A new fire paradigm is emerging.

“These people are saving our lives, so we’ve got to save their lives,” said Lisa Moeller. 

Moeller is a retired physician assistant and board member of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, an advocacy group based in Eugene that is aimed at promoting safe and ecological wildland firefighting and management.

She tracks research about wildfire smoke and firefighter health. And she notes that a majority of studies done thus far have been on male cohorts, not accounting for biological impacts on women.

Regardless of their gender, though, wildland firefighters are “camping next to where a fire is and inhaling smoke overnight, and then they’re working 15- to 16-hour days and then getting about six hours of sleep in an uncomfortable situation,” Moeller said. 

"The claim that they're going to do all this new road building and logging in roadless areas on behalf of wildland firefighters, and make it more efficient for them, is just a big lie," Ingalsbee says. "Not in our name you don't."

Ingalsbee fears that punching even more roads into these forests will lead to more human-caused wildfires, which have been rising steadily for decades. But he doesn't think any of this is really about wildfire prevention or creating more logging jobs.

"What's driving a lot of Trump's executive orders for public lands management is not real economic drivers. I don't hear industry clambering for this," he says. "It's more ideology."

For Ingalsbee, the U.S. government is just racing to open up as much of the West as possible so industry can squeeze out maximum profits on timber, oil and coal.

Tim Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and the executive director of the advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said this year's spike in injuries and deaths is a sign of overaggressive tactics: "a predictable result of the worst policy choices in the worst possible conditions," he said.

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"It has been the perfect firestorm of severe climate-driven conditions that are conducive to easy ignition, rapid fire spread, large fire growth, and erratic fire behavior," Ingalsbee said.