Re: The unspoken truth about wildfires

On Jul 30, 2026 at 2:40:35 PM EDT, "Dude" <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 7/30/2026 11:33 AM, Tara wrote:
>> 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.
>> 
> There's not much an individual can do, by themselves, personally, to
> control the threat of wild fires. That being said:

when you consider that approximately half of forest fires are human caused and
the other half by lightening, I think there is a lot that humans can do.


> 
> "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." - Smokey Bear

Yup, listen to Smokey