Learn to live with wildfire smoke, British Columbians told
British Columbians are going to have to live with the health effects of huge forest fires for decades to come and need to be prepared to protect themselves individually and as communities.
“We are going to have to face this again and again and again,” Health Minister Adrian Dix said.
He said it means training and hiring more nurses and providing greater support to health workers as they work with affected people in communities.
And, he stressed, among those most affected by fires and the resulting evacuation alerts and orders are the elderly living in care homes.
A Northern California tribe works to protect traditions in a warming world
"One of the first things the government outlawed was cultural burning," said the Southern Sierra Miwuk's Lerma.
State officials made this tribal practice of igniting small fires illegal in 1850. The years of fire suppression that followed have made wildfires worse.
"'Smokey the Bear' all over the place," said Fouch-Moore. "And now our forests are overgrown and in bad health. And they're like, 'Oh wait, maybe we should let the Indians do their thing.'"
In recent years, the National Park Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) have started to collaborate with Indigenous communities to return traditional burning to the land.
Preparing homes for wildfires is big business that's only getting started
Some insurance companies give people a break if they invest in home hardening. These are long-recommended techniques: fire-resistant roofs, covered gutters, no plants or mulch within 5 feet of the house, mesh on air vents that can stop embers from flying inside.
America’s fire spotters aren’t ready to fade away just yet
Wildfires unfold across vast, difficult terrain, in fast-changing conditions and with a frightening amount of random chance. In places like Glacier, officials don’t just put them all out. They must decide, sometimes hour by hour, whether letting a fire burn might provide ecological benefits or whether it is threatening enough lives and property to justify putting firefighters at risk.
New technology aids in these decisions, said Andy Huntsberger, a district fire management officer in the Flathead. But “it doesn’t replace the human element,” he said.
Climate change boosts risk of explosive wildfire growth in California by 25%, study says
Climate change has ratcheted up the risk of explosive wildfire growth in California by 25% and will continue to drive extreme fire behavior for decades to come, even if planet-warming emissions are reduced, a new study has found.
Living with wildfire: How to protect more homes as fire risk rises in a warming climate
Humans have learned to fear wildfire. It can destroy communities, torch pristine forests and choke even faraway cities with toxic smoke.
Wildfire is scary for good reason, and over a century of fire suppression efforts has conditioned people to expect wildland firefighters to snuff it out. But as journalist Nick Mott and I explore our new book, “This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Your Home, Yourself, and Your Community in the Age of Heat,” and in our podcast “Fireline,” this expectation and the approach to wildfire will have to change.
Over time, extensive fire suppression has set the stage for the increasingly destructive wildfires we see today.
North America’s summer of wildfire smoke: 2023 was only the beginning
The pressing question on many people’s minds: “Is this the new normal?” From our perspective as air quality scientists, we think the answer is likely “yes.”
How Indigenous techniques saved a community from wildfire
“When you think about how wildfire seasons are playing out, if we invested more into the proactive, then we would need less of that reactive wildfire response,” said Kira Hoffman, a wildfire researcher at the University of British Columbia. “We’re not going to see probably the effects of a lot of this mitigation and treatment for 10 or 20 years. But that’s when we’re really going to need it.”
Wildfires are an essential component of the natural cycle of forests, but in recent years, more of them have grown so big that containment is nearly impossible. Fire prevention zones — created in the offseason — can help slow approaching blazes so that people can escape, and can also enable firefighters to gain control over some areas.
We need to rethink wildfire in order to better protect ourselves
A wildfire on a Hawaiian island might appear at first glance like an anomaly. But the factors that created it—heat, drought, and wind—make fires like this one a possibility across much of America. Driven by a changing climate, a century of forest mismanagement, and more development in fire–prone areas, devastating fires are becoming the norm. Those dramatic images can leave us feeling powerless in the overwhelming force of fire. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
US wildland firefighter pay threatened by Republican feud in Congress
"We're going to have these people out fighting wildfires for us in this country. And their pay could be cut by 50%," said Representative Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies.
The impossible fight to stop Canada’s wildfires
Today, many of Canada’s Indigenous people are frustrated with governments’ “two-tiered system,” which often prohibits cultural burning while appropriating Indigenous fire knowledge for use on massive prescribed fires. “There’s a lot of concern that agencies will come and extract the knowledge that they want and put it into their agency practices, but then Indigenous people still won’t be at the table,” says Cardinal Christianson.
How climate change stoked Canada's record-breaking wildfires
The hot, dry conditions that fueled the blazes were at least twice as likely because of the influence of human-caused global warming. And they were at least 20 percent more intense than they would have been in a world without climate change.
The research consortium World Weather Attribution, which investigates the links between climate change and individual extreme weather events, released the findings Tuesday.
The new study found that Indigenous communities, as well as remote, difficult-to-access communities, were disproportionately affected by this summer’s wildfires. Limited resources and geographic barriers to wildfire response teams made them more vulnerable.
Living with wildfire: How to protect more homes as fire risk rises in a warming climate
Wildfire is scary for good reason, and over a century of fire suppression efforts has conditioned people to expect wildland firefighters to snuff it out. But as journalist Nick Mott and I explore our new book, “This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Your Home, Yourself, and Your Community in the Age of Heat,” and in our podcast “Fireline,” this expectation and the approach to wildfire will have to change.
Over time, extensive fire suppression has set the stage for the increasingly destructive wildfires we see today.
A ‘perfect storm’ set Hawaii ablaze. Experts say it could happen almost anywhere
The advancement of wildland and urban conflagrations is being accelerated by global warming, Pyne said, which is like “putting the system on steroids.” But he added that worsening wildfires are also influenced by the ways in which humans interact with the landscape, manage agriculture and organize their cities and economies, among other choices. “It’s not just that it’s either land use or climate that’s affecting it — they’re both being shifted by our conversion to fossil fuels and fossil biomass” such as asphalt, plastics and petrochemicals, he said. “My sense is that that has accelerated what I regarded as a slow-motion Pyrocene into a fast-maturing one.”
The real story behind that photo of a weirdly unscathed house in the rubble of Lahaina
It appears these modifications had the effect, however unintended, of making the home more resilient to flames.
Locals have been sounding the alarm for years about Lahaina wildfire risk
But while the inferno happened shockingly fast for the people of Lahaina, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been building for years, like the dry grasses that caught alight and fueled the blaze. The enormity of the catastrophe speaks to both the challenges of preparing for the unimaginable and the incredibly high stakes of inaction.
Susanne Moser, a New England-based climate change resilience expert, says communities and governments are going to have to confront that reality as climate change makes disasters like Maui’s more likely to occur. It may be expensive, but if people don’t pay for it upfront, they may pay later in lives.
Why wildfires are at their deadliest in more than a century
That fires are suddenly inflicting mass casualties again “should be a really significant red flag,” said LeRoy Westerling, a climate and wildfire scientist at the University of California, Merced. “Our perception of the underlying risk is no longer reflective of the reality we currently have. All over the world, this is happening right now. … That is a warning sign that something’s happened that we need to take into account.”
Learning how to garden a forest
After more than a century of mismanagement, and given the challenges of climate change, forest restoration for wildfire resilience presents an unprecedented and complex task that requires diverse tools and tactics tailored to each site. A growing body of research shows that the most biodiverse and resilient forests are often located on protected Indigenous lands where people make a sustainable living from it. Providing funding, legal support, and more rights to Indigenous communities to manage their land is key to climate conservation goals. McKay believes that collaborative stewardship through Native advisory councils, created with the right intentions, can serve as a meaningful step in that process.
The age of the urban inferno is here
In general, we’ve long believed the built environment offered formidable firebreaks and worried over what might be lost when fires passed near homes as a form of tragic collateral damage. But increasingly, fires emerging hotter and more intense from the natural landscape are burning human structures not as collateral but as fuel, jumping from home to home as earlier fires would jump from tree crown to tree crown, with vegetation, Swain told me when I interviewed him in the wake of the Marshall fire for New York magazine, acting only as a wick. These firestorms may seem like a harbinger, he said, but they are also a throwback, to a time a century or more ago when towns and cities, in a time of wood-frame buildings and premodern firefighting, regularly stared down the threat of incineration by flame.