Last year, nearly 50 million acres of Siberian taiga burned in one of the largest uncontrolled blazes of this century. Just the year before, 4.4 million acres of forest in California, and earlier a whopping 60 million acres in Australia were rocked by massive wildfires. The year before that, 2 million acres of the Amazon rainforest burned, which was an unprecedented amount for such a humid area. Recently, the world has been rocked by enormous wildfires that fill the atmosphere with smoke and turn the skies red. While wildfires can occur naturally, oftentimes they are inadvertently caused by humans. Small wildfires can actually be healthy for a forest, but at these massive scales, they become huge contributors to deforestation and climate change. Let’s examine what these massive burns mean for the planet and the people who live on it, and what we can do to help. 

Environmental Impacts of Wildfires 

One of the most evident connections between the environment and wildfires is global warming. The gradual global temperature increase makes wildfires more likely to happen, elongating the fire season. Then, when millions of acres of forest burn, massive amounts of CO2 are released into the atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect and continuing the warming of the atmosphere. Just like other types of deforestation, wildfires have an even greater net impact on emissions than just their CO2 output, since they destroy valuable trees that would otherwise absorb some of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide. This feeds into a self-sustaining cycle of warming and burning. 

Wildfires can impact the health of those living near them, too. Wildfires are a major source of air pollution, so much so that they can affect the air quality several thousand miles away from the actual fires. This poor air quality can cause health problems for those in the affected area. Those who already live in areas with poor air quality or who are affected by respiratory conditions like asthma are especially at risk when it comes to smoke exposure. Increased air pollution rates have also been shown to correlate with increased rates of asthma. 

Then, of course, there’s the issue of deforestation. As explained in one of my earlier posts, wildfires make up one of the largest contributors to deforestation, and are responsible for about 23% of global forest lost each year. In the Amazon and the Indonesian rainforest, the vast majority of fires are intentionally started by humans in order to clear trees to use the land for farms or mines. These kinds of intentional burns are immensely wasteful and damaging to the natural environment. Even though they may not be as large as some of the massive naturally occurring blazes, the fact that they are started by humans should make them much more preventable. Furthermore, rainforest trees are not fire-resilient in the slightest – they would never encounter fire naturally in the humid tropical climate – so these burns have a high risk of spreading further than intended and growing into an uncontrollable wildfire. 

Why Some Wildfires are Good  

After reading about all the negative effects of wildfires, it may come as a shock to hear that they can actually have ecological benefits in some cases. When it comes down to it, fire occurs naturally. Wildfires have been happening long before humans started interfering with the affairs of nature, and forests have developed to accommodate and develop from them. Fires clear out dead material on the forest floor and add nutrients to the soil. They can remove established species of plants and give other, less common species a chance to grow in places they could not earlier, improving the biodiversity of the forest. 

In fact, many species of plants actively rely on wildfires in order to reproduce. Consider the pitch pine, whose pinecones only release their seeds when exposed to high levels of heat, so that they have the best chance of growing with little competition in a nutrient rich, post-fire environment. The pitch pine grows to be taller than most of the other trees in the forest so that it has the best chance of being struck by lightning, and its sap, called pitch, is extremely flammable, expressly for this purpose. A healthy forest should burn once in a while. However, when wildfires reach the size of the massive fires we are seeing so frequently today, it is devastating to the ecosystem. Forest fires are only healthy in small doses.  

Preventing Wildfires 

One of the best possible ways of preventing future massive wildfires might be to fight fire with fire. As I just described, small, controlled burns can actually be beneficial to a forest’s health. They also lower the risk of a hugely destructive wildfire from breaking out. Smaller fires remove lots of dry, excess, dead material that would otherwise build up over time. If small fires are constantly suppressed by humans, when the forest eventually catches fire the resulting blaze will be much larger and hotter than normal, and likely cause significant ecological damage.  

Instead, effective forest management should involve regular controlled burns: small, man-made forest fires that are highly monitored and contained to a certain area. This practice has actually existed for thousands of years. Many Native American tribes used controlled burns to renew their forests and keep them healthy long before the colonial settlers arrived. However, for the past 100 years or so, American governments have ignored the traditional approaches to forest management, opting instead to suppress fires whenever they appeared. It’s this kind of practice that leads to the enormous uncontrolled wildfires like in California two years ago. However, things are beginning to move in the right direction. 

Since 2018, the state of California has begun to return to the more traditional methods, greatly increasing the number of prescribed burns conducted on its forests. Although the results have yet to be fully realized, a few more years of this practice could greatly reduce the size of future California wildfires. Unlike other environmental issues, the negative effects of wildfires are not limited to vague, impersonal concepts like habitat destruction and climate change. When a forest burns, the effects are seen and felt by millions. People can see the towering flames, marvel at the crimson skies, and breathe in the smoky, polluted air. Hopefully, this kind of public visibility will bring about much swifter action in curbing wildfires than we’ve seen with other environmental concerns. However, it is important to remember that despite how eye-catching wildfires can be, there are plenty of other less visible environmental issues that should not be overlooked.