Smokey bear history biography graphic organizer

Last year, the deadliest wildfire season in state history swept across California. More than 8,000 fires burned nearly two million acres and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to suppress.* In a matter of minutes, a town named Paradise was engulfed in flame and almost completely destroyed; 85 people died.

The United States had been living in fear of such devastation since the early years of World War II when fire was seen as a weapon of war.

And for almost as long, we’ve had Smokey Bear, sweetly but insistently reminding each of us of our role in protecting the country from this danger: “Remember—only you can prevent forest fires.”

In 1942, Japanese submarines shelled an oil field outside Santa Barbara, near the 2,700-square-mile Los Padres National Forest.

Concerned that fire on the homefront could distract from the war effort, the War Advertising Council and the U.S. Forest Service launched a campai