COMMENT – So far this year runaway fires have destroyed thousands of hectares of Canadian forest, releasing clouds of smoke so large that they affected air quality as far south as New York. At one stage the smoke was even over the North Atlantic to Great Britain and Europe. Those fires were quickly joined in the annual burn-fest by fires in Spain and Portugal. Then on the tourist mecca island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean, and even in Switzerland, a country better known for its snow-clad ski slopes.
Most recently, a deadly grass fire travelled at a speed of more than a mile per minute to destroy another tourist hotspot, the town of Lahaina on Hawaii’s island of Maui. The death toll from this fire alone could be in the hundreds.
Not the First
And this spate of deadly, destructive blazes is not the first in modern history. This year’s northern hemisphere fire season joins last year’s, and the year before that. You would need to be woefully ignorant not to see a connection to climate change. For in all these cases above-average atmospheric temperatures, dry summer weather and strong winds have combined to make ideal conditions for deadly runaway infernos.
You would have thought that, by now, fire prevention specialists, environmentalists and other scientists would have come up with a stratagem to prevent, or at least curtail these annual disasters. But is seems they haven’t.
Simple Solution
So here is a suggestion, one which the SA Smallholder has been punting for years: Firebreaks.
Yes, large tracts of forest must be cut up into manageably smaller parcels of land, say 5km by 5km (or even smaller). Each block should be separated by a clean-cut break sufficiently wide to prevent wind-borne heat, flame and sparks from migrating to the adjacent blocks. How wide these breaks should be, therefore, will be dictated by the predicted wind speed in the different locations, and the size and type of vegetation to be protected.
Sure, this will displease the aesthetically sensitive. But how much more sensible to endure the “unsightliness” of a patchwork quilt of forest or wilderness than to suffer the distinctly unpleasant sight of vast expanses of blackened, dead, charcoal-covered earth many times larger.
And it’s not only about the loss of a few million trees in the firebreaks and their beneficial effects on atmospheric carbon dioxide usage. It’s also about the vast volumes of pollutants, carbon dioxide among them, that become uncontrollably released in a runaway fire.
And besides, the added employment offered by the armies of workers necessary to complete the firebreak preparation will surely take care of any joblessness a country might have.
Not to mention the boom in chainsaw manufacturing and sales that such an undertaking would require.
Picture Credit: US Dept of Agriculture, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.