Can Firefighting Alone Stop Western Wildfires?
SMERCONISH: The beautiful American west is burning. At least 26 people haven't made it out of the wildfires alive. Dozens more are missing. Entire cities have gone up in flames. And thousands have been forced to abandon their homes. In Oregon alone, about 500,000 people are under evacuation orders, that's more than 10 percent of the state's population. That number is expected to grow. The scale of the fires burning right now unprecedented. We haven't even reached the most active part of the region's fire season. And yet, nearly 5 million acres have burned. That's the size of New Jersey. Three million of those acres have burned in California alone, with five of the 10 largest fires in state history still burning all at once. Huge swaths of Washington, also on fire, while Portland and Seattle now have the worst air quality in the world. And the scenes are apocalyptic. Here's how it looked in San Francisco as the city was blanketed in smoke so thick it blocked the sun. Can firefighters alone ever get ahead of the curve? Joining me now is Jennifer Balch, fire scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Balch, can conventional firefighting alone, get ahead of the curve, win this battle in the long term?</s>JENNIFER BALCH, FIRE SCIENTIST/EARTH LAB DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER: The simple answer is no. We're asking way too much of our firefights. There were 28,000 firefighters right now fighting over a hundred blazes across the western U.S. and there's a reason why we're never going to get ahead of this. There are three ingredients needed for fire. You need a warm climate. You need fuels and you need ignitions. And we're essentially changing all three of those. We, people, are changing all three. And we've put tens of millions of homes in harm's way. We've essentially built a nightmare into flammable landscapes, made more vulnerable because of climate change.</s>SMERCONISH: I watched one of your lectures online, and I learned a great deal including the fact that in the late 19th century, portions of the eastern United States were burning. And you see some parallels. Can you explain?</s>BALCH: Yes. We had essentially as the frontier was moving westward, the eastern U.S. was on fire, because we were clearing trees. We were leaving slash. And we were essentially fuelling the ironworks industry leaving huge landscapes open and vulnerable to fire. And there were huge blazes in the eastern U.S. which is completely counterintuitive to what we have today. Now, what we have today in comparison is just an extension of our story with fire in that we completely convert landscapes. We bisect fuels. We put in roads. We farm. We introduce invasive species. There's lots of ways that we change the landscape. And today what we're dealing with is that we've essentially built homes in the line of fire. Over the last 24 hours, there were 1 million homes that were within wildfire perimeters. There were another 59 million that were a kilometer, up to a kilometer away. So that's the fire problem that we have now is that way too many homes are literally in beautiful but also really flammable landscapes.</s>SMERCONISH: And I take it that what has exponentially grown the problem, in comparison to what transpired at the end of the 19th century is that then there wasn't the factor of climate change that we're confronted with today.</s>BALCH: Yes, what we're seeing today, part of the story here is climate change. This is climate change affecting us now not in 2100. Fires are very responsive to warming. It takes just a little bit of warming to lead to a lot more burning. And over the last three or four decades, this is consistent with what we're seeing as a trend. A trend in increasing burning. Across the west, human caused warming has dried out our fuels and effectively doubled the number of western forests that have burned since 1984. So, this is consistent with what the fire science community and the firefighting community have seen in our understanding. It just is getting tiresome. I feel like I'm a broken record saying this over and over again, but we have a serious fire problem that's made worse by climate change and the number of homes that are in harm's way. And we have to do something about this. And frankly, we can do something about it. That's the hopeful bit about fire is that it's not like other hazards. It's not like hurricanes or floods necessarily. We actually can do quite a lot to change the shape of fire. And the other piece of this story is ignitions. Humans start the vast majority of our wildfires. Across the U.S., 84 percent of our fires are actually started by people. The single day with the most number of human-started fires is July 4th. Fireworks, camp fires, celebrations. We spark a lot of fires. So, we're now moving out of the lightning season and into the human ignition season. And, you know, the big question I have is can we do something right now? Can we think about how our daily activities, how driving off the side of the road, how camp fire, how other activities are actually going to change and reduce -- can we reduce those ignitions? One less spark.</s>SMERCONISH: Dr. Balch, thank you so much. I appreciate your expertise.</s>BALCH: Thank you.</s>SMERCONISH: Up ahead, all 20 Oscar-nominated actors in both 2015 and 2016 were white, sparking the #OscarsSoWhite. Is the answer diversity standards? And I want to remind you to answer this week's survey question at Smerconish.com. Has football become too involved in social activism?