Soda Rock Winery in Healdsburg's Alexander Valley burns in the 2019 Kincade Fire Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP
The Reason Why California Wildfires Become Megafires – and the Solution
By Stephen Erickson
California wildfires have burned over 1,400,000 acres in less than a week’s time. The L.N.U. Lightning Complex fire in Napa Valley and the S.C.U. Lightning Complex fire east of Silicon Valley are megafires. Each one has scorched over 370,000 acres and continues to burn largely uncontained. They are already the 2nd and 3rd largest fires in state history.
‘Megafire’ is one of several new descriptors that have entered our climate lexicon for weather events whose intensity and scale are so extreme they require new definition. Megafires blaze with such intensity they create their own weather patterns and are virtually unstoppable, each one releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.[1][2] They are ravaging warming, beetle-stricken forests, not just across the Western United States and Australia, but in what were ‘cooler’ regions, Canada, Alaska, and Arctic forests even further north. Siberian megafires have charred over 51 million acres so far this year.[3]
The causes of California megafires vary. Several years ago it was arson or human negligence, in 2019 the principal culprit was downed power lines. This time 12,000 lightning strikes from dry thunderstorms ignited 700 fires.
There is, however, only one reason why fires become megafires.
Global warming. We are in a climate emergency. Greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere have reached a point that, absent from profound human-caused emission reductions over the next four years, human extinction will likely occur later this century. The science on this is abundantly clear.
Temperatures will continue to increase and weather events will become even more severe just from the greenhouse gasses already trapped in our atmosphere. Megafires will return to California every fire season and rage beyond our ability to control them.
So what can we do? Pray and endure? Yes. And take action. Realize this:
Far and away the most climate-destructive industry is Big Agriculture. Big Ag, comprised of industrial agriculture and factory farming, produces as much as 57% of global greenhouse gas emissions.[4][5] Industrial agriculture is responsible for 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, 60% of methane gas, and 80% of nitrous oxide emissions.[6] Just manufacturing synthetic fertilizer by converting nitrogen to ammonia requires 1.2% of the world’s energy use.[7]
There is only one way that exists to drawdown atmospheric carbon: healthy soil’s ability to sequester carbon. This is our singular solution to global warming.
The farming method that maximizes plant’s ability to draw carbon out of the atmosphere is Regenerative Agriculture. Regenerative ag sequesters carbon. Lots of carbon. Esteemed Australian climate scientist and soil microbiologist Walter Jehne, molecular biologist and soil scientist David C. Johnson, Ph.D.,[8] and others have calculated that regenerative agriculture can draw down 20 billion tons of atmospheric carbon a year. 20 billion tons is double the world’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions.[9] We need to do this at scale — and quickly.
You have an essential role in stopping and reversing global warming. Vote and advocate. Vote this November for candidates who have the best voting records supporting environmental and climate friendly legislation, who promise the strongest commitment in this regard.
The Green New Deal is one part of the solution. The other is replacing the 2018 Farm Bill. Lobbied for and drafted in large part by Big Ag, it’s a blanket endorsement of industrial agriculture and factory farming. It significantly increases global warming and enables the killing of the soil microbiome on 231 million American crop acres eliminating that soil’s ability to sequester carbon. It is a path to disaster.
A New Farm Bill repurposing subsidies currently propping up industrial agriculture over to incentivizing regenerative agriculture will turn the tide on global warming and become one of the most important pieces of legislation ever signed into law.
At its core this solution is, perhaps surprisingly, nonpartisan. Build soil carbon and soil health. All else — increased crop yields, nutrient-dense toxin-free produce and the health benefits for everyone of eating safe healthy food, one million new small farm jobs and the revitalization of rural economies across the country, the recovery of Monarch butterflies and thousands of other species on the brink of extinction, a cooling planet, and the end of megafires — all bounty follows.
Each one of us can be a firefighter. Take immediate action with your vote and your voice. Join the most important cause of all of humanity’s endeavors to date. By slowing and reversing global warming and cooling California’s climate, we will extinguish the ‘mega’ from our fires.
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[1] Laura Parker, How Megafires Are Remaking American Forests, National Geographic Aug. 9, 2015 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-wildfires-forest-fires-climate-change-science/
[2] Heyck-Williams, S., L. Anderson, B.A. Stein. Megafires: The Growing Risk to America’s Forests, Communities, and Wildlife. Washington, DC: National Wildlife Federation. 2017 https://www.nwf.org/-/media/Documents/PDFs/NWF-Reports/NWF-Report_Megafires_FINAL_LOW-RES_101717.ashx
[3] The Great Healing blog https://www.thegreathealing.org/blog/siberian-wildfires-have-burned-49-million-acres-so-far-this-year
[4] GRAIN, Henk Hobbelink, The Great Climate Robbery. Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications, 2016. Pgs. 1-7
[5] GRAIN, Commentary IV: Food, Climate Change and Healthy Soils: The Forgotten Link, Trade and Environment Review, 2013, https://www.grain.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTUvMTEvMDUvMDhfNDZfMDZfNTIyX0dSQUlOX1VOQ1RBRF8yMDEzLnBkZiJdXQ
[6] Vandana Shiva. Who Really Feeds The World?. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2016. pg. 8
[7] Paul Hawken, Drawdown, New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2017 pg. 201
[8] David C. Johnson, Ph.D., is a Molecular Biologist and Soil Scientist at New Mexico State University unraveling the secrets of soil microbes.
[9] Walter Jehne, Regenerate Earth, Healthy Soils Australia, Global Cooling Earth, 2017, http://www.globalcoolingearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Regenerate-Earth-Paper-Walter-Jehne.pdf