MAINE SUNDAY TELEGRAM • September 27, 2020
Firefighters were only beginning to gain ground against Western wildfires that have destroyed vast swaths of forestland and choked the skies when observers started looking for explanations. It doesn’t especially matter what caused these wildfires. Smokey Bear left generations of Americans with an outsize sense of individual responsibility: It was never true, as he famously said, that only you can prevent forest fires. Forests catch on fire as surely as rain falls from clouds and rivers run to the sea. Wildfires sparked by human activity and dramatically worsened by climate change are a permanent emergency we’ll be dealing with for the rest of our lives. We need to act like it. Making wildfires events we can live with – quite literally, disasters we can survive – must be the goal.