“Each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”

– Edgar Allan Poe

“Some paradise,” my mother said, a touch of bitterness in her voice. “Phttt!” She dry spit at the acrid, smoky sky.

I was visiting my parents’ home in Paradise Valley, Mont., about 60 miles north of Yellowstone National Park. Formed by the spectacular Yellowstone River, the valley boasts bucolic ranches, rustic hamlets and scattered homes, including my parents’. They’d lived there for a decade, and loved every minute of it – until this, the summer of 1988, the year of the great Yellowstone fire.

My parents weren’t particularly angry that there was a fire, a natural occurrence; rather they were angry it had gotten out of hand. They grumbled about what they perceived as the badly misguided policy of the National Park Service. Instead of suppressing naturally caused fires in their infancy, the service allowed such fires to burn themselves out.

That policy, begun in 1972, was a reversal of a decades-old policy of forest-fire suppression that had allowed copious amounts of underbrush and dead wood to build up. Thus, the forest was deprived of the fire it needed to “clean” and rejuvenate itself, and fuel accumulated – creating the potential to turn ordinary fires into out-of control conflagrations.

But the “let it burn” policy literally backfired in Yellowstone, and “out of control” the fire became: started by lightning strikes and allowed to grow in June, it suddenly overcame all suppression efforts as it spread across almost a third of the huge park. Finally, it ended as it had begun, with an act of nature. “What an army of firefighters, hundreds of aircraft and $120 million couldn’t do,” a recent New York Times video reported, “a quarter-inch of snow did, on Sept. 11.”

Fast forward to 2013, when the potential for megafires that destroy forests, burning not only underbrush but mature trees and even their roots, has grown significantly. Although the fire suppression policy has been reversed, much of the fuel that accumulated during the past century remains. And each decade, because of climate change-driven temperatures and drought, that fuel gets a little drier, as does the soil beneath it and the air that bathes the forest.

Climate change is setting the disaster table in another way: ever-warmer temperatures have allowed the virtually uninhibited spread of the mountain pine beetle, which has killed millions of acres of trees throughout the West. While mature, living trees normally resist fire, the dead timber stands add considerably to the fuel load.

Complicating the issue and exacerbating the potential for disaster is the intrusion of human habitation and infrastructure into “natural” (read “formerly natural”) areas. This summer’s Yosemite Rim Fire threatened several communities, 2,500 homes and the reservoirs that supply San Francisco’s water and power.

Since the end of World War II, and especially recently, as the baby boomers are reaching retirement age, millions of homes and entire communities have been built within or on the edge of forests. The homes are often nestled among trees in steep canyons or on mountainsides, making them extremely difficult and dangerous for firefighters to protect in a conflagration. And of course “controlled burns” to reduce fuel loading in such areas are out of the question.

One simplistic solution that’s been proposed is to “permit more logging” on public lands, potentially creating jobs and, of course, profits for resource extractors. But logging has to be profitable which means either clearcutting – and who is responsible for replanting public lands? – or selectively cutting the biggest, most fire resistant trees, leaving much of the accumulated fuel behind. And the scale of the problem is far greater, and spread across far more ecosystems – forest, chaparral and grassland – than mere logging can address.

The conventional wisdom since the 1970s has been that “the forest will grow back” after a fire – it always has. But in an era of climate change, the return of the mature “climax” forest is no longer a certainty. Perennial drought and optimal conditions for pests and invasive species might mean that the forests you see today, once burned, are gone forever from your ecological house.

Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. Reach him via email through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.