A view of the wildfires from outer space

This is a view of the wildfires burning in Texas from the space station.

If you read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, you'll find out that over the course of history, wildfires sparked by lightning strikes made the Central Texas soil fertile enough to farm. As more and more people moved into the Hill Country, nature's cycle of destruction and new life was interrupted and the soils lost a good deal of their fertility. The increase in population also made the natural occurrence of wildfires more dangerous and destructive.