You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Plants are marching north. Native gardening will never be the same.
Thirteen miles isn’t very far: roughly the length of Manhattan or the distance you run in a half marathon. On a freeway, it takes less than 15 minutes to drive.
Multiply 13 by 10, though, and it becomes 130 miles — more than the width of the state of Connecticut. Move the U.S. border 130 miles north, and Whistler Blackcomb becomes an American ski resort; move it south, and Tijuana is the new Los Angeles. If you started walking, it would take you 35 straight hours to cover the distance; if you called an Uber, you’d be looking at a $450 ride.
The temperature regions that determine the local viability of different plants, called plant hardiness zones, are believed to be slipping north at a rate of about 13.3 miles per decade — not a number that sounds especially alarming, but one that will, over a century, add up to dramatically reshape the regional flora of the United States. In addition to being yet another depressing climate statistic, though, that number is also generating a lot of headaches in the surprisingly combustible world of native gardening.
It’s been 16 years (or approximately 21 northward miles) since Douglas Tallamy’s warning in his book Bringing Nature Home that “unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” Though we may still be far from achieving his long-term goal of a “homegrown national park,” in which Americans convert half their yard space to native gardens, Tallamy’s teachings remain hugely influential in gardening and conservation circles (42 states have their own specialized native plant societies promoting these goals).
Tallamy insists that “all plants are not created equal, particularly in their ability to support wildlife.” If we’re to sustain the remaining biodiversity in the U.S., it is essential to feed insects — and in turn, the birds that eat those insects — the foods they’ve evolved to eat. If a plant isn’t native to these ecosystems, then it isn’t worth planting or sustaining. Often, says Tallamy, doing so is actively detrimental to biodiversity goals.
But what even is a native plant in this obviously shifting world? Already, New York City is considered subtropical, capable even of supporting certain hardy palms; by 2040, Seattle could be in the same hardiness zone that central Florida, New Orleans, and parts of Texas are in today. Researchers have seen plants native to the South slowly pushing their ranges north.
Native plants are frequently the species under the most stress from the new weather patterns in their historic ranges. The state tree of Washington, the Western hemlock, for example, is especially susceptible to drought and is struggling to survive in a drier Pacific Northwest. “We’ve found a lot of mortality of trees that should be in the prime in their life,” explained Raymond Larson, an associate director and curator at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens and a contributor to Great Plant Picks, a viability resource for Pacific Northwest gardeners.
As a result, many horticulturalists with an eye on the next century are actively exploring — and recommending — plants that are explicitly not native. Axios Seattle recently published a list of trees that Pete Smith, a program director at the Arbor Day Foundation, believes will be able to tolerate the next 50 to 100 years in the region, and it notably included the Japanese pagoda tree; the pawpaw, a native of the East Coast; and the ginkgo, which is “incredibly tough, very long-lived, and great at tolerating urban stresses” — but an exotic from China that is particularly reviled by Tallamy.
“What honestly most gardeners — many gardeners, anyway — have kind of lost track of is what the word ‘native’ means,” Smith explained to me when I followed up to ask about the globe-spanning range of his recommendations. “It is presumptuous, even, to talk about native plants as if 1492 was some magic date that talks about what is and was native to this continent.”
“Native” doesn’t have a hard and fast definition. In Bringing Nature Home, Tallamy writes that a true native is a plant that interacts “with the community that historically helped shape it,” but he also warns against using too small a timescale when making these determinations: “[A] history measured in centuries is the tiniest drop in the proverbial bucket of evolutionary time.” Native plant purists, Smith added, will argue that “the only quality tree is a tree that was grown from a seed from right underneath the tree that bore that seed. Isn’t that a wonderful ideal? [But] it’s not practical.”
Some native plant proponents have allowed for species that are retreating north (or up) on their own volition since these changes happen slowly and food-chain communities can relocate with them. A number of Southern species in the United States got there in the first place by being pushed down during the last ice age, and have been reclaiming prehistoric ranges as the cold has receded over the last 10,000 years. But ancient forests don’t appear to have migrated as complete ecosystems during these upheavals; it was a race of every-species-for-itself. “There’s a lot more interchangeability among members of an ecosystem than people had thought,” David Jablonski, a paleontologist, told the Smithsonian.
There is also the problem that the climactic zones are moving faster than trees can follow. “The average forest migrates at a rate of roughly 1,640 feet each year,” Wired has written — that is, about three miles in a decade. In order “to outrun climate change,” trees would need to book it north at a rate of “approximately 9,800 to 16,000 feet” a year, or about 10 times as fast. Plenty of foresters aren’t waiting around for that to happen and are seriously exploring the controversial idea of human-assisted migration.
Larson, at the UW Botanic Gardens, meanwhile, said their horticulturalists are looking off-continent for inspiration for the hard years ahead. “We’re experimenting more with plants in Mediterranean climates,” he said, and “also the southern hemisphere: Australia, Chile, New Zealand." Places that have "somewhat similar climates," to the Pacific Northwest, “but tend to get a little bit hotter." And while some of these experiments haven’t panned out as hoped in the past, “we’re going to try them again, because 5 or 10 degrees can make all the difference.”
The conventional wisdom, that introducing or nurturing exotics results in a decline in biodiversity, is also being challenged — often heatedly so. It can seem at times that for every study that expounds on the evils wrought by alien plants, another concludes the exact opposite. The ongoing debate has produced fiery polemics, such as one signed by 19 ecologists and published in Nature in 2011, which announced “it is time … to ditch this preoccupation with the native-alien dichotomy and embrace more dynamic and pragmatic approaches … better suited to our fast-changing planet.” The scientists also swatted down the frequent synonymizing of “nativeness” with “good,” pointing out that “the insect currently suspected to be killing more trees than any other in North America is the native mountain pine beetle.”
(These sorts of back-and-forths are presumably what led former Arnold Arboretum horticulturist Peter Del Tredici, one of the Nature letter’s signatories, to observe, “the use of exotic versus native species … seems to bring out the worst in people, not unlike the debates over gun control and abortion.” Whoever said gardening was boring?)
Arthur Shapiro, a distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California at Davis, is also among those who have challenged the uncompromising emphasis on the superiority of native plants. “There are many nonnative plants grown in gardens that are immensely useful to butterflies and other pollinators,” Shapiro told me. “And there are many native plants that are completely useless. They might as well be made with rubber or wood.” If you were to uproot every exotic plant in urban California, for instance, you’d “essentially do away with the butterfly fauna.”
That’s partially due to a principle known as ecological fitting, which is “what happens when species with totally disparate histories, that evolved in different parts of the world, come into contact — perhaps as a result of commerce, perhaps as a result of gardening — and they fit together,” said Shapiro. “It’s a marriage made in heaven.” Additionally, oft-vilified “novel ecosystems”, sometimes disparagingly dismissed as “trash ecosystems," arise when exotic species are naturalized due to human influence and/or certain native species recede. Increasingly, though, scientists like Shapiro are viewing these emerging anthropocenic systems as environmental success stories. An unmanaged invasive pine plantation in Puerto Rico, for example, was found to have far more biodiversity than a nearby native-only forest of the same age, Nature recounts; the observation, made in 1979, ran so counter to the established beliefs about the sanctity of native plants that “it took almost a decade" for the resulting paper to pass peer review.
The native/non-native dichotomy is undoubtedly clumsy, so much so that one idea has been to dispense with the unhelpful language altogether. “Neonative,” a term proposed by University of Vienna conservation biologist Franz Essl, for example, could be adapted to describe species that have moved beyond their native ranges and established new foothold populations “due to human-induced changes of the biophysical environment, but not as a result of direct movement by human agency.”
Another idea is to take a step back, put our preconceived notions in check, and learn from what we’re seeing. “As climate changes, communities are going to change, mixtures are going to change,” Shapiro said. “Trying to stop it — except for managing things of economic or medical importance, pests, or disease vectors — is equivalent to trying to plow the sea. It’s futile. So we should actually be paying close attention to what’s happening, because we can learn a lot from it, about how communities self-assemble.”
This isn’t your permission to go plant a bunch of English ivy and scotch broom, though. Two things can potentially both be true: certain native plants have essential ecological functions and some non-native plants can play an important role in shaping future ecosystems. In fact, they’re going to have to, if the climate keeps warming and the hardiness zones continue their upward march.
“We would always tell someone: choose native first,” Smith, of the Arbor Day Foundation, concurred. But at the same time, “Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Half of all Americans are sweating under one right now.
Like a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, or an atmospheric river, a heat dome is a meteorological phenomenon that feels, well, a little made up. I hadn’t heard the term before I found myself bottled beneath one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where I saw leaves and needles brown on living trees. Ultimately, some 1,400 people died from the extreme heat in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon that summer weekend.
Since that disaster, there have been a number of other high-profile heat dome events in the United States, including this week, over the Midwest and now Eastern and Southeastern parts of the country. On Monday, roughly 150 million people — about half the nation’s population — faced extreme or major heat risks.
“I think the term ‘heat dome’ was used sparingly in the weather forecasting community from 10 to 30 years ago,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Brett Anderson told me, speaking with 36 years as a forecaster under his belt. “But over the past 10 years, with global warming becoming much more focused in the public eye, we are seeing ‘heat dome’ being used much more frequently,” he went on. “I think it is a catchy term, and it gets the public’s attention.”
Catching the public’s attention is critical. Heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the U.S., killing more people annually than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or extreme cold. “There is a misunderstanding of the risk,” Ashley Ward, the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, told me. “A lot of people — particularly working age or younger people — don’t feel like they’re at risk when, in fact, they are.”
While it seems likely that the current heat dome won’t be as deadly as the one in 2021 — not least because the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the country have a much higher usage of air conditioning than the Pacific Northwest — the heat in the eastern half of the country is truly extraordinary. Tampa, Florida reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday for the first time in its recorded history. Parts of the Midwest last week, where the heat dome formed before gradually moving eastward, hit a heat index of 128 degrees.
Worst of all, though, have been the accompanying record-breaking overnight temperatures, which Ward told me were the most lethal characteristics of a heat dome. “When there are both high daytime temperatures and persistently high overnight temperatures, those are the most dangerous of circumstances,” Ward said.
Although the widespread usage of the term “heat dome” may be relatively new, the phenomenon itself is not. The phrase describes an area of “unusually strong” high pressure situated in the upper atmosphere, which pockets abnormally warm air over a particular region, Anderson, the forecaster, told me. “These heat domes can be very expansive and can linger for days, and even a full week or longer,” he said.
Anderson added that while he hasn’t seen evidence of an increase in the number of heat domes due to climate change, “we may be seeing more extreme and longer-lasting heat domes” due to the warmer atmosphere. A heat dome in Europe this summer, which closed the Eiffel Tower, tipped temperatures over 115 degrees in parts of Spain, and killed an estimated 2,300 people, has been linked to anthropogenic warming. And research has borne out that the temperatures and duration reached in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
There’s link between climate change and heat domes is now strong enough to form the basis for a major legal case. Multnomah County, the Oregon municipality that includes Portland, filed a lawsuit in 2023 against 24 named defendants, including oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, seeking $50 million in damages and $1.5 billion in future damages for the defendants’ alleged role in the deaths from the 2021 heat dome.
“As we learned in this country when we took on Big Tobacco, this is not an easy step or one I take lightly, but I do believe it’s our best way to fight for our community and protect our future,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement at the time. The case is now in jeopardy following moves by the Trump administration to prevent states, counties, and cities from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. (The estate of a 65-year-old woman who died in the heat dome filed a similar wrongful death lawsuit in Seattle’s King County Superior Court against Big Oil.)
Given the likelihood of longer and hotter heat dome events, then, it becomes imperative to educate people about how to stay safe. As Ward mentioned, many people who are at risk of extreme heat might not even know it, such as those taking commonly prescribed medications for anxiety, depression, PTSD, diabetes, and high blood pressure, which interfere with the body’s ability to thermoregulate. “Let’s just say recently you started taking high blood pressure medicine,” Ward said. “Every summer prior, you never had a problem working in your garden or doing your lawn work. You might this year.”
Air conditioning, while life-saving, can also stop working for any number of reasons, from a worn out machine part to a widespread grid failure. Vulnerable community members may also face hurdles in accessing reliable AC. There’s a reason the majority of heat-related deaths happen indoors.
People who struggle to manage their energy costs should prioritize cooling a single space, such as a bedroom, and focus on maintaining a cool core temperature during overnight hours, when the body undergoes most of its recovery. Blotting yourself with a wet towel or washcloth and sitting in front of a fan can help during waking hours, as can visiting a traditional cooling center, or even a grocery store or movie theater.
Health providers also have a role to play, Ward stressed. “They know who has chronic underlying health conditions,” she said. “Normalize asking them about their situation with air conditioning. Normalize asking them, ‘Do you feel like you have a safe place to go that’s cool, that you can get out of this heat?’”
For the current heat dome, at least, the end is in sight: Incoming cool air from Canada will drop temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees in cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with lows potentially in the 30s by midweek in parts of New York. And while there are still hot days ahead for Florida and the rest of the Southeast, the cold front will reach the region by the end of the week.
But even if this ends up being the last heat dome of the summer, it certainly won’t be in our lifetimes. The heat dome has become inescapable.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.
In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”
That value has clearly resonated with lawmakers on the Hill. Legislators tasked with negotiating appropriations in both the Senate and the House of Representatives last week proposed fully funding Energy Star at $32 million for the next fiscal year. It’s unclear how the House’s decision to go into recess until September will affect the vote, but Ben Evans, the federal legislative director at the U.S. Green Building Council, said the bill is “a major step in the right direction demonstrating that ENERGY STAR has strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.”
A worker connects panels on floating solar farm project in Huainan, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The United States installed just under 11 gigawatts of solar panels in the first three months of this year, industry data show. In June alone, China installed nearly 15 gigawatts, PV Tech reported. And, in a detail that demonstrates just how many panels the People’s Republic has been deploying at home in recent years, that represented an 85% drop from the previous month and close to a 40% decline compared to June of last year.
The photovoltaic installation plunge followed Beijing’s rollout of two new policies that changed the renewables business in China. The first, called the 531 policy, undid guaranteed feed-in tariffs and required renewable projects to sell electricity on the spot market. That took effect on June 1. The other, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and mandated that new distributed solar farms consume their own power first before allowing the sale of surplus electricity to the grid. As a result of the stalled installations, a top panel manufacturer warned the trade publication Opis that companies may need to raise prices by as much as 10%.
For years now, Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest producer of iron ore, has directed much of the earnings from its mines in northwest Australia and steel mills in China toward building out a global green hydrogen business. But changes to U.S. policy have taken a toll. Last week, Fortescue told investors it was canceling its green hydrogen project in Arizona, which had been set to come online next year. It’s also abandoning its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Australia’s northeastern coast, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“A shift in policy priorities away from green energy has changed the situation in the U.S.,” Gus Pichot, Fortescue’s chief executive of growth and energy, told analysts on a call. “The lack of certainty and a step back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green-energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed.” But green hydrogen isn’t dead everywhere. Just last week, the industrial gas firm Air Liquide made a final decision to invest in a 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration put two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on administrative leave, CNN reported. The reasoning behind the move wasn’t clear, but both officials — Steve Volz, who leads NOAA’s satellites division, and Jeff Dillen, NOAA’s deputy general counsel — headed up the investigation into whether President Donald Trump violated NOAA’s scientific integrity policies during his so-called Sharpiegate scandal.
The incident from September 2019, during Trump’s first term, started when the president incorrectly listed Alabama among the states facing a threat from Hurricane Dorian. Throughout the following week, Trump defended the remark, insisting he had been right, and ultimately showed journalists a weather map that had been altered with a black Sharpie market to show the path of the storm striking Alabama. NOAA’s investigation into the incident concluded that Neil Jacobs, the former agency official who backed Trump at the time and is now nominated to serve as chief, succumbed to political pressure and violated scientific integrity rules.
In March, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to repeal the state’s climate law and scrap the 2030 deadline by which the monopoly utility Duke Energy had to slash its planet-heating emissions by 70% compared to 2005 levels. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation. But on Tuesday, the GOP majorities in both chambers of the legislature plan to vote to override the veto.
Doing so and enacting the bill could cost North Carolina more than 50,000 jobs annually and cause tens of billions of dollars in lost investments, Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts reported. That’s according to a new study from a consultancy commissioned by clean-energy advocates in the state. The analysis is based on data from the state-sanctioned consumer advocate, Public Staff.
For years, a mystery has puzzled scientists: Why did Neanderthal remains show levels of a nitrogen isotope only seen among carnivores like hyenas and wolves that eat more meat than a hominid could safely consume? New research finally points to an answer: Neanderthals were eating putrefying meat garnished with maggots, said Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University. “When you get the lean meat and the fatty maggot, you have a more complete nutrient that you’re consuming.”
Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.