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To casual observers, 1997–98 was, as the World Wildlife Fund declared, “The Year the World Caught Fire.” Flames seemed to erupt everywhere, and what didn’t burn outright appeared to vanish in a planetary pall of smoke. A climatic shift almost tectonic in power, the most extreme weather in a century of records, reversed the normal flow of the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Normally humid areas dried, and arid sites wetted, both creating fuel. Where humanity failed to supply the spark, lightning succeeded. The scale was breathtaking: the Pacific became a true ring of fire. Some 2.5 million hectares burned in Russia’s Far East, almost 5 percent of the Khabarovsk region’s forested estate along with most of the northern half of Sakhalin Island. Crown fires broke out in December in the normally snowed-in forests of Alberta, then raced through an early spring. Another immense swath of fires burned in Indonesia, from Sumatra to Java to East Kalimantan. Wildfires broke out in Australia. Rainforests normally immune to fire in Amazonia and Mesoamerica burned stubbornly. Winds brought the smoke from tens of thousands of fires—the largest complex on record for Mexico—in a great gyre through the southern United States. Then Florida erupted, with lightning-kindled fires in every county, and the Earth’s greatest fire power, a country capable of spending a billion dollars fighting fires in a single season, was forced to evacuate 100,000 people before the taunting flames. The fires were telegenic, they were timely. Burning Borneo, smokedin Singapore, ravaged Russia—all seemingly became nature’s metaphor for the collapse of Asia’s emerging economies. The suggestion circulated further that here was a signature of global warming. An unstable climate was arcing into fire. The endless burnings were the pilot flames of an environmental apocalypse. Flaming Florida argued further that technological fixes were few and far between, that a bull market in American stocks could not halt the inexorable decline of nature’s exhausted economy . The fires could not be bought off or beaten off. The future was fire. Chapter Ten The Future of Fire BURNING BEYOND THE MILLENNIUM 172 But staring into the flames, however hypnotic, missed half the story. The Earth had known greater fire complexes, even recently. The 1982–83 fires in Indonesia were, in fact, larger than those of 1997–98. The Siberian fires of 1987 dwarfed those of the Far East by a factor of five or more. Amazonia had burned more seriously in 1988. Western Canada had endured more massive outbreaks in 1981, 1989, and 1994. The 3 percent of Florida’s protected lands that burned paled beside the 105 percent (!) reportedly burned at the beginning of the century. Wildfire, however, was not the core concern. The flame-mesmerized media missed the fact that ENSO’s climatic shuffle meant that areas that normally burned did not. That was emblematic of the great expanses of Earth that no longer accepted routine fire. For most of the planet, 1998 was once again “The Year the Earth Hardly Burned.” What the millennium displayed was a colossal maldistribution of combustion—too much of the wrong fire, too little of the right. In general, the developing world had too much wildfire, the developed world too little controlled burning. El Niño’s climatic rhythms had an echo: there were places of fire drought as well as fire deluge. But the eruption of wildfire followed climatic rhythms, while the erosion of routine burning obeyed a deeper driver. Behind it, like the ponderous changes of climate that swung into and out of ice ages, hummed the dynamo of industrial fire. Probably the Earth was experiencing as much or more combustion than it ever had because there was more fuel to burn. Paradoxically, it knew less free-burning fire than it had since the last millennium, perhaps since the retreat of the Pleistocene ice. That rending of combustion from flame explained a lot about why the Earth was burning as it was. As the World Burns: What Is and Isn’t Burning, and Where Places with Too Much Fire Places with too much fire were, by and large, places with lots of fresh fuel. Of course, timing mattered, and that meant weather. Combustibles could pile up from logging or land clearing, but if they remained wet, they didn’t burn. Similarly, a severe drought could, by itself, stock a landscape with fuel...

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