The Guardian has an excellent long-form article about wildland fires, titled ‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown weirder. Author Daniel Immerwahr writes that in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable. He writes about fires around the world, pyrophobia, indigenous fire, and how hundreds of thousands die each year from such smoke-related maladies as strokes, heart failure and asthma.
Toward the end of the article he writes about fires in Indonesia where forests have been drained, burned, or clear cut, then summarizes.
Here is an excerpt:
…No single one of Indonesia’s many fires in recent decades has been especially noteworthy. But altogether they’ve been cataclysmic. In 1997, a dense haze of airborne particulates from Indonesia’s fires was perceptible as far as the Philippines and Thailand. That year, on Sumatra – centre of Indonesia’s fires – a commercial plane crashed due to poor visibility and killed all 234 aboard. The next day, two ships collided off the coast of Malaysia for the same reason, and 29 crew members died.
The economist Maria Lo Bue found that Indonesians who were toddlers during the 1997 haze grew less tall, entered school six months later and completed almost a year less of education than their peers. Another economist, Seema Jayachandran, found that the fires “led to over 15,600 child, infant and fetal deaths”, hitting the poor especially hard.
Picture a dangerous fire and you’re likely to imagine a thicket of tall trees blazing in a drought-stricken climate. But a more accurate image is smoldering peat or scrub burning by a tropical logging road. The real threat isn’t catching fire, but the slow violence of breathing bad air. You’ve got a hacking cough, your father suffers a stroke and you watch your daughter – short for her age – leave school a year early.
—
Fire is not in itself a bad thing. Many landscapes, built to burn, simply couldn’t exist without regular fires, either natural or intentional. Though foresters once sought to tamp blazes out everywhere, we now recognise that as a grave mistake. A fireproof planet isn’t something we can get, or should even want.
We badly need a healthier relationship to combustion. Rather than erratic, runaway fires, we need regular, restorative ones, like we used to have. Our forebears didn’t shun flame – they were relentless fire-setters. But they adhered to two important limits. First, they fed their fires with living vegetation, which reclaims lost carbon as it regrows. Second, they were guided by long-acquired experience with fire’s complex paths and consequences.
We’ve blasted far past both of those limits. We’re now burning fossilized vegetation, which sends carbon on a one-way trip to the warming atmosphere. And we’re kindling fires that bear little resemblance to the ones we’re used to. There’s no generational wisdom telling us what to do when we drain the peatlands of Central Kalimantan or let dry fuel pile up precariously in the California countryside, all while raising the temperature to hitherto unrecorded heights.
Books about fire typically end with prescriptions: we must invest in science, reclaim lost cultural knowledge, burn intentionally, build resiliently, and power our grids renewably. All that is true, surely. But given how complex fire is, and how unprecedented nearly everything we’re doing with it is, the best advice would seem to be: slow down. We have scrambled our landscape, changed our energy diet, altered the climate and revised our relationship to flame, all in a very short time. It’s not a surprise that fire, once a useful if obstinate companion to our species, has now slipped our grasp.
The world won’t burn up, as we sometimes imagine. But the fires of tomorrow will be different from those of yesterday, and we’re racing headlong into that unsettling future, burning tankfuls of gas as we go.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Tom.
Andrew J. Thanks for your comments. So Cal Chaparral is a very diverse ecosystem, it certainly is one of the things that I miss about my time living in so cal, I know for a fact that many area have been type converted to grass, I remember very clearly coming to a cross roads concerning RX fire in the so cal chaparral, just my opinion but I believe burning at a landscape level is utter nonsense, there is enough man caused fire without deliberately putting more fire on the ground. I like the idea of modified fuel treatments to protect communities at risk. Fuel breaks and lots of them.
Looks like folks are very aware concerning the brush biome ecosystem. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bes2.1460
It was available in good used condition for $10 to $15. It’s one of the best accounts of how we got here and the research is the amazing.
I suggest you read “In a Dark Wood” by Alston Chase. Hard to find with a Google search. They don’t want you to read it.
Amazon has some copies. It must be out of print because it’s expensive.
Population growth can increase the dangers of fires. Not only expanding the range of people into fire prone areas, but increased deforestation by the increase of people. If everyone had 2 offspring, the population would double every generation. More people = more resources consumed.
I am glad that I grew up in a county that gave women the right to choose, and perhaps limit their footprint on the earth, and even reduce fire danger.
Check this out albeit somewhat dated, worth looking at, most fires are stated to clear land, AG/Economy driven.
The best New Green Deal would maybe entail the wealthiest countries working with some of these depressed economies, I know we are defined by our borders and yes borders are important, but the global ecosystem is essential to the human race surviving, not so weird to me, a growing population is going to consume more resources, real simple…….
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/world/asia/indonesia-red-sky-fires.html
Hi William and Anton,
Near the beginning of 1970 I read a book (to which I cannot find reference) by a professor at the University of California, Davis about the need to burn the LIVING brush which was growing on so much ef the California land on which the weird wildfires are now burning.
He cited evidence that when this was done on trial plots of lands that when this living brush was removed that water began flowing in dried up streams. For in earlier times natural wild fires were allowed to burn in these area which are now burning so the young brush were not allow to grow deeper and deeper into the ground and ultimately transfer this water to the atmosphere. This stopped occurring as natural wildfires were quickly extinguished and the brush with its deep roots kept growing to produce more and more fuel on the dry surface which has made wildfires more weird.
I ask William: How much of this brush which was growing in 2005 and continued to grow since that time until it began to burn in recent times. For it seems very heeded the Professor’s advice which is now 50 years old.
I usually close my comments with ‘Have a good day but I doubt there will not be many good days until we begin to manage the ‘natural’ land as the Professor suggested. Jerry
Harold Biswell was a UC Berkeley faculty member who produced literature with those sorts of findings and would have been active in the 70’s. You can get his book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Prescribed-California-Wildlands-Vegetation-Management/dp/0520219457
It’s an easy and informative read and he talks about burning in the chaparral and pine-conifer forests. Dynamics have changed since his time tho – our hotter and drier climate leads SoCal chaparral to reburn at too short intervals and is leading to conversion to annual grasses. Sort of a catch 22 because burning to reduce fire danger sounds great, but you don’t want to lose all of that native brush either.
Clean up the dead wood! Stop stoking the fire with diesel and gas!
As a photojournalist I have been covering wildland fires in Southern California since 2005. I have been immersed in and on the front lines of all the major fires. Within that time frame alone it is my own experience they now burn hotter and travel much faster than they did over 15 years ago.