We need a wartime mindset to fight the threat of wildfires |
As France and Spain battle historic wildfires, comparisons to the second world war abound. “One of the continent’s biggest evacuation efforts since World War II,” reports the Associated Press. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called the wildfires his country’s “most difficult situation since the second world war”.
The images crossing all our screens certainly feel war-like – emergency aircraft and black smoke fill the skies, frantic civilians seeking shelter, historic towns lying in ruins, charred forests and burned-out vehicles, exhausted and sweat-soaked emergency responders.
Of course, brutal fires such as these are not restricted to France and Spain. They are hitting much of Europe. Australia has wrestled with escalating heat and devastating wildfires for years; during the fires of early 2020, the Australian government was forced to deploy the most military assets since the second world war. The US has lost entire towns to these climate-induced infernos. Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Chile, Russia, Turkey, Indonesia … all know the terror and loss of the fiery new world in which we reside.
And in my own country, nearly a thousand wildfires are currently burning across Canada.
In Europe, many leaders, including Macron and the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, have made a point of linking these fires to the climate emergency; in Canada and the US, decidedly less so. Less common still are leaders and media who connect these events to their primary source – our continued combustion of oil, gas and coal (with the Guardian and a few others being notably exceptions).
Yet these extreme events leave no doubt: the........