Understanding the history of wildfire is relatively new. That’s because fire science often falls between the cracks in established disciplines. As the well-known historian of modern fire Stephen Pyne has pointed out, while many universities have fire departments, they are never academic ones.

But a steady gathering of data has demonstrated that fire isn’t just an integral part of today’s Earth system—how the geosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere interact in our own time. Fire was an important feature of the Earth before humans, too. It has had an ongoing impact on the atmosphere—both on carbon dioxide, and especially, oxygen levels. It has also guided the evolution of plants and has sustained the health of ecosystems by helping to maintain the balance of species that live in them. These discoveries—and the lessons they teach us—should inform how we think about and manage fire in the modern world, and even encourage us to welcome it more often than we have.

Fossil charcoal in sediments from 170 million years ago. Courtesy of A. C. Scott

The earliest evidence of burned plants, preserved as charcoal, is found in rocks of the late Silurian Period (around 420 million years ago). But during the late Silurian, plants were too small to fuel big fires. They had to evolve into a large number of groups—several of which included trees and tree-like species—for the Earth’s first widespread forests to appear and offer evidence of the first extensive wildfires. Many of these charred materials date from the aptly named Carboniferous Period (between 360 and 300 million years ago), when plants first diversified throughout the world into a wide range of ecological niches.

An important feature of charcoal is that it preserves the detailed anatomy of the plant from which it came, thus allowing us to identify the plants that were burned. Examining these charcoal remnants has helped scientists trace how wildfires evolved, along with the Earth, over the next 200 million years or so. We can discern, for instance, that major changes were taking place in the Earth’s vegetation during the Cretaceous Period (between 140 and 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, walked the land). This was a time when the early flowering plants first evolved and spread. The seeds of these small and weedy plants blew in after extensive fires cleared other vegetation. The plants then grew rapidly to cover the bare soil, expanding the area they covered. This was also a time when many groups of plants with fire-resistant or fire-loving characteristics thrived. Pines evolved to have thick bark to shield them from flames. Eucalypts, which are very flammable but developed mechanisms to regenerate after fire, evolved in the southern hemisphere. Other plants such as proteas—widely found in Australia and southern Africa today—flourished thanks to wildfires, too.

The last and perhaps most significant change in the Earth’s vegetation was the evolution of grasses and grasslands. While we have evidence of grasses from more than 20 million years ago, it was only around 7 million years ago that we begin to see signs that grasses, too, co-evolved with wildfires. So-called C4 grasses, like the tall varieties that grow in the savanna, were able to thrive in dry conditions—and spread across the globe, especially in Africa where there was an extensive dry area across the southern part. Their success, like that of the Proteaceae, was linked to fires. Grasslands burned on a regular basis, killing shrubby vegetation and trees nearby and creating more space for grasses to return more easily.

Charred Flower from the Cretaceous, 120 million years ago. Courtesy of Ian J. Glasspool.

Summary of fire through time diagram. Courtesy of A. C. Scott.

As we continue to learn the history of fire on this planet, we can better understand the nature and role of fire in many of the world’s ecosystems today. Many, such as South Africa’s Cape fynbos shrublands and many coniferous forests, have natural wildfire; indeed, some, including savanna grasslands, could not exist without fire. Other ecosystems, such as rainforests, cannot survive when fires are permitted to burn.

For thousands of years humans seemed to instinctively understand this complexity, and welcomed and used wildfire in a number of ways, both in the open agricultural environment as well as in the home. But over the past 100 years or so, there has been a major transition in how we view fire: As towns and cities have become larger, people have opted to extinguish natural fires. Urban populations have lost knowledge of fire and have demonized it, amping up their fear of flames at the same time that they have built out into remote wilderness areas with flammable vegetation. Today if a blaze breaks out at all, it is contained and extinguished in the service of protecting people and property. But sometimes letting fires burn may be the best option for an ecosystem.

Understanding the evolution and biology of ecosystems’ fire responses might help communities recognize which species around them are fire-dependent, which are fire-sensitive, and how to make wiser choices when managing wildfires. We need to appreciate that not all vegetation is the same, and that transposing different forest practices across different regions may not work. It has been shown, for example, that the conifer forests of North America burn much more frequently and vigorously than the conifer forests of Northern Europe. The ecosystems respond differently, and they should therefore be managed differently as well.

Environmental factors that influence fire can combine to have a devastating effect. Wildfire is a normal part of the landscape in the western United States—but the spread of invasive grasses and increased development, along with changes in climate that are leading to earlier spring snow melt and a longer dry season, are almost certain to produce more frequent and larger fires.

Climate change is fueling more extreme wildfire events all over the world. As temperatures rise and winds increase, small fires appear to be spreading more rapidly and amalgamating to produce larger fires. Large pyrocumulus clouds created by vast blazes like the 2019 Australian megafire produce dry lightning and create more ignitions. Most worrying, global warming is changing fires’ internal dynamics, making them more dangerous for firefighters and the general population. Historically, fires have expanded from surface vegetation, where they burn relatively slowly, to tree crowns where they spread more rapidly—and firefighters have depended on this model to predict how a fire will spread as they plan out their work. However, we are now seeing dramatic changes in fire behavior. Firefighters, including the renowned Spanish wildfire specialist Marc Castellnou, have noticed that surface fires appear to be spreading faster, accelerated by increased wind speeds. During the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California, flames consumed buildings but left the tops of trees surrounding them with unburned crowns, their leaves still green. This indicates that the surface fires are outpacing canopy fires, which means that firefighters’ planning calculations may be wrong. Fires typically used to die down at night as temperatures fell, giving firefighters a break. Increasingly, that appears not to be happening.

The aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Photo by Shealah Craighead.

We urgently need more research to help to understand how and why fires are changing—and how to deal with the new conditions. In the meantime, initiatives such as FireWise in the U.S. and FireSmart in Canada, which engage with communities to help educate and develop local community initiatives, provide information and experience about how to plan and keep safe in the event of a wildfire.

Wildfires built the Earth we cherish today, by guiding the evolution of plants and ecosystems and people. As the 400-million-year history of fire teaches us, many ecosystems need fire to survive. Rather than squelching flames indiscriminately, we must learn, once again, how to live with them.

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A panel of experts gathered at Artistry Honolulu to take their best shot at the urgent question “What Can Hawai‘i Teach the World About Climate Change?” The Zócalo/Daniel K. Inouye Institute “Pau Hana” event brought together Chip Fletcher, a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa geologist; Robert Lempert, a RAND Corporation scientist and contributor to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and Joshua Stanbro, chief resilience officer for the City and County of Honolulu.

Despite the recent torrent of grim United Nations reports, and terrifying TV footage of Florida beach homes being blown to smithereens, the evening’s tone was relatively upbeat. While nationalistic leaders bellow about withdrawing from international climate accords, states like Hawai‘i and California are aggressively pursuing their own environmental paths, and the panelists suggested that significant work is being done at the state and local level to keep Earth from turning into a giant Sahara.

Much of the discussion, which took place before an overflow crowd, focused on how the most remote of U.S. states (as well as one of the smallest) could become a climate-change laboratory and set an example for others to follow. Moderator Catherine Cruz, host of Hawai‘i Public Radio’s “The Conversation,” dived straight into the question of how Hawai‘i—which lately has been battered by torrential rains, volcanic eruptions, and other torments—can bring its citizens together around climate-related issues.

Stanbro, the Honolulu official, acknowledged that even experts sometimes are unsure how to size up the risks to the planet—and figure out how best to respond. “We don’t know how this is going to shake out, so we’re sort of inventing it in real time,” he said.

That’s one reason, Stanbro explained, why Honolulu city and county are holding a series of nine meetings around the island of Oahu, to get a sense of what various communities are doing to address specific local problems, set priorities, and develop action plans. Stanbro said that many cities and counties have stepped up their responses to global warming, now that bond agencies are including climate change as a risk factor in evaluating municipal credit ratings. If a municipality doesn’t have a good plan for mitigating these threats, a bond agency may give it a lower credit rating, making it more expensive for the municipality to get credit and take on debt.

Lempert, the RAND expert in climate management and adaptation, said he has studied communities around the country that are making climate-change response a critical part of their planning. Stage one of this process, Lempert said, is simply for communities to notice and acknowledge that climate change is happening. Step two is making a risk assessment. Step three is coming up with an action plan to reduce the municipality’s carbon footprint.

“We’re just starting to see people moving into it, and there’s a lot going on,” he said, citing communities that are developing new guidelines for bridges, roads, and other infrastructure that now have to take climate change impacts into account.

Fletcher, the geologist, said he recently co-authored an op-ed in a local newspaper about sea-level rise, which could reach one meter (about three feet) by the end of this century. Hawai‘i is very susceptible to this menace, particularly during the summer, and high-tide flooding could prove catastrophic before mid-century, if present carbon emission rates persist.

Rather than stick their heads in the sand, communities need to start adapting to these changes, Fletcher said, and some are doing just that. He has proposed that if a community is going to invest in long-term expensive infrastructure, like a coastal power plant, it needs to anticipate as much as a six-foot sea level rise because it’s unclear how fast the Antarctic ice shelf will melt. Fletcher also said that improved climate-change modeling also can offer better predictions on how (for example) erosion caused by rising seas will affect Oahu’s north and south shores in different ways.

Climate change is in many ways a numbers game: A rise in global temperature of 1.5 degrees centigrade could prove devastating. Such a figure may sound small, Lempert said, but on a global scale, over long periods of time, “that’s a gigantic number.”

“When we were six degrees colder, we had miles of ice on top of North America,” Lempert said. “When you gather up all the scientific evidence, half a degree makes a surprising difference.”

Such an increase could swamp parts of Hawai‘i, whose seas already have risen 3.5 inches since 1960, according to some calculations. And with world temperatures currently heading for 3.5-degree centigrade increase by the end of the century, much will hinge on what happens in places considerably bigger and more densely populated than the Aloha State. There’s a growing demand for new energy, and about half of this is coming from India and China, whose populations are eager to enter the global middle class.

What’s really needed, the panelists concurred, is “a war on carbon.” The developed world needs to be helping poorer countries buffer themselves against the worst effects of a warming atmosphere while slashing overall carbon emissions by about 50 percent per decade, if global warming is to be limited to no more than 2 degrees by mid-century. That scenario, the panelists conceded, would be a huge stretch. But Hawai‘i, which has vowed to be virtually carbon-free within three decades, already may have helped sway California Governor Jerry Brown to make the same pledge, Stanbro suggested.

Hawai‘i also can learn from other communities. Fletcher said he recently did some research on how flood-threatened Miami has invested a small fortune to build 80 pump stations which will take rain runoff and other water, spin out some its contaminants, and recycle it into Biscayne Bay. The city is studying how to sacrifice the first and second floors of buildings to allow water to move back and forth through these structures, and also how to raise many of its most vulnerable roads.

Some of those same strategies could be applied to Waikiki Beach, he said, because it’s obvious that fleeing an area is simply too costly and too difficult technically. “We’re wondering how to adapt in place” to surging seas, said Fletcher, adding: “A year ago, I was wondering when are we going to get going on this. Now I stand in amazement at the city and county of Honolulu, and also the state, at the progress we’ve made… in the last two years.”

During the audience question and answer segment, one attendee asked how renewable energy could figure in plans to grow Hawai‘i’s rail system. “By 2045, the entire grid is going to renewable,” Stanbro replied. “As the grid gets greener and greener, the train gets greener.”

Another audience member asked how to make fossil fuel corporations aware of their environmental responsibilities. “We need to stop subsidizing them,” Fletcher responded—but, he continued, we should remember that fossil fuels helped lift humanity out of the hunter-gatherer phase. The problem is that we should’ve started shifting away from fossil fuels in the 1970s. That didn’t happen, and the energy companies “are a main reason why it didn’t.”

A third audience member asked how to ensure that we don’t put the costs of environmental sustainability on the poor and on indigenous communities. Stanbro said that such groups already have borne a disproportionate share of climate-change impacts. “We’ve got to figure out how we put equity into this,” he said.

Still, the challenges before us are monumental, the panelists agreed, and they’ll require many municipalities to experiment with many different approaches. “Humans have been figuring their way out of pinches and problems for a long, long time,” Stanbro summed up. “I am optimistic about the models and the innovations that are going to come out as a response to the challenges.”

The post Can Hawai‘i’s Local Communities Lead the Global Fight Against Climate Change? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This question is a difficult one. In fact, it is considerably easier to start with the opposite question: What can the deep history of the oceans not tell us about the future? Understanding what ocean history is unable to tell us—and then what it can reveal—establishes the limits of our current knowledge and provides a window onto what may lie ahead.

The deep history of the oceans definitely cannot tell us about the consequences of human-caused pollution with long-lived materials, such as non-biodegradable plastics or radioactive waste. Also, it cannot explain the consequences of pollution from other harmful substances, such as highly toxic synthetic chemicals that had never existed before we manufactured them, or heavy metals that only recently appeared in such concentrated forms—thanks to human processing. The impact of such products only can be understood by careful study and monitoring of the effects they have going forward.

Common sense plays a role as well. For example, we intuitively know that animals, large or small, will not survive having their innards stuffed full of plastic, or being severely entangled in plastic debris. Yet, we first allowed ocean plastic pollution to grow to frightening proportions before we began to think about tackling the problem. But at last things are beginning to change, following several years of graphic news coverage about large-sized plastic pollution and microscopic particles.

But for some subjects only serious study will do. For example, the impacts of radiation on the marine ecosystem resulting from nuclear testing, spillages from shipwrecks, and shore-based accidents, are surprising. These effects seem limited, both at Bikini Atoll, which endured 23 nuclear test explosions, and around the site of the Fukushima reactor accident. It turns out that the main problem for ocean animals lies not with passing through radiation in the water, but with direct ingestion of radioactive materials. This is because radioactive substances are quickly diluted in the vast volumes of the oceans, and because water itself is a good radiation absorber. Radioactive pollution in the ocean therefore is a major concern only close to its release points, as it enters the food web. It’s less of a concern for animals that occasionally pass through—which is good news, given that humanity enthusiastically dumped radioactive waste in the oceans from 1946 until well into the 1990s.

It turns out that the real killers are invisible chemicals—especially polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) previously used in paints, coolant, electronics components, and fluorescent lights. These substances have been released in vast quantities and can be traced through the food web, from the smallest plankton at the beginning to sharks and whales at the top. Similar to other long-lived pollutants, PCBs accumulate to higher and higher concentrations from bottom to top in the food web.

The scale of the PCB problem is enormous: Up to 10 percent of all PCBs produced have now made it into the oceans. That’s a large amount, but it also means that up to 90 percent of PCB pollution in oceans is yet to come, since oceans are the final station for everything carried by water. We need to prevent the PCBs from entering the environment, which requires a massive clean-up operation focused on waste-collection sites (especially landfills). This is progressing, but some 83 percent of PCBs remain to be eliminated.

We know from estuaries and coastal regions that these dangerous pollutants have already become widespread in marine organisms. And they’ve even been found in creatures on the sea floor at the greatest depths of the Pacific, our largest ocean. In whales, typical marine apex predators, the impacts include devastating infant mortality when females pass lethal amounts of PCBs to unborn or suckling calves.

Having addressed human impacts that are completely new to the oceans and the wider Earth system, we can now return to the original question of what deep ocean history can tell us about the issues we’ll face in the future. The three main ones are global warming and ocean acidification, oxygen loss in the oceans, and mass extinction.

Deep ocean history gives us particularly good information about the impact and ultimate fate of our large and quickly rising levels of carbon emissions. It is obvious from Earth’s history that this will, in the short term—over decades to centuries—lead to global warming as well as ocean acidification. Because of the speed at which these two processes are developing under our current emissions trajectory, their combination jeopardizes many ecosystems, both in the oceans (including our all-important coral reefs, home to one-third of all marine biodiversity) and on land.

The oceans’ deep history also reveals that nature has no fast mechanisms to cope with these levels of carbon emissions. Over thousands of years, a process called carbonate compensation—where waters affected by ocean acidification interact with carbonate in sea-floor sediments—will start to reduce the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels somewhat. But the geological record clearly demonstrates that a full clean-up of our current levels of carbon emissions will take a few hundred thousand years.

Nature has provided us with a beautiful illustration of this, especially around 56 million years ago, after there was a natural pulse of carbon dioxide and/or methane into the climate system. About 6 C global warming occurred, and carbonate dissolution developed over vast tracts of the deep-sea floor, while oxygen concentrations in large tracts of the ocean fell dangerously low. A wave of extinction swept through the deep sea, with some groups of organisms losing half of their species count. The system needed about 200,000 years to recover.

So nature can, and will, surely cope with our emissions, but not on timescales relevant to society, and not necessarily in ways that humans will appreciate. Deep ocean history shows us that all manner of ecosystem mayhem—including a large-scale wave of death and extinction in the deep seas—is likely to occur while Mother Nature is going about this clean-up.

Another area where deep ocean history gives us a critical warning about the future is de-oxygenation of the oceans. Oxygenation refers to the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, and oxygen is vitally important for almost all life on Earth, except for a few specialist microbes. Warming of the oceans, combined with river inflow that is too full of fertilizers and other nutrients, has changed environmental chemistry so that oxygenation of open oceans and coastal seas has been steadily declining during the past half-century. The volume of ocean with no oxygen at all has quadrupled; the volume of ocean where oxygen levels are falling dangerously low has increased even more.

Deep ocean history is full of episodes lasting several thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, during which deep water in complete ocean basins became totally oxygen-deprived. In those cases, it was often related to natural cycles of runoff from land that washed nutrient-rich soils from land into the sea, and processes that severely inhibited deep-ocean circulation (which brings oxygen into the deep sea).

Today, the problem is mostly related to an enormous amount of artificial and human and animal waste-derived nutrients being dumped into the oceans, and to global warming, which is occurring 10 to 100 times faster than in recent geological history. Given that de-oxygenation is widespread and quickly expanding in the modern ocean, the specter of widespread oxygen deficiency is looming large on a global scale. We see it in many of the world’s major lakes as well. It is a vastly destructive process for ecosystems, and in the deep history of the oceans it has been a player in virtually all major mass extinction events. For smaller events in ocean history, where only a single basin was affected, ecosystem recovery took several thousands of years. For the biggest events, where (almost) the entire world ocean was affected, recovery times ran into the hundreds of thousands of years. After true mass extinctions, recovery times extended to millions of years.

The third main process for which history offers important background information is mass extinctions. Extinctions are always underway: Estimates are that “background” extinction rates are of the order of two species per year for every 1 million species on Earth. Given that there are roughly 10 million species on the planet today, a “normal background” extinction rate would be 20 species per year. Yet recent studies put the actual number of extinctions happening today at more than 1,000 times that “normal background” value. This implies that more than 20,000 species per year are becoming extinct, out of the 10 million species on Earth!

How does this compare to the greatest of the five major mass extinctions of the past half-billion years? Well, reconstructions indicate that Earth’s greatest mass extinction, the End-Permian event 252 million years ago, saw a rate of extinction of roughly 150 species per year, though we cannot exclude brief intervals with higher peak rates. Still, it is clear that modern extinction rates are right up there with the worst nature has gone through in a half-billion years.

The insight that we are living through extinction rates unsurpassed in the last 500,000,000 years puts a fine point on the argument that we are indeed in the beginning of the “sixth major mass extinction.” All five previous mass extinctions were exceptionally hard on complex, specialized organisms, and left more resilient, simpler forms to inherit the Earth. Humans are among the most complex, specialized organisms around today, with a deep dependence on other complex, specialized organisms. If we don’t turn the tide on extinction rates urgently, both in the oceans and on land, then all bets are off for our survival. For the first time in Earth’s history, one species has the power to decide the fate of all others.

The post To See the Fate of the Oceans, Look Back a Half-Billion Years appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The United States, we are told, will have a burst of economic growth, now that it is unshackled from an agreement that required (suggested is more accurate) our nation to do too much while other countries did not do enough. Hours after the announcement, Vice President Mike Pence stated on Fox News that this was “for American jobs.”

But there are questions about all of these claims, especially the one about what leaving Paris might mean for the economy and jobs.

The United States should get an economic boost if leaving the agreement means that it does not change its domestic environmental policy—and other countries respond by putting limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the service of fighting climate change. But that doesn’t square with the context.

The United States is already in the process of changing domestic policy, and leaving Paris is only part of it. Back in March, President Trump signed executive orders instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back the Clean Power Plan, a program designed to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from coal, and to review and roll back CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy), standards that were designed to increase gas mileage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from autos.

Given the fossil fuel sympathies of the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, one can easily predict what direction these policies will take. You may like the official U.S. position on greenhouse gas emissions—that we don’t care about them much anymore—or you may not. As for me, full disclosure: I lived in the San Fernando Valley in the 1980s and worked in China in the mid-1990s, so from my personal experience I can tell you there are some things that I consume—like air—that I find better when I can’t see them.

But this article is about economics, not personal preferences. We economists tend to look at both the immediate impact and the long run impact of policy.

In the near term, being free of the Paris Agreement means that the elimination of anti-pollution restrictions on coal can go forward. Coal producers and coal-fired energy plants can then lower their costs by reducing the amount they have to spend on pollution abatement. Lower costs mean lower prices, and all good Econ 101 students know that when producers lower prices, consumers purchase more. That means more coal and coal-related jobs, and that is the point.

But that’s only the beginning of a longer story. Modern economics traces its study of external costs (such as pollution) back to the 1960 classic “The Problem of Social Cost” by Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase. This and subsequent studies clearly show that the efficiency of a free competitive market in allocating a nation’s resources is impaired when external costs are free to the producer. The problem can be solved in one of two ways: private side payments or government intervention. An example of a side payment would be when a neighbor pays you to not use Roundup in your garden because they are trying to grow a totally organic garden just over the fence. But side payments are unusual. Thus government has a role in restoring efficiency to free markets by bringing the external cost into the producer’s cost equation.

In the case of a coal mine that is polluting the nearby water supply, total cost has two elements: an internal cost paid by the consumer through the price of coal, and an external one paid by the person facing higher water prices due to increased purification costs. When coal is priced too low, as it will be with fewer regulations, too much is consumed and those purchasing water are in fact also purchasing some of this extra coal with it.

Thus, unless the United States is willing to return to the table and negotiate greenhouse gas emission reductions once again (and it isn’t), then its current response is: Since you (insert your favorite miscreant country here) are not going to do more to control emissions, we are going to increase our emissions as well. Let’s all pollute together, shall we?

As with the coal mine example above, those producers who can lower costs with less regulation of emissions will end up producing more, and those who bear the additional costs, for example through additional asthma medication purchases, will end up paying for that additional production. And that means our free market system will produce too much of some goods and not enough of others.

For the longer-run economic impact, it is useful to think of this change in the context of a simple economic model developed by another Nobel Laureate, Robert Solow. In the Solow framework, there are three ways to increase economic growth in the long run: capital accumulation, increased labor, and productivity gains. The great strides in per capita income in the U.S. between 1950 and 1990 were due in large part to productivity gains. At present we are in a productivity improvement drought, part of the reason that our economy has grown at only two percent per year over the last eight years.

What does this have to do with Paris? It’s simple. A heavier reliance on fossil fuels, which is an old technology, impairs innovation and productivity gains. So long as it is possible to lower costs through non-taxed carbon emissions, the incentive to innovate is diminished.

To be sure, there always is some incentive to innovate; it’s just that there is less now that we’ve left Paris. But the incentive to innovate remains high in the United Kingdom and the European Union, where research institutes such as The Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult and The Fraunhofer Institute continue to pursue emission abatement technology. China also is innovating, having invested $1.2 billion more than the United States in renewable energy research and development in 2015 alone.

Energy innovators in Europe and China see an opportunity for their products to gain immediate market acceptance from the demand induced by their government’s actions to satisfy the Paris Agreement. But can’t U.S. innovators see the same opportunities in the Chinese and European markets? The answer is only a qualified yes. First, Trumpian trade policy introduces a great deal of uncertainty about trade relations and the ability to penetrate these markets in the future. Second, innovators have to worry about exporting to foreign markets about which they may know little. So there is a double whammy to American incentives. This means that the United States will fall behind in energy-related technology industries, and the associated employment and income growth of the future will be sacrificed to the coal mines of Appalachia.

But all is not lost. California immediately rejected the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and as of this writing has been joined by 11 other states in the United States Climate Alliance. The Alliance members promise to uphold the Paris Agreement standards regardless of the Trump Administration’s position on them. California by itself is a $2.5 trillion economy with nearly 40 million residents. That is a big market by any standard. And, combined with the world-class universities and research institutions, the incentives lost in Coal Country might well survive on the Left Coast.

That’s why California Governor Jerry Brown quickly jumped on a plane to China to affirm a partnership and co-operative position vis-à-vis the country with the most to gain from reducing carbon emissions. It seems that the Governor, along with the California legislature, recognizes the long-run stakes for economic growth and prosperity.

Is this enough? Perhaps it is. Innovators in this country might find more than enough demand for their products from the 102 million people living in United States Climate Alliance states.

So, regardless of one’s views on the Trump administration’s decision to exit Paris, the economics are very clear. We’ll see a misallocation of U.S. resources through induced market failure in the short term, and slower growth in the longer run—unless enough states act to effectively negate the withdrawal.

In the very long run, the news might be a little better. Ultimately, the United States will go to renewable energy because of economics. Self-driving vehicles, electric vehicles, and efficient battery storage packs will eventually become cheap enough to price fossil fuels out of the market.

When that happens, even more income, jobs, and wealth will shift westward. So, from Silicon Beach to the Emerald City on the cote gauche, it is not au revoir Paris. Instead, as the Grammy-winning EDM duo The Chainsmokers sing, “We are staying in Paris.”

The post We’ll Always Have (the) Paris (Accord) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I study the behavior, ecology, and evolution of groundhogs and the 14 other species of marmots—large, charismatic ground squirrels that live throughout the northern hemisphere. I realize that these rodents can’t tell us when seasons will change. I know that the whole idea of celebrating a mid-winter festival in Los Angeles’s usually balmy clime also makes little or no sense. I know that hanging out with a taxidermied animal I stuffed myself might seem a bit quirky for a tenured professor.

But Groundhog Day—and its inherent absurdity—also serves as a reminder to me and my colleagues of why we do what we do. The United States has prospered in no small part because of our commitment to supporting science and technological innovation. With each new advance—from the automobile to the polio vaccine to computers to space travel—we have reinvented ourselves and the world around us. Scientific discovery is at the core of America’s success. Conversely, an Internet meme a few years ago wondered, “Why is that only in America do we accept weather prognostication from a rodent but deny climate change from a scientist?” But for my colleagues and me, groundhogs are symbols of science, not superstition.

At my annual lab celebration, posters of groundhogs and plush stuffed groundhogs—not to mention a glittering Swarovski crystal specimen, given to me by UCLA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as thanks for years of service as department chair—add to the ambiance. Groundhog-themed comics festoon the lab walls. “Two Buck Chuck,” our stuffed adolescent groundhog, presides over the festivities perched in one corner. One fall long ago, when I was doing my postdoctoral research, I found him dead on the side of the road and threw him into the freezer. My wife Janice and I had to wait to stuff him until Christmas break, when the smell associated with thawing and skinning him would be less offensive to our lab mates.

We’ve been holding our Groundhog Day fête since 2001. America has been at it far longer than that. Groundhog Day was originally a reimagining of Candlemas Day, a Catholic mid-winter festival which itself had roots in a pagan celebration. Europeans observing Candlemas tracked hibernating hedgehogs to predict when winter would end. When the Pennsylvania Dutch came to our shores, they too looked for a hibernating mammal that might help them monitor the weather.

Woodchucks, also known as groundhogs, were native and seemed to fit the bill: Males popped up out of their burrows each February, probably checking things out and deciding when they should start waking up females to mate. The new Americans took notice, and Groundhog Day was born.

Since 2001, I have run a long-term study, initiated 55 years ago by my mentor Ken Armitage, now an emeritus professor at the University of Kansas. Ken is the world authority on marmots, and is credited with emphasizing the importance of their annual cycle, which varies by location, in explaining why marmot sociality varies. It was Ken, actually, who first came up with the idea of celebrating Groundhog Day. He used to host the members of his lab at his house, serve “ground hog” (a.k.a. sausage), and recite marmot poetry.

The study follows individually-marked yellow-bellied marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. The value of the work is rooted in its longevity—it’s one of the longest-running studies of its kind and an important tool for studying evolution in action. The animals are now emerging about a month earlier in the spring than they did 30 or 40 years ago.

Understanding how individuals respond to environmental change is essential if we want to predict how animals will react to global warming and other human-driven habitat shifts.

Science is what I do. I’m thrilled and inspired by being able to spend my days uncovering the secrets that hide in plain sight around us, and to use my marmot studies to train students to think critically and objectively. Our grand American experiment has prospered when it has the best possible information—and I know that the scientific method is a very efficient process for revealing nature’s truths. This is the spirit in which I commemorate Groundhog Day—celebrating America’s devotion to science, not just superstition.

The post Why Groundhog Day Now Elevates Science Over Superstition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These all-female amphibians clone themselves to make eggs—all girls—and they’ve survived this way for five million years. A real-life lineage of Amazonian amphibians, they achieve the seemingly impossible, generation after generation. Whatever your deepest beliefs about what is natural, normal, or even conceivable with sex and reproduction, these seven-inch salamanders blow them out of the water.

What’s more, grasping exactly what they’re up to could help us understand how climate change will affect northern ecosystems.

Unisexual salamanders seem rare, but they are abundant from the east coast as far west as the Great Lakes. Where I live in New England, the person who studies them, as part of what’s called the Blue Spotted Salamander Complex, is Kristine Hoffmann, an energetic PhD candidate at the University of Maine. I tried to talk with her in the fall, but her rigorous daily schedule of visiting her radio-tagged salamanders in their damp woodsy hideouts kept us from finding a time until late December, after the salamanders had crawled away to sleep off the winter in their burrows.

“I grew up in a vernal pool,” Hoffmann told me, referring to the 100-foot-long seasonal wetland situated behind her childhood home in Massachusetts. She spent hours there as a kid, looking at wood frogs, salamanders and the whole ecosystem of creatures that gravitated there to breed, lay eggs, and mature before leaving in search of a hidden place to hang out when the pool went dry.

Hoffmann, in waders and giant gloves, checks some salamander breeding cages in a small vernal pool still partly covered with ice. It was raining. Big Night is more fun for amphibians than it is for people. Courtesy of Kristine Hoffmann.

In 2012 Hoffmann came to Maine to study how urbanization was impacting vernal pools and the blue spotted salamanders. In Maine, salamanders may be the most abundant vertebrate—certainly more populous than people or moose. Scientists have estimated that in Maine the total weight of the salamander population actually exceeds that of people, but that is partly a function of Maine’s small human presence and vast woodlands. In any case, salamanders are a rarely seen but critical part of the ecosystem, in particular in the early spring when they are a feast of “little hamburgers” for hungry owls, skunks, and even just-out-of-hibernation bears who eat their eggs.

Hoffmann quickly realized that these salamanders, for all their importance, were scientifically mysterious. “Nobody had ever just followed a blue spotted salamander and seen where they lived and what types of wetland they liked.” So Hoffmann got to work hiking to dozens of wetland sites, trapping and measuring and releasing scores of salamanders and then using statistics to compare their preferences. Her survey became so ambitious she ended up asking groups of Upward Bound high schoolers from Maine to design cheap new live traps. (Watch a video.) With the new traps, she and a crew monitored 42 wetlands over the course of two years.

She also implanted tiny radio transmitters in some salamanders so she could follow them. Some, she discovered, could walk as far as 400 meters in a week. (In Ohio labs some salamanders have walked nine miles on a treadmill. Poor things.)

The salamanders’ new year begins on what Hoffmann and other scientists call Big Night, the first warm night of spring when it is raining and the air smells like mud even though there is still ice in the tops of the vernal pools. On that night all of amphibians are on the move, which is why so many frogs end up getting smashed on roadways. The salamanders wake up in their burrows and head downhill to the pool. If they find one that’s too small it will dry up before their babies metamorphose. If it’s too big it’ll have fish that eat their eggs. But, if they’re lucky, they end up in a vernal pool that’s just right.

A mating frenzy begins. Male frogs and female frogs pair up. A male blue spotted salamander, whose blackish gray back is peppered with attractive pale blue spots, approaches a female blue spotted salamander, nudges her with his snout, hugs her from behind, and then rubs his chin over her snout while vibrating his hind limbs alongside hers. Eventually he lets go of her and drops some sperm packets in the mud and she picks them up with her cloaca and then the sperm and eggs combine and divide. Blah blah blah.

Well, that’s how the straight salamanders do it anyway. Amidst the frenzy, the female unisexual salamanders—who look almost identical to the blue spots—sneak in and steal some sperm packets. These sperm then stimulate their cloned eggs to divide, but the genes in the sperm may or may not be taken up by the dividing eggs. So some embryos will have two sets of chromosomes from their mother, and others will have three sets, including one from dad. There’s a name for reproducing via sperm-stealing: kleptogenesis.

A male blue spotted salamander. His sperm is used by the unisexual salamanders to stimulate the development of their eggs. Courtesy of Kristine Hoffmann.

Self-cloning seems exotic but recent research shows it’s surprisingly prevalent. At least 80 different fish, reptiles, and amphibians reproduce via parthenogenesis, Greek for “virgin birth.”

This suggests that it’s we sexual reproducers who are the weirdos. Why devote so much energy to finding partners if there’s another way? The unisexual salamander is a compelling data point in this argument. People used to think that parthenogenesis “cost” organisms by making them more vulnerable to parasites and predators and more inclined to go extinct. But the unisexual salamanders have survived lo these five million years—ever since two salamanders of different species met in some ancient pool and did their thing. When their chromosomes didn’t line up exactly their offspring produced eggs with two chromosomes, not one. As time went on, these salamanders swapped out their original genes with new ones from nearby salamanders. So the unisexual salamanders who descended from this ancient pair are part of other “complexes” with other salamanders across North America.

Rather than being evolutionary dead ends, unisexual salamanders thrived. While sexual salamanders produce between one and ten eggs, the unisexual ones produce as many as 30. And studies of a group of unisexual salamanders in Ohio (who steal sperm from a different species of salamander than the Blue Spotted) found that they regrow their tails 1.5 times faster than regular salamanders. (If anyone can figure out a half decent pun about unisexual salamanders getting more tail, or tails, um, please drop me a line.)

“Salamanders are kind of strange,” observes Hoffmann. “Usually animals have a set of rules for unisexual reproduction, but salamanders don’t follow them.” Some of the unisexual salamanders she’s found have not just two or three sets of chromosomes but four or even five.

And in the vernal pools, things get even stranger. In other salamander complexes, the usual ratio between unisexual salamanders and their sperm donors is 2 to 1 or 3 to 1. But in the Maine vernal pools that Hoffmann surveyed there are 78 unisexual females for every blue spotted male. That’s a ratio that’s theoretically impossible because it’s thought that a blue spotted male only has enough sperm packets for 7-35 females. Are the males producing a lot of sperm? Are the females reproducing without males? “They’re doing something theoretically impossible and we don’t know what it is,” she says.

This spring Hoffmann will do a series of studies of salamanders to see how they’re reproducing, but the question isn’t just academic. The blue spotted salamanders are at the bottom of their geographic range, and as the climate warms, they may move further north. If it turns out that the unisexual salamanders can reproduce even without male sperm, then Maine may still have lots of these salamanders to feed our bears, eat our mosquitos, and outweigh us. If not, well, the woods may change right beneath our feet.

The post What Self-Cloning Salamanders Say About Climate Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Marquee sporting events are often billed as a great boon for cities and the environment. Chapter 1 of the Olympic Charter tasks the International Olympic Committee with encouraging “a responsible concern for environmental issues.” Cleaning up Rio de Janeiro’s water was a centerpiece of Brazil’s 2009 proposal to host the games, but efforts fell behind or failed to materialize. And this won’t be the first Olympics to struggle to meet environmental promises. As ESPN pointed out, Sydney had its own water problems in 2000, and the smog in Beijing got 2008 dubbed the “most polluted Olympics ever.” We shouldn’t be surprised; environmental cleanup efforts in sprawling metropolises almost always take more time and money than expected, in part because they push against the steady current of environmental degradation that comes with life in the industrialized world.

But Brazil’s rivers are just the tip of the melting iceberg. To paraphrase Naomi Klein, climate change changes everything—including sports. In the sinking island nation of the Maldives, kabaddi players have told my collaborator Adam Flynn that they are adapting their traditional tag game to be played in shallow water. In Alaska, snow was hauled in by train in March to make the Iditarod sled race possible, and even then parts ran over a bone-jarring mixture of ice and dirt. Climate change combines with countless instances of wrecked ecologies—poisoned waters, polluted skies, and dead landscapes—to form a larger environmental megacrisis that will profoundly shape how we spend time outdoors.

Sports, like so many human activities, balance our competing impulses to adapt to and control our environment. We celebrate the endurance required to compete on the “frozen tundra” of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, while underground electric wiring prevents Lambeau’s turf from actually becoming frozen. Golf began as a conversation with the landscape of Scotland; now it is played on designed-from-scratch courses in Arizona that consume more than 80 million gallons of water daily. In a way, these feats of engineering are impressive—just like the Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal. But now we are increasingly forced to adapt to the consequences of our own past attempts to control our environment.

When you’re left gasping during an outdoor run, it’s pedantic to try to draw a crisp line between the harsh effects of a record-breaking heat wave and those of dangerous, choking smog. Both are equally oppressive. (In fact, they compound each other.) The same goes for Rio’s rivers, dying of contamination, and Aspen’s melting snows. Due to the same poor planning that gave us the climate crisis, we’re suffering from a loss of outdoor spaces suited for play.

Winter sports in particular will take a hit. Already the season is becoming shorter, and snowstorms more unpredictable in many favorite ski destinations. Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse told the Senate in 2013:

“Before the end of the century, the number of economically viable ski locations in New Hampshire and Maine will be cut in half; skiing in New York will be cut by three-quarters; and there will be no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts.”

Winter sports have long supplemented the elements with artificial snow and ice, but soon fabricated winter may be the norm. Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Games in Russia, was a subtropical beach town. Dubai and Qatar have built indoor ski slopes in scorching deserts that climate change is making increasingly inhospitable. Qatar also plans to use advanced new cooling technology to keep 2022 World Cup players from passing out from the heat in their open air stadiums. Engineered environments like these—and air-conditioned, covered football stadiums—are the beginning of a costly, high-tech effort required to preserve and adapt our great cultural rituals for a warmer planet.

As adaptation to a harsher climate increasingly requires more sophisticated and costly technologies, the danger is that already-expensive sports like skiing or sailing will become even more rarefied drivers of inequality. The very affluent may be able to pay for the privilege of living like climate change isn’t happening, but many of us will be priced out of certain sports for good.

That’s a shame, because sports have long brought together people from all walks of life. Now, we may go beyond the divide between the cheap seats and the VIP box. We may be headed towards a world with two sets of games: those played in the manicured spaces inhabited by the very affluent and those played on the hot, troubled planet left to the rest of us.

This spring I participated in Arizona State University’s “The Future of Sport 2040” Emerge Festival, along with my colleagues at the Applied History Institute. For our installation—“The Games That Got Us Through”—we imagined an American climate migration and the new sports of its refugee culture. The centerpiece was Cistern, a tag-like game of ritualized water raiding that seeks to minimize violence in the struggle over a scarce resource.

It was a timely thought experiment. The Olympics in Rio will, for the first time, feature a team of refugee athletes. With millions fleeing violence, and millions more likely to flee rising seas and broken ecosystems, we need to start figuring out how displaced people can live lives of dignity in the 21st century. And that means figuring out where and how people can run, jump, and play in an increasingly volatile world.

Games and sports can be a great boon for people in precarious situations. They can help settle conflicts peacefully. They can bring communities together, turn suspicions into friendships. They can give young people an outlet for energies that could otherwise turn disruptive or dangerous. Events like the World Cup and the Olympics can be sources of inspiration, excitement, and shared identity for people in difficult times. Thus it’s a productive exercise to think about the games we might play in the future.

The good news is that we can change the games we play much easier than we can change our agricultural infrastructure, or evacuate the billions who live in the path of rising seawaters. We don’t know what new sports the Olympics might include a century from now. But we should adapt, and celebrate new games even as we memorialize the lost ones. Let’s not forget: Just like Venice was founded by refugees, basketball was invented during a storm.

The post Will Environmental Crises Segregate Sports? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The novel is shorthand for the dangers of unfettered scientific progress. But the unforgettable creation scene, depicted in movies with frenzied screams of “It’s alive!” and arcing electricity, doesn’t happen until one-third of the way through the novel.

If you’ve never read the book, you might expect the story to begin with Dr. Frankenstein recounting his mistakes or heading off to school to study anatomy. Instead, we start with Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer. The Arctic exploration might seem random, but it makes more sense in the light of the environmental crisis unfolding in the Northern Hemisphere when Shelley was drafting the novel.

Mary Shelley was an astute observer of the world; her journals reveal a young woman with a powerful drive to learn, reading a range of political, literary, philosophical, and scientific works. For Frankenstein, she seems to have been inspired by a series of electrical experiments and new microscopic discoveries to imagine whether it would be possible to infuse the spark of life into dead flesh. But her observations were not limited to the world of books—they extended to the environment around her to include the dark forests of eastern France, the sublime peaks of the Alps, and the miserable weather of 1816.

In her preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley comments that the summer of 1816 in Geneva, where she was staying, was memorably unpleasant: “It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” This dreary weather wasn’t a chance occurrence—it was just one small manifestation of larger environmental changes.

Between April 5-11 of 1815, the volcano Tambora erupted in Indonesia, more than 7,500 miles away from Geneva. Tambora’s eruption is one of the largest in recorded human history, 100 times more powerful than Mount St. Helens’ 1980 explosion. The eruption pumped a massive quantity of sulfur into the atmosphere, radically cooling the Northern Hemisphere by 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit to 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit. In essence, people living between 1815 and 1816 experienced an extreme, miniature global climate change event.

The constant rain that Shelley complains about in her preface caused flooding in Geneva, forcing people out of their houses and onto higher ground. Thanks to Tambora, violent storms rolled over Switzerland and much of the rest of Europe. In June 1816, temperatures in New England began to fluctuate wildly, going from 82 degrees Fahrenheit on June 5, to -30 degrees the next day, as reported by the Connecticut Courant (now the Hartford Courant). In Quebec, there were reports of frost the week of June 12–19, followed by a brief return to temperatures as high as 75 degrees (more normal for June), followed again by snow and ice. (These numbers may not be totally accurate, since they were anecdotal reports in 19th century newspapers.) Accordingly, 1816 has been called “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death” and “The Year Without a Summer.”

In parts of London, the weather had a rather mundane impact. La Belle Assemblée in July reports, “The precarious state of the weather, with the departure from town of several fashionists belonging to the higher classes, and the more serious causes of emigration, have rendered the modern toilette less subject to fluctuation than might otherwise been expected.” Thanks to the unseasonable weather, the trendsetters (the fashionists) left London earlier than usual so the mode of dress (the toilette) was more subdued.

The eruption of Tomboro in 1821.

But the radical shift in climate had far more serious effects, too. The Connecticut Courant reports the weather had a macabre fallout on the bird population: “A variety of birds, among which are the hummingbird, the yellow bird, the marten, and the beautiful scarlet sparrow have been so benumbed, as to be taken by the hand and great numbers have actually perished by the cold.” The birds that were “taken by the hand” were likely eaten, not nursed by the fire until they regained their strength. Other stories include birds flocking to towns seeking warmth and respite from the frozen woods, only to be trapped by hungry humans.

One feature occurs again and again in the news reports: a focus on food. Even brief discussions of the weather are reliably accompanied by concerns about the availability of food. The weather was destroying crops, setting people on edge. Reports out of Montreal, again printed in the Connecticut Courant, suggest that the city was on the verge of rioting because “the high price of bread excites general alarm, but it is owing to artificial causes. Wealthy individuals have engrossed the flour that came to Montreal, and now extort the enormous profit of center per cent. … The situation of the poor in general throughout the Province is dreadful.”

There were riots in the United Kingdom; in the city of Frome, citizens raging against skyrocketing potato prices were subdued by the cavalry. La Belle Assemblée might seem to suggest that London was insulated from the unrest, but even it hints that there were “more serious causes of emigration” from the city as it became home to masses of displaced vagrants and beggars.

One report out of Maine, in the Connecticut Courant, notes, “A famine for man and beast seems to stare us in the face.” The author goes on to ask, “What is to become of us? We hope, notwithstanding, that the God of harvest will not utterly forsake us.” Famine was widespread in the Northern Hemisphere, stretching as far as China where there are accounts of people eating clay to survive. Conservative estimates put the death toll from Tambora’s disruption of agriculture at 71,000—all because the weather was 31 degrees cooler than normal. Distressingly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections for global warming suggest that the earth’s climate will be roughly 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average by about 2025.

The Year Without a Summer is why Robert Walton is important to Frankenstein: Like the newspapers, he’s concerned about surviving climate chaos. Walton journeys to the Arctic in search of a northern paradise. He says that in the Arctic “the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. … There snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.”

Frankenstein begins with the search for new, more habitable lands because of environmental anxieties. People did not know that the cooling trend was a temporary result of volcanic activity. Rather, they thought the summer of 1816, with its famine, social unrest, and winter eternal, was the new normal. To survive in this afflicted world, new sources of food and land would be necessary, so Walton heads north hoping to find a balmy Eden. Amusingly, Walton would have found the Arctic much balmier now: The Arctic was already about 5.22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average in 2015. That might open up the Arctic to farming, but at the same time the Middle East might become an uninhabitable wasteland, not to mention other unforeseen changes.

At the end of the novel, Walton, at the urging of his crew, turns his ship around, ending his quest to find the Arctic Eden. Walton and Frankenstein (who is telling Walton his story, after the captain saved him) are both frustrated by the sailors’ cowardice. The crew doesn’t want to die for glory, honor, and science. Later Frankenstein reconsiders his anger and reflects that he remembered too late: “My duties towards my fellow-creatures had greater claims to my attention, because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery” than his need for self-aggrandizement. The novel emphasizes social responsibility in the face of a climate crisis.

Today, archival technologies allow us to understand the human dimension of climate changes throughout history: How have people in different times and places reacted to a dynamic, deadly world? Reading arcane and previously lost documents, like stories chronicling the summer of 1816, gives us the opportunity to understand the complex nature of our world, to remember what we might have forgotten, and to consider how our communities and societies can be more resilient in the face of a changing climate. The future will always be unpredictable, but every day is an opportunity to learn more from the past and put that knowledge to work. A volcano, a novel, and a smattering of newspaper reports can reveal a possible gap in our thinking about climate change today—the bedrock importance of food security and the turmoil shortages will cause, because the difference between sustenance and starvation can be a matter of degrees.

The post <i>Frankenstein</i> Is a Story About Climate Change’s Horrors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The images are gripping. Horizons glow with satanic reds squishing through black and bluish clouds, as though the sky itself were bruised and bleeding. Foregrounds bristle with scorched neighborhoods still drifting with smoke and streams of frightened refugees, a scene more commonly associated with war zones.

But we’ve seen this before. Big fires are big fires, and one pyrocumulus can look pretty much like another. Communities with homes burned to concrete slabs, molten hulks of what once were cars alongside roads, surrounding forests mottled with black and green— these are becoming commonplaces.

What strikes me most about those Fort McMurray images making their way down from western Canada is the mashup of foreground and background, the collision of free-burning flames with a fossil-fuel powered society. The first form of burning dates back to the early Devonian, when life first colonized the continents. The second tracks the Anthropocene, when humanity changed its combustion habits and wrenched the Earth into a new order. At places like Fort McMurray the deep past and the recent present of fire on Earth rush together with almost Shakespearean urgency.
 

***

 
The plot is old, the stage setting and cast of players updated.

Monster fires are no stranger in the boreal forest. It’s a fire-ravenous biota that burns in stand-replacing patches. This is not a landscape where misguided fire suppression has upset the rhythms of surface burning and catapulted flames into the canopy. They’ve always been in the canopy and everything has adapted accordingly. White and black spruce and jack pine and aspen experience exactly the kind of fire they require.

How big those patches get depends on how dry the fuel is, how brisk the winds, and how extensive the forest. In northern Alberta there is not much to break a full-throated wildfire. The Chinchaga fire started on June 1, 1950, and burned across northeastern British Columbia and most of Alberta until October 31, a total of 3 million acres.

Nor is a burning city a novelty. In North America the wave of settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries paralleled a wave of fire. The surrounding lands were disturbed, and frequently alight with both controlled and uncontrolled fires. The towns were built of wood—basically, reconstituted forests. The same conditions that propelled fires through the landscape pushed them through towns.

Only a century ago did those urban conflagrations finally quell as urbanites turned to less combustible materials; fire codes and zoning regulations organized buildings in ways that discouraged spreading flames; fire services acquired the mechanical muscle to halt blazes early; and the wave of settlement flattened. Over the past century it’s taken earthquakes or wars to overcome these reforms in modern cityscapes, and unleash widespread conflagrations.

Meanwhile, a broadly rural scene morphed and polarized into an urban frontier of wildlands and cities that faced one another without intervening buffers. The middle, working landscapes, like the middle, working classes, shriveled at the expense of the favored extremes. In 1986 the term wildland-urban interface appeared. It was a clumsy, dumb phrase, but it referred to a dumb problem. Watching houses, and then communities burn was like watching polio or plague return. This was a problem we had solved, then forgot to—or chose not to—continue the vaccinations and hygiene that had halted their terrors.

Initially, the problem appeared a California pathology. But it soon broke out of quarantine and has spread across western North America. The prevailing narrative held that the problem was stupid Westerners building houses where there were fires. Most of the vulnerable communities, however, are in the Southeastern U.S., and if climate change modelers are correct, we will see the fires moving to where the houses are. That will make it a national narrative. In truth, the problem is international, each country with its own quirky combination of fire-quickening factors. Mediterranean France, Portugal, Greece, South Africa, and Australia are experiencing similar outbreaks. North America has no monopoly over catastrophic conflagrations.

It’s tempting to appeal to climate change as the common cause. Yet the burning bush and scorched town are joined not just by global climate change, but by a global economy, and a global commitment to fossil-fuel firepower. That makes the issue both more pervasive and, paradoxically, more amenable to treatment. It means that, while there is one grand prime mover, there are many levers and gears. Fire is a reaction that takes its character from its context. It’s a driverless car barreling down the road, synthesizing everything around it.

The enduring images of the Fort Mac fire may, in fact, be its cars. Car-propelled flight, cars stranded for lack of gas, cars melted in garages, evacuation convoys halted due to 60 meter flames, relief convoys laden with gasoline. It isn’t only what comes out of the tailpipe that matters, but how those vehicles have organized human life in the boreal. The engagement (or not) with the surrounding bush. The kind of land use that cars encourage. The kind of industry that must develop to support those cars. The kind of city that such an industry needs to sustain it. The oil sand industry that has shaped the contours of modern Fort McMurray is in turn shaped by the internal-combusting society it feeds.

So there are really two fires burning around and into Fort McMurray. One burns living landscapes. The other burns lithic landscapes, which is to say, biomass buried and turned to stone in the geologic past. The two fires compete: one or the other triumphs. At any place the transition may take years, even decades, but where the industrial world persists its closed combustion will substitute for or suppress the open flames of ecosystems. The wholesale transition from the realm of living fire to that of lithic fire may stand as a working definition of the Anthropocene. Once parted they rarely meet.

At Fort McMurray they have collided with unblinking brutality. Wild fire burned away controlled fire. The old fires have forced the power plants behind the new ones to shut down and their labor force to flee. It’s like watching an open pit mine consume the town that excavates it. It’s tempting to regard the incident as a one-off, a freak of a remote landscape and a historical moment. But those collisions are becoming more frequent.

That’s not the deep worry, however. The deep horror is that the two fires may be moving from competition into collusion. They are creating positive feedback of a sort that makes more fire. Those images of fire on fire are the raw footage of a planetary phase change, what might end up as a geologic era we could call the Pyrocene. They will continue until, as Shakespeare put it, they “consume the thing that feeds their fury.”

Disaster is not always tragedy, and Fort McMurray and the industrial complex behind it may well escape lethal consequences. So if Shakespeare seems too elevated, consider Edna St Vincent Millay.

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

We have in truth been burning both ends of our combustion candle, and if its light seems more lurid than lovely, there are yet texts to be read in the awful splendor of its illumination.

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The city was sprawling but exciting. I loved the weather, the beach, the palm trees. My husband had a job and a car, we found a furnished apartment in an art deco building in Los Feliz, and I set out to be a public interest lawyer. After dropping my husband off downtown in the morning, I would drive to wherever I had an interview … or to some part of the city that sounded interesting to explore. But I soon became depressed, and then angry, about the thick yellowish gray morning sky, the fluorescent orange sunset, and the metallic taste and eye-stinging character of the air around the airport and Caltech.

My chance to do something about this ugly fact of life in L.A. came when I was hired by the Center for Law in the Public Interest, a brand-new not-for-profit legal services organization founded by four corporate lawyers looking to bring high-class representation to environmental and civil rights issues. From a small office building on Santa Monica Boulevard near UCLA, the center set out to bring litigation with a major impact that would test the reach of brand new laws: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and, most powerful of all, the Clean Air Act—all signed into law by Richard Nixon. The center’s litigation docket included cases to stop plans to blanket the basin with freeways and build a string of nuclear power plants along the coast.

One day, the center got a phone call from the city attorney of Riverside, asking if we could help bring a lawsuit to stop Los Angeles from sending its smog downwind, where it was having serious impacts on health and quality of life—not to mention reducing property values and scaring away potential employers.

As the junior lawyer at the center, I was assigned to look into possible legal theories that could be used. On its face, the likelihood of winning a Riverside-vs.-Los Angeles nuisance case seemed small, but fortunately we had the new, but untested federal Clean Air Act as a possible legal tool. This truly groundbreaking federal law set national air quality standards based on public health. It also required states to develop plans to attain those standards. It also gave citizens the right to go to federal court to enforce deadlines and other requirements. Within months, we had a District Court injunction ordering the state of California to file an attainment plan—and I became among a handful of experienced clean air lawyers in the U.S.

These were times of great hope and ambition but we had a powerful ally: the support of the public who were demanding cleaner air. Funding for atmospheric research within the University of California reached unprecedented levels, and there were bipartisan legislative proposals to strengthen state and local authority. Just as we are now seeing in China and India, ordinary citizens were demanding action. They had good reason: The Los Angeles Basin violated federal health standards over 200 days a year in the 1970s. And one-hour “emergency levels”—over 20 parts per billion ozone, enough to trigger warnings and cancel school playground time—happened dozens of times, especially in the eastern part of the L.A. basin. The San Gabriel Mountains to the north and east were hidden behind a white or sometimes light brown haze of pollution most of the year.

Science and technology had also advanced to the point where we could measure and connect the effect of ozone pollution with restricted growth in children’s lungs. We were armed with the conviction that we could slay the smog monster—we had the Lung Association and the Sierra Club, the NAACP, and local homeowner groups united in support of taking action to clean up the air. Air pollution had not yet become a partisan issue in part because the smog was so visible and oppressive. A broad swath of the population from both parties understood that the only solution to this difficult issue was clearly strong action by the government to deal with the major sources of pollution.

We began with cars. The first target: volatile organic compounds (VOCs), hydrocarbons that react with combustion products (nitrogen oxides) in sunlight to produce photochemical oxidants, usually measured as ozone.

But we hit a complicated challenge almost immediately. Reduce the amount of VOC in gasoline and adjust the ratio of air to fuel in the engine, and emissions go down dramatically. But in the process you also increase those nitrogen oxides that are precursors for smog. Controlling the nitrogen oxides impairs fuel economy. And who knew the exact chemical formula for preventing the formation of smog in the atmosphere at various times of day and seasons of the year? Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of modeling in atmospheric chambers and on computers led to more sophisticated knowledge of the airshed—the whole Los Angeles basin where the air is trapped by the mountains. But no amount of tweaking could overcome the basic problem: too many cars, too much petroleum burned, not enough options for walking, bicycling, or taking transit to meet the needs of people.

Then there were the power plants. Southern California Edison and the L.A. Department of Water and Power operated a fleet of generating stations along the coast; the pollution coming from their stacks would impact the entire population, since air flows mainly from ocean onshore, from west to east across the basin. Back in the ’70s those plants burned fuel oil containing a residual amount of sulfur that turned to sulfur oxides in the combustion process, creating a separate health risk and damaging vegetation and paint on neighbors’ cars.

Despite all these threats to health and the environment, local and state agencies were slow to respond. Yes, backyard incinerators had been banned in the ’60s, and oil companies had been required to provide gasoline with lower VOCs in summer months. But the auto industry, which employed thousands of assembly line workers in Van Nuys and Pico Rivera, was still in denial that much could be done.

By 1975, when Jerry Brown became governor on a platform that promised “blue skies,” the public was ready for more. Brown appointed Tom Quinn, his campaign manager, to chair the Air Resources Board. Quinn was a communications expert and seasoned political strategist. He was also a Los Angeles native, raised near the Griffith Observatory, who had a passionate hatred of smog. Quinn recruited an automotive engineer, Robert Sawyer, a professor at UC Berkeley. He also hired an environmental lawyer (me)—to help enact a set of regulations that within a few years had in-basin power plants burning cleaner natural gas, and new cars redesigned using catalytic technology and evaporative control equipment that slashed emissions by 90 percent.

There was resistance, with battles fought in the board hearing rooms and in the legislature. But we made progress starting in the late ’70s that continued through 1990. The success of these programs not only improved the health of residents, it allowed for continued growth: a doubling of California’s population, and a more than doubling of both the number of vehicles and the gross state product.

I believe we were able to make dramatic progress through a combination of the right political leadership, legal tools, activist nongovernmental organizations, and emerging science and technology. And this success in reducing Southern California smog built an agency with the technical know-how and policy experience to take on the next air challenge: greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

This is of course a global challenge, requiring actions by individuals, businesses, and nations around the world, but we have the same combination of ingredients in place.
But that’s a story for another day.

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