The 'why' of wildfires

National Observer

21-07-2025

We burned past a milestone this week, and not the kind any of us want to celebrate. Across Canada, wildfires have already torched more land than was burned in the entirety of last year — which was the second-most destructive fire season this century, eclipsed only by the year before that.
Over five and a half million hectares of forest have gone up in flames so far this year. It's a scale that's hard to visualize or wrap your mind around. But you might try this: there are 72 countries whose entire land mass is smaller than that, including the likes of Costa Rica and Croatia.
And, of course, it is only mid-July and there are at least two months left in the Canadian fire season. This year has not been tracking to be as destructive as the horrendous fires of 2023, but these recent years have all been staggering in size and ferocity.
Canada's forests are truly enormous. But Mike Flannigan, one of Canada's foremost fire experts, estimates that seven per cent of Canada's forests have burned in the last three years.
In British Columbia's northeast, the provincial government estimates that nearly a third of forests could burn by year's end. In the last two years, wildfires had already burned 10 per cent of that region's forests — more than the 60 preceding years, combined. The area has been in a multi-year drought lasting six or seven years now, says Lori Daniels, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been particularly badly hit this year and both provinces have recorded well over a million hectares burned. For Manitoba, that's more than 10 times the 20-year average. Manitoba had to declare a provincewide state of emergency for the second time this summer and is ordering new evacuations. Almost 13,000 people are out of their homes, and some Indigenous communities evacuating again, just days after returning to their communities.
There are 72 countries in the world whose landmass is smaller than the amount of hectares of forest that have burned across Canada this year — and wildfire season isn't over yet.
Smoke from forest fires has smothered cities across North America, in many cases choking residents already sweltering through heat waves. Earlier this week, Toronto ranked as the second-most polluted city in the world for air quality.
These climate impacts are rarely attributed to climate change in the public conversation. And it's even more rare for the media to delve beneath abstract concepts like 'climate change' and pinpoint its main cause, the burning of fossil fuels.
Even as tragedies mount, they remain decontextualized and deracinated, floating across our newsfeeds as problems without any tangible cause that could be tackled.
Only 13 per cent of Canadian news stories about wildfires mention climate change, even in passing. That's according to a media analysis I helped produce for the organization Re.Climate last year. And that 13 per cent figure is almost certainly an overcount because we deliberately omitted any emergency notices or breaking news about evacuation orders and alerts. The percentage has actually dropped from 16 per cent in 2023.
The causes of climate change are even harder to find. Fossil fuels are mentioned in just 10 per cent of the stories that touch on climate change, even though they cause about 90 per cent of carbon pollution and 75 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Specific products that we interact with in real life — like oil, gasoline or natural gas — are even more rarely linked to climate change.
It's a particularly bizarre omission because it violates such a fundamental checklist for storytelling and journalism: the five W's. We usually get the Who? What? Where? and When? but very rarely the Why?
That missing 'why' isn't just an oversight — it's a political gift to the status quo. If wildfires, heat waves and floods are just something happening, then no one is responsible. But if they are, in fact, the predictable consequences of continued fossil fuel combustion — then we have to reckon with who profits from that combustion, who enables it and who celebrates it.
This evasion allows governments to avoid shifting our domestic economy from fossil fuels to clean electricity, and allows them to greenlight new pipelines and LNG export terminals for export, all while publicly mourning the devastation of fiery disasters — as if the burning forests and burning fuels were unrelated. Politicians can promise support for communities one day, and stand at a ribbon-cutting for carbon-spewing projects the next.
As the climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has long been arguing, making the connection explicit is crucial to public engagement.
Hayhoe is talking about research like a new study just published in Nature Climate Change on how extreme events affect support for climate policies around the world. As one of its contributors writes: 'simple exposure to extreme weather events does not affect people's view of climate action – but linking those events to climate change can make a big difference.'
Until we name the cause, we can't address it. Until we connect fossil fuels to climate impacts in our everyday conversations, our news coverage and our political discourse, we'll keep fuelling a worsening spiral.
The fires tearing through Canada's forests are a kind of haunting mirror — burning trees reflecting the combustion in engines, furnaces, power plants and export terminals. Until we confront that symmetry and connect the burns, we'll keep fueling the flames.