© Wikimedia CommonsFILE PHOTO: Documents show disingenuous American manipulation in order to maintain hegemony
In the last decade, mega-wildfires have become routine news. In 2015, fires burned a record 10 million acres of U.S.
wildlands, and
5.5 million burned in 2016, including major fires in California and a blaze that started in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that damaged 2,400 buildings in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and killed 14 people. While wildfires are a natural phenomenon usually sparked by lighting, it turns out the recent destruction isn't all Mother Nature's fault. A new study shows that 84 percent of wildfires in the United States are started
intentionally by humans or by human activity.
According to a
press release, researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder's Earth Lab took a deep dive into the U.S. Forest Service's Fire Program Analysis-Fire Occurrence Database, analyzing all wildfires recorded between 1992 and 2012. The researchers found that humans caused more than 1.2 million of the 1.5 million blazes in the database.
The cost of those human-induced fires is staggering. The researchers estimate that man-made fires have tripled the average fire season over the past 21 years from 46 days to 154 days. It now costs over $2 billion per year to fight the fires, and that figure does not include the impacts to recreational lands or local economic impact that fires can have.
"We are playing a really substantial role in shifting fire around," Jennifer Balch, fire ecologist at the Earth Lab and lead author of the study in
PNAS, tells
Christopher Joyce at NPR. "I think acknowledging that fact is really important particularly right now when we have evidence that climate is changing, and climate is warming, and that fires are increasing in size and the fire season is increasing."
Thomas Swetnam, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona who studies forest fires, tells
Doyle Rice at
USA Today that it's not necessarily the case that more people are maliciously setting fires or that Smokey Bear has failed in his mission to educate the public. Instead, Swetnam says that climate change is the biggest driver of increased fires. An increase in drought, fuel buildup in unburned forests, earlier springs and higher temperatures are all contributing to more combustible forests. So the same actions that might have caused a small, easily extinguished fire decades ago are now creating dangerous infernos.
"[This is a] very well done study," he said. "We have known for a long time that fires set by people are an extremely important factor in the wildfire problems, but this study shows in detail how important people are in lengthening the fire season and contributing to increasing numbers of large wildfires."
Rice reports that debris burning starts the most human-caused fires, at 29 percent, with arson the cause of 21 percent of fires. Equipment use causes 11 percent of fires, while campfires and children playing with fireworks or matches each cause 5 percent of fires. The Fourth of July, predictably, is the biggest day for wildfires, with 7,762 fires ignited on that date over the 21-year study period.Balch tells Joyce that there is a solution. She suggests conducting more prescribed burns on forest land to decrease the amount of fuel in the forests after 100 years of fire suppression.
Before I lived in Utah, the MSM always blamed forest fires on smokers. Smoking is against the Mormon religion, so the narrative changes once you're inside the state border, and blames campers.
While I was growing up in NZ, we often had smoke from Aussie wildfires drifting over the Tasman and causing haze over NZ. People didn't think Aussies had deliberately gone out into the bush to start fires - it's an enormous place with very sparse vegetation. Has no one ever seen lightning start a fire?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? I notice this article has no anecdotes of people admitting to letting their campfire get away from them and either not noticing it or not having enough water to put it out!!??!! And I don't know about you, but my experience with fire has been that under most conditions it's not that easy to get a fire going, much less get out of your control, unless you're very drunk. Just try getting a fire going after you've fallen in a river on a chilly Fall day!
In Africa, apparently rhinos go around putting out fires in terrain very similar to the Aussie bush. Are we supposed to believe they wouldn't have developed this behavior if there weren't any humans about starting fires?
What's with this blame thing anyway? It seems every catastrophe that occurs is human-caused. The average person is apparently so powerful that together we caused rich, large, multi-national corporations to unwillingly pollute the whole world with noxious chemicals and unbiodegradable substances and plough under all arable farm land for cities. (It had nothing to do with corporations wanting to make obscene amounts of money, oh no.) Together, we have apparently changed the climate of an entire planet. (Never mind that the sun is much bigger and more powerful than all of us put together.) All this blaming of the average person is so Catholic! If the Inquisition didn't get you, here, try this to destroy your mind.