Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/why-is-europe-burning Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49139790 Points: 18 # Comments: 9
On July 15th, a wildfire broke out near the small town of Orés, Spain, in the northern province of Zaragoza. Propelled by strong winds and low humidity, the flames quickly spread over foothills and through canyons. By the next day, as the fire ballooned to more than eleven thousand acres, five towns in its path had to be evacuated. For José Luis Duce Aragüés, a wildland firefighter whose family is from Zaragoza, news of the fire felt personal. As a teen-ager, he’d spent summers exploring the same mountains that were now burning.
Just two days later, Aragüés, who is based in California but travels internationally to help communities manage fire risk, learned about another blaze. This one, in the nearby Guadalajara province of Spain, was close to where members of his family live today. He’d begun his fire career in Guadalajara, working summers in the small town of Cogolludo. “Everything started for me there,” Aragüés told me. “I started my suppression career there—my first hand crew, first engine crew. I know those mountains, those forests, those trails.” The La Mierla fire, as it came to be known, grew to more than eighty thousand acres. Many of his friends and family in the area either evacuated or worked to combat the flames. His uncle, a retired wildland firefighter, used his heavy machinery to build a firebreak around his farm, and then drove it to a nearby village to offer aid. The size and ferocity of the La Mierla fire disturbed Aragüés, yet the situation was about to get worse. “I couldn’t believe that, when that fire was being controlled, this other fire happened,” he said.
On July 22nd, sparks from a piece of heavy machinery ignited a fire near the town of Burgohondo, in Ávila province. Aragüés had worked in that area, too, for Spain’s Brigadas de Refuerzo en Incendios Forestales—the national firefighting force—and for a fire-prevention team under the country’s Ministry of Environment. This time, the flames spread and merged with a fire that was already burning nearby, in the mountains southwest of Madrid. The conflagrations ultimately crossed into Toledo province and grew into the Burgohondo fire complex—the largest wildfire in Spain’s recorded history, covering more than a hundred and thirty-five thousand acres. One scientist estimated that the complex has released the energy of twenty-three atomic bombs. Aragüés learned that one of his former crewmates, who was defending a friend’s house, lost his own home when the fire travelled down a slope next to him. Another friend, also a firefighter, sent him a text from near the fire: “José, everything we learned, everything we knew, everything that we have been learning for 25 years, means nothing.”
Already this year, more than two hundred thousand hectares have burned in Spain, a figure that is twice than the historical average. France is dealing with a similarly extraordinary fire season. A conflagration west of Bordeaux, described as four times the size of Paris, prompted the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history: two hundred and twenty thousand people. Meanwhile, English firefighters have struggled to contain the Tintwistle Moor fire, which is thought to be one of the largest in the country’s recent history. Even as meteorologists warned that a “monstrous, long-lasting” heat wave—Europe’s fourth of the year—was approaching, other fires burned as far north as Sweden and as far south as Crete.
The terrifying news cycle prompted me to open Instagram on a recent evening. Perhaps because I am a qualified wildland firefighter myself, I was quickly blasted with scenes of the fires. I saw horses running for their lives through ghostly, smoke-filled streets; drone footage of charred earth and the husks of homes; and flames engulfing forests as sirens wailed in the distance. Many montages were accompanied by heart-wrenching soundtracks. After an hour of mainlining imagery of infernos, I felt like reality itself had gone up in flames. One scene, of a burning forest under an orange sky, was overlaid with a single word: “L’Apocalypse.” I felt that special sense of doom that descends when humanity is pummelled with disasters.
In “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World,” the critic and journalist Dorian Lynskey points out that defeatism is unhelpful, and should not be mistaken for moral seriousness. “The evolutionary purpose of fear is to jolt one into an act of self-preservation,” Lynskey writes, “but one cannot live in a constant state of psychic emergency. The higher the stakes, the less tenable fear is, and the more likely it is to breed dissociation or hopelessness.” He instead calls on readers to resist—“to live in the space between ‘Everything will be OK’ and ‘Everything is fucked,’ between denial and despair.’ ” Lynskey suggests that there might be some way to grasp the significance of events like the unprecedented wildfires in Europe without giving in to dread. For me, the only way to do this is to get curious about why these things are happening. Why are flames erupting in this particular way, in this particular moment in time? Why is Europe burning?
When I put that question to Antonio J. Vera Mena, a Spanish wildland firefighter who has been working in Andalusia as a member of a helicopter-borne brigade, he described a matrix of factors. One of them is extreme heat. Another, paradoxically, was a recent period that was exceptionally wet, which nurtured thick grass in areas that were already overgrown. “We put all these ingredients in a cocktail shaker, and the result is massive fires that far exceed the extinguishing capacity of firefighting teams,” Mena said in an e-mail.
In June, Stephen Pyne, a former wildland firefighter and an emeritus professor of history at Arizona State University, published his forty-sixth book, “Undying Fire: A Fire History of Europe.” When I called him, he posed me one of his central questions about megafires: “Why is it that countries that we think of as modernized—those that have money, science, technology—are the ones that are being clobbered?” Climate change is, of course, part of the story. “Fossil fuels give you power,” Pyne told me, but burning them “disrupts the climate in ways that make fires more powerful.” Extreme fire weather, exceptionally dry, windy, and often warm conditions, is on the rise globally. That said, climate change is happening everywhere—and, in Pyne’s account, only some areas are experiencing worsening fires. This is one of the mysteries he’s interested in.
