Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. 

Because the burn area in eastern Arizona is sparsely populated, damage to property so far has been minimal compared to, say, wildfire destruction in California, where the interface of civilization and wilderness is growing ever more crowded.  However, the devastation to life in the fire zone, from microbiotic communities that hold soil and crucial nutrients in place to more popular species like deer, elk, bear, fish, and birds -- already hard-pressed to cope with the rapidity of climate change -- will be catastrophic. 

The vastness of the American West holds rainforests, deserts, and everything in between, so weather patterns and moisture vary.  Nonetheless, we have been experiencing a historic drought for about a decade in significant parts of the region. As topsoil dries out, microbial dynamics change and native plants either die or move uphill toward cooler temperatures and more moisture.  Wildlife that depends on the seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follows the plants -- if it can. 

Plants and animals are usually able to adapt to slow and steady changes in their habitat, but rapid and uncertain seasonal transformations in weather patterns mean that the timing for such basic ecological processes as seed germination, pollination, migration, and hibernation is also disrupted.  The challenge of adapting to such fundamental changes can be overwhelming.

And if evolving at warp speed (while Mother Nature experiences hot flashes) isn’t enough, plants, animals, and birds are struggling within previously reduced and fragmented habitats.  In other words, wildlife already thrown off the mothership now finds the lifeboats, those remnants of their former habitats, on fire. Sometimes extinction happens with a whimper, sometimes with a crackle and a blast.

As for the humans in this drama, I can tell you from personal experience that thousands of people in Arizona and New Mexico are living in fear.  A forest fire is a monster you can see.  It looks over your shoulder 24 hours a day for days on end.  You pack your most precious possessions, gather necessary documents, and point your car or truck toward the road for a quick get-away.  If you have a trailer, you load and hitch it. If you have pets or large animals like a horse, cattle, or sheep, you think of how you’re going to get them to safety.  If you have elderly neighbors or family in the area, you check on them. 

And as you wait, watch, and worry, you choke on smoke, rub itching eyes, and sneeze fitfully.  After a couple of days of that omnipresent smoke, almost everyone you meet has a headache.  You know that when it is over, even if you’re among the lucky ones whose homes still stand, you will witness and share in the suffering of neighbors and mourn the loss of cherished places, of shaded streams and flowered meadows, grand vistas, and the lost aroma of the deep woods.   

Cue the Inferno

These past few years, mega-fires in the West have become ever more routine.  Though their estimates and measurements may vary, the experts who study these phenomena all agree that wildfires today are bigger, last longer, and are more frequent.  A big fire used to burn perhaps 30 square miles.  Today, wildfires regularly scorch 150-square-mile areas. 

Global warming, global weirding, climate change -- whatever you prefer to call it -- is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook.  It is not just burning up far-away Russia.  It’s here now.

The seas have warmed, ice caps are melting, and the old reliable ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams are jumping their tracks.  The harbingers of a warming planet and the abruptly shifting weather patterns that result vary across the American landscape.  Along the vast Mississippi River drainage in the heartland of America, epic floods, like our wildfires in the West, are becoming more frequent.  In the Gulf states, it’s monster hurricanes and in the Midwest, swarms of killer tornadoes signal that things have changed.  In the East it’s those killer heat waves and record-breaking blizzards. 

But in the West, we just burn.

Although Western politicians like to blame the dire situation on tree-hugging environmentalists who bring suit to keep loggers from thinning and harvesting the crowded forests, the big picture is far more complicated.  According to Wally Covington of Northern Arizona University, a renowned forest ecologist, the problem has been building towards a catastrophe for decades.

Historically, Western forests were relatively thin, and grasses, light shrubs, and wildflowers thrived under their canopies. Fires would move through every few years, clearing the accumulated undergrowth and resetting the successional clock. Fire, that is, was an ecological process.  Then, in the 1880s, cattle were brought in to graze the native grasses under the forest canopy.  As the grass disappeared, fires were limited and smaller trees were able to mature until the land became overcrowded. Invasive species like highly flammable cheat grass also moved in, carried there and distributed in cow dung. Then, foresters began suppressing fires to protect the over-stocked timber that generated revenues and profits.

All this set the stage for catastrophe.  Next, a decade of drought weakened millions of trees, making them susceptible to voracious beetles that gnaw them to death. Warmer air carries more moisture, so winters, while wetter than normal, are not as cold.  Typical temperatures, in fact, have become mild enough that the beetles, once killed by wintry deep freezes, are now often able to survive until spring, which means that their range is expanding dramatically.  Now, thanks to them, whole mountainsides across the west have turned from green to brown.

Finally, spring runoff that used to happen over three months now sometimes comes down torrentially in a single month, which means that the forests are dry longer. Even our lovely iconic stands of aspen trees are dying on parched south-facing slopes.  Cue the inferno.

If you live in the West, you can’t help wonder what will burn next.  Eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas are, at present, deep in drought and likely candidates.  Montana’s Lodgepole Pine forests are dying and ready to ignite.  Colorado’s Grand Mesa is another drying forest area that could go up in flames anytime.  Wally Covington estimates that a total of about half-a-million square miles of Western forests, an area three times the size of California, is now at risk of catastrophic fires.  As ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger observed in 2008 when it was California’s turn to burn, the fire season is now 365 days long.

The Fire Next Time

That may explain why ”smoke season” began so early this year, overlapping the spring flood season. Texas and other Western states may be drying up and readying themselves to blow dust your way, but in Utah, where I live, it was an extremely wet winter. Watersheds here are at 200% to 700% of the normal snowpack (“normal” being an ever more problematic concept out here).  Spring weather has become increasingly weird and unpredictable.  Last year we had record-breaking heat and early monsoons in May.  This year it was unusually cold and damp.  The mountains held on to all that accumulating snow, which is now melting quickly and heading downhill all at once. 

So although skiers are still riding the mountain slopes of northern Utah, river-rafting guides in the south, famous for their hunger for whitewater excitement, are cancelling trips on the Colorado and Green Rivers because they are flowing so hard and high that navigating them is too risky to try.  In our more sedate settings, suburbs and such, sandbags are now ubiquitous.  Basement pumps are humming across the state.  Reservoirs were emptied ahead of the floods so that they could be refilled with excess runoff, but there is enough snowmelt in our mountains this year to fill them seven times over.  Utah Governor Gary Herbert went on television to urge parents to keep children away from fast-moving streams that might sweep them away.  Seven children have nonetheless drowned in the past two weeks.

The old gospel got it mostly right when God told Noah, “No more water, the fire next time.”  In the West we know that it is not actually a question of either/or, because they go together.  First, floods fuel growth, then growth fuels fires, then fires fuel floods.  So all that unexpected, unpredicted moisture we got this winter will translate into a fresh layer of lush undergrowth in forests that until very recently were drying up, ravaged by beetles, and dying.  You may visit us this summer and see all that new green vegetation as so much beautiful scenery, but we know it is also a ticking tinderbox.  If Mother Nature flips her fickle toggle switch back to hot and dry, as she surely will, fire will follow. 

When fire removes trees, brush, and grasses that absorb spring runoff and slow the flow, the next round of floods is accelerated.  If the fire is intense enough to bake soils into a water-resistant crust, the next floods will start landslides and muddy rivers. The silt from all that erosion will clog reservoirs, reducing their capacity both to store water and to mitigate floods. That’s how a self-reinforcing feedback loop works. Back in the days when our weather was far more benign and predictable, this dynamic relationship between fire and flood was predictable and manageable.  Today, it is not.

It may be hard to draw a direct line of cause and effect between global warming (or weirding) and a chain of tornadoes sawing through Joplin, while the record-breaking blizzards of 2011 may seem to contradict the very notion that the planet is getting hotter.  But the droughts, pestilence, and fires we are experiencing in the West are logical and obvious signs that the planet is overheating.  We would be wise and prudent to pay attention and act boldly.  

Biological diversity, ecological services like pollination and water filtration, and the powerful global currents of wind and water are the operating systems of all life on Earth, including humans.  For thousands of years, we have depended on benign and predictable weather patterns that generally vary modestly from year to year.  The agricultural system that has fed us since the dawn of history was based on a climate and seasonal swings that were familiar and expectable.

Ask any farmer if he can grow grain without rain or plant seeds in a flooded field.  Signs that life’s operating systems are swinging chaotically from one extreme to another should be a wake-up call to make real plans to kick our carbon-based energy addictions while conserving and restoring ecosystems under stress.

In the process, we’ll need a new vision of who we are and what we are about.  For many generations we believed that developing westward, one frontier after the next, was the nation’s Manifest Destiny.  We eliminated the Indians and the bison in our way, broke the prairies with our plows, dammed raging rivers, piped the captured water to make the desert bloom, and eventually filled the valleys with cities, suburbs, and roads.

The Wild West was tamed.  In fact, we didn’t hesitate to overload its carrying capacity by over-allocating precious water for such dubious purposes as growing rice in Arizona or building spectacular fountains and golf courses in Las Vegas.  We used the deserts near my Utah home as a dumping ground for toxic and radioactive wastes from far-away industrial operations.  The sacrifice zones in the Great Basin Desert where we tested bombs and missiles helped our military project the power that underpinned an empire.  The iconic landscapes of the West even inspired us to think that we were exceptional and brave in ways not common to humanity, and so were not subject to the limitations of other peoples -- or even of nature itself. 

But whatever we preferred to think, the limits have always been there.  Nature has only so much fresh water, fertile soil, timber, and oil.  The atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon dioxide and stay benign and predictable.  When you overload the carrying capacity of your environment, there is hell to pay, which means that monster fires are here to stay.

After the American West was conquered, tamed, used, and abused, the frontier of our civilizing ambitions moved abroad, was subsumed by a Cold War, was assigned to outer space, and now drives a Humvee through places like Iraq and Afghanistan.  On an overheating planet, if the West is still our place of desire and exception, then fire is our modern manifest destiny -- and the West is ours to lose.

Copyright 2011 Chip Ward