There is an argument, perhaps no longer PC, that the indigenous population used fire to hunt, and so burnt off regularly. Fires these days are indeed devastating because we try to stop them. Established eucalyptus trees also thrive after a scrub fire; a "devastating" fire kills them.

> Perhaps because humans like things to stay the same, and perhaps because these sorts of natural, inevitable changes aren't that common - most of us don't regularly see fires in our local environment - we label this change in an emotive way: devastating, despite the necessity of the thing.

The problem is different IMHO. Humans have effectively terraformed our surroundings. We (i.e. everyone but the Romans where they had aqueducts) used to build away from forests (or, where necessary, tear down the forests) for as long as we didn't have motorized fire pumps, because it was simply too dangerous to build too near to forests.

Nowadays? Land has gotten scarce, the only place where one still can get land is land that wasn't zoned for residential developments. And now that a lot of this land very close to forest boundaries has been settled, we routinely see devastation from forest fires.

And, specifically to the US, their building style aka wood frames and cardboard makes the situation worse. Here in Europe, we had devastating fires wipe out entire city blocks because embers flying around set other buildings ablaze in the long-distant past - but ever since a lot of our buildings were made out of brick and later on cement, it's rare to see buildings on fire from a forest fire. Even in Croatia, where forest fires are a sad routine every summer (mostly from morons with cigarettes or glowing-hot DPFs parking illegally on dried out bush) and we got a looooot of questionably-legal settlement going on, it's rare that houses catch fire simply because the structure is so much more resilient.