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The Northeast is becoming fire country

Maps of recent fires across the region resemble California in August, with hundreds of red dots.

I like to turn to the New York Post for thoughtful environmental reporting, and, after the fire, I read with interest that “scores of squirrels, birds, raccoons, skunks and other critters that call the Brooklyn oasis home were forced to flee the burned sector—and it could take years for them to return, according to wildlife experts.” A park official also warned that it would take “many seasons” for the forest to recover from the loss of “all” its ground cover. As I walked through the footprint of the burn, with birdsong floating above me and squirrels leaping on the ground feasting on acorns, I thought that, at worst, Brooklyn now had its own inadvertent experiment and study plot in fire ecology. According to Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the cause of the current drought is some random atmospheric variability: a high-pressure system over the central and eastern United States that is suppressing rainfall and refusing to budge.

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