You can’t lecture the fire.
Earth Force was founded a year and a half ago to reduce future wildfire severity; to help prepare landscape scale forests for the healthy resumption of the fire return intervals of low intensity fire to which they are adapted. We join the legions of communities and organizations already chasing this shared goal of avoiding the worst future fire outcomes and enabling a multitude of forest objectives. We are all talking about fire and smoke this week because millions of people on the US Eastern Seaboard are presently being exposed to the possible day to day future where megafires become more frequent. Everyone downwind, please be safe. Everyone under evacuation order throughout Canada — we wish for better fortunes ahead for yourselves and your communities in this ongoing crisis.
This week we have to individually do what we must to keep ourselves safe — wear your mask, change your filters, deploy a box-fan-filter in your home (or school) to improve your air quality. Do whatever you need to improve health and safety in your place and space; the wind will change and this cloud will pass (though the fires are likely to burn until winter in those remote locations). But while the winds are blowing smoke in your direction tie a string around your finger to remind yourself after the moment has passed to think about how we got here and how we can avoid this kind of crisis becoming an annual event.
Eleven years ago, the Washington Smoke Blog was created to coordinate statewide community engagement and awareness on air-quality and fire risk — they’ve got a lot of great tips on how to improve your air quality and stay safe in smoke weather. In the intervening years it has become the thing you always turn to as August moves into September and the smoke season arrives. We’ve all just kind of accepted it as the way things are now, but this is not inevitable and it doesn’t have to be this way. This year the smoke blog opened up on May 18th as wildfire smoke blew down out of Alberta into Washington. This current East Coast smoke event is another chance to recognize that it isn’t normal and we don’t have to accept it as such. We’re seeing massive smoke, and extreme fire behavior on the ground, that would have been movie fiction a decade ago. High severity fire today isn’t like it was a few years ago; a mere 75% tree mortality in a high severity fire of yore would be much preferred to 100% mortality moonscapes, topsoil burning, landscapes becoming hydrophobic, seedbeds being compromised, and rains washing whole mountainsides into streams creating massive fish-kill events. Of course, all that biomass goes up into the air we breathe as particulates that damage health and wellness for everyone living downwind.
What we can do, even if we aren’t personally under this smoke cloud today, is to get involved and help out. This crisis in Northern Alberta (and BC, and NWT, and Quebec, and Nova Scotia, and Chile earlier this year and Russia last year and variously in France, Spain, Australia, Indonesia, etc. etc. etc.) is driving home the point that we are all in this together. We can remind our government(s) that we care about clean air and water. We can affirm our support for the efforts to change the way we manage our wildlands, both above and below the border. We can remind our elected officials of promises made and not yet kept (Support Tim’s Act, text here), while thanking them for their initial efforts increasing funding for proactive management activities.
Above all we can change the mix of how we deal with this challenge from one of suppression to one of mitigation and preparation. Today it is 100x easier to spend money fighting a fire than preparing for a fire — everyone is an environmentalist until their house is burning down.
Fires thrive on alignment of landscape characteristics like temperatures, humidity, wind, fuels, and slopes. We’ve got two big buckets of mitigation to address those, one relatively fast and narrow and one relatively slow and broad:
1) Remove the fuel — Actively reduce and remove biomass from our forests. Without fire to pick winners and losers we have too many trees competing for too little light, water, and resources. These stressed survivors are more prone to disease, pest, and yes fire. When they go the cycle builds towards more severe fires more frequently.
2) Lower the temperature — Stop burning fossil fuels. The climate is hotter, more energetic (lightning starts, wind assisted growth), and more extreme and we’ve pushed forest systems to the breaking point. All of these things are driven by fossil fuel emissions, to the first order.
20% of the conifer forests in California no longer fit the habitat they live in, exemplifying the two effects of not enough fire and too much CO₂. Even if we cannot directly do everything ourselves and in our situation, we can stop enabling and subsidizing practices and industries that are actively harming the survivability of our forests and communities. Individual action is nice, but collective action changes the world. Let’s try for good changes going forward.
Environmentally speaking, the fires in Northern Alberta are a really big deal, and the 1600% increase in acres burned is a story so big it’ll take a while to work its way into the discourse. Fires at high latitudes put massive soil carbon reserves at risk (see above and remember the Washington border with Canada is the 49th parallel, these northern fires are up near 60 degrees — right in the massive soil carbon reservoir). A fire in a boreal forest or peat bog isn’t just liberating a few hundred years of living carbon from the burning trees but tens of thousands of years of accumulated carbon as the topsoil (topbog?) burns. These locations can lose a meter of soil in a high severity fire — that all goes back into the air, and of immediate relevance, into our communities and cities where we can experience nightmare orange skies for ourselves.
We know that preparation pays a multiple of avoided damage for each dollar invested, while response represents additional cost on a loss already occurring, yet it is far easier to spend on response than on mitigation. We need to collectively stop pulling people out of the river and walk up the stream to deal with the person who keeps throwing them in. In theory and aspiration, we can set out to do both, though in practice the the rescue operation of active response starves preparation for resources — people can only focus on so much.
The costs of wildfire are widely and wildly under-reported. This summary (Reduce Wildfire Risks or We’ll Pay More for Fire Disasters) from 2015 probably looked alarmist at the time, but that’s how non-linear growth rates work. This week folks have noted that estimates of climate change cost and impact do not include air quality effects, and also reminded each other that inhalation of PPM2.5 is bad at every level (no safe threshold). The thing we can say with confidence is that we are lowballing the costs and impacts.
If this Bladerunner sky is getting you down, and it should, make a point to do something specific about it one month from now. Write it down. Hold yourself to account. What we’re seeing, clearly day after day and year after year, is that the environment isn’t sitting on its hands while we sort ourselves out. The environment will perform a hard ecosystem reset in these at-risk woodlands if we don’t get to them first and prepare them for what is coming. High severity fires in California have led to loss of 30% of conifer area — that means the impacted ecosystems no longer support evergreen trees over the course of the last 10 years. The problem here isn’t that a fire started, these are fire adapted ecosystems and many of these forest elements depend on fire; the new problem is that any fire start can turn into an ecosystem or community obliterating firestorm (like Paradise, California or Lytton, BC) despite our most stringent and comprehensive response efforts.
Not wanting to end on a down note, I’ll point out that we (collectively) know specific things we can do to help, even if no one thing solves every part of the problem in every place the problem exists. We still can’t ask the fire to follow our best burning practices guidance, but we can prepare the ground and our communities for much better fire outcomes in the future (and some communities and groups have a lot more experience at this than others). The landscapes we do work on may still burn severely in the most extreme conditions (Lytton reported 121F the day before the fire swept through, and that fire created more lightning strikes in 48 hours than Canada usually receives across the whole country in a full year), but on every other day of the year those landscapes will have a fighting chance to get the fire they need instead of a catastrophic fire that consumes everything and swaps a cherished forest for a ghostly moonscape.
Earth Force, specifically, is on the ground providing hardware and software to help manage and accelerate fuel reduction work in the American West.
We have some skin in this game… we believe we all do.
