Karthik Srinivasan<p>Long read on the wildfires, and the state of the environmental crises. Truly damning. Read the whole article! <br>(HT <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://fediscience.org/@DrYohanJohn" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>DrYohanJohn</span></a></span> )</p><p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/540fa28d-9590-4ea2-99d7-453e3e2c3086" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">ft.com/content/540fa28d-9590-4</span><span class="invisible">ea2-99d7-453e3e2c3086</span></a></p><p>"In fact, the smoke may be so bad the planes can’t even fly. And the water drops may evaporate before they even touch the flames. “It’s like spitting on a campfire. We waste so much money on these large fires that would be much better spent on prevention, mitigation and preparedness,” says Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Canada’s Thompson Rivers University."</p><p>"Indigenous peoples burnt land to promote certain species or to clear land for livestock. According to a 2007 study by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, Native Americans burnt an average of 1.8mn hectares a year in California alone. “Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period,” the scientists wrote."</p><p>"When European settlers arrived in California and elsewhere, they prohibited deliberate fires. The historian Stephen Pyne dates this preference to the Enlightenment, which had made open fire unfashionable: “Open burning reeked of superstition and magic; it was deemed dangerous and unnecessary.” Moreover, temperate Europe, including Britain and Germany, is one of the few regions that hasn’t had fire at its heart. Northern Europeans viewed open fire as an aberration and a risk. "</p><p>"Our control of fire was a Pyrrhic — or pyric — victory. The forests got thicker. The climate got warmer. The fires got bigger. In the US, this has been linked to the rise in people living near the forest, people leaving cities like San Francisco for cheaper, more spacious housing. But in Europe, a contrasting trend is at play. In Portugal, Spain and Italy, people have been leaving the countryside for cities. Those that remain tend to be older. Small-scale farming, which helped limit the spread of wildfires, is no longer profitable. Plots of lands that produced olives or food for livestock have been taken over by trees. This forest regeneration has been seen as an environmental success story. But given the warming climate, it created a tinderbox."</p><p>"This is where prescribed burning comes in. Castellnou, the Catalan forest fire chief, likens it to a vaccine: “Just as in medicine, a vaccine contains the same disease to create resistance. We need to vaccinate our forests.” Prescribed fires are generally carried out in the cooler months, when the vegetation is packed with water, so that the fire can be brought under control. "</p><p>"In North America, wildfires have damaged areas that were meant to serve as carbon offsets. In Europe too. “Nowadays, there’s this movement to plant trees to store carbon, which I think is another mistake because they will burn, at least in southern Europe and also progressively in northern Europe,” says Portugal’s Paulo Fernandes. “We cannot really trust forest plantations to store carbon.”"</p><p><a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/ClimateChange" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateChange</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/GlobalWarming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GlobalWarming</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/Wildfires" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Wildfires</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/EnvironmentalCrises" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>EnvironmentalCrises</span></a></p>