The Camp Fire & Wildfires: Understanding Environmental Science

“Fire on the Mountain”

As I may have mentioned before, I like science.  And most especially I like environmental science, since that’s what I’m studying in school.  Something that I like to think I’m decently good at is making science approachable to a broader audience, so that one doesn’t have to wade through research article after research article to get to the meat of the issue.  Or at least I hope I’m good at that, since I’m going to try it out now. 

To be fair, I’ve got a lot of informational ideas on my mind tonight.  This may be a misstep on the way to something better, and rather unlike the other posts I’ve made before.  I’m still trying to work out the kinks of this thing that I call a blog, and what I’ll post, when, and how it’ll be formatted.  But I think this is all important, timely information.  It may be dry, but it’s those dry things that catch on fire.

I want to kind of start a series about making environmental science more appealing to general readers, and maybe along the way tell some fun stories about Darwin, Muir, Keeling, Leopold, and other such notable figures of environmental science.  And who knows, I might branch out into other fields, too. I really like epidemiology, or the study of disease, and boy would I like to tear Richard Preston a new one.

But today, let’s start timely, with the confusingly named Camp Fire.  You’ve probably heard about it, and for good reason; it set the awful capstone of California’s 2018 wildfire season and now has the grisly honor of being the deadliest wildfire in California recorded history, with over 85 official deaths and about a dozen individuals still missing.  And that’s only the official count.

Not only that, the fires raged for about the entire month of November, cancelling school, business, and life in general for a huge swathe of territory.  The fire is thankfully now fully contained and no longer poses a threat to the area.  For this season.  Because, inevitably, there will be a worse one sooner or later.

What is a wildfire, exactly? Well, the simple answer is exactly what the name sounds like; a fire that has gone wild.  Or, I suppose a more accurate description would be this; a fire that burns the wild, as opposed to a house fire, grease fire, or rings of fire. The more complicated answer isn’t actually all that more complicated; to quote Wikipedia, the god of knowledge, a wildfire is “a fire in an area of combustible vegetation occurring in rural areas.”  It’s trees on fire.  Just like Smokey Bear warned us about.

There is a lot of science behind wildfires.  There are whole college degrees in it.  Entire branches of research are dedicated to studying it and controlling it.  People spend their entire lives watching for it.  Or at least the better part of a summer in 1989.  But the basics of it, as I understand them, boil down to this; when a region is dry for a significant part of the year, any sort of spark that can catch dry plants aflame is dangerous.

Wildfire spreads like, well, wildfire. It can burn at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, cover millions of acres, and travel uphill, downhill, and across fields and forests at anywhere from 10 to 20 miles per hour.  In fact, it even travels faster uphill.  There are grass fires, forest fires, crown fires, surface fires, shrub fires, prairie fires, ladder fires, bush fires, and plenty of others.  It’s destructive, dangerous, and deadly.  And also our partially fault.

While wildfires have been recorded in the fossil record as early as 400 million years ago, and are an entirely natural process, most wildfires that we see today are human-caused or human-aggravated. While the most common natural triggers of wildfire are lightning and volcanic eruptions, the underlying factor between all of them is a dry climate.  And northern California, due to plenty of factors include air parcel movement and differences between pressure over the sea and pressure over land, is incredibly dry for most of the summer.

This is a natural thing, but we, as humans, are making it a lot worse.  I’ll go into a lot about climate change at some point, but the gist of it is this; primarily because of the burning of fossil fuels, the conversion of natural land, electricity production, and agriculture, we are warming the atmosphere at an unnatural rate.  And this is going to make things hotter.  The summers will be hotter, and the winter will be shorter.  This will allow more and more woodland to dry out in places that have chronically dry summers, like California.  Which leads to a larger risk of fire, and when those fires burn, it leads to larger, faster, deadlier wildfires.  Which is exactly what we’re seeing.

California doesn’t know quite yet what started this November’s huge fires.  But they know for sure it wasn’t the unraked leaves.  The current belief is that it was caused by faulty power line that was producing sparks in an exceedingly dry area.  And this is the trend that we’re seeing; not an increase in wildfires due to natural causes, but due to human causes.  We move in to forested areas, develop them with houses and utilities, and then those utilities have some sort of problem and burn everything to the ground.  And when they do, it’s the people living there who pay the price.

Untended campfires, hot ashes, coals, lit cigarette butts, sparking power lines, faulty wiring, arson, industrial waste, and more are just some of the many, many human causes of wildfire.  And while wildfire is a natural part of plenty of environments, including the prairies that once covered my home state of Illinois, they’re becoming more and more destructive because we’re moving into areas prone to wildfires, and aren’t properly managing ourselves.  The best way to control wildfires is to make sure they don’t get out of control in the first place; that is, don’t throw your cigarette butt out the window, you dirty heathen.  Smokey Bear’ll tell you where you can throw it.

And this is becoming worse, this human encroachment into wild, dry territory.  It’s putting people at risk, and the rest of the world is aggravating it with continued pollution, which leads to continued drought.  But, like any problem, there are solutions.  As ironic as it may seem, one of the most effective solutions for preventing wildfires (besides healthy outdoor practices) is controlled burning of dry areas, something that my father, a forest ranger, is very familiar with. Our county has practiced prescribed burning for years.

One of the largest problems with people moving into these dry areas, besides the fact that they and their property are now in nature’s line of sight, is that it allows brush to accumulate. It stops the natural burning and removal of dry brush, which instead builds up until it catches fire and launches these catastrophic disasters.  So, instead, one proposal is to manage forests in a way that more closely mirrors healthy ecosystems, which includes the controlled use of small burns, preventing enough fuel from building up before the whole place explodes.

All things considered, these wildfires are less of a problem for the ecosystems.  Trees will regrow.  Animals will migrate.  These fires, however, end up as more of a problem for the people.  It’s absolutely heartbreaking to hear that so many people died in this most recent fire, far more people than there should have been.  In a perfect world, there wouldn’t have been any deaths.  My condolences go out to those that lost their homes in this fire, or were displaced by the evacuation.  I can’t imagine what it would be like, to lose one’s entire livelihood to this blazing inferno.  It’s a human disaster in every sense of the word.

But the issue is that this isn’t going to change any time soon.  It’ll happen next year.  Probably in California.  Definitely somewhere in the country.  And it’ll happen the year after that.  Wildfire has been here before us, and it’ll be here after us.  Billy Joel was right; we didn’t start the fire, and we can’t stop it, either.  We have to live with it and adapt, as our climate gets worse and the brush piles keep growing. We can’t go back now.  Our only course of action is to learn from this and go forward.  The next time that you’re out in the woods and see one of those fire danger signs, pay very close attention to it.  Or next year’s Camp Fire could be your fault.