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)
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.