We’re in the middle of another catastrophic wildfire season: a record 7.4 million acres have burned across the US, and firefighter “entrapments” — which is when they’re trapped by the wildfire in a life-threatening manner — have hit a 20-year high.

As we discussed in a far-reaching interview, US Senator Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and aerial firefighter, has an unusual diagnosis of the problem: we are choosing to let this happen, and not because of our gas-guzzling pickup trucks.

For other major disasters — tornadoes, hurricanes, mudslides, terrorist attacks — accountability is expected from the government, he told us. (No expense is spared to evacuate the Gulf Coast for a hurricane.) The approach is usually coordinated, prompt, funded, and effective. When it’s not: “We have an investigation. We ask questions.” As a result, there are generally very few deaths or injuries, and the economic impact is mitigated.

But when wildfires wipe entire towns off the map, or kill 30,000 Americans each year from smoke inhalation (200-500 directly), or, in the case of LA last year, destroy 15,000 homes and roughly $250 billion in value, making it among the most expensive disasters in US history… blob media will circle the same factors: high temperatures, historically low snowpack, decades of drought, Trump’s cuts to the US Forest Service, climate change. Shrug.

“Their response is, ‘This is a fait accompli. We can’t stop these fires from happening. We’ve just got to accept that our cities are going to burn down. And oh, by the way, if you happen to live in a wildfire prone area, shame on you. You shouldn’t have lived there in the first place.’” Sheehy added: “It’s a total inversion of responsibility.”

Sheehy’s diagnosis is less fatalistic: we know how to stop communities and forests from burning down; we’ve simply built a system that doesn’t allow people to do their jobs.

“It’s incredibly frustrating to me to see this ‘business as usual’ approach every time we have these cataclysmic disasters, whether it’s Texas, whether it’s New Jersey, whether it’s Florida, whether it’s California,” he said. “And the truth is we can fight these fires. The truth is we can prevent these fires. The truth is we can better protect our communities. We have chosen not to. And that’s what I’m trying to change here. That’s why I’ve been leading the wildfire reform effort because it’s so overdue. We are betraying and abandoning our communities.”

Subscribe now

PERHAPS WE SHOULD LISTEN TO THE FORMER AERIAL FIREFIGHTER/NAVY SEAL WHO IS ALSO A SENATOR LEADING WILDFIRE REFORM

Sheehy fell into firefighting by accident.

As a kid, his neighbor, a Navy veteran, taught him how to fly. Later, after graduating from the US Naval Academy (as the first midshipman to graduate from Army Ranger School), he became a Navy SEAL team leader and oversaw special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After earning a Purple Heart and Bronze Star with Valor, Sheehy “medically separated” from the military in 2014 — the senator still has a bullet lodged in his arm somewhere — and proceeded to face some of the most dangerous work of his career.

Moved by the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, which burned nineteen firefighters alive, Sheehy founded two aerial firefighting companies, one of which produced “the first drone ever to be used on an active wildfire.” For the next decade, he served as a waterbomber pilot (scooping and dropping water) as well as an air attack pilot (directing the broader firefighting effort) while actively serving as CEO.

Prior to getting recruited by the Republican Party to run for Senate in Montana, those years on the frontlines served as one giant lesson in the unnecessary bureaucratic, civic, and moral dysfunction worsening our wildfires.

“As I learned more, every layer I went deeper, it was kind of like, ‘There’s no way this is actually what’s going on.’ Every time I went a layer deeper, the worse it got, the worse it got, the worse it got.”

As he sees it, these are some of the major problems.

First: we’re fighting fires with dirt and shovels.