Part of the Series
Planet or Profit
Kansas was recently ravaged by the largest wildfire in its history. The Anderson Creek wildfire burned through roughly 400,000 acres of Kansas and Oklahoma over the course of four days last week, stymied only by an unseasonable snowfall on Easter morning.
Kansas’ Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a state of disaster emergency declaration for five counties last week. His state has been facing frequent abnormal weather, mostly in the form of unusually warm temperatures, which predispose it to record wildfires.
What we are seeing in Kansas is simply the micro of the macro, a symptom of a world that is increasingly susceptible to burning. We live on a planet that is approaching a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial average temperatures: a level not seen in the last 110,000 years.
Hotter, Longer, Larger
As Truthout reported this week, “NASA recently released data confirming that February was the warmest month ever measured globally, at 1.57 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline temperature average. The new record easily smashed the old global temperature record, which was set just one month before, in January.”
To see more stories like this, visit “Planet or Profit?”
Hence, it should not come as a surprise that the record temperatures ushered in a record wildfire, and have us set up for what may well be yet another record wildfire season in the United States.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a group that describes itself as putting “rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet’s most pressing problems,” provides a sobering overview of how anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is contributing to wildfires. UCS research shows that wildfires in the Western United States are increasing in number, and wildfire season is becoming longer, due to ACD.
For example, the average number of annual wildfires larger than 1,000 acres was 140 per year between 1980 and 1989, but has increased dramatically to 250 per year between 2000 and 2012.
Additionally, the average length of the wildfire season was five months during the early 1970s, whereas now it is more than seven months long and increasing.
UCS research shows that another contributing factor to the escalation of wildfires across the Western United States is the fact that the winter snowpack is melting up to a full month earlier than it did in previous decades, and wildfires are now projected to burn more land than ever in the future.
Other prominent studies support what the UCS has found. Researchers from the University of Utah released a report showing that over the last three decades, wildfires across the Western United States have, indeed, been growing both larger and more frequent.
Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence from around the world continues to present itself in more dramatic fashion as time goes by.
“In Tasmania, bushfires have grown so severe that 1,000-year-old trees are burning to ash while dried-out peat bogs are rapidly catching fire,” Truthout reported this week. “Experts there are warning that what is happening in Tasmania is a human-caused calamity as severe as the razing of the temples in Palmyra by ISIS” (also known as Daesh).
Meanwhile, in Indonesia, 2015 was the worst wildfire season in the country’s history. By mid-October, the island nation saw more than 100,000 individual fires. Damages in that month alone reached more than $30 billion, and more than half a million people were reported sick from the smoke.
“In [the] next 30 years, we’re looking at pretty consistent disruption of current fire patterns for over half the planet — most of which involve increases” in severity, Max Moritz, a fire specialist based at the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, warned back in 2012. His words are even more relevant today, as we head into what may be this planet’s worst wildfire season yet.
Help us Prepare for Trump’s Day One
Trump is busy getting ready for Day One of his presidency – but so is Truthout.
Trump has made it no secret that he is planning a demolition-style attack on both specific communities and democracy as a whole, beginning on his first day in office. With over 25 executive orders and directives queued up for January 20, he’s promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, and implement a “drill, drill, drill” approach to ramp up oil and gas extraction.
Organizations like Truthout are also being threatened by legislation like HR 9495, the “nonprofit killer bill” that would allow the Treasury Secretary to declare any nonprofit a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip its tax-exempt status without due process. Progressive media like Truthout that has courageously focused on reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza are in the bill’s crosshairs.
As journalists, we have a responsibility to look at hard realities and communicate them to you. We hope that you, like us, can use this information to prepare for what’s to come.
And if you feel uncertain about what to do in the face of a second Trump administration, we invite you to be an indispensable part of Truthout’s preparations.
In addition to covering the widespread onslaught of draconian policy, we’re shoring up our resources for what might come next for progressive media: bad-faith lawsuits from far-right ghouls, legislation that seeks to strip us of our ability to receive tax-deductible donations, and further throttling of our reach on social media platforms owned by Trump’s sycophants.
We’re preparing right now for Trump’s Day One: building a brave coalition of movement media; reaching out to the activists, academics, and thinkers we trust to shine a light on the inner workings of authoritarianism; and planning to use journalism as a tool to equip movements to protect the people, lands, and principles most vulnerable to Trump’s destruction.
We urgently need your help to prepare. As you know, our December fundraiser is our most important of the year and will determine the scale of work we’ll be able to do in 2025. We’ve set two goals: to raise $93,000 in one-time donations and to add 1295 new monthly donors by midnight on December 31.
Today, we’re asking all of our readers to start a monthly donation or make a one-time donation – as a commitment to stand with us on day one of Trump’s presidency, and every day after that, as we produce journalism that combats authoritarianism, censorship, injustice, and misinformation. You’re an essential part of our future – please join the movement by making a tax-deductible donation today.
If you have the means to make a substantial gift, please dig deep during this critical time!
With gratitude and resolve,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy