The smoking hot history of wildfire.

Wildfires have been going on since before civilization began. We can trace their impact back to the dinosaurs and early recorded human history. But that’s not really what we’re interested in: we’re interested in when humans became the target. 

Today, thousands of people are displaced, hurt, and killed due to the disastrous effects of wildfires. They have become massive, uncontrollable natural disasters, going on for days, weeks, and even months.

They destroy hundreds of thousands of structures every year, cause billions of dollars in damage, and we still continue to fight them. But why? 

Wildfires are the only natural disasters that we continue to fight. You’ve probably never heard of anyone trying to “fight” a hurricane or “fight” a flood. It just doesn’t happen. So why do we have teams of people dedicated to the offensive position instead of the defensive? Why isn’t prevention more considered? These are the questions we’re going to answer today.

Let’s go back to where all of this really started.

Yes, wildfires have always been around but in the past, they’ve only really started in long periods of drought and increased temperature. Our Earth had normal warm and cool periods that heightened different disasters and this kept things in balance. The trees would burn and new ones would take their place and in the next hundred years, there would be another fire to wipe most of them out again. It was a way to keep the forests biodiverse, healthy, and allowed strong trees to continue to grow despite the adversity they faced in the dry periods.

Fast forward to when humans became the boss, we come to expansion. Humans began to cut down trees and clear land for agriculture and living spaces. We began experimenting with fire and burning charcoal for fuel. We went through all the normal warm and cool periods and faced a lot of issues but eventually faced and conquered everything that came our way. That brings us to the 20th century, where the technological age finally swept the nation and we were on our way to a new bright future. 

That is, until Big Burn.

The Great Fire of 1910 shocked America to its core. Commonly known as the Big Blowup or The Devil’s Broom Fire, it blew through over three million acres across the Northwest United States and Canada, barreling through Idaho, Montana, Washington, British Columbia, and a multitude of national forests. Big Burn killed 87 people and only lasted a total of two full days, spreading multiple smaller fires all over the Northwest. 

The cause of the fire was unknown but many were said to believe it was caused by the extreme heat and the period of severe drought that took place the season before. These things were relatively common; a fire blows through an area every hundred years or so and creates new life, rejuvenating an area.

There was just one problem: people. People were now living in places that were previously untouched by technology and interaction. Now, they were all in danger and they didn’t even know it until it was too late. Thousands of people lived in the Northwest by this time and all were heavily impacted by the fire’s wrath. 

And so the United States Forest Service (USFS) came up with a brilliant plan to make sure no one was ever harmed by fire ever again. Put out every fire in sight.

From the Work Projects Administration Poster Collection. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division

The USFS, previously underprepared and underdeveloped since being overtaken by the mining and forestry units, suddenly got flooded with enough capital to make this vision a reality. They had previously developed a plan to do just this but suffered to get the money they needed until this moment, where they seized control and suddenly put firefighters more than double the population of Idaho into action. 

These firefighters and the Forest Service worked under the “10am policy”, with a goal of extinguishing all fires by 10am the morning after they submitted a sighting. And this worked wonders! Fires seemed to become less of an issue as decades passed, with more and more people moving to the West and having less and less of a problem with wildfires. Not only that, but the people demanded more. With the rise of climate change activism and pushback against fossil fuels and harmful vegetation practices, people demanded the government step in. 

And since then, we’ve had millions of campaigns worldwide that have instituted things like “planting trees for every dollar donated” and using less pesticides and growing organic food and sustainability summits for forestry. All eyes are on us to make things more “green”, including our forests. When you picture a forest, you envision luscious trees as far as the eye can see. You look around and not a single part of the mountain isn’t covered by them. This is the image we’ve all been painted by our peers and mentors.

But that was just the smoke that led to the source. The real problem was brewing beneath the surface and we were all suddenly aware of it in the summer of 2017. 

2017 was the worst wildfire season on record at the time. There were almost 10,000 individual fires that burned 1.5 million acres of land and hurt or killed over 80 people. The damage was higher than the previous 10 years combined and more than 10,000 structures were completely totaled. This year was completely unprecedented, with California receiving heavy rains that season and the drought being temporarily halted. In the next five years, some of the deadliest fires on record (13 of the top 20) would happen, with 2018 and 2020 being among the worst. Billions of dollars in damages would accrue every year, debt would skyrocket, the USFS would be unequipped to handle the severity of the disasters, and chaos would ensue. 

We would be utterly powerless once again.

So let’s trace back our steps. Why, after everything we’ve done, could this have happened? We’re doing everything we can to plant more trees, be more environmentally friendly, employ more people to fight more fires. What are we doing wrong?

Remember when I discussed the natural balance of the forests? Things burn one year, they regrow the next hundred, and the cycle continues? We’ve completely upset that balance. After the 1910 fire, we began to up our defense and stopped the natural patterns of nature. Even small fires were extinguished before they could burn any remaining fuel on the forest floor, leaving there to be more dead brush, broken branches, and extra plant matter around for years and years until it got too hot.

On top of that, our planting efforts have gone through the roof and poor forest management has caused our natural world to be overgrown, densely populated, and straight up unhealthy. Despite our best efforts, climate change has continued to grow and become an anxiety-inducing concern for many Americans. And in spite of this, we haven’t shifted our efforts to preventing wildfire. We’ve continued to fight and it makes no sense.

Now, we have an exhausting amount of fuel on the ground, wildfires that are the biggest and most powerful we’ve ever seen, and over 16 million homes in high-risk areas, with the majority of them not having the proper amount of defensible space needed to protect themselves.

We need to shift the priority over to creating a safe zone, investing in evacuation and home hardening, and taking accountability for the places we chose to live. 

There is always a price to pay for living in a beautiful area. We can’t continue to make that price our homes, our livelihoods, and the ones we love.