The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires
Strategies intended to safeguard forests and homes have instead increased the likelihood that they’ll burn.
The provincial government of Alberta defines a “wildfire of note” as a blaze that could “pose a threat to public safety, communities or critical infrastructure.” Last year, Alberta’s first wildfire of note broke out unusually early, on April 30th, near the tiny town of Entwistle, about sixty-five miles west of Edmonton. A second wildfire of note was recorded that same day, in the town of Evansburg. Four days later, an astonishing seventy-two wildfires were burning, and three days after that the number had grown to a hundred and nine. Some thirty thousand people had to be evacuated, and Alberta’s premier declared a state of emergency. “It’s been an unusual year,” Christie Tucker, an official from the province’s wildfire information unit, observed at the end of the week.
The unusual soon became the unheard-of. Owing to a combination of low winter snowfall and abnormally high spring temperatures, many parts of Canada, including the Maritime Provinces, were just a cigarette butt away from incineration. On May 28th, with flames bearing down on Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, some eighteen thousand people were told to evacuate. “Basically, all hell is breaking loose,” a fire chief in Halifax, Rob Hebb, said. Meanwhile, the largest fire ever recorded in Nova Scotia—the Barrington Lake fire—was burning toward the city’s southwest.
The fires kept hopscotching across the country. Before the Barrington Lake fire had been contained, a new monster, the Donnie Creek fire, emerged in British Columbia. On June 18th, after scorching more than two thousand square miles, Donnie Creek became British Columbia’s largest recorded blaze. Saskatchewan saw dozens of wildfires, Quebec hundreds. Evacuation orders went out to the entire city of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. Many of the blazes created their own weather, in the form of thunderstorms spawned by rapidly rising hot air. The smoke from the fires drifted across much of the United States, prompting health alerts from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. By late June, Canada had broken its previous annual record for acreage burned, set in 1995, and by mid-October nearly forty-six million acres—an area larger than Denmark—had been charred. This was almost triple the previous record and nine times the annual average.
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“This summer across Canada has been absolutely astounding,” Lori Daniels, a professor in the department of forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “The word ‘unprecedented’ doesn’t do justice to the severity of the wildfires,” Yan Boulanger, a research scientist at Natural Resources Canada, said.
As bad as Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was—Europe, too, saw its largest wildfire on record, a blaze that consumed more than three hundred square miles in northeastern Greece—the conflagrations are predicted to keep growing. A paper that appeared last summer in the journal Fire Ecology warned that “increasing warming and drying trends” will make wildfires “more frequent and severe,” and a recent report from the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, a body established by Congress, predicted a future “defined by wildfires that are increasingly extreme, vast in scale, and devastating.” Another recent report, from the Federation of American Scientists, observed that the world is warming so fast that the models firefighters rely on to predict how blazes will behave have become obsolete. “Climate change is drying fuels and making forests more flammable,” the report said. “As a result, no matter how much money we spend on wildfire suppression, we will not be able to stop increasingly extreme wildfires.”
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In the course of starting more blazes—in upstate New York and California—O’Connor comes to see the wildfire problem less in terms of surfeit and more in terms of scarcity. Prior to human settlement, lightning-induced fires were, it seems, a regular occurrence in North America. These blazes acted as a kind of ecological reset; from the ashes of the incinerated forest (or grassland), pyrophytes blossomed. Later, Native Americans routinely burned the landscape—to foster the growth of useful plants, to clear space for farming, and to improve the conditions for hunting. In the sixteen-thirties, Thomas Morton, an English colonist who settled in Massachusetts, wrote that this practice produced a parklike landscape that was “very beautifull and commodious.” Two hundred years later, the artist George Catlin described the sight of Native Americans burning the prairie as “indescribably beautiful.” At night, Catlin wrote, the flames could be seen from many miles away, “creeping over the sides and tops of the bluffs, appearing to be sparkling and brilliant chains of liquid fire.” In addition to maintaining parklike conditions, these managed blazes prevented fuel from building up, and so staved off larger, potentially unmanageable conflagrations.
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Pyne’s argument for the Pyrocene begins with fire itself, which he divides into three sorts. “First-fire” is the kind that requires no human intervention. This sort is as old as the hills, or even older: the earliest evidence of fire on Earth comes from fossilized charcoal dating to the Silurian period, when plants were just starting to creep onto dry land. Second-fire, in Pyne’s scheme, is the kind that humans set, or at least control. It’s not clear when, exactly, hominins learned how to manipulate fire, but the discovery may go back as far as 1.5 million years. Controlling fire was such a significant breakthrough that, Pyne argues, it altered the course of evolution. Cooking enabled our ancestors to devote less space to digestion and more to cognition, developments that, in turn, meant humans could no longer live without flames.
First-fire and second-fire both rely on the same fuel source: living—or at least recently live—plants. For most of human history, this was the constraint on combustion. Then people figured out how to access ancient biomass in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas. The combustion of fossil fuels produced third-fire, which altered the atmosphere and, in the process, the climate. “Fire created the conditions for more fire,” Pyne writes.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/the-perverse-policies-that-fuel-wildfires
