Picked up THIS ARTICLE in the San Jose Mercury News, after reading Left i today. It expands on a post on Left is Right a few days ago. Snippet:

Chaparral, from the Spanish word chaparro, or scrub oak, poses unique problems for fire prevention. A mixture of tough shrubs such as chamise, manzanita and sage, it is designed to burn. Many of its plants need fire to sprout their seeds. When left to nature, chaparral would burn every 30 to 100 years from lightning strikes. When fire is suppressed, as it has been for a century in populated areas of the state, shrubs grow tall, dense and, in drought-parched summers, dangerously dry. "There are really dense thickets of vegetation that burn quite readily,'' said Dar Roberts, an expert in remote sensing and wildfires at the University of California-Santa Barbara. "In some areas you can hardly walk through it. It's like one giant thick fuel bed.''