I’m not sure if these fires are correlated with the staff reductions in BLM. In the interview with a resident she doesn’t mention anything about that, just that last year was very wet which provided a lot of fuel and this hot dry spring has turned it into a tinder box.

This administration also impaired FEMA’s ability to provide disaster response to those impacted by this event.

I seriously doubt ranchers were politically against OPM being used for fire prevention funding. Agriculture industry is well known to be highly socialist politically when it comes to agriculture subsidies.

ah yes, those fat cat ranchers might have to get off their golden thrones and do some hard work for a change. You should maybe look into the business as both a rancher and the food supply chain. A big benefit is that ranchers are far better partners and stewards of the land than developers and other industries (like oil and gas).

If you think ranching hasn't changed in 2000 years you know nothing about it. First, what we see in Canada & the US is most similar to Spanish open grazing of ~200 years ago, not some sort of neolithic practice from several thousand years ago. Then the obvious and game changer was barbed wire, and now intensive industrialization such as feed lots, genetic selection & artificial insemination, GPS tracking and data-based herd management. Public grazing is such a minor part of the picture now. The technology you call for is IMO the worst development: factory meat and massive consolidation.

Grazing rights are weird. A lot of them pre-date the existence of any sort of federal control of the lands. They function as private rights that were then managed by the BLM, although SCOTUS considers them public they do not function anything like that nor are rooted in public chain of custody. You have to pay a fee almost like a property tax to realize them, but the grazing rights themselves are bought and sold privately and generally rooted in a genesis as privately homesteaded limited private property rights.