may be different. As treacherous late-season wildfires burn millions of acres from California to Montana, the level of frustration among elected officials and their constituents may have finally combine to break the political logjam...more