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This is the Cato Daily podcast for Monday, May 24, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Wildfires continue to ravage big chunks of the Western United States,

but managing wildfires looks a little bit more like not managing

wildfires than you might expect.

Holly Freckwell and Jonathan Wood of the Property and Environment Research Center spoke with

me about how markets present a massive opportunity to manage

federal lands in a way that imposes fewer costs on the people who live near them.

We spoke last month.

Wildfires, as far as the eastern half of the United States is concerned, is a thing that the

Western half of the United States has to deal with. For the most part, that is, wildfires are much

more manageable in the eastern half of the United States.

So give us a sense of the scale of the problem and who is most affected by the problem of wildfires. Well the scale of the problem is huge and a large reason that we see the difference between the east and the west is that in the west we have a lot more public land.

And our public lands are managed very differently than our private lands.

Our national forests cover 193 million acres and a good portion of those, about 80 million

acres, are at risk of wildfire and in need of some sort of restoration.

...