CHICAGO IS BURNING

The blaze that ravaged a metropolis, and the lies that it launched.

- MARGARET TALBOT

In the age of climate change, "natuthan ever. We can absolve ourselves of responsibility for volcanic eruptions and earthquakes (except the ones caused by fracking). But the lengthening hurricane season, the floods, and the droughts? They've got our fingerprints all over them. Higher average temperatures and drier vegetation are making wildfires burn hotter and break out more frequently a development that was hard to ignore this past summer. Smoke from Canadian wildfires in June turned the skies over New York and Washington, D.C., a lurid, choking orange. A fire on Maui incinerated the town of Lahaina and killed nearly a hundred people. "We can't really call them wildfires anymore," a climate scientist named Jennifer Francis told the A.P. in July. "They're not wild. They're not natural anymore." Who or what we blame for such calamities helps determine how we respond to them. Call them acts of God or artifacts of nature's inevitable cycles, and we might just do nothing.

Big cities don't tend to burn on the scale they did in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, when conflagrations levelled vast swaths of London (1666), Moscow (1812), New York (1835), and Edo, now Tokyo (repeatedly), to name a few significant instances. Fire has become a different kind of menace, owing to modern extinguishing technology, professional firefighting forces, and, crucially, the fact that, in wealthier countries, we no longer light our homes and cook our food with open flames in neighborhoods constructed largely of wood. Wildfire smoke drifts into far-flung cities and pollutes our lungs, raising the risk of long-term health damage. Smaller towns in landscapes rendered combustible by extreme heat-the grasslands on Maui, the Sierra Nevada foothills in California-may be consumed almost entirely.