World on Fire

It’s fire season across the country. A few weeks ago, my home state, Massachusetts, looked up and beheld a sepia-yellow sky, like something out of Breaking Bad. You could step outside and smell something burning. Something was, hundreds, thousands of miles away. A flare-up of wildfires across Ontario and far northern Minnesota kicked up a cloud of smoke, moved by jet streams across a wide swath of the Great Lakes, New England, and a significant portion of the Northeast. It was a stark reminder that climate disasters do not respect state lines or national borders—and that our political inaction has far-reaching consequences.

Moreover, other wildfires have been in the news recently. At the beginning of the month, 60,000 people around the city of Spokane, Washington, were evacuated as a wildfire bore down on them, burning 8.2 acres and 600 houses. 390 square miles in Washington state have also been burned by fires. A number of wildfires burning across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah are currently stretching state and federal firefighting resources thin, exposing severe gaps in government funding during a particularly dry summer.

I looked at the hazy, milky sky for those few days in July and wondered how much worse this would get before our lawmakers take decisive action. The frequency of wildfires has been increasing in recent years, despite decades of warnings from the scientific community. According to research conducted by UCLA, forest fires burned ten times as much land in 2024 as they did in 1985, thirty times as many high-severity fires in that same time, and increased amounts of fire spread potential and fire season length. According to NASA, they more than doubled worldwide between 2003 and 2023.

There are several causes for these increases in frequency and severity, and many point directly to systemic policy failures. The most direct is climate change. NASA notes that warmer nighttime temperatures allow fire activity to continue overnight. Climate change also raises temperatures overall. Summer rainfall is lower, and the snow melts earlier in the season, which causes drier weather and longer droughts. These are ripe conditions for wildfire in the right areas during the fire season, and the northwestern US and far eastern Russia and Alaska face the brunt of wildfires as a result. Yet, while the world burns, fossil fuel subsidies remain largely intact, and comprehensive climate legislation continues to stall in Congress.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that wildfires are generally a normal feature of forests. Natural wildfires can clear thick brush and leaf litter, according to the Smokey Bear website, which turns it into nutrient-rich ash to feed plant life. Plants and trees across the country have evolved to withstand natural fires. For thousands of years before colonization, Native Americans deliberately created managed, localized fires for these purposes. After colonial settlement and before the advent of modern ecological science, decades of misguided government fire suppression policies allowed forest debris to grow out of control, making the wildfires that did break out more destructive and violent. This legacy of poor bureaucratic forest management continues in the present day.

To an extent, there are things we can do as people to reduce the risk of wildfire, as Smokey Bear’s famous slogan goes. According to the National Park Service, 85% of wildfires are caused directly by human activity, like leaving campfires unattended, burning uncleared debris and flammable things like firewood piles, tossed cigarette butts, equipment malfunctions, and simple arson. Simply being responsible around fire can do a lot.

However, individual responsibility is not a substitute for robust environmental legislation. The broader conditions that make fires likely regardless of our intentions—the effects of climate change—do not seem likely to go away anytime soon. Until we hold our elected officials accountable and demand systemic reforms, we will simply have to get used to looking up at a yellow sky.

About the Author

Oliver Chi is a leader of the BranchOut! Newton Chapter. As a senior at Newton North High School in Newton, MA, he has a strong interest in history and community involvement. Through AmeriCorps, he assisted with the 2024 election by guiding voters through procedures and supporting the overall process. Oliver is a member of Newton North’s varsity History Team. He wrote an independent research paper on the impact of the War of 1812 on American nationalism, which was later published in the American Journal of Student Research.