The smoke around New York City is back. But don’t blame Canada.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, where I’ve lived for 25 years, we used to blame California and Washington for our occasionally smoky skies. Then in the summer of 2015, Vancouver’s air turned Martian orange, just as the air on the East Coast did last year. Only this time, the fires were ours. It wasn’t just a bad year; something fundamental had changed. Since then, almost every summer has brought red suns at midday, health advisories, broken heat records, anxiety and, when fires get close, real fear: Our old house is a tinderbox. Where would we go?
Red flag warnings in New England indicating fire weather — that is, hot, dry, windy conditions — have been issued repeatedly since late October. These warnings are common in the West, but they are extremely rare in the Northeast, where I grew up and where my base line was established, my notion of what normal weather is. And I can tell you: This isn’t normal. Back in the 1970s, the idea of wildfires along the I-95 corridor in November was simply inconceivable.
This fall, more than 500 wildfires have ignited in New Jersey alone. And in the past two weeks, in parts of Connecticut and Pennsylvania where developments end and wild lands begin, known as the wildland-urban interface, fires have been threatening homes, too. New York City’s fire department responded to 271 brush fires across the five boroughs just in the first two weeks of November. A 5,000-acre fire has been burning for more than a week on the New York-New Jersey border, prompting voluntary evacuation orders on Saturday, after the fire broke through containment lines.
Last month a firefighter was killed and two more were injured by a vehicle while fighting a wildfire in Berlin, Conn. On Nov. 9 an 18-year-old New York State employee was killed fighting a fire in Sterling Forest State Park. Wildfire fighters getting killed? Maybe in Colorado or California. But in the Northeast, hardly ever.
Two weeks ago, a newspaper reporter from Provincetown, Mass., called me. Could the pitch pine and scrub oak forests of Cape Cod burn like the Western forests I described in my book “Fire Weather”?
“Yes,” I told him. “Maybe not in the past, but now they can.”
It felt strange, almost traitorous, to say that, because I’ve been going to the cape since I was a child. I know the smell of those pine needles in summer, the soft crunch of the cones underfoot. The idea of those trees burning never occurred to me before this year.
We are being reminded the hard way that we share this world. Smoke knows no boundaries, and neither does fire. It’s not a Southern problem or a Western problem; it’s our shared reality. This is not just a “bad year.” Globally, 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history, and that record is already being broken. This year is on track to be not only one of the driest autumns in U.S. history since records have been kept but also the first full year in which global temperatures rose 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. That doesn’t sound like much, but when this kind of elevated heat is prolonged, it stresses natural systems, killing marine creatures and making forests and grasslands more flammable.
Like many of us, I can sense things unsettling — eroding and encroaching at the same time. Jenga blocks, big and small, are being pulled from structures we take for granted, destabilizing the country, the climate, entire ecosystems.
After Hurricane Helene, people experienced an estrangement from the world as they knew it in the deluged hill country of North Carolina. When a heat dome killed nearly 700 British Columbians and more than a billion intertidal creatures in 2021, we experienced it there, too. Things feel different now, in large part, because the weather is different now.
Thanks to the relentless burning of fossil fuels, we are — right now, in real time — departing the Holocene epoch, the Goldilocks zone of relative climate stability that enabled us to build the world as we know it over the past 12,000 years. We must recognize this moment for what it is: the beginning of a new era of civilizational retreat, contraction and consolidation. Call it the post-Holocene.
Climate scientists have seen this coming since the 1950s, and petroleum companies have been denying and deflecting the unwanted attention ever since. Failure of imagination is a human specialty. This perceptual glitch, which Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the “Lucretius Problem” after the Roman poet and philosopher, occurs when we base our estimation of possible future extremes on limited past experience.
This was a signal feature of the response to the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alberta, fire, which drove the largest, most rapid evacuation from a wildfire in modern times. Despite two years of drought, two weeks of intense heat, detailed weather forecasts predicting extreme fire weather and the presence of five wildfires around the city, the first evacuees were alerted not by authorities but by neighbors, family members and fires in their backyards.
In 2016, in this terrible fire, I saw something that was harder to miss in the Canadian West: those fierce southern fires creeping steadily northward in tandem with rising temperatures, like the combustive equivalent of Lyme disease or dengue fever, until Canada became infected, too.
Since then, wildfires have been burning more intensely, quickly and lethally than ever, and it is hard not to see echoes in other global trends. In these November fires, I can’t not see an allegory for the forewarned scorching of our political norms: the detailed forecast, the abundant precedents, the myopic faith in (or outright disdain for) old laws and methods that might somehow contain this volatile new energy.
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