We Are Living in the Age of Fire. And It’s Only Going To Get Worse
The hills of Louis Creek Valley are covered in lovely, towering Douglas fir, healthy evergreens climbing from the grassy meadow at the valley floor up to the ridges where the mountains meet the sky. It’s lush, like much of interior British Columbia, where densely packed conifers line the innumerable wooded valleys, the heavy cone-laden branches reaching down to the ground.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Joe Gilchrist, a fire steward of Secwepemc people, and a firefighter for more than 30 years, stands on the valley floor and looks at the beautiful trees. But what he sees first is danger.
“It’s been over 100 years since it’s been illegal for Indigenous people to use fire on the land, and so in that time, the trees have overgrown the area, and some of the trees have got diseased,” he says. “It’s just gotten thicker, and the trees that have died have fallen to the ground, and branches and the needles that fall every year go onto the ground and just add to the fuel. It’s just a major fire waiting to happen.”
Until the 1860s, the Secwepemc were regularly setting this valley ablaze in the spring and fall, when the undergrowth can safely be burned off without the fire climbing the trunks where they could cause a crown fire, where flames leap quickly from treetop to treetop.
The valley then was a patchwork of ecosystems, with grazing land for game, berry and mushroom patches, and healthy, diverse stands of trees. It provided food resources, and, crucially, it was not vulnerable to megafires.
“Megafires just weren’t possible, because the forest itself was bio diverse,” says Gilchrist. “It wasn’t one monoculture of trees that are too close together and too over-aged and with lots of fuel on the ground.”
It was similar throughout the continent. The forest in the pre-Columbian Americas was not primaeval, in a wild state, as is normally imagined, but carefully managed by Indigenous peoples, who were constantly burning. European settlers always remarked on the burning in their diaries and letters, finding it wasteful. Now, experts see that they knew what they were doing.
Read more: L.A. Fires Show the Reality of Living in a World with 1.5°C of Warming
Professor Lori Daniels, director of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Wildfire Coexistence, has been matching fire scars on tree rings with Indigenous oral history, and finding evidence of the repeated low scale burning before the Colonial era. One tree, in Tobacco Plains, near the Montana border, had survived 52 fires.
The tree rings showing scars from low-intensity fires stopped in the 19th Century, when settlers took over and banned traditional burns. After the Second World War, when fire towers and water bombers increased the effectiveness of fire suppression, the forests became both safer from fire, and yet ever more vulnerable as the fuel load built up.
“Between 65% and 85% of the trees that we see in the forest today came in when Indigenous fire stewardship stopped,” says Daniels. “So beautiful, green, forested British Columbia, the dense forest that we see as blankets across the hill slopes, by far the majority of those trees are on those mountains because they have not burned with a surface fire for decades to a century.”
The gorgeous wooded slopes, in British Columbia and much of North America, exist because we romantically yearned for edenic wildlands. What that thinking produced is dangerous fuel loads. Because of the effectiveness of modern fire suppression, the amount of fuel has been steadily increasing for decades. And because of climate change, it is much drier.
The result is a terrible new normal, with immense out-of-control wildfires now regularly turning massive swaths of the boreal belt around the top of the world to charcoal. The boreal ecosystem—the wilderness areas of evergreens between the deciduous woodlands to the south and the tundra to the north—makes up almost a third of the planet’s forest land. It is a vital economic and ecological zone, and a crucial storehouse of carbon—or, it used to be.
In 2023, more than 6,000 fires ravaged 37 million acres of land in Canada alone, scorching a land mass the size of Montana and poisoning the air as far away as Atlanta. Last year was not as bad, but it was still terrible, and worse in Russia, where almost 22 million acres were burnt.
This season started badly in Canada. Many “zombie fires” had overwintered, smoldering beneath the snow. One fire overwintered for two years in a row, a grim new first.
They broke out early in a hot, dry spring, forcing the evacuation of towns and villages across the country, leaving a pall of smoke across the land. By the end of May, there were hundreds. More than 90 were out of control, meaning firefighters had decided they were too big to fight.
About 40,000 people, mostly indigenous, were ordered out of their homes, some flown south, others making long, harrowing car journeys through smoky woods.
On June 2, residents fled the northern Saskatchewan town of La Ronge after a fire breached the airport where crews were working. The next day much of the town of Denare Beach burned, while heartbroken residents watched remotely on doorbell cams.
Natural variations in weather mean some years are worse than others, but the trend line is clear. Because the climate is warming, the fire season starts sooner and ends later. There is more fuel, and it is drier. Lightning, which starts many fires, is now striking further north than the past. Some forests have been made doubly vulnerable by climate-change-induced pest infestations.
The fires are more dangerous and more damaging than they used to be. They burn hotter, creating their own weather, towering pyrocumulonimbus storms: massive, hellish fire tornadoes that throw flaming trees through the air and generate thousands of lightning strikes in their vicinity, sparking more fires.
The fires now grow so quickly that veteran firefighters are often shocked by their behavior. They jump lakes and rivers, sending burning embers up to three miles through the air.
So far, there have been few casualties, but veteran firefighters think it is just a matter of time.
In 2016, a fire near Fort McMurray, a city of 100,000 people in northern Alberta, moved so fast that officials were forced to order an emergency evacuation, and surrender much of the town to the blaze. It was only because so many of the young and hardy residents had safety training from the oil industry that there were not mass casualties.
The fire at Fort McMurray was a bitterly ironic wakeup call. It highlighted the new danger of the fast-moving megafires to northern towns, and put a spotlight on the underlying reason for the new danger: Fort McMurray is a bustling city only because of the vast bitumen-mining operations there, where the world’s most carbon intensive oil is boiled out of tarry sand.
Mike Flannigan, who has been studying wildfires as long as Joe Gilchrist has been fighting them, is scared.
In 1985, Flannigan gave his first talk predicting that climate change would lead to bigger fires. Audiences were skeptical, but he was confident that he was right. In 1991, he published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research predicting a 46% increase in annual area burned when the amount of carbon in the atmosphere doubled from pre-industrial levels, which measured 280 parts per million (ppm).
Read more: Where We’ll End Up Living as the Planet Burns
In 1991, when the atmospheric carbon levels measured 355 ppm , 2.5 million acres burned in Canada. This year, the level of C02 is 427 ppm ten million acres burnt by July 1.
Flannigan’s models were far too conservative.
“We—the modelers—have done pretty well with getting the temperature increases, but the impacts from those temperature increases has been grossly underestimated,” he says
He finds that disquieting. “It’s happening faster than I would have thought, and there may be surprises coming—not just for fire—but for climate change, surprises that catch us all off guard.”
“Fire is always where people are,” Flannigan continues. “It goes with us wherever we go. But the genie is out of the bottle. Fire is now uncontrollable, and we’re going to see more and more fire and more and more catastrophic fire.”
Flannigan thinks we are living in the pyrocene, the age of fire, an idea from Arizona environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne. By burning so much coal and oil, we have changed the climate and can no longer control the processes.
Canada’s forests—which make up 8.5%of all global forest area—were once a crucial storehouse of carbon, but because of the fires they have been a net carbon emitter since 2001. The fires of 2023 released 647 million metric tons of carbon, more than the total annual emissions of South Korea that year.
The fires are so hot that they are burning off the top soil in some places, which means some land that was treed will come back as savannah—grasslands which do not store as much carbon.
And the news may get much worse. Many of the trees in northern Canada spring from permanently frozen peat bogs, which contain enormous quantities of carbon. As the climate warms, and that permafrost melts, it becomes susceptible to fire, posing a horrifying climate risk: massive, unfightable northern fires spewing huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, which could push Earth past a climate tipping point that once crossed will cause a spiral-effect of endless warming.
“It’s not a steady state,” says Flannigan. “It’s not normal. We’re on a downward trajectory. Sometimes I say we’re in Dante’s circle of hell. I don’t know which circle we’re on, but I know which way we’re going.”
Only one thing might stop the terrifying processes that humans have set in motion.
“The bottom line, until we deal with greenhouse gasses, fossil-fuel burning, we’re going to continue to warm and we’re going to continue to see more fire.”
Stephen Maher is the author of The Prince, The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau.