Hazy Days
Florida has hurricanes, California earthquakes, and the Midwest twisters. For much of the 32 years I have lived in the Mountain West, we’ve had nothing: no natural disasters to speak of. Some in the Mountain West might consider COVID-19 and the ensuing crazy migration of well-heeled remote workers to be a disaster of sorts. And indeed, that onslaught of wealth and expectations has had dramatic cultural and economic effects on dozens of Western communities.
But now, it seems, we have smoke. August has become the season of smoke. This is not news to anyone living west of the 100th meridian. Forest fires have been scorching the West, particularly Idaho, since the ocean retreated from the land somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million years ago.
Fires, however, have become more common, bigger, more costly, and more unpredictable. Perhaps the biggest difference between now and prehistoric times is that we, in general, bring them on ourselves. According to the U.S. Forest Service, 85% of wildland fires in the U.S. are caused by humans. Whether one calls that a natural disaster or not is a debate of semantics.
There is a myriad of ways we set the world on fire. We toss cigarettes around, drive cars through brush, walk away from campfires, or out of spite or anger or thirst for attention just light a match to a field. The Park fire in California, which has burned 430,000 acres to date and has sent much of its smoke east to Idaho, was started in a particularly novel way: a man pushed a burning car off a 60-foot embankment and ignited the biggest fire currently burning in the U.S.
Believe it or not, the Park fire is one of 79 fires now burning in the U.S. To date this year, 5.2 million acres have gone up in smoke, basically the equivalent of the land area of New Hampshire. It’s as if we’ve burned up a state. On average, between 2001 and 2020, 7 million acres have burned each year—strike a New Jersey and Connecticut from the map each and every year for 20 years.
A study recently published in “Nature Ecology and Evolution” found that the intensity and frequency of wildfires globally more than doubled over the last 20 years. Drilling down, the scientists found that in the Western U.S. and Canada these extreme fires have increased 11-fold in frequency for conifer forests (more temperate climates) and over 7-fold increase for the more northern boreal forests.
The why of it all is not that mysterious. A fire is just a chemical reaction (combustion) in which cellulose (wood), when heated enough, reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and water (and heat and light). Fire experts represent the same reaction with a triangle, the three points of which are fuel, weather (heat), and oxygen.
So, what has changed over time?
The oxygen content of the air is just as it was a million years ago: 21%. However, the fuel load in our forests has increased over the course of 113 years of fire suppression policy. Ever since the Big Burn of 1910, when 3 million acres of Idaho and Montana burned in 48 hours and 86 people were killed, putting out wildfires at all costs has been the rule. At one point, in 1935, the Forest Service’s policy was to have any fire spotted put out by 10 a.m. the following morning.
And the weather—the third leg of the triangle—has changed. In other words, the heat factor has increased. Summers are longer, hotter, and drier; winters are shorter. Regardless of what you attribute the cause to, average temperatures have increased over time. It is plainly measurable. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last year was the warmest year on record, at least since 1850 when records were first kept. In fact, the 10 warmest years in the last 174 years have all been between 2014 and 2023. Don’t believe the record keepers? Talk to someone in Phoenix or Las Vegas.
The fact is hotter, drier weather brings those fuels closer to their ignition point. Consequently, it doesn’t take much to get wildfires going. Once they start, they tend to be self-perpetuating because the combustion itself generates tremendous heat, which simply enables more combustion if there is more fuel and oxygen around.
If you weren’t already concerned about walls of flame roaring past the wilderness-urban-interface, where more and more people are choosing to live, then consider the following. In particularly intense fires, pyrocumulonimbus clouds develop. A devious quirk of physics, these clouds and associated lightning is generated by the fire itself. Bolts of lightning strike out ahead of the fire front, softening the target, if you will. Containing a fire like that is not in our current arsenal of tricks.
There is also the daunting prospect that these intense fires can liberate toxins that through ignorance or apathy we have introduced into forests that will one day burn: arsenic from gold mines, asbestos from vermiculite mines, radioactive elements from nuclear accidents, and probably a few more we don’t know about yet. When mega fires (those greater than 100,000 acres) burn through such areas, a lot of bad stuff rides the smokey plumes to elevations at which they can blow just about anywhere. For better or worse, raging wildfires are not just a Western problem.
Back to basics. Of the two variables on the fire triangle that are directly or indirectly controllable—fuel and heat/weather—we have let both get out of control. Thankfully, we haven’t figured out how to mess up the oxygen concentration of our atmosphere.
The fourth, somewhat invisible variable in the fire triangle is us. For the most part, we start the fires. And then we put them out. And clearly, we are messing with the climate—which drives the weather—but we don’t have to. We can put less carbon in the atmosphere, which would slow the warming of it. We can decide how much fuel to leave lying around the forests, and we can even decide how many people live in the wilderness-urban interface, where problems tend to start. We could divert money from fire suppression to fuel management or education or other efforts to prevent these monsters from being unleashed in the first place.
Or, like Nero, we can just pick up a fiddle and play. But that didn’t work out too well for him.
I’m not a biblical guy, but somedays in the Rockies, when you can’t see the Rockies, it feels like a prophesy come true (Peter 3:10-14):
“... the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are done on it shall be burned up.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the ring of that.