More room for fire Wildfires, from Australia to Siberia, are in the news more often every year. In Europe too, nature areas catch fire with increasing frequency. What is behind this, and what can be done about it? You'd rather keep the landscape open and free of dead matter.’ TEXT NIENKE BEINTEMA PHOTO VICKI SMITH/GETTY IMAGES
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isaster strikes more and more often. The eucalyptus forests of Australia, the Canadian taiga, the heathland in Brabant. Even the Siberian tundra is burning, bleaching and smouldering. All this is putting more and more CO2 into the air worsening the greenhouse effect and giving us even hotter and drier summers, causing even more fires. What is to be done? Invest more in firefighting? Not necessarily, say Wageningen experts. Instead, they argue for a completely different approach targeting prevention and a ‘resilient landscape’. One of these experts is Cathelijne Stoof, a wildfire specialist in Wageningen and the project leader of PyroLife, an international training programme on wildfire management for PhD students. The other is Guido van der Werf, who specializes in the interactions between wildfires and the climate. He started in Wageningen on 1 September 2023, as a personal professor of Wildfires and the Carbon Cycle. ‘People always see fire as a bad thing,’ says Van der Werf,
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‘whereas fire is also a very useful part of the natural cycles on Earth. Fire clears away dead matter and ensures a rapid recycling of nutrients. It clears the way for new life, literally and metaphorically. In earlier times, people made use of fire by periodically burning land, but on a small and manageable scale. Nowadays people know very little about fire. They have lots of wrong ideas about it.’ Stoof: ‘That is also because of a massive bias in the reporting: the evacuation of holidaymakers on Rhodes was in the news for days, the wildfire in Algeria which killed 34 people hardly at all. People are often surprised to hear that Africa has the most fires. And on the news, you only ever see fleeing people and burned-out cars. But never recovery, the fresh green growth and carpets of wildflowers. That negative framing suggests that all fires are bad and must be stopped. For the bigger picture, it is important that we sometimes accept fire. That calls for a more diverse perspective on fire than we generally see at present.’ >