Listen to this article.
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.
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
“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.”
As the wildfires have multiplied, so, too, have books on the subject. Recent volumes range from the intimate (Manjula Martin’s “The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History”) to the sweeping (Edward Struzik’s “Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire”) and the quick-turnaround (“The Summer Canada Burned: The Wildfire Season That Shocked the World,” compiled by Monica Zurowski). Fire, it might be said, is a hot topic.
M. R. O’Connor’s “Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World” (Bold Type) began, in the author’s telling, with a “gimmick.” Several years ago, O’Connor, a Brooklyn-based journalist, visited Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest with a local botanist. The two came upon a rare wildflower, Gentiana catesbaei, which, the botanist explained, thrives on recently torched ground. Many plants, O’Connor learned, have evolved to tolerate fire—these are known as pyrophytes—and some have come to depend on it to stimulate reproduction. Intrigued, she enrolled in Introduction to Fire Effects, an online course offered by the University of Idaho.
One thing leads to another, and pretty soon O’Connor finds herself travelling to central Nebraska to light it on fire. As part of a crew producing a “prescribed burn,” she’s handed a drip torch—basically, a fuel cannister attached to a long nozzle. Although she hasn’t had much training, she’s soon igniting the prairie. She describes the experience as “thrilling.” A professional fire-setter tells her, “You have the fire bug.”
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.
Once the U.S. government had pushed Native Americans onto reservations and seized their land, controlled burning ceased across much of the country. Then the U.S. Forest Service moved to eliminate wildfires entirely. Gifford Pinchot, who became the agency’s first director, in 1905, considered flames to be the enemy of the trees.
“Of all the foes that attack the woodlands of North America, no other is so terrible as fire,” he wrote. Toward the end of the summer of 1910—an unusually dry one in the American Northwest—gale-force winds whipped up hundreds of blazes in Idaho and western Montana. These coalesced to form one of the largest forest fires in U.S. history—an inferno that killed eighty-seven people, destroyed several whole towns, and consumed more than three million acres. Following what became known as the Big Blowup, the Forest Service doubled down on fire control. William Greeley, who became the head of the agency in 1920, wrote that the great fire had “burned into” him the conviction “that fire prevention is the No. 1 job of American foresters.”
In 1933, the Roosevelt Administration created the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the earliest New Deal programs. The C.C.C. put millions of (mostly single) men to work on projects that included building fire lookouts, digging firebreaks, and fighting forest fires. In 1935, the leader of the Forest Service, Ferdinand Silcox, announced the “10 A.M. Policy.” All fires on Forest Service land were to be extinguished by the morning after the day they were reported. Other federal agencies, following the Forest Service’s lead, soon adopted similar policies. Though many blazes pushed past the 10 A.M. deadline, the policy remained in effect until the late nineteen-seventies.
Gradually, it became clear that fire suppression was wrecking many of the forests it was intended to save. (Among the trees whose seeds require fire to germinate are giant sequoias.) These days, O’Connor writes, the Forest Service likes to boast that it oversees the country’s biggest prescribed-fire program, which burns almost 1.5 million acres a year. But this isn’t nearly enough to make up for what’s become known as the “fire deficit.” According to some estimates, this deficit amounts to more than three million acres just in the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona, and according to others it amounts to more than ten million acres across Washington and Oregon. A wildlife biologist whom O’Connor meets in central Nebraska tells her that the controlled burns he’s organized in the past decade have charred about thirty thousand acres. But to preserve the prairie that remains, he estimates, nearly twice that area should be combusted every year. “I have a dream of road-to-road fires one day,” he tells her. “Our goal here is to dream big.”
At one point in her travels, O’Connor visits Yosemite National Park with Stephen J. Pyne, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University. Pyne might be described as the Gibbon of fire history; he has written some thirty books on the subject, including a nine-volume work, “To the Last Smoke,” on the legacy of fire in different regions of the U.S. As O’Connor was interviewing Pyne for her book, Pyne was researching a book of his own, “Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park” (University of Arizona).
Geologically speaking, we live in the Holocene, the epoch that began about twelve thousand years ago, at the close of the last ice age. But many geologists argue that the Holocene, too, has come to an end, and that we have entered a new epoch, widely referred to as the Anthropocene. Pyne believes that the new epoch would be better labelled the Pyrocene, a term of his own invention. “The Pyrocene began when a fire-wielding creature met a fire-receptive period in the Earth’s history and their interaction made anthropogenic fire an informing presence,” he writes in a previous book, “The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.”
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.
Like O’Connor, Pyne proposes fighting more fire with fire. He advocates a return to the sort of “cultural burning” once practiced by Indigenous peoples not just in North America but in almost all parts of the world where the landscape is flammable. “If fire there will be—must be—then replace fires of chance with fires of choice,” Pyne urges. He praises the Australians, who are trying to revive cultural burning practices on Aboriginal lands. “The suppression of fire practices was part of colonizing the land; restoring fire is seen as a means to recover some of those losses,” he writes.
Toward the end of “Ignition,” O’Connor visits the Yurok Reservation, in Northern California, to participate in a prescribed burn. The exercise is a collaboration between tribal members and an assortment of outsiders eager to be part of what O’Connor calls the “good-fire revolution.”
“With all these megafires, they finally realize, ‘Oh, maybe we should ask these Indigenous peoples how to take care of the forest,’ ” Margo Robbins, a Yurok basket-maker and activist, tells her. “We took care of it for ten thousand years.” As it happens, one of the directors of the operation, Kelly Martin, is a wildland firefighter who spent a decade working in Yosemite. “Humans created this condition, and humans can step in to remediate it,” Martin says. “We have no time to waste.”
If the summer of 2023 was Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, its costliest remains 2016’s, when flames swept through Fort McMurray, a city in northern Alberta. The Fort McMurray fire forced roughly ninety thousand people to evacuate, destroyed more than two thousand homes, and caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage. In a chronicle of the event, “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World” (Knopf), John Vaillant proposes yet another name for our new epoch: the Petrocene. The Petrocene, he argues, began a century and a half ago with the discovery of oil, which put immense amounts of energy at the disposal of ordinary people.
“Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than six hundred horsepower,” Vaillant, a Vancouver-based writer, observes. “Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or a pharaoh could have summoned such power, and its equivalent would have required hundreds of enslaved people and draft animals.”
The Fort McMurray fire is, in Vaillant’s telling, a cruelly appropriate Petrocene disaster. The city, nicknamed Fort McMoney, owes its existence to the Alberta tar sands, a vast deposit of low-quality oil that has to be either dug or steamed out of the ground. Pretty much everyone who lived in Fort McMurray at the time of the fire worked, either directly or indirectly, on getting this oil to refineries, so that it could be pumped into gas tanks and combusted. The resulting carbon dioxide—together with the CO2 from burning billions of tons of coal and tens of billions of barrels of conventional oil—contributed to the hot, dry conditions that turned Fort McMurray into a tinderbox. The fire spread so fast that many residents barely made it out, along the city’s sole southbound highway. “Combustive energy had drawn people to Fort McMurray,” Vaillant writes, and combustive energy drove them “out again, en masse.”
Fort McMurray was carved out of Canada’s vast boreal forest, and its location, too, was key to the catastrophe. Many of the most destructive wildfires of recent years have jumped from forests or grasslands into communities situated in what’s become known as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”). As Vaillant puts it, the WUI “is a beautiful place to live, until it goes feral.”
According to Nick Mott and Justin Angle, the authors of “This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat” (Bloomsbury), construction in the WUI is yet another reason wildfires are becoming more dangerous. (The two put it on par with climate change and the history of fire suppression.) We’re putting up more homes than ever before, they write, in “areas ripe for fire.”
In the U.S., California is the state that has the most housing in the WUI—about five million units. Texas comes in second, with more than three million. And the figures keep climbing: between 1990 and 2020, the total number of homes in the zone increased by nearly fifty per cent in the U.S., to more than forty-four million.
“Why do we keep building so vigorously where people are most at risk of losing their homes and lives to wildfire?” Mott, a Montana-based journalist, and Angle, a professor at the University of Montana College of Business, ask. Part of the answer, they conclude, lies in the way the risk is spread around. When a serious wildfire threatens a community, the federal government often gets involved. In this way, it’s not just those who live in the WUI who bear the cost of trying to protect it; it’s also, Mott and Angle write, “you, the taxpayer.” A 2023 study they cite concludes that, in the fire-prone American West, this implicit subsidy can amount to more than twenty per cent of a home’s value. Meanwhile, local government officials, who are responsible for most zoning decisions, have little incentive to curb construction in the WUI. On the contrary, local governments depend on new development to bring in more property-tax revenue. “If I’m a county commissioner, why would I care if that house burns down?” Kimi Barrett, a policy analyst at Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group, tells the authors. “Because I’m not going to pay for it.”
Mott and Angle have all sorts of suggestions for individuals who want to reduce the odds that their homes will go up in smoke. They urge those who live in high-risk areas to replace wood-shingled roofs with metal ones, remove lower limbs from trees, and keep woodpiles at a distance. But, they acknowledge, these sorts of home-hardening projects do little to address the larger issue of development in the WUI, which, they say, has become a “cycle” that will be “hard to reverse.”
Canada’s 2016 wildfires, which included but were not limited to the Fort McMurray fire, released about a hundred and seventy million tons of carbon dioxide into the air. The following year, according to the European Union’s earth-observation program, carbon emissions from Canada’s wildfires rose to about four hundred million tons. In 2023, they came to an astonishing 1.7 billion tons.
These figures point to another hard-to-reverse cycle. When trees burn, they release the carbon they took up while growing. This carbon contributes to warming, which increases the likelihood of wildfires, which release more carbon, and so on. In the far north, this cycle is exacerbated by the soil, which is often loaded with dead plant material. Igniting such carbon-rich soil further adds to emissions.
More prescribed burning, more metal roofs, better zoning—these are all steps that could make a significant difference at a local level. But dealing with the wildfire crisis on a regional or a national scale would require addressing the CO2 feedback loop, which is impossible for any region or nation to do on its own. Hence the predictions of a flame-filled future. As Pyne observes in one of his bleaker moments, “We have created a Pyrocene. Now we have to live in it.” ♦
