Climate and fire

For those of us in the North Country, this past week seemed like a little taste of hell. Unprecedented heat, with temperatures topping 100 degrees in the border country. Massive wildfires and choking smoke that descended on the region by midweek, forcing evacuations of hundreds of people. A major economic engine shuttered, for how long remains to be seen.
It’s tempting to dismiss it all as a one-off, the kind of event we’re unlikely to see again any time soon. But anyone paying attention to recent history here knows that’s not even remotely the case. We’ve written these same kinds of headlines far too often in recent years. Far from unusual, what we’ve experienced this week is rapidly becoming our new normal.
A quarter century ago, climate scientists warned us that without significant changes in our energy systems, we faced a hotter future, where wildfire would increasingly reshape many parts of the globe, including northeastern Minnesota. We are reaping the bitter harvest of our failure to heed those warnings. That future is now, and it’s only going to get worse if we do nothing to address this existential crisis.
We know that many residents of our region, mostly for partisan reasons, still refuse to accept the obvious reality of climate change and our species’ overarching role in the heating of our planet. Yet here’s a fact that no one can deny: The planet doesn’t care what you or your political tribe choose to believe. Denying the reality of climate change won’t protect your home from burning in a wildfire or protect your lungs from the kind of dense particulate air pollution residents of our region were forced to endure yet again this week. Denying climate change won’t reopen the Boundary Waters. The reality of climate change is now threatening to devastate the local economy with a closure of the BWCAW during the peak of the summer season.
Dense smoke, virtually unheard of in the North Country 25 years ago, now has to be factored into summer plans. We never knew about air quality indexes up here in the recent past because the air quality was always good. That’s no longer true, and it isn’t just from local fires. Last year, it was smoke from massive Canadian fires. Other years, it’s smoke from massive fires in the western U.S. We’ve even experienced smoke recently from enormous conflagrations in Siberia. The boreal forests are burning all around the world and they’re not going to stop anytime soon. Forest types exist where they do mostly due to climate, primarily temperature and precipitation. The cool, wet climate that used to typify northeastern Minnesota’s summers, and which made wildfires in July virtually unknown as recently as 20 years ago, has been replaced by a climate that is warmer and more prone to drought than in the past. Twenty-five years ago, our fire season lasted from snowmelt to green-up in the spring and leaf fall to first snow in October.
Now, fire season lasts from March to November.
None of this is an argument for despair, and it’s certainly not an argument for resignation. It’s an argument for honesty and action. Our local economy, our tourism season, our public health, and the forest itself are all built on assumptions about this region’s climate that are no longer true. We can keep responding to each fire, closure, or smoke-filled day as a freak event— or we can start planning, as a region and as a state, for a warmer, drier future. We need to manage fuels more aggressively near communities. We need to rethink what we plant and work to protect it as this forest transitions to something else.
We need to be investing in the kind of emergency and health infrastructure that a longer fire season demands. We need to recognize that the summer climate in northeastern Minnesota is more akin to what was experienced in the western U.S. 25 years ago— and that means it’s going to burn with a lot greater frequency. We need to add our voices, loudly and consistently, to the broader push to cut the carbon emissions driving this shift in the first place. This is too important to be hampered by mindless partisan politics.
The events of this week, while dramatic, should be much more than a headline. They must be a wake-up call. This land is speaking to us, in the plainest language it knows. It’s telling us that our world has changed. The only question is, will we listen in time?