Preventing Forest Fires: Bring Back The Buffalo

"Most of us assume that these giant conflagrations, often started by lightning, are a normal part of the natural cycle. That's partly true -- and partly wrong.The worst fires tend to occur where enormous amounts of dead tinder have accumulated in thick stands of trees. In much of the American West, neither the trees nor the tinder are "natural." They are there because something else is missing. That something is the buffalo....It is time to stop the century-long conversion of former buffalo country to forest -- and of that forest into firewood."