Edition No. 1 · July 26–28, 2026
How fire outgrew the firefighters — the science, ecology and economics of a burning century
Wildfires in southwest France and Spain have driven more than 300,000 people from their homes, licked at the edge of Bordeaux, forced a rerouting of the Tour de France's final stage and shut down NASA's Deep Space Network complex outside Madrid, while in British Columbia separate fires have merged into single vast complexes. These are not simply bigger versions of familiar summer fires: hotter, drier fuels and longer fire seasons are producing blazes that generate their own weather and outrun conventional suppression. At the same time, new research on giant sequoias and on charcoal in the Triassic rock record is reframing fire as something ecosystems evolved with — and something we have spent a century mismanaging. The result is a civil-protection and insurance problem that will define the next several decades of land use in the Mediterranean, the American West and beyond.