Wildfires Are Growing, And Firefighters Have Never Been this Scared
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While I’m not an emotional desert, few things tear me up. But put me in front of anything to do with pained animals, and you may as well start dialing the insurance company; serious water damage is about to go down. Then this documentary happened, and now you can add firefighters and climate change to the list of things that make Hannah teary-eyed. Our land is in grave danger, and, for the most part, we’re just watching the shit hit the fan.
Firefighters—those machine-like folk we deem indestructible—are admitting fear. Fires are burning at unfamiliar levels, making the men and women fighting them question whether they will in fact be retuning home. The whirls they’re facing are as tall as the tallest trees, and sometimes the smoke’s so thick they can only act upon sound. These fires didn’t exist twenty years ago, and they didn’t rage with such intensity back then. What’s changed? The climate, for starters.
Drought-stressed trees, earlier spring thaws, higher than normal temperatures, and increased fuel loads – fire mitigation policies have left forests loaded with thick vegetation that would have been burned out had fires been allowed to occasionally burn naturally – have grossly affected the fire landscape. 10-day fires used to seem long, but now firefighters are tackling burns lasting months, even seasons. Worse yet, wildfires are no longer seasonal; they’re a year-round ordeal.
And with federal and state budgets for wildfire mitigation constraining how much outfits like the Forest Service can do, the problems leading to wildfires are compounding.
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Recent wildfires, namely in Colorado, have been beastly record breakers, and they're surprising firefighters on too regular a basis. Surprise is what kills in the firefighting industry. The bummer news? Every year, it just gets worse; fire's erratic behavior isn't mellowing out, and it isn't going to until the human-planet dynamic changes.
Firefighters have heroic jobs, but they’re humans, and their lives aren’t worth risking for infrastructure. Fires these days are beyond the professionals’ capability to manage, and that’s frightening. The risks these men and women take are unacceptable, and they’re doing it because of us, and for us. Don’t be a bystander–the choices we make today directly influence our future climate, and thus the future jobs of hard workers like these.
Now go hug a tree–and a firefighter, too.
