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Well, this is a newspaper, so here’s some news: there is no Mother Nature. When it comes to a forest fire, there is vegetation and oxygen and heat. Combined in a certain way, they can create spectacular destruction. And in the case of Alberta’s boreal forest, it must be said that humans have had a lot to do with the arrangement.

Every document written about the risk of forest fire mentions climate change. Not all of them specify the increment of energy that humans are supposed to have added to the global climate; it is one of many inputs, just as the naturally authored El Niño is. What one notices is that climate change often appears in scientific papers and government plans as an “if”, or an “assuming …”, or a premise to be addressed in the future. The tendency is toward gesture; the feeling is one of a religious incantation, of mentioning something whose mention is obligatory.

After all, whatever your beliefs about climate change, it is the part of the fire-risk equation that individual states, provinces and towns cannot solve on their own. So these documents usually move quickly to the more practical topic of forest management.

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Forest experts do not share anything like a consensus on how to handle wildfires, as a general problem; for individuals much depends on what must be described, again, as a sort of religious orientation. In the temperate zones of the Earth, any forest is certain to burn eventually. Some thinkers are in favour of a relaxed approach to fire response that emphasizes the defence of human life and property, but that is slow to intervene in the deep wilderness, so that forests may experience frequent, relatively harmless and predictable ground-fires.