The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires

The fires kept hopscotching across the country. Before the Barrington Lake fire had been contained, a new monster, the Donnie Creek fire, emerged in British Columbia. On June 18th, after scorching more than two thousand square miles, Donnie Creek became British Columbia’s largest recorded blaze. Saskatchewan saw dozens of wildfires, Quebec hundreds. Evacuation orders went out to the entire city of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. Many of the blazes created their own weather, in the form of thunderstorms spawned by rapidly rising hot air. The smoke from the fires drifted across much of the United States, prompting health alerts from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. By late June, Canada had broken its previous annual record for acreage burned, set in 1995, and by mid-October nearly forty-six million acres—an area larger than Denmark—had been charred. This was almost triple the previous record and nine times the annual average.