Smokey the Bear was misguided, as many of you noted. These areas need periodic fires for a variety of reasons. I hike in a part of the Jemez mountains near Los Alamos that was mostly burned down not too many years ago, and the ecosystem has recovered beautifully - lots of aspens and wildflowers. One problem with Los Alamos (besides the fact that it was built for the purpose of building bombs to incinerate people) is that it was put up by Easterners who naively built houses and other buildings of wood - not the typical building material in New Mexico.
Let us also draw a distinction between controlled burns for the purpose of simulating the effects of fires otherwise suppressed, and the practice of allowing natural fires to burn without supression, which is the practice that resulted in the massive Yellowstone fire. While they are branches of the same tree, they are different policies with potentially different results.