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Time Magazine
15 hours ago
- General
- Time Magazine
We're Living in the Age of Fire. It Will Only Get Worse
The hills of Louis Creek Valley are covered in lovely, towering Douglas fir, healthy evergreens climbing from the grassy meadow at the valley floor up to the ridges where the mountains meet the sky. It's lush, like much of interior British Columbia, where densely packed conifers line the innumerable wooded valleys, the heavy cone-laden branches reaching down to the ground. Joe Gilchrist, a fire steward of Secwepemc people, and a firefighter for more than 30 years, stands on the valley floor and looks at the beautiful trees. But what he sees first is danger. 'It's been over 100 years since it's been illegal for Indigenous people to use fire on the land, and so in that time, the trees have overgrown the area, and some of the trees have got diseased,' he says. 'It's just gotten thicker, and the trees that have died have fallen to the ground, and branches and the needles that fall every year go onto the ground and just add to the fuel. It's just a major fire waiting to happen.' Until the 1860s, the Secwepemc were regularly setting this valley ablaze in the spring and fall, when the undergrowth can safely be burned off without the fire climbing the trunks where they could cause a crown fire, where flames leap quickly from treetop to treetop. The valley then was a patchwork of ecosystems, with grazing land for game, berry and mushroom patches, and healthy, diverse stands of trees. It provided food resources, and, crucially, it was not vulnerable to megafires. 'Megafires just weren't possible, because the forest itself was bio diverse,' says Gilchrist. 'It wasn't one monoculture of trees that are too close together and too over-aged and with lots of fuel on the ground.' It was similar throughout the continent. The forest in the pre-Columbian Americas was not primaeval, in a wild state, as is normally imagined, but carefully managed by Indigenous peoples, who were constantly burning. European settlers always remarked on the burning in their diaries and letters, finding it wasteful. Now, experts see that they knew what they were doing. Professor Lori Daniels, director of the University of British Columbia's Centre for Wildfire Coexistence, has been matching fire scars on tree rings with Indigenous oral history, and finding evidence of the repeated low scale burning before the Colonial era. One tree, in Tobacco Plains, near the Montana border, had survived 52 fires. The tree rings showing scars from low-intensity fires stopped in the 19th Century, when settlers took over and banned traditional burns. After the Second World War, when fire towers and water bombers increased the effectiveness of fire suppression, the forests became both safer from fire, and yet ever more vulnerable as the fuel load built up. 'Between 65% and 85% of the trees that we see in the forest today came in when Indigenous fire stewardship stopped,' says Daniels. 'So beautiful, green, forested British Columbia, the dense forest that we see as blankets across the hill slopes, by far the majority of those trees are on those mountains because they have not burned with a surface fire for decades to a century.' The gorgeous wooded slopes, in British Columbia and much of North America, exist because we romantically yearned for edenic wildlands. What that thinking produced is dangerous fuel loads. Because of the effectiveness of modern fire suppression, the amount of fuel has been steadily increasing for decades. And because of climate change, it is much drier. The result is a terrible new normal, with immense out-of-control wildfires now regularly turning massive swaths of the boreal belt around the top of the world to charcoal. The boreal ecosystem—the wilderness areas of evergreens between the deciduous woodlands to the south and the tundra to the north—makes up almost a third of the planet's forest land. It is a vital economic and ecological zone, and a crucial storehouse of carbon—or, it used to be. In 2023, more than 6,000 fires ravaged 37 million acres of land in Canada alone, scorching a land mass the size of Montana and poisoning the air as far away as Atlanta. Last year was not as bad, but it was still terrible, and worse in Russia, where almost 22 million acres were burnt. This season started badly in Canada. Many 'zombie fires' had overwintered, smoldering beneath the snow. One fire overwintered for two years in a row, a grim new first. They broke out early in a hot, dry spring, forcing the evacuation of towns and villages across the country, leaving a pall of smoke across the land. By the end of May, there were hundreds. More than 90 were out of control, meaning firefighters had decided they were too big to fight. About 40,000 people, mostly indigenous, were ordered out of their homes, some flown south, others making long, harrowing car journeys through smoky woods. On June 2, residents fled the northern Saskatchewan town of La Ronge after a fire breached the airport where crews were working. The next day much of the town of Denare Beach burned, while heartbroken residents watched remotely on doorbell cams. Natural variations in weather mean some years are worse than others, but the trend line is clear. Because the climate is warming, the fire season starts sooner and ends later. There is more fuel, and it is drier. Lightning, which starts many fires, is now striking further north than the past. Some forests have been made doubly vulnerable by climate-change-induced pest infestations. The fires are more dangerous and more damaging than they used to be. They burn hotter, creating their own weather, towering pyrocumulonimbus storms: massive, hellish fire tornadoes that throw flaming trees through the air and generate thousands of lightning strikes in their vicinity, sparking more fires. The fires now grow so quickly that veteran firefighters are often shocked by their behavior. They jump lakes and rivers, sending burning embers up to three miles through the air. So far, there have been few casualties, but veteran firefighters think it is just a matter of time. In 2016, a fire near Fort McMurray, a city of 100,000 people in northern Alberta, moved so fast that officials were forced to order an emergency evacuation, and surrender much of the town to the blaze. It was only because so many of the young and hardy residents had safety training from the oil industry that there were not mass casualties. The fire at Fort McMurray was a bitterly ironic wakeup call. It highlighted the new danger of the fast-moving megafires to northern towns, and put a spotlight on the underlying reason for the new danger: Fort McMurray is a bustling city only because of the vast bitumen-mining operations there, where the world's most carbon intensive oil is boiled out of tarry sand. Mike Flannigan, who has been studying wildfires as long as Joe Gilchrist has been fighting them, is scared. In 1985, Flannigan gave his first talk predicting that climate change would lead to bigger fires. Audiences were skeptical, but he was confident that he was right. In 1991, he published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research predicting a 46% increase in annual area burned when the amount of carbon in the atmosphere doubled from pre-industrial levels, which measured 280 parts per million (ppm). In 1991, when the atmospheric carbon levels measured 355 ppm , 2.5 million acres burned in Canada. This year, the level of C02 is 427 ppm ten million acres burnt by July 1. Flannigan's models were far too conservative. 'We—the modelers—have done pretty well with getting the temperature increases, but the impacts from those temperature increases has been grossly underestimated,' he says He finds that disquieting. 'It's happening faster than I would have thought, and there may be surprises coming—not just for fire—but for climate change, surprises that catch us all off guard.' 'Fire is always where people are,' Flannigan continues. 'It goes with us wherever we go. But the genie is out of the bottle. Fire is now uncontrollable, and we're going to see more and more fire and more and more catastrophic fire.' Flannigan thinks we are living in the pyrocene, the age of fire, an idea from Arizona environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne. By burning so much coal and oil, we have changed the climate and can no longer control the processes. Canada's forests—which make up 8.5%of all global forest area—were once a crucial storehouse of carbon, but because of the fires they have been a net carbon emitter since 2001. The fires of 2023 released 647 million metric tons of carbon, more than the total annual emissions of South Korea that year. The fires are so hot that they are burning off the top soil in some places, which means some land that was treed will come back as savannah—grasslands which do not store as much carbon. And the news may get much worse. Many of the trees in northern Canada spring from permanently frozen peat bogs, which contain enormous quantities of carbon. As the climate warms, and that permafrost melts, it becomes susceptible to fire, posing a horrifying climate risk: massive, unfightable northern fires spewing huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, which could push Earth past a climate tipping point that once crossed will cause a spiral-effect of endless warming. 'It's not a steady state,' says Flannigan. 'It's not normal. We're on a downward trajectory. Sometimes I say we're in Dante's circle of hell. I don't know which circle we're on, but I know which way we're going.' Only one thing might stop the terrifying processes that humans have set in motion. 'The bottom line, until we deal with greenhouse gasses, fossil-fuel burning, we're going to continue to warm and we're going to continue to see more fire.' Stephen Maher is the author of The Prince, The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau.
Epoch Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
‘The Greatest American: Benjamin Franklin'
With the observances of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution now underway, this is a perfect time to reconsider Benjamin Franklin, the most audacious and unpredictable of the Founding Fathers. Economist Mark Skousen, an eighth-generation direct descendant of Franklin, authored 'The Greatest American: The Genius of Benjamin Franklin' as a user-friendly guide to the Colonial era's most intriguing celebrity. Indeed, calling Franklin a 'celebrity' is the easiest way to classify him, as Skousen points out Franklin enjoyed prominence in 22 different careers.
Boston Globe
21-06-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
The Battle of Bunker Hill rages again -- in Gloucester
Spectators also will be able to interact with the military reenactors, as well as hundreds of 'civilian' interpreters who will depict the hardships of everyday life in the besieged town of Boston at the time of the battle. Organizers chose The spectators 'will get a very good look at what Advertisement Narrators using a sound system will describe the events in context for the audience as they unfold. A slightly compressed version of the reenactment will be staged Sunday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. 'We'll follow the script of what already happened historically,' said Dietzel, 37, of Bridgewater. 'We have people coming from all over the country, a few coming from Canada, and a few British coming from the UK' to portray the combatants. Advertisement Although Bunker Hill technically was a British victory, the Colonial troops inflicted massive casualties on the British, who were forced to mount three assaults on the Americans' hilltop fortifications before the rebels ran out of ammunition and retreated. The British lost 1,054 killed and wounded in the battle, the first pitched conflict of the American Revolution. The Colonials suffered 450 casualties, but gained the morale-boosting confidence that they could stand and fight a disciplined army with superior numbers. 'Reenactments make history come alive in a way that you don't really get from the textbooks,' said Annie Harris, chief executive officer of the Essex National Heritage Area, one of the event's organizers. 'It was a more significant battle than many of us realize,' Harris said. 'You think about the Battle of Bunker Hill, and you see the obelisk [in Charlestown], and you don't really think much about it.' The reenactment includes what Dietzel described as a series of battle vignettes interspersed throughout the day, beginning with the approach of several ships posing as troop-bearing British naval vessels toward Half Moon Beach in Gloucester beginning about 8 a.m. Saturday. From 9 to 10 a.m., the rebels will build their redoubt, or hilltop fortification, with period hand tools. Spectators are encouraged to join the soldiers as they assemble their defenses, and to learn about their 18th-century backgrounds and motivation to take up arms against the British. From 10 to 11 a.m., British reenactors will land on Half Moon Beach. From about 1 to 2 p.m., they are scheduled to make a flanking attack on Cressy Beach. British commanders ordered this flanking move as their marines made a frontal assault on the redoubt. Advertisement The coordinated attacks were unsuccessful, as was a following frontal assault. Only on the third assault, which will be staged about 4 p.m. Saturday, did the British break through and claim victory atop Breed's Hill, the Charlestown summit where the battle actually occurred. 'If we wanted to keep this exactly right, we'd have to burn a city,' which the British did to Charlestown, 'but we can't do that,' Dietzel said with a chuckle. Dietzel said he feels honored to be able to portray Warren, a key Revolutionary figure whom he has researched extensively. 'I've been reading biographies, letters from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and attending lectures. I've been in the weeds with this man for quite some time,' Dietzel said. The goal of the reenactment, which has been years in the making, is to convey the relevance of the battle to 21st-century Americans. 'We want to make sure we do justice to this event and help share a story that's important to us all,' Dietzel added. 'I told my third-grade teacher I wanted to be a Minute Man. It's been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember.' Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at
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Miami Herald
19-06-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
Schoolhouse-turned-home in NY lists on land that was part of Underground Railroad
A property with deep historical roots has landed on the real estate market for the first time in over three decades in the rolling greenery of Bedford Hills, New York. It's the oldest 'surviving' building in the area — a schoolhouse that was built in 1790 and restored in 2023 not only to be a thing of beauty, but also a property that showcases its past in a glorious way. It's listed for $5.5 million. 'Buxton Pond Farm has long been a sanctuary for notable American visionaries,' the listing on Sotheby's International Realty says. 'It was the country home of DeWitt Clinton, former Governor of New York and architect of the Erie Canal. David Hosack, botanist and physician to Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, also left his imprint here through his botanical collaborations with Clinton. In the 20th century, the property was home to pioneering television actress and writer Gertrude Berg, who chronicled her life at the farm in the acclaimed 2009 documentary 'Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg.'' As the photos show, the residence sits on 11 acres and each building is original in its own way, with gardens and trees dotting the land, adding to its curb appeal. 'At the center of the property stands a distinguished 1795 Colonial residence, meticulously preserved and exuding quiet sophistication. With six bedrooms and five full baths, the home features wideboard pine floors, original fireplaces, a wood shingle roof and classic clapboard exterior,' the listing says. 'Gracious rooms offer garden views and open onto lawns anchored by heirloom rose beds and rare botanical specimens. The estate is further enriched by a stunning pool oasis, framed by rolling lawns and flowering borders.' Other buildings on the property, per the listing, include: Barn with attached living quartersThree-car garageChicken houseGreenhouse The grounds were also a stop on the Underground Railroad, the listing notes. The Railroad was a resistance against slavery toward the end of the Civil War and provided those enslaved with an escape. The property had 'historic stone walls offering refuge to those seeking freedom,' the listing says. The listing is held by Krissy Blake of Sotheby's International Realty-Greenwich Brokerage. Bedford Hills is about a 45-mile drive northeast from New York City.
Daily Record
19-06-2025
- Sport
- Daily Record
Bob MacIntyre drops incredible Ryder Cup claim directly about himself that shows the world his insatiable desire
In-form Scottish star looking to extend smart sequence at TPC River Highlands In-form Bob MacIntyre can finish a sharp sequence in style and take more key Ryder Cup steps with another big week at the Travelers Championship. The Scottish star is in Connecticut for the final Signature Event of 2025 on the PGA Tour looking to maintain an impressive run. MacIntyre came agonisingly close to winning the US Open at Oakmont last weekend as he finished outright runner-up behind JJ Spaun. The 28-year-old was playing for the sixth successive week in the States and hasn't missed any available cuts in that spell since starting out at the Truist Championship in the second week of May and continuing unbroken through the PGA Championship, Charles Schwab Challenge, Memorial, RBC Canadian Open and US Open. MacIntyre's work has him up to fourth in The Ryder Cup points standings as he chases down a place in skipper Luke Donald's European team for September's clash with United States. He said: 'As far as the Ryder Cup is concerned, that's where I want to be. I want to play every Ryder Cup from now until the day I retire.' MacIntyre is looking to sign-off the spell in style at TPC River Highlands with his superb recent form taking up to No.12 in the Official World Golf Rankings. The Tartan star is putting in the hard yards and said: 'I was going to take a week off and not play Colonial, but my game has been feeling good and I believed that a result was coming so we decided to play Colonial, which was good. I had Mikey Thomson on the bag for that and we got a Top 10 there. 'I am starting to see things happening with my game. Driver, putter, everything. I feel things coming and just have to keep going and keep going until I get that result. If you are planning a schedule, you probably wouldn't do six weeks, never mind going to a seventh [at the Travelers]. 'But I make big calls and I trust what I do. I just felt that was the right thing and we've built some good momentum and then a result like this comes. Look, I've put a lot of work into this. It's not just happening through luck. I've built a team around me that I think are the best I can get and they can support me. People that are known and people that are still unknown. I trust every one of them pretty much with my life. 'I mean, this is my job and this is my life, but it's all about trust. I trust them and they obviously trust me to go out there and try to deliver, as I almost did on this occasion.' MacIntyre will get a short break after the Travelers and return home to get ready for the next stretch which begins at The Renaissance and the defence of his Genesis Scottish Open title before a huge following week in the hunt for the next major at The Open at Royal Portrush. He said: 'I can't wait to get home, to be honest. This will be an 11-week stretch for me in the US and it's tough for me and [girlfriend] Shannon. But we're out here to do a job and that's to play good golf. My attitude has been up and down, but we are trying our best out there and that's all you can do.'
