{"id":22018,"date":"2020-09-10T06:32:38","date_gmt":"2020-09-10T06:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=22018"},"modified":"2020-09-14T03:11:35","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T03:11:35","slug":"coping-with-western-wildfires-5-essential-reads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/coping-with-western-wildfires-5-essential-reads\/","title":{"rendered":"Coping with Western wildfires: 5 essential reads"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jennifer Weeks<\/a>, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Intense wildfires are raging in California, Oregon and Washington state<\/a>, spurring mass evacuations and leaving charred towns in their wake. A regional heat wave<\/a> is keeping temperatures high and humidity low, creating difficult conditions for firefighters. These five articles from The Conversation\u2019s archive explain what\u2019s driving Western fires and how they\u2019re affecting residents.<\/p>\n

1. Welcome to the Pyrocene Age<\/h2>\n

Many factors have combined to create conditions for today\u2019s epic wildfires, including climate change, land use patterns and decades of fire suppression.<\/p>\n

Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne<\/a>, a historian of fire, argues that Earth may be \u201centering a fire age<\/a> comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lakes, periglacial outwash plains, mass extinctions and sea level changes. It\u2019s an epoch in which fire is both prime mover and principal expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

This transition reflects how humans interact with the land and how they use fire, Pyne writes. Humans believed that they could contain fire on the land, as they did in factories. Meanwhile, they burned more fossil fuels, adding to combustion sources. Today, Pyne writes, \u201cThe climate is unhinged. When flame returns, as it must, it comes as wildfire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Map<\/a>
More than 100 large fires were burning in 12 Western states on Sept. 10, 2020.<\/span>
\nNational Interagency Fire Center<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

2. Climate change\u2019s fingerprint<\/h2>\n

While climate change isn\u2019t the only driver of Western fires, Kevin Trenberth<\/a>, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, sees its influence clearly. Typically, lightning, power lines or poorly doused campfires ignite these conflagrations \u2013 but climate change is making the U.S. west hotter and dryer, and thus more prone to burn.<\/p>\n

Water \u201cacts as the air conditioner of the planet,\u201d Trenberth explains. \u201cIn the absence of water, the excess heat effects accumulate on land both by drying everything out and wilting plants, and by raising temperatures. In turn, this leads to heat waves and increased risk of wildfire<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because scientists can estimate how much extra heat climate change is adding to the atmosphere, its role in creating conditions for wildfires is clear, Trenberth argues. Researchers who study climate and fire have observed these trends playing out in the West, with longer fire seasons and more destructive fires since the 1980s<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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3. Treating wildfires like earthquakes<\/h2>\n

Californians have lived for decades with the risk of earthquakes. Now, in the view of University of California Santa Barbara scholars Max Moritz<\/a>, Naomi Tague<\/a> and Sarah Anderson<\/a>, they need to think about wildfire risk in the same way.<\/p>\n

This means taking long-term steps, such as limiting development in the wildland-urban interface<\/a>, where homes and businesses adjoin fire-prone undeveloped areas; retrofiting homes to make them more fire-resistant; and improving evacuation planning and warming systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cFollowing the roadmap for earthquakes, from seismic planning to earthquake retrofitting to education campaigns, the state can move the response to wildfire from reactive fighting to comprehensive preparedness<\/a>,\u201d the authors assert.<\/p>\n