12 newyork| september14–27, 2020
intelligencer
By2050,the areaburnedannually intheAmericanWestis expectedto havedoubled,perhapsev en quadrupled.Up the coast, in Oregon, five separate
towns, the governor said, had been “sub-
stantially destroyed,” with smoke carried
forward by near-hurricane-strength
winds. In the Cascade foothills, five sepa-
rate fires had burned over 100,000 acres
each. Half a million people, one-tenth of
the state’s population, were in some stage
of evacuation, many of them piling into
Portland— experiencing, at the time, the
worst air quality anywhere in the world.
In San Francisco, Wednesday at noon,
you couldn’t see anything. “No measurable
sunlight” was penetrating the canopy of
smoke and reaching the ground—the fire
equivalent of an eclipse. Rooftop solar
stopped working. It was 30 degrees colder
than the forecast had called for. A friend’s
toddler walked out the front door with a
flashlight, searching for the sidewalk. With
smoke plumes rising 50,000 feet, you
couldn’t even fly above the fires, only
through them.
On social media, in a mood of tragic
acquiescence, people were posting real-time
photos of Bay Area burnt orange alongside
stills of Blade Runner 2049 and debating
how much science fiction had already gotten
right. Among climate activists, the mood
was exhaustion and urgency—fury that so
little had been made of climate change in
coverage of the summer’s historic heat wave,
which ended in these flames, and conviction
that the fires made the case for climate
action, again, as if the world needed another
reason to move faster.
We must, of course. But in planning a
path forward, through fire, California can-
not wait for a Green New Deal or electrified
everything. For one thing, it would take too
long—the climate impacts of even the most
aggressive global decarbonization, scientists
believe, won’t be observable for decades.
Until then, all else being equal, warming will
worsen, and the fires of the American West
will too. By 2050, the earliest we can hope to
see the benefits of fast climate action, the
area burned annually in the West is expected
to have doubled, perhaps quadrupled.
That isn’t to say nothing can be done. It
can. As fire scientists have been arguing
now for decades, a century of bad forest
management—suppressing all fires—has
proved a catastrophic failure, producing
an unmanageable amount of what scien-
tists call “fuel” and the rest of us call “dead
trees.” In the mouths of climate skeptics,
or Donald Trump, blaming forest man-
agement can sound like an evasion: It’s
climate change, after all, that has quin-
tupled the amount of flammable forest
and extended the wildfire season by two
months. And it’s no coincidence that
three of the four biggest fires in California
history are burning in the immediate
aftermath of a historic heat wave, during
which Death Valley registered what may
have been the highest temperature ever
recorded on planet Earth: 129.9 degrees.
But one reason “forest management”
sounds like an evasion is because it also
sounds doable—small, manageable, a mat-
ter of “clearing brush” from your backyard.
In fact, the need for what’s called “con-
trolled burning” to thin the state’s dead-
wood is so large it would dwarf anything
humans have ever seen. In January, a team
of scientists offered an authoritative esti-
mate of how much of California would
have to be burned under human supervi-
sion to stabilize its fire ecology: 20 million
acres. That’s approximately one-fifth of the
state—an area roughly the size of Maine.
But the state is falling far, far short.
“Between 1982 and 1998,” writes Elizabeth
Weil of ProPublica, “California agency
land managers burned, on average, about
30,000 acres a year”—about one-600th of
the needed 20 million acres. “Between
1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an
annual 13,000 acres.” A new proposal by
Governor Gavin Newsom calls for burning
fewer than 100,000 acres; a more ambi-
tious proposal, from state and local offi-
cials, aims for only 1 million acres.
“California is built to burn,” the fire his-
torian Stephen Pyne once told me. “It is
built to burn explosively.” Indeed, many
thousands of years ago, millions of acres
burned there each year. But while there is
wisdom in the Indigenous approach to
controlled burning that governed the
region for centuries, the population of thestate before the arrival of Europeans may
have numbered less than 200,000. Today,
it is 40 million, almost all of them people
living in communities defined by sprawl
into what is referred to, not just by scien-
tists but even by locals, as the “wildland-
urban interface.” If you are rooting for a
return to a truly “natural” fire regime in the
state, you are rooting against almost every-
thing we know of as life in California today.
This is why, beyond the immediate
threat of their flames and the eerie conta-
gion of their smoke, the California fires
offer a threefold prophecy of our climate
future. First, however much we do to sta-
bilize the world’s climate, it will not stop
the burning anytime soon. Second, it isn’t
that the land itself can’t survive climate
change but that the conditions of habit-
ability on which we have erected our
sprawling, often unjust civilizations are
being profoundly shaken, even in places
with comparatively little warming. And
third, we have ahead of us the hard work
not only of rapid decarbonization but of
adapting to the new world already made
inevitable by warming— particularly for
the communities, disadvantaged and mar-
ginalized, that always stand most clearly in
the path of climate impacts like wildfire.
Take housing. Since 1990, more than 60
percent of new residential development in
California has been in wildfire-prone
areas—housing for those who can’t afford
to live in Greater L.A. and the Bay Area.
Today, more than 1 million buildings in
the state are vulnerable to wildfires. These
building patterns must stop, and perhaps
even reverse, if the next generations of
Americans are to feel truly safe in their
homes. In parts of the West, there has
been some movement—stricter safety
regulations, for instance, on new homes in
dangerous areas. But in California, where
the threats are bleakest and the housing
market is most pinched, the state’s modest
housing-reform bill, SB50, has failed mul-
tiple times simply because it requires a
paltry increase in housing density. A poli-
tics of genuine climate p rotection—not to
mention climate-based relocation—would
prove far more disruptive.
What is required, climate economist Ger-
not Wagner says, is “a radical rethinking of
how and where we live.” And if our politics
is moving too slowly, in California and else-
where, warming isn’t slowing down to
match it. Indeed, as the unprecedented
burn rate of the Bear Fire shows, precisely
the opposite is happening. “For many, it’s
time to retreat,” climate scientist Michael
Oppenheimer tweeted on Thursday, reflect-
ing on the fires. “What would the cost be?
What’s the cost of not retreating?” ■