Ep. 056: Wildfires - What's Actually Burning, and What Can Be Done

A mountain has been burning 13 miles from the Grange Project for two weeks. Wales has just gone into drought after receiving 8% of its average July rainfall, the driest July in 190 years. Just under 22,000 hectares have burnt across the UK so far this year, more than the whole of 2022, with most of the summer still to come.

This is a special episode, recorded quickly, to try to understand what is actually happening.

Tom is joined by James Hitchcock, Rewilding Advocacy and Policy Lead for Rewilding Britain in Wales, and Alex Crawley, co-director of Grazing Management and a Nuffield scholar who studied wildfire in France and California. Both arrive from different starting points and both refuse the easy answer.

Because there is an easy answer doing the rounds, in two versions. Restock the uplands and graze down the fuel load. Or rewild, rewet, and the landscape stops burning. Neither survives contact with the detail.

What the conversation gets to instead is more useful: not all fuel loads are equal, spring fires and summer fires are different problems, rewilding sites are genuinely more vulnerable during their transition years, and almost every wildfire in Britain starts with a person.

Chloe joins Tom afterwards to pick over what the interview left out, including the effect on people, the standing grass on their own land, and whether "wildfire" is even the right word.

Chapters[00:00] Welcome to a special episode, and why the gap since the last one

[03:04] Setting the scene: a mountain on fire 13 miles away, and what 220 hectares means in Grange Projects

[05:20] Why are we seeing more wildfires now, or are we?

[05:22] Alex on whiplash weather, soil moisture and winter vegetation build-up

[06:20] James on fire danger modelling, the first UK mega fire, and degraded habitats

[11:29] What the Met Office projects for 2050, and why it may already be out of date