Fighting Fires, Past & Future

The world’s heart is breaking along with Australia’s. So, what do we do?

- MELINDA MURPHY

I read the news. “More than a billion animals dead.” Then I sat on my bed and sobbed. Truly. I sobbed. And I bet I’m not the only one.

And it’s not just the animals. Sadly, so much has been lost in the Australian wildfire, just so much. Dear Aussie friends of mine know several families whose homes burned, and there are plenty of others among the expat community in Singapore who are closely connected in some way to the sufferers. Farms are completely gone. Lives have been lost. And a way of life has disappeared for so many.

The bad news

While Australia has certainly copped the worst and largest fires of recent times, it has not been the only place to suffer. One headline read, “2019 Was the Year the World Burned”.

For California, 2019 wasn’t as bad as 2018, but it was still pretty awful. In fact, seven of California’s ten most destructive fires have taken place in the past four years. The Amazon? Eighty-thousand fires burned in 2019, an increase of more than seventy-five percent from 2018 (yet all those fires are only half as big as Australia’s). Russia’s Siberia saw hundreds of fires, too. While several of these were closer to cities than in the past, many were so remote that they weren’t fought; the resultant smoke created a global environmental hazard with three hundred megatons of carbon dioxide released. Then, of course, there’s Indonesia on our doorstep. Last year’s annual burning of the palm oil fields proved particularly destructive.

One possible answer