> Well, 4.4 million acres burned in 2020 and 1.7 million in 2018, so were a third of the way to that 20 million already.

Unfortunately this article was written in Sept 2020 so I think (but don't know) that those are baked in. But in the big picture, yes, nature will eventually burn what needs to be burned. However the hope is for controlled burns, not burns that destroy lives and property. The Camp Fire in 2018 alone killed 85 people. That's a steep price to pay for refusing to do controlled burns.

The issue isn’t just the quantity but they type of burning. Historically, wildfires would burn out underbrush and younger trees, but would leave the older, larger trees alive. This would clear out the underbrush so that there was never too much at any given time.

But over the last century or so, well intentioned environmentalism has meant that these fires get put out before they get going. This has led to a very dense accumulation of this underbrush and young growth trees, which essentially have turned California forests into tinderboxes. Now when a fire starts and gets out of control, it gets so intense that it takes out old growth trees with it.

We’ve managed to turn natural forest fires from something that was a rejuvenative part of the ecosystem’s life cycle into an apocalyptic death blow.

old nature wanted ~5MM acres a year, we messed with it, then nature figures out a way to get what it wants (after some delay). I thought we'd learn our lesson with that firestorm in 1991 (my first big fire memory). silly me.