There’s something unsettling about the virus, this seemingly inescapable, omnipresent, insidious force that keeps us locked in our homes. Some people almost wished for a tangible enemy, something obvious and terrifying but at the very least visible, so that they could justify the sacrifices and fear. The universe granted that wish in a very 2020 way—wildfires swept the west coast with the same force that the Australian wildfires did way, way back in January of this year. Suddenly, the sky was like something out of Dante’s Inferno, and you could taste the smoke particles floating in the air even through a face mask. The landscape matched the gathering feeling of apocalypse, and new numbers, like 4 million burned acres, joined the statistics we sing ourselves to sleep with: 45.1 million global COVID-19 infections, 230,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States eight months and counting of using the phrase ‘unprecedented times.’ An article written by Stanford University student Nestor Walters on the wildfires poses the question: “How many more times do we need to hear words like trying, tumultuous or challenging as adjectives to times before we accept that these are simply the times we live in?”
No one can escape it—not the wildfires, not the pandemic, and not climate change. Rozzi, an American pop singer, released a ballad called “Orange Skies” about the wildfires in her hometown of San Francisco. She said of the song, “Despite the massiveness of the issue, I knew I wanted to make the song personal – because of course the underlying issue itself is personal. Climate change isn’t some mythical thing happening to other people, in other places – it’s happening right now, right outside our doors.”
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk reports 7,348 wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and heatwaves over the past 20 years. These natural disasters resulted in the deaths of 1.23 million people, affecting a total of 4.2 billion people, and caused $2.97 trillion in global economic losses. Most effected are China and the United States. The report unequivocally links these events to the rising global temperature as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, and finds that any improvements to disaster response or climate adaptation will be “obsolete in many countries” if climate change, the source of the problem, is not immediately addressed.
So how does climate change cause forest fires? National Geographic explains that as temperatures rise due to climate change, the hot air “soaks up water from whatever it touches—plants (living or dead) and soil, lakes and rivers. The hotter and drier the air, the more it sucks up, and the amount of water it can hold increases exponentially as the temperature rises; small increases in the air’s heat can mean big increases in the intensity with which it pulls out water.” In California, the rise in temperature is about 3 degrees Fahrenheit, far above the global average of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat combines with parched forest material, which is even dryer due to a persistent drought more intense than any for the past 1,200 years, producing the ideal conditions for a fire to consume forests, in addition to all of the settlements that have increasingly encroached among traditionally undeveloped lands.
Some preventive measures exist, though actual implementation by governments and industry varies. In Australia, nomadic aboriginal groups used to practice surface vegetation burning to prevent outbreaks of fire. Though indigenous populations can no longer engage in that tradition, the method is still emulated by local governments. Urban planning in Australia—where the 2019/2020 season was the hottest on record and driest for 120 years—must prevent expansion into flammable wildland areas, include vegetation-free zones around properties, use fireproof building materials, and plan evacuation and rescue routes in advance. In California, controlled burning of dry brush and excess debris is a common practice, though it contributes to air pollution. Currently, timber companies and biomass industries do not substantially support the state’s fire prevention strategy, so reducing costs of thinning projects would create better incentives for participation on an industry level. Additionally, as in Australia, building codes should emphasize fire-resistance and developing into high-risk areas should be banned. As a whole, these measures could reduce short term damage, but would address only the symptoms of the problem, rather than the problem itself. Unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, and the warming of the Earth slows, these practices will not suffice.
Economically, the stakes are high for leaders to respond effectively. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced investments in the CAL FIRE air fleet, early wildfire warning technologies, fire detection cameras, and permanent firefighting positions, along with related crisis counseling, legal services, and housing and unemployment assistance for people affected by the fires. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, on the other hand, was widely criticized for his slow response to the wildfires, though he did expressly link them to climate change—a link that the Australian Finance Minister denied. Though Australia has pledged to reduce its emissions by between 26 and 28% within the next decade, a UN report noted that few of the Conservative government’s policies are designed to reach this target. Studies on the economic impact of wildfires on affected areas show that “large wildfires lead to instability in local labor markets by amplifying seasonal variation in employment over the subsequent year” and that rural areas in particular struggle to recover. Even without the pandemic-induced recession, effects last months and even years in places like rural Oregon. Short term economic gains as local laborers rebuild are overshadowed by the slow economic growth that follows as tourism, logging, and other essential industries drop.
It’s been an overwhelming year, but the pandemic, the wildfires, and climate change are nothing new. We are experiencing the colliding effects of problems we as a global society created and then ignored, until a virus halted civilization and the skies turned orange. The problem isn’t invisible, it’s in everything: it’s the fuel that runs the world we are literally watching burn. But we still have time, just a tiny bit of time, to turn things around, and to lower our emissions by switching to renewable energy, and to rebuild a post-pandemic society sustainably. Nestor Walters puts it best: “We don’t own the past or future; all we have is now. We can’t let hope take away our now, or we’ll find ourselves looking out the window one morning, wondering if the sky used to be blue.”
Featured Image from Bloomberg
