This new normal of near-constant wildfire smoke annoys me as much as the next person. But it serves as a reminder that we share one fragile atmosphere that we’re collectively screwing up. Fruitless to waste all this energy pointing fingers like children when we should be joining hands to fix this. It’s like nature’s warning signal.
Whether it be wildfire smoke, a global pandemic, or heat waves, nature know no geopolitical borders. So maybe instead of squabbling over whose smoke is whose, we could acknowledge that we’re all in this smoldering mess together. We only have one planet to live on, and we only have one atmosphere to breathe from.
(just food for thought)
It’s actually a normal natural process that needs to happen. It’s the only way Lodgepole Pines regenerate for instance (their pods need heat to crack open to release seeds). This is actually a healthy thing, for the environment anyways. Fires aren’t bad, it’s the methods we use to intervene and plan, and our development planning that’s the real issue.
The size of these fires aren’t good though.
When people talk about fires being good for an ecosystem they are talking about smaller fires where afterwards biodiversity is able to recover. With individual fires as large as we’re having it takes a very long time for biodiversity to recover.
Yup! I recently read about aboriginal tribes doing controlled burns during the winter, rainy seasons etc. They even noticed certain plants would grow more afterwards, attract certain animals etc
And is it winter , or rainy or controlled ATM ?
Hey I don’t mean to nitpick but the preferred term nowadays is “First Nations”, thank you
while you are not wrong, there isn’t really anything else we can do. At this point the best thing to do - because it is the only thing feasible - is let the first burn, and then start over by doing the regular burns that forests need. We know from other fires that forests tend to recover a lot faster than you would expect and so in a decade we will have healthy forests again.
Sure, if you can put in a large fire break across a province/state and burn just one side this year, and the other side next year that would be good. However both need to burn and there is no way to do just a small area every year and catch up to where the forests need to be.
Yes one or two wild fires every few years are part of natural process, but what going on RN is way out of scale and add to the already not natural pressure we put on forest regeneration.
We’ve been suppressing fires for decades, allowing underbrush to build up creating even worse conditions for fires.
Either we let it burn, or make a conscious effort to clean up the underbrush ($$$). There is nothing we can do to reverse climate change fast enough to stop this.
I think you’re right in a micro sense. People are probably downvoting you because this logic is generally an opening volley by climate change deniers to argue that everything that’s happening now is natural.
A fire isn’t bad, giant fires that burn huge swathes of land because higher than normal temps have dried the land to tinder are kinda bad. And we need to recognize that the higher than normal temps are the result of fossil fuel burning at an insane rate (sorry for the reddit link, need someone to rehost this great graphic over here!)
In combination with poor forestry fire management. Which is essentially what I was getting at.
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No, not like this.
These fires we have now, and have had for the last few years, do have a historical event we can look back on, albeit with dread.
The Permian Extinction. One of the characteristics of it was apparently forest fires on this scale.
The Permian extinction was caused by the basaltic flood eruptions that created the Siberian Traps, with a volume of four million cubic kilometers of lava. That’s not happening here.
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