Weekend short read: Fire is a metaphor, until its not

Jennifer Pahlka · 22 Aug 2026 · eatingpolicy.com ↗

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A century of fire suppression policy in the American West has dangerously overloaded forests with fuel and made megafires more likely.

Their wordsWe now know that fires are necessary for healthy forests, that a century of fire suppression in the West has been disastrous.
Our reading
Regulatory delays are driven more by the incentives built into the bureaucracy administering the rules than by the substance of the rules themselves.

Their wordsThe difference is mostly the delay, which stems not necessarily from the regulation itself, but from the incentives in the machinery that administers it.