“ Nature loves fire at least, ” I think, considering the calls for forest management to separate the wild-urban interface we’ve meshed with controlled burns. Back in Chico, the symptoms of population swell are evident — grocery aisles and roads always a bit more crowded than expected. Although many of the displaced thousands have left to start anew, recent faces have kindly become familiar ones. “That’s one of the hardest things, the lack of certainty,” Jori Krulder, a Paradise High School teacher and fire survivor, tells me. “We don’t know what school is going to look like.

Source: New York Times April 24, 2019 10:03 UTC