The unprecedented fires aren’t just caused by the climate crisis. Land use –especially real estate and animal husbandry – have a lot to answer for
A good, natural fire can be a cleansing force. Yet, the recent and ongoing catastrophic fires around the world – including in Brazil, the US, Sweden, Russia and Australia – are not moments of a healthy fire cycle but conflagrations of a dying biosphere.
Terrible as they are, the fires in the western American states are only middling on a global scale. As of early November, 8.6m acres (3.5m hectares) had burned nationally, with half of that total in California. This year has been the worst fire season on record for Colorado and California, the latter enduring five of its six largest fires since colonization. But the American catastrophe pales in comparison to Australia’s wildfires last summer, which incinerated an eye-watering 46m acres. More than a fifth of the country’s forests were destroyed in a single year. Siberia’s fires in 2020 were even bigger – 47m acres. A tenth of South America’s largest wetland, the Pantanal, went up in smoke this year – some 6m acres – coupled with the Amazon losing 8.5m acres. That latter figure is only half the size of last year’s fiery nightmare.
These unnatural wildfires may offer few ecological benefits, but they clear out the deadwood clogging up the public sphere. It is commonly understood that the recent fires are linked to climate change, but that is only half right. “Land-use change” is a cause of similar importance, yet it takes up little space in our public sphere. While the center and left may congratulate themselves that they “get” climate change unlike the pig-headed right, no political faction has mobilized around this second great disaster.
The recent fires each have local idiosyncrasies, such as the Brazilian government’s murderous attack on indigenous people or California’s trillion-dollar real estate industry, but a global perspective helps one see why things became awful everywhere. Climate change can reduce precipitation and warm the air, a combination that dries out soils and trees in some ecosystems like California, turning forests into kindling awaiting a spark. Such processes are aggravated by the jump in deforestation globally since the 1990s. The end of history seems to have heralded the end of forests too. For example, most clearcutting of the Amazon has happened since 1990, with almost all of the land replaced with pasture for cattle. As the world-market finally emerged in the 1990s – an event predicted nearly a century and a half before by Karl Marx in 1848 – capitalism swiftly remade heaven and Earth through carbon emissions and land-use change of unprecedented scope.
Centrists seem to believe that the fires will convince conservatives that climate change is real. This has not happened. During a press conference on the fires in September, Donald Trump claimed that “it’ll start getting cooler”. After the Arctic tundra caught fire for the first time in 2018, the fascist Sweden Democrats suggested cutting taxes on gasoline. Conservatives in Australia and Brazil blamed the fires on non-existent eco-terrorists. Centrists don’t realize that the solution is not more “facts” but a rebalancing in social forces.
