Are the American West’s Wildfires Inevitable?

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MEGAFIRE
The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame
By Michael Kodas
365 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.

FIRESTORM
How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future
By Edward Struzik
257 pp. Island Press. $30.

On Aug. 20, 1910, unusually vicious winds whipped through Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Mountains, where firefighters had been keeping a number of small yet pesky wildfires in check all summer. Aside from nearly knocking the men off their horses, the gales caused isolated blazes to combine, yielding a single giant conflagration that would come to be known as the Big Blowup. A forest ranger named Ed Pulaski was among those encircled by the fire, and he feared death was as certain as the smoke that blotted out the sun. “The whole world seemed to us men back in those mountains to be aflame,” he would later recall. “Many thought that it really was the end of the world.”

Pulaski guided 45 firefighters to shelter in a mine shaft, where he fended off the encroaching flames with wet blankets. When one firefighter panicked and tried to flee, Pulaski saved the man’s life by holding him at gunpoint. Although the whole crew eventually passed out from lack of oxygen, all but five of them survived the ordeal. Scores of their colleagues weren’t so lucky: In addition to scorching a swath of land the size of Connecticut, the Big Blowup claimed the lives of at least 78 firefighters, some of whom opted to commit suicide rather than burn alive.

Staggered by the scale of the destruction and the vitriol of the resulting newspaper headlines, the five-year-old United States Forest Service felt compelled to declare an all-out war on wildfires. Instead of letting minor fires run their course to rejuvenate the land, the Forest Service began to snuff out any blaze, no matter how tiny or remote — preferably by 10 o’clock on the morning after it was first spotted. Zero tolerance thus became the core tenet of modern wildfire management; to this day, legions of firefighters equipped with special axes known as “Pulaskis” attack every wildfire with militaristic zeal.

And yet, like many well-intentioned policies that arise in the wake of tragedy, the war on wildfires has proved to be self-defeating. As detailed in Michael Kodas’s bracing “Megafire” and Edward Struzik’s drier “Firestorm,” today’s forests are often clogged with desiccated vegetation because — unlike in countless millenniums past — they are seldom cleansed by naturally occurring blazes. With such an abundance of fuel to feast on, wildfires like those currently raging in California have become increasingly ruinous and intense. Ten million acres of the United States burned in 2015, over three times more than the annual average throughout the 1970s. And the Forest Service now spends more than half its budget fighting fires, compared with just 16 percent in 1995.

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The bureaucrats and scientists who have tried to warn against the folly of treating every wildfire like a mortal foe have discovered their message is a nonstarter. That’s partly because so many businesses are keen to preserve the status quo: About 40 percent of America’s wildfire-fighting resources, from helicopters that can cost as much as $7,000 an hour to catering services that charge $100,000 a day, are now provided by private companies. “Most don’t get paid if they’re not actively fighting a fire,” Kodas points out, “so they lobby to fight as many fires as they can.”

But the most powerful constituency in favor of perpetuating the futile war on wildfires is the people who’ve chosen to inhabit risky terrain. According to a 2015 study, America’s 13 Western states contain 1.1 million homes deemed “highly vulnerable to wildfires” because of their proximity to forests full of tinder. There is no easy way to convince the owners of those homes that a fire they can glimpse from their bedrooms should be allowed to burn for long-term strategic purposes. Nor have denizens of the so-called “wildland-urban interface” been receptive to the idea that controlled burns, set and supervised by government employees, are necessary to thin out cluttered woodlands. In fact, when the Forest Service attempted to burn off some high-risk brush near Prescott, Ariz., a few years ago, angry locals threatened to kill anyone involved in the operation.

As mammoth wildfires have been turning more and more forests into charred moonscapes, they’ve also been accelerating climate change. Blazes that penetrate the soil spur the release of substantial quantities of greenhouse gases, particularly in chilly places like Alaska, where carbon and methane have been sealed beneath the permafrost for eons. The warming effects of these gases create a devastating feedback loop: A hotter climate extends the length of the wildfire season, which in turn leads to more wildfires that produce more greenhouse gases.

Carbon and methane aren’t the only substances wildfires shake loose. As Struzik observes in the most frightening chapter of “Firestorm,” blazes often churn up the hazardous remnants of old mining activity — asbestos, arsenic, even uranium. That phenomenon should be of grave concern even to city folk who never venture within a thousand miles of a burning forest. “Wildfire experts and public health officials are just beginning to appreciate that toxins that are liberated by fire can migrate to far-flung places where most people are completely unaware of the consequences,” Struzik warns. (He cites a 2016 study by Australian and Canadian epidemiologists who found that wildfire smoke could be responsible for as many as 600,000 deaths per year, worldwide.)

Though “Megafire” and “Firestorm” cover much of the same alarming ground, Kodas’s book is far better at capturing the Sisyphean struggles of the men and women who battle blazes for a living. The author of a previous book about the tourist trade on Mount Everest, Kodas has a knack for fluid prose and an eye for ghoulish detail. In recounting one Colorado firefighter’s brush with fiery death, for example, he notes that her severely burned fingers “felt like balloons about to pop”; later, he evokes the desolation of a burned-out wilderness by describing how “thousands of incinerated ponderosas looked like brushstrokes of black ink against the gray ash.”

Struzik, an academic and environmental journalist whose most recent book dealt with the effects of climate change on the Canadian Arctic, writes with a certain stiffness, even when narrating the moment-by-moment drama of a 2016 wildfire that forced 88,000 people to evacuate the Canadian oil town of Fort McMurray. (“Formulating a wildfire management plan is as much an art as it is a science” is one of his typically anodyne observations.) “Firestorm” comes alive when Struzik discusses the work of offbeat scientists, like the man who has been “monitoring the fate of flammulated owls in the Manitou Experimental Forest on the front ranges of the Colorado Rockies since 1981.” But lay readers might have a limited appetite for such geeky tangents.

“Megafire” may be the more engaging of the two books, but I also found it to be the more downbeat — although unintentionally so. Kodas concludes by chronicling the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of 19 firefighters who perished under mysterious circumstances in an Arizona inferno in 2013. He expresses hope that these deaths will begin to awaken people to the fact that, ever since the Big Blowup, wildfire policy has been guided by a “tangled tree of legends” rather than solid science. But that sentiment struck me as depressingly naïve. In recent years, high-profile tragedies have rarely transformed public discourse; instead, they’ve tended to inspire people to cling ever more fervently to their customary beliefs, as if it would be dishonorable to admit the existence of complexity and nuance. Such is life in the era of the knee-jerk double down, which is why the era of megafires is likely here to stay.