With California fires still burning, I thought it might interesting to consider this:

In 1891 Gifford Pinchot, later to be appointed America's first Chief Forester by Teddy Roosevelt, visited the Kaweah Colony (pdf), a utopian Socialist community situated in a grove of California's Giant Sequoia. As related by Stephen Pyne in Fire in America (p 302):

... Kaweah colonists informed [Pinchot] that they had saved the grove from burning up 29 times in the past 5 years. To this, Pinchot wryly inquired, "Who has saved them during the remaining three or four thousand years of their age?"

Who saved the Giant Sequoias?

The answer is the Sequoias saved themselves. They're fire-adapted trees. Sequoias have thick bark that insulates the rest of the tree from low- to moderate-intensity fires. They also rely on fire to recycle nutrients and kill off competitors.

If you think the claim of 29 "saves" is 5 years is grossly exaggerated consider this, also from Pyne's Fire in America:

the modification of the American continent by fire at the hands of Asian immigrants [now called American Indians, Native Americans, or First Nations/People] was the result of repeated, controlled, surface burns on a cycle of one to three years, broken by occasional holocausts from escape fires and periodic conflagrations during times of drought.

Maybe not quite 29 fires in 5 years, but a lot of fires in 3000 to 4000 years.

Additionally:

The Giant Sequoias are having difficulty reproducing in their original habitat (and very rarely reproduce in cultivation) due to the seeds only being able to grow successfully in mineral soils in full sunlight, free from competing vegetation. Although the seeds can germinate in moist needle humus in the spring, these seedlings will die as the duff dries in the summer. They therefore require periodic wildfire to clear competing vegetation and soil humus before successful regeneration can occur. Without fire, shade-loving species will crowd out young sequoia seedlings, and sequoia seeds will not germinate.

In fact the colonists who "saved" the Giant Sequoias from fire may have done more harm than good. Fire is a necessary component of nearly all forest ecosystems, whether frequent fire (3-5 years) for Giant Sequoia or Ponderosa Pine (and to a lesser extent Douglas Fir) or periodic fire (200-300 years) for lodgepole pine.

Low intensity fires, which occur when an area burns frequently, don't kill most trees. Fire kills lodgepole pine however, but like the Sequoias, lodgepole pine seeds usually need fire to germinate, as do jack pine in the east and some varieties of brush (snowbrush ceanothus, for example).

The property damage and sometimes loss of human life from wildfire is both scary and tragic (I live in a high fire danger area), but fire or its equivalent (for example, brush removal and thinning) are necessary for ecosystems to function.