Why Read: From the wildlands of the western United States to the rolling vineyards of Provence, we are engulfed in flames. This week, we dive into why the flames are reaching so high, and what we can do to attempt adaptation in the face of such fury. - era

I'd rather fight 100 structure fires than a wildfire. With a structure fire you know where your flames are, but in the woods it can move anywhere; it can come right up behind you. - Tom Watson, Pend Oreille County Fire District 4 [Washington]

It is known that wildfires behave unpredictably - this is fundamental - but it is my experience that humans in the presence of wildfire are also likely to behave in aberrant and unpredictable ways. - Michael Leunig, Australian Poet and Cartoonist

The world is on fire.

With each passing year, the accelerating climate apocalypse is exacerbating fire conditions faster than anyone had projected. Yes, we knew what was coming, but few foresaw just how fast these flames would run. Now, we face a new era of our own making.

We have entered the Age of the Inferno.

When I was a young man, I joined my local volunteer fire department. Beginning with wildland training and moving along to structural (the science and art of fighting fires in buildings) was a coterie of lessons in humanity's fragile, wobbling stance on this Earth. Tales of veteran crews of hotshots being brutally burned were drilled into us; they were grave enough to stay in one's mind for life.

To this day, I stop for a moment of silence at memorials dedicated to those we have lost in this unending battle to remain safe from runaway flames. The bravery and courage of the men and women who fight our fires is unparalleled in our species outside of combat duty.

But fire doesn't care.

Of all the climate effects we have wrought upon ourselves, fire may be the most insidious. With greater and greater conflagrations becoming an ever-present factor across much of the world, especially in the warmer months, this seemed an apt time to address in these pages why this is happening, what we're likely to see down the road, and how to better protect ourselves from the growing threat of flames.

We have become a force of nature. Not long ago, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, forest fires, even earthquakes and volcanic explosions were accepted as "natural disasters or "acts of God."  But now, we have joined God, powerful enough to influence these events. - David Suzuki

There is a cardinal rule for fire's cascading chemical reaction, exemplified by a basic model called the "fire triangle": when you put heat, fuel, and oxygen together, you get fire.

The same model tells us what can be done to stop the flames. Remove any of the three, and the reaction ends. Fires can be smothered, cooled, or have their fuel removed and they will be starved of the things that allow them to continue. A wet blanket, a hose, a removed hedge, or a backburned field - any would serve to create a break in the reaction. They can also slow the speed of increase.

With the fire triangle in mind, it is clear why the changes to our natural environment have created a recipe for disaster. The presence of oxygen is (usually) a given. Meanwhile, we have drastically and unilaterally warmed our planet (heat), caused massive drought while extracting from the water table and our river systems with reckless abandon, and failed to anticipate the consequences while building our homes and cities at the edges of the forests that we have so effectively dried out (fuel).

The list of rising risks could go on and on, from suppressing too many fires over the years and adding to the fuel load in our forests to increasing the factors that start fires (cigarettes, campfires, semi trucks, fireworks).

The results are predictable. According to the Colorado Sun:

Humans cause roughly 84% of wildland fires in the U.S., University of Colorado researchers found in a 2017 review of more than two decades of wildfire data. 

Human-caused fires account for 44% of total land area burned each year, extending the natural fire season by over 100 days and damaging ecosystems that don't naturally experience burning, the researchers found. Natural wildfires are typically started by lightning.

The average annual wildfire count across the U.S. has decreased in recent decades, dropping from 80,303 between 1991-2000 to 62,435 from 2015-2025. However, the average annual burn area has doubled, rising from 3.7 million acres to 7.6 million acres during those same periods.

So, as much as it may seem so, the number of fires isn't increasing. Their severity is. Firefighting efforts have increased because burned acreage has increased. And we are advancing in our efficacy in firefighting - but not fast enough to outrun the advance of the flames.

And this is true not just in the US.

As long as there's fuel to burn, your chances of having large fires increases when you increase temperatures. It's that simple. - Park Williams, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

[Unusual warmth] leads to drying things out quicker. What that means is the fire has to do less work to ignite the vegetation right next to it. And it can spread faster, and it releases energy more quickly. - Neil Lareau, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Nevada, Reno

The temperature is rising, everywhere.

The above chart has global land temperatures now sitting at 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.52 degrees Fahrenheit) over baseline, with that baseline being the 1850-1900 average.

That means land that's hotter than it's ever been. Heat.

Global precipitation patterns, meanwhile, are changing. While a hotter climate means more rainfall, it doesn't mean more rainfall in all areas. So, extreme rain events will continue to plague various places.

But which ones are trending dryer?

Bad news.

Traveling the world map counterclockwise, the following are seeing extreme decreases in annual average precipitation: Canada, Alaska, parts of the American West and Southwest, Central America, Chile, Brazil, much of Central and South Africa, corners of Australia, Indonesia, India, southern China, much of Siberia, and the entire Mediterranean. Even parts of Greenland are drying out, which perhaps explains the country joining the wildfire club this year. This dries out vegetation and provides our second piece of the fire triangle: fuel.

Not only are all these areas currently burning too much, but they will also burn faster and bigger in the coming years. The super El Niño about to really hit this fall will cause all manner of disruption - including extreme rain in some regions and drought in others. Worsening drought in most of these regions around the globe would only serve to exacerbate the situation.

A quick glance at this NASA FIRMS map shows the predicament. Across the Southern Hemisphere (in winter at the moment), countless fires are getting dryer. These are likely almost all brush and clearing fires set on purpose for agriculture. Come summer, those areas that are drying out can easily burn.

The Amazon, for example, regularly sees burning as brush fires get out of control. Major efforts are finally underway to stop human encroachment and burning after an about-face by a Brazilian government now free of the "burn it all" policies of Javier Bolsonaro. And they are leading to great successes: 7.7 million acres (still a massive number, granted) of Amazon rainforest was burned in 2025 - the lowest on record since 2025 and 78.5% less than the previous year. But there are serious concerns that El Niño could change that trend.

Meanwhile, in the Northern Hemisphere, things have gone out of control. Outside of the frontlines of Ukraine, most of those red dots are wildfires. This is already a record year across the Western United States and Western Europe, and the fire seasons aren't nearly over.

BORDEAUX, France - Firefighters battled to control wildfires threatening the French city of Bordeaux on Sunday, while authorities evacuated increasing numbers of people from its suburbs.

The southwestern French region has been hit by wildfires during an intense summer heatwave that has gripped many parts of Europe. Spain has declared a national emergency and a wildfire near Valencia resulted in the death of an elderly man. - Reuters (7/26/26)

In Europe this summer, heat has been the Number 1 factor in mortalities.Some 10,000 souls have been lost from May through July due to the extremity of the heatwaves (ongoing) that have raked the continent without reprieve. Next came the drought, and then came the fire. Heat and fuel.

The burning of homes takes lives in fits and starts - first those of our most vulnerable, then our bravest. Grandparents and young families can't outrun a force they can neither address nor even fully comprehend. Firefighters fall, as they have across the Northern Hemisphere this year, either trying to save others or because fire behavior in these conditions is often unpredictable.

When Spokane, Washington, saw an arson fire this summer (one of three simultaneous wildfires in the region) that burned more than 700 homes, the problem was indicative. The arsonist was obviously criminal. Perhaps he could have been stopped faster - he had, in fact, been picked up by police twice earlier that day - but it was the fire conditions themselves that proscribed that, despite heroic efforts, a swath of the city would be leveled.

We have always had arsonists. We have not always had conditions that enable them to singlehandedly level a city.

And so our homes burn, our cities begin to burn, and our forests burn, ever faster. Hardly anyone perished, thankfully, in the Spokane disaster. But the real damage happens in slow motion.

These fires, particularly when they burn furniture upholstery and electrical appliances, create incredibly toxic smoke. They also poison the land they occur on and the groundwater beneath them. Even the smoke from an "average" wildfire burning only in  stands of trees creates huge amounts of PM 2.5 (particulate matter 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter) pollution in our air. That is 30 times smaller than a strand of hair. What happens when it hits a human lung?

Nothing good.

According to the website of the US EPA:

The health effects of short-term PM_2.5 exposure, and subsequently smoke, can range from relatively minor (e.g., eye and respiratory tract irritation) to more serious health effects (e.g., exacerbation of asthma and heart failure and premature death). In addition, there is initial evidence that short-term smoke exposure may lead to preterm birth (Picciotto et al. 2024) and impact brain function (i.e., cognitive performance as measured through a brain-training game) (Cleland et al. 2022). Fine particles are respiratory irritants, and exposures to high concentrations can lead to persistent coughing, phlegm, wheezing and difficulty breathing. Exposure to PM_2.5 may affect the body's ability to remove inhaled foreign materials, such as viruses and bacteria, from the lungs. For example, some studies have reported an increase in the risk of COVID-19 cases and deaths in response to wildfire smoke exposure (Zhou et al. 2021; Meo et al. 2021; Schwarz et al. 2022). Although most healthy people will recover quickly from smoke exposure, some may experience health effects such as pulmonary inflammation and transient reductions in lung function (U.S. EPA 2019).

Ozone concentrations may also be elevated during wildfire smoke events, but downwind of fires where smoke is less dense and atmospheric conditions are conducive to its formation. Elevated ozone concentrations can lead to a range of respiratory effects such as reductions in lung function, inflammation of the airways, chest pain, coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath - even in healthy people. These effects can be more serious in people with asthma and other lung diseases. Children, older adults and outdoor workers are also at increased risk of experiencing ozone-related health effects (U.S. EPA 2020). There is also limited evidence indicating associations between ozone exposure and other health outcomes, such as cardiovascular effects and premature mortality (U.S. EPA 2020).

In many parts of the world, we have never had so much smoke in our air. We will not know for years to what degree such PM 2.5 and ozone exposure increases lung damage, cancer rates, pulmonary events, asthma attacks, and viral infections. The deaths will be hard to count, but they will be legion.

The Age of the Inferno is nothing if not an era of easily foreseen consequences finally coming home to roost.

Probably most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died [...], those who loved them forever questioning "this unnecessary death," and the rest of us tiring of this inconsolable catastrophe and turning to the next one. - Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Fire changes the chemical composition of everything it touches. Nothing that has burned can be recovered. We must learn to protect our homes by building homes in vulnerable areas with fire-resistant materials, by [keeping] the area surrounding the home free of burnable landscaping and debris, and by keeping fire extinguishers in good working order. - Senior FEMA Official

Mitigation in emergency management can be equated to fire prevention in the fire service, it is doing things that will limit or eliminate a specific threat. When dealing with wildfires in the wildland / urban interface, using FIREWISE concepts has the potential to do as much for homes in danger from wildfire, as residential sprinklers do from the threat of an interior structural fire. - David Halstead, Senior Management Analyst, Florida Division of Emergency Management

They will keep coming, these fires - and will grow with every year. Their severity and resulting trauma will not let up. That much is clear, at this point. Now for the good news. We can do something about it. We can reduce the damage.

Let's start with federal, state, and/or provincial policies before moving to the individual tool kit you personally need for the Age of the Inferno.

On the federal side, we need a few essential things:

Individually, there are many things we can do. Some of these recommendations name specific products, only because your author is already actively using them for the reasons stated herein. They aren't intended to be product placements.

Of the many ways to improve our lot when it comes to the immense dangers of wildfire, I have done my best to offer a few that may just make the biggest difference. There are many more.

If this is the world we must face, doing so with calm, composure, and courage while preparing for our new world is the task. We would do well to channel the likes of author Norman Maclean, who fought fires with the forest service so long ago in the wild and unforgiving mountains of western Montana.

The calm stoicism in the face of danger and hardship so common in the early 1900s is clearly needed again these days, on multiple fronts.

Oh, and while single ignition events are varied and, in the end, hardly matter with conditions as they are, it would still serve us well to cut it out with the fireworks, the random gunfire, the gender-reveal bombs, and the flicked cigarettes. Let's do ourselves a favor and not make it worse.

If we do all of this, maybe - just maybe - we can make this new Age of the Inferno just a little bit less ... infernal.

Your comments are always welcome.

Sincerely,

Evan Anderson

[email protected]