United States | Wildfires

America in flames

The future of the country’s north-west is hot and smoky

Burning man
|WASHINGTON, DC

SO BAD are the seasonal wildfires sweeping America’s tinder-dry north-west that Alex Thomason, a public-spirited lawyer in Washington state, bought himself a second-hand fire engine to fight them. “We can operate hoses, we can understand water,” he told reporters. “We’re going to at least save one or two houses.” But this is not a problem American can-do-ishness can fix. In fact, overzealous firefighting is partly to blame for the fires that have so far consumed over 8.5m acres of forest in Washington, California, Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Alaska and which, with the desiccated Santa Ana winds yet to reach southern California, could exceed the record devastation of 2006, when nearly 10m burned.

Forest fires, started by lightning strikes, are part of the natural cycle in temperate woods. They thin trees and remove debris, clearing space for a diversity of new seedlings, often of species adapted to survive a scorching. The thick bark of the ponderosa pine makes it almost fireproof. The jack pine depends on fire to melt the hard resin that encases its seeds. Yet climate change and decades of fire suppression have disrupted this pattern, turning what might once have been small, low-intensity and potentially regenerative fires into tearing infernos.

A recent run of hot, dry summers, including a four-year drought in California, is a likely indicator of global warming; July was America’s hottest month since 1880. So, in a related blight, is a surge in pests, such as bark beetles, which are surviving the mild winters in record numbers, and have turned thousands of acres of sappy conifer forest into dead wood, ready to burn. The average wildfire season is now 78 days longer than it was 40 years ago, according to a recent report by the US Forest Service (USFS). No surprise, then, that the six worst fire seasons since 1960 all occurred this century.

But assiduous firefighting is also to blame. Between 1998 and 2007 about 80,000 wildfires a year were suppressed and only around 300 a year left to burn. This has led to a vast build-up of dry brush which, once ignited, can act as a “fire ladder”, lifting the flames into the forest boughs where, in the current arid conditions, they may become uncontrollable “mega-fires”. These ravage more than 100,000 acres apiece, burning at an intensity that leaves little life behind.

Such infernos are now common. Over the past decade America has seen on average ten mega-fires a year. Since June this year, five mega-fires have razed more than 5m acres of central Alaska, while five large fires in Washington state, where Barack Obama declared a state of emergency last month, burned over a thousand-mile front, and laid waste to almost a quarter of a million acres.

The costs of the conflagration are enormous. In the last week of August alone the USFS spent $243m on a firefighting effort involving around 30,000 American firefighters, with reinforcements from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the national guard. The longer-term costs, in terms of ecosystem damage and respiratory problems caused by the thick blacks clouds currently blotting out the western horizon, will be greater.

The outlook is grim. The National Research Council estimates that the amount of land burned in western North America could quadruple with every degree of warming—of which there are expected to be at least a couple by the end of this century. The feared effect of this and other warming-related changes is that America’s forests could, as early as 2030, start to emit more carbon into the atmosphere, including in smoke from wildfires and methane from disturbed ground, than they absorb through photosynthesis.

More judicious firefighting might slow the damage a bit. But that would mean leaving houses to burn, which is a long-standing political problem urban sprawl is making even tougher; between 1940 and 2000 the number of houses within half a mile of a national forest more than tripled, to 1.8m. Smart wildfire management can also be expensive. And because wildfires are not eligible for the dollops of federal money earmarked for other sorts of natural disaster, the USFS’s budget is another thing going up in smoke.

In 1995, the forest service spent 16% of its budget on fire suppression, and the rest on other important activities, including clearing brush and managing watersheds. This year the agency will spend a little over half its budget on firefighting, and by 2025, it predicts, that could rise to around 67%. This, says the agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, who oversees the USFS, will leave “much fewer resources for the very restoration projects that have been proven to reduce the risk of wildfire.”

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "America in flames"

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