If there are any human stories in the future, they will be about what we did today to improve our chances of survival—not what we said.
I first saw soil fires during a heatwave in 1996 it an area of cleared woodland on the route of the Newbury bypass after the trees had been cleared. The last of the trees had been cut and were being burned in great mounds. The dry pine needle litter on the forest floor, exposed to the sun and wind, rapidly lost moisture, and then the massive fires in which the trees were burned spread underground and continued to burn long after the trees had burned.
Many Fires in British Columbia have burned through the winter underground, moving from burned areas to unburned areas. These “Zombie Fires” are insulated by surrounding soil and smoulder in the low-oxygen environment.
In the future, we need to be closely monitoring the landscape, reintroducing management to clear overgrowth, coppicing at scale to capture carbon, and improving flood defenses. Landowners need to be responsible as well as the government. Stewardship of the land needs to be more than words and exclusion. Nature connection needs to run deeper than sitting under a tree and asking what it wants. We already know what nature needs from us. We need to do it.
