Re: The unspoken truth about wildfires

On Jul 30, 2026 at 2:29:26 PM EDT, "Tara" <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Jul 30, 2026 at 2:04:17 PM EDT, "Julian" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> Bordeaux and Madrid are threatened by flames. In Sicily, arsonists tied
>> burning rags to the tails of cats to spread fires. Here in Britain the
>> Cairngorms and Peak District national parks are ablaze. It’s the climate
>> Armageddon, say the greens. If only we had built more wind farms and
>> eaten fewer cows this would not be happening.
>> 
>> Hot, dry spells undoubtedly make fires more likely, but awkwardly for
>> those blaming climate change, wildfires are getting less frequent
>> worldwide, not more, as the globe warms. The acreage burned has
>> decreased steadily since 2000, according to Nasa’s satellites, and is
>> thought to have almost halved in a century. The great fires of 1871 in
>> Wisconsin and Michigan burned more than a million hectares long before
>> anybody drove a car, before even Joseph Swan’s first light bulb, when
>> the world was cooler.
>> 
>> It is not just the trend that is surprising. Hard to believe, but this
>> year is an unusually quiet year for wildfire: so quiet it is breaking
>> records for lack of fires by this date, even in Europe. If you don’t
>> believe me, check the figures produced by the Global Wildfire
>> Information System: as of last week, the world had seen 106 million
>> hectares burn this year, the lowest at this date since these records
>> began in 2012. In Europe, just 3.6 million hectares have burned – less
>> than half the average for this date. That’s cold comfort to people
>> driven from their homes in France, but it is nonetheless a fact.
>> 
>> The real issue is that climate change is a handy excuse for politicians
>> who have failed to take precautionary measures to prevent wildfires.
>> They can just shrug: it’s global warming, innit? It has been known for
>> many decades that in fire-prone habitats, the longer you go without a
>> fire, the worse the fires will be. So preventing the build-up of tinder
>> by controlled burns is the most important factor.
>> 
>> The California filmmaker Gabriel Mann’s hard-hitting 2023 documentary
>> Hotshot showed in detail how fire suppression has made today’s fires
>> harder to control. He has no patience with those who use climate change
>> as an alibi. ‘They tell you the sky is falling and it’s all the fault of
>> our modern, shitty climate,’ he says. ‘But when was the climate not shitty?’
>> 
>> Here in Britain the government has consistently and relentlessly
>> demanded less ‘cool’ burning – low-intensity, controlled fires – in
>> winter on heather moorland, Britain’s most fire-prone habitat. Such
>> fires have been used by farmers and gamekeepers for generations to
>> create a mosaic of short and long heather. This encourages fresh young
>> heather shoots for sheep and grouse to feed on and makes open areas for
>> rare birds such as golden plover and curlew to nest in. If done in
>> winter it can burn off the rank heather plants while leaving the moss
>> underneath barely touched, as demonstrated by a famous video in which a
>> gamekeeper places a Mars bar in the moss, lights a fierce fire over it,
>> then picks up the unscorched, unmelted chocolate bar, unwraps it and
>> eats it.
>> 
>> Natural England argues that regular cool burning harms the habitat;
>> researchers at York University and elsewhere argue the opposite: that it
>> encourages the growth of sphagnum moss and other species by letting
>> light in. But both sides agree that regular cool burns can dramatically
>> reduce the risk of much more damaging wildfires, which burn down through
>> the moss layer and into the peat. Cutting heather instead is less
>> effective but better than nothing. Yet Natural England has banned
>> heather burning on deep peat altogether and is pushing hard to limit it
>> further everywhere – or at least tie it up in complicated licensing
>> rules. As a result, the fuel load on heather moorland has been
>> increasing; in places the heather is now waist-deep. The National Fire
>> Chiefs Council warned last year that such restrictions on heather
>> management would increase ‘the danger to firefighters and the public’.
>> 
>> Unlike private owners, bodies such as the Royal Society for the
>> Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the National Trust are refusing to burn
>> and reluctant to graze heather moorland, as they join the cult of
>> ‘rewilding’. With the support of government, they plan to mitigate the
>> fire risk by ‘rewetting’ moors with leaky dams to hold back rainwater.
>> But this approach is useless in a drought.
>> 
>> Case in point: the Tintwistle fire in the Peak District spread from a
>> wild camp in woodland on to a heather moor owned by United Utilities and
>> managed by the RSPB. This moor had been extensively ‘rewetted’ yet it
>> went up like a torch and the fire spread, drowned Manchester in smoke,
>> burned deep into the peat and was only contained – for now – when local
>> gamekeepers and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue used two diggers and
>> a bulldozer to create a firebreak on its northwest flank on the
>> neighbouring Stalybridge estate. But so quick is Natural England to
>> prosecute landowners and gamekeepers for even inadvertently breaking
>> rules about managing habitat that they were anxious they might be
>> punished for doing this.
>> 
>> Richard Bailey, coordinator of the Peak District Moorland Group,
>> estimates that the past month’s firefighting by gamekeepers would have
>> cost the taxpayer millions of pounds if done by the fire service. Many
>> long, hot, hard days and nights have left gamekeepers and their families
>> under severe mental strain, alleviated a little by generous food drops
>> from Micklehurst cricket club. You can imagine how much it sticks in the
>> craw for these gamekeepers that they have been working to save land
>> managed by an organisation that makes the risk worse.
>> 
>> The nearby Dovestone fire was also started on RSPB-managed land after a
>> man drowned in the local reservoir and his friends commemorated him with
>> fireworks. The Cairngorms fire too began on land owned by the RSPB at
>> Abernethy. The irony is not lost on locals that the very same people who
>> tell us that climate change is an existential crisis are also the ones
>> urging us to stop using the one tool we know helps to mitigate the
>> problem. If your view is that climate change is a massive threat, why
>> are you pursuing policies that increase fuel load?
>> 
>> The North York Moors fire last year affected 2,500 hectares of moorland,
>> smouldering for more than a month in the peat and releasing vast
>> quantities of carbon dioxide. Yet no Defra minister bothered to visit.
>> The cost of fighting these fires does not fall on their department, so
>> why do they care, says Jamie Blackett, founder of Ground Cry, a new
>> organisation campaigning on behalf of ground-nesting birds like curlews.
>> 
>> The authorities know their policies increase the fire risks. Here is
>> what the Cairngorm National Park says in its Integrated Wildfire
>> Management Plan about plans to increase shrubs and other vegetation by
>> reducing deer and stopping burning: ‘These habitats will take many years
>> to develop and during the intervening period fuel loads will increase,
>> as will the corresponding need for fire risk mitigation.’ So they knew
>> the risk was increasing. But little was done. John Kirk, a board member
>> of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, told the Strathspey Herald:
>> ‘Everyone is furious… the entire Abernethy forest has no firebreaks.’
>> 
>> Andrew Gilruth, chief executive of the Moorland Association, says:
>> ‘While Scotland has a clear plan to manage the excess vegetation, in
>> England the authorities are obsessed with rewilding and restricting all
>> commonsense measures for reducing fuel loads.’
>> 
>> In May, before the drought, Gilruth wrote to MPs who represent moorland
>> constituencies to point out that the number of firefighters is down by a
>> quarter over the past seven years and that the fire service relies
>> heavily on gamekeepers’ vehicles, water bowsers and other equipment.
>> Banning the burning of heather means fewer keepers can justify having
>> such equipment. He described Defra’s refusal to change policy on heather
>> burning as reckless.
>> 
>> Sadly he was proved right. So was I. After I warned in these very pages
>> last year that government policy was worsening the fire risk on
>> moorland, it gives me no pleasure to say: ‘I told you so.’
>> of
>> 
>> Matt Ridley
> 
> Indigenous peoples in North America have been conrolling the threat of wild
> fires with prescribed/controlled burns for centuries. Canada is looking to do
> the same in co-operation with our native people. We have a problem doing this
> however because of the acessibility and vastness of our forests. But in a
> country the size of Britain (and other European countries), it seems to me
> that controlled fires are a no brainer.

that should be the 'inacessibility' of much of our forest.