Fighting Wildfire's the Wrong Way?

This is my first post that is not about a specific hazard, but rather a potential problem with the way we fight a certain type of hazard. The article I read was legitimately very interesting to me because it raised a lot of potential problems about the way we fight wildfires. The article begins by discussing the way we measure the strength of wildfires by the death total or property loss that comes out of them. It references the 32 people that have lost their lives this year so far fighting wildfires, 19 of which were in the Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona this past June. This fact leads to probably the strongest statement in the article: "The U.S. fights wildfires like it once fought wars." This is a bit extreme, but it does make a good point in that we attack wildfires head on with overwhelming manpower. The cost most certainly adds up, as the federal government budgeted $2 million last year to fight wildfires, but has already crossed that dollar amount this year. This is not to say that fighting wildfires don't deserve this type of funding, because when lives and millions of dollars in property value are at risk, they most certainly do. However, do we need to fight every single wildfire out there? This is what the article suggests we do. As I learned in my visit to Yosemite, wildfires are allowed to burn at times with the benefit of burning some plants so that forests don't become overcrowded. I don't believe that every wildfire we instantly run to and fight with all available manpower we have until it's put out, but maybe we should let nature take it's course a little more often. I think where the article makes a very strong point is that if we continue to fight the majority of wildfires we're just encouraging people to move closer and closer to forests at risk for fires. This brings in the engineering paradigm, as well as the swiss cheese model, in that we're almost telling people to move closer forests, which is just setting them up when that fire occurs for property loss to occur, and in the worst cases death. So maybe we have to change our approach. Maybe we let a few more fires burn, not only to save money, but to remind people of how dangerous it is to ignore hazards and the potential affects they have.
http://science.time.com/2013/10/04/let-it-burn-changing-firefighting-techniques-for-a-warming-world/