The western United States is burning.
This year’s damaging experience is just the latest in a recent series of devastating wildfire seasons, a trend that will only likely increase over the coming years.
Over the last few decades, and especially since 2000, the wildfire season is getting longer, with more fires, bigger fires, and more damaging fires. Even before the end of this year’s season, 600,000 acres have burned in California, and almost a million acres each in Oregon and Washington. More than five million acres were destroyed in the boreal forests of Alaska. We are on track to have the most devastating fire season ever.
More than eight million acres have burned in six of the years since 2000. There are two main reasons behind the growing conflagrations. The first is the legacy of fire suppression polices that snuff out fires as they appear, but leads to the build-up of fuel that is the raw material for larger, more devastating fires.
The second is climate change, which is making the West hotter and drier. The higher temperatures wick away moisture from the trees, making them more combustible. The combination of more combustible material and a hotter, drier climate leads to more fires.
But in contrast to this obvious rise of risk and vulnerability, there are also other forces at work, often ignored in the popular national media. Fires make for great images. The intense media coverage focuses on images of destruction, tales of heroism, and narratives of community resiliency. The fires are depicted as malevolent forces emerging from the forest to attack the innocent.
As an academic who studies the environmental stresses on society, I’ve dug into the costs and responses to forest fires. What I’ve found is that discussions on this topic often lack any sense of the social and political context of these fires—and how our policies are worsening the damage and increasing the cost.
Building Deeper Into the Woods
A number of economic practices and social issues are exacerbating our forest fire problems.
The first is the enlargement of what is known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI). More people are building homes in the interface close to the wildlands and forests. Since 1970, there has been a 50 percent increase in the low-density housing that borders state and federal wildlands. And the majority occurs in areas subject to increasing risk of fire. California has almost five million housing units in the WUI.
