The Devil’s Diary

Entry the Tenth

We Increased the Fire Risk

The twenty-eighth of July, in the year 2026

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. (What you inherit from your fathers, earn again if you would possess it.) Goethe, Faust, Part One, lines 682–683³⁷

I required no torch. Humans changed the conditions in which torches, lightning, machinery, power lines, and ordinary accidents meet dry fuel. Then they arranged the defendants in a circle. The company pointed to the customer. The customer pointed to the company. The government pointed to the voter. The voter pointed to the government. Each statement named a real causal link. Each speaker used that link to remove the speaker from the human cause.

Wildfire is a natural ecological process. Human greenhouse gas emissions have also increased the probability of extreme fire weather, prolonged fire seasons, and exceptional burned area. Land use, ignition, vegetation, suppression, weather, and governance determine particular outcomes. The presence of several causes does not erase the measured human contribution. It describes the mechanism through which the contribution operates.¹²⁵

This article makes one empirical claim and one ethical claim. The empirical claim is that human activity has increased wildfire hazard and has left documented vulnerabilities unresolved. The ethical claim is that every human remains inside the word we. Science can estimate different causal shares. It cannot convert a smaller share into moral nonexistence. Responsibility here is neither equal guilt nor equal control. It is the refusal to make another human actor carry the whole human account.

Human influence increased the danger. Institutions delayed known protections. Every participant can identify someone with more power. That fact changes what each person can do. It does not create an innocent species outside humanity.

The global record carries a human signal

The 2023–2024 global fire season burned about 3.9 million square kilometres. Global burned area was slightly below the average of earlier seasons, while fire carbon emissions were 16 percent above average. Climate change increased modelled burned area anomalies by as much as 40 percent in Canada, 18 percent in Greece, and 50 percent in western Amazonia. The probability of high fire weather increased by an estimated factor of 2.9 to 3.6 in Canada and 20.0 to 28.5 in Amazonia.³

The 2024–2025 season repeated the pattern. At least 3.7 million square kilometres burned globally, 9 percent below the post-2002 average. Fire carbon emissions reached 2.2 petagrams of carbon, 9 percent above average and the sixth highest total since 2003. Global area alone therefore cannot answer whether a season was worse. Carbon emissions, regional extremes, deaths, displacement, smoke exposure, and destroyed homes describe different dimensions of harm.⁴

The same report attributed large regional changes to anthropogenic climate forcing. It found extreme fire weather in Northeast Amazonia 30 to 70 times more likely, with burned area about four times larger than in a modelled world without climate change. In the Pantanal and Chiquitano region, fire weather became four to five times more likely and burned area increased by an estimated factor of 35. The analysis estimated Southern California burned area at 25 times the counterfactual value for the January 2025 event. The confidence and uncertainty differed by region and method. The direction across the focal regions was consistent. Human-caused climate change raised the probability or magnitude of extreme fire.⁴

The IPCC reports that anthropogenic warming lengthened or increased the frequency of hot and arid periods favourable to wildfire across as much as one-quarter of global vegetated land from 1979 onward. It also reports that increases in burned area have been attributed to human-induced climate change in some regions. These are global and regional conclusions, not a claim that every fire or every hectare has the same cause.⁵⁶

Canada supplies an unusually clear causal test

Approximately 15 million hectares burned in Canada in 2023, more than twice the previous modern record and more than seven times the 1986 through 2022 annual mean. Canada recorded about 6,700 ignitions, fewer than the usual annual average of roughly 8,000. Lightning caused 59 percent of the fires and 93 percent of the burned area. Sixty very large fires produced 73 percent of the annual burned area. Researchers concluded that human-caused climate change enabled the sustained extreme fire weather.¹

The smaller number of ignitions sharpens the argument. A record area did not require a record number of sparks. Heat, atmospheric dryness, early snow loss, prolonged drought, and the persistence of dangerous weather allowed a limited set of fires to become enormous. Lightning supplied most ignitions. Human influence changed the conditions in which the lightning operated.¹²

A separate attribution study compared the current climate with counterfactual simulations containing little or no human influence. Human-caused climate change significantly increased the likelihood of burned area as large as the 2023 total across most of Canada. The increase exceeded a factor of two in eastern and southwestern ecozones. A season as long as the 2023 season became more than five times as likely in almost every Canadian ecozone. The estimated probability ratio for cumulative high wildfire risk area was at least 3.75, with a best estimate of 9.5. The models explained about 40 to 60 percent of yearly regional variation in burned area. Ignition, vegetation, management, and suppression accounted for additional variation.²

An earlier attribution study of the 2017 British Columbia season found that human influence made extreme fire weather and fire behaviour measures two to four times as likely and increased modelled burned area by a factor of seven to eleven in the study region. The study found no attributable signal in its extreme dryness measure, and its burned area estimate retained uncertainty from causes outside the climate model. The limits belong in the record with the result.³⁴

Probability is causal evidence. A person who loads a die changes an outcome without choosing the face of any individual throw. Human emissions changed the distribution of wildfire conditions. Immediate ignition and amplified hazard remain distinct causes inside the same event.

The emissions have identifiable human routes

Canada accounted for about 1.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022. Excluding land use, land-use change, and forestry, it emitted 685 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2024, about 17 tonnes per person. The energy sector produced 81 percent of the total. Oil and gas emissions reached 208 million tonnes, 5.1 percent above their 2005 level.⁷

A peer-reviewed study traced emissions from 88 major fossil fuel and cement producers and modelled their contribution to atmospheric drying and forest fire in the western United States and southwestern Canada. Those emissions contributed an estimated 48 percent of the long-term increase in atmospheric drying from 1901 through 2021, with an interquartile range of 38 to 63 percent. They also contributed an estimated 37 percent of cumulative forest area burned from 1986 through 2021, with an interquartile range of 26 to 47 percent. The estimate applies to that region and period. It does not allocate the entire result to one company or extend automatically to every fire.¹¹

These figures establish differences in causal contribution. They do not support the fantasy that an oil company is a nonhuman force acting upon an otherwise absent species. Corporations are legal organizations created, directed, financed, staffed, regulated, supplied, and patronized by humans. Governments are humans organized through law and office. Markets are repeated human transactions structured by rules. Systems constrain participants and outlast individuals. They remain forms of organized human action.

The warnings arrived before the disasters

Canada failed to meet every national emissions target set before the current 2030 target despite issuing more than ten climate plans since 1990. A 2023 federal audit found that only 45 percent of measures in the 2030 plan had implementation deadlines and that 95 percent lacked a stated emissions reduction target or expected reduction. Responsibility was fragmented among federal organizations, while the environment minister lacked authority to compel corrective action across government.⁸

A 2024 follow-up found that nine of twenty audited measures were proceeding as intended, nine faced challenges, and two faced significant barriers. A 2025 audit examined nine financial measures projected to exceed 100 billion Canadian dollars and found shortcomings in every one. The gap between expected reductions and the 2030 target had increased.⁹¹⁰³³

Canada released its first National Adaptation Strategy in 2023 after federal auditors had recommended national adaptation planning in 2006. The 2025 audit found that the strategy did not prioritize national climate risks, lacked economic analysis for allocating resources, and had an inadequate system for measuring results. Planned bilateral action plans and the Indigenous Climate Leadership Agenda had not been established. The current federal plan aims for high-risk communities to develop wildfire prevention and mitigation plans by 2030 and for up to 15 percent of those plans to be implemented by 2028.¹²¹³

Natural Resources Canada had already stated in 2018 that national wildfire science and technology capacity was failing to match increasing wildfire complexity. It identified longer seasons, more severe events, declining research programs, limited academic capacity, and an aging expert workforce. Advance warning, available measures, and delayed implementation establish responsibility for unresolved risk even where no study can assign a specific destroyed house to a specific delayed program.²⁹

Policy also changed the fuel and the vulnerability

Early managers in Canada’s Rocky Mountain national parks suppressed fire and prohibited Indigenous cultural burning. Parks Canada now states that those policies created unnaturally large fuel loads and increased severe wildfire risk in those parks. Prescribed fire is now used in suitable ecosystems to reduce accumulated fuel and make future fires less intense and easier to control.¹⁵

A study of 160 communities across boreal Canada found a deficit of recently burned forest around 54.4 percent of them. It found that 74.4 percent had no more than 10 percent recently burned forest within ten kilometres. The authors concluded that suppression policy may be increasing flammability around boreal communities. A separate Canadian study found that Indigenous fire stewardship can reduce fuel loads and wildfire risk while documenting legal, jurisdictional, financial, and institutional barriers to Indigenous-led burning.¹⁶¹⁷

Fire management must fit local ecology. Prescribed fire, cultural burning, vegetation management, firebreaks, ignition-resistant construction, training, evacuation planning, emergency agreements, clean-air facilities, early warning, and national resource sharing address different components of risk. Their availability defeats the claim that human agency ends when a fire begins.^1315172223

First Nations communities carried documented institutional failures

In 2022, Canada’s Auditor General concluded that Indigenous Services Canada did not provide First Nations communities with the support they needed to manage floods, wildfires, and other emergencies. The department spent about 646 million Canadian dollars on response and recovery from the 2018 to 2019 fiscal year through the 2021 to 2022 fiscal year, compared with 182 million dollars on preparedness and mitigation. It had 112 eligible structural mitigation projects awaiting funding. The audit did not identify all 112 as wildfire projects.¹⁴

The same audit found that ninety First Nations evacuations from the 2009 to 2010 fiscal year through the 2021 to 2022 fiscal year lasted longer than three months. Fourteen lasted at least four years. Evacuation service standards existed only in Ontario. A 2025 follow-up found unsatisfactory progress on 53 percent of recommendations across six audited First Nations program areas and found fewer emergency management service agreements than in 2022.¹⁴¹⁸

Parliament documented similar deficiencies after 12,800 First Nations people were evacuated during the 2017 wildfires. It reported inadequate preparedness funding, limited local training, exclusion from coordination and decisions, communication failures, culturally inappropriate evacuation conditions, and unclear responsibilities. A 2023 committee report stated that many current problems repeated the 2018 findings.³⁰³¹³²

Federal publications reported at least 45,000 people evacuated from First Nations communities during the 2025 fire season. The year-end weather review reported about 8.9 million hectares burned and ranked 2025 as Canada’s second-worst wildfire season by area after 2023. Indigenous people represented 5 percent of Canada’s population in the 2021 census, while people from First Nations communities represented at least three of every five reported wildfire evacuees in the year-end review. These figures document disproportionate burden. They do not justify assigning responsibility for the hazard to the people carrying that burden.^19202127

The National Risk Profile identifies colonialism, forced displacement, remote locations, limited emergency services, and infrastructure deficits as factors in disproportionate Indigenous disaster risk. It also identifies gaps in national wildfire response and inadequate inclusion of Indigenous knowledge. The common human responsibility argued here therefore includes responsibility to repair unequal exposure and restore authority to communities whose practices were constrained.²²

Firefighters reached physical limits

During 2023, Canadian agencies assigned full suppression to about 79 percent of detected fires and contained about 85 percent of full-response fires below 200 hectares. Canada remained at national preparedness level five for a record 120 consecutive days. More than 1,700 personnel moved among Canadian agencies, and more than 5,500 personnel arrived from twelve countries and the European Union.¹

These facts record a major operational effort under extreme conditions. Parks Canada describes extreme crown fire as fast-spreading and very difficult to control, with only indirect action possible against the head. The responsibility claim does not accuse firefighters of failing to stop physically uncontrollable fire. It places responsibility earlier in the sequence, where humans altered hazard, fuel, preparation, infrastructure, and exposure.³⁵

Canada later announced 104 million Canadian dollars for FireSmart projects and 316.7 million dollars over five years for a national aerial surge program. Ten aircraft and two support assets were reported available for the 2026 season. These investments prove that policy instruments exist. Their announcement alone does not establish adequate scale, timing, or measured effect.²³²⁴

The damage extends beyond burned area

A 2025 Nature study estimated that 98 percent of Canadians experienced at least one day in 2023 when fine particulate pollution exceeded the World Health Organization daily guideline and wildfire smoke supplied at least half of that pollution. The study estimated 1,300 acute premature deaths in Canada, with a 95 percent confidence interval from 800 to 1,800. It separately estimated 8,300 chronic premature deaths, with a 95 percent confidence interval from 5,800 to 10,800.²⁵

Those values are epidemiological estimates built from emissions, smoke transport, exposure, baseline mortality, and exposure-response models. The acute and chronic estimates come from separate calculations and should remain separate. The authors reported substantial uncertainty in emissions and modelled particulate concentrations. The uncertainty limits the precision of the estimate. It does not reduce the estimated burden to zero.²⁵

Canada recorded about 5.37 million hectares burned in 2024 and about 8.9 million in 2025. The 2024–2025 global report estimated that roughly 100 million people worldwide were exposed to wildfire activity during that reporting season. Fire responsibility therefore concerns evacuation, homes, health, culture, education, infrastructure, livelihood, ecosystems, and carbon as well as hectares.⁴²⁶²⁷

“We” includes every participant

The IPCC estimates that the highest-emitting 10 percent of households produce 34 to 45 percent of global consumption-based household emissions. The lowest-emitting 50 percent produce 13 to 15 percent. Those numbers matter. They identify where reductions, resources, and authority can have the greatest effect. They also establish that contribution is unequal.²⁸

The ethical error begins when unequal contribution becomes a machine for manufacturing nonresponsibility. A high emitter says the system required the behaviour. A lower emitter says the individual share is too small to matter. A government says voters would reject stronger policy. Voters say government should act without them. A producer says demand caused production. A consumer says supply caused demand. Each speaker identifies one constraint and converts it into total absolution.

Every human does not possess equal money, choice, knowledge, safety, citizenship, mobility, or institutional authority. A child, a displaced person, a subsistence farmer, an oil executive, and a head of government cannot perform the same acts. Universal responsibility therefore means response within actual capacity, not an identical burden or identical blame. Greater causal contribution and greater power create greater concrete duties. Smaller contribution changes the scale and form of response. It does not authorize the sentence “nothing I do belongs to this.”

Difference determines the work. It does not determine who counts as human enough to answer.

The culture of “pass the buck” completes the damage

“Pass the buck” names the transfer of responsibility to another actor. Climate politics has expanded the transfer into a complete culture. The company transfers to the customer. The customer transfers to the company. The state transfers to the market. The market transfers to preference. The voter transfers to the state. The wealthy transfer to population growth elsewhere. The less wealthy transfer to historical emitters. The institution transfers to another jurisdiction. Every transfer can begin with a true fact. The truth of the receiving actor’s contribution does not cancel the sending actor’s contribution.

This is why the phrase “only one person” fails. One ballot rarely decides an election. The voter still accepts that voting is an act of political responsibility. One purchase rarely determines a production system. One worker rarely controls a corporation. One official rarely controls a state. Collective outcomes exist through actions whose individual marginal effect is small. Marginality describes scale. It does not erase membership in the cause.

The system also cannot carry moral responsibility in place of people. A system has no lungs to fill with smoke, no child to evacuate, no hand to sign a permit, no voice to cast a ballot, and no conscience to answer. It is a durable arrangement of human incentives, laws, infrastructures, habits, dependencies, and decisions. Naming the system is necessary because isolated choice cannot explain the result. Treating the system as a nonhuman defendant protects every human who reproduces it.

Responsibility exceeds the private ledger

Polymyth states its Derridean operation as taking responsibility for that which we deem ourselves not responsible for. This sentence is a project paraphrase, not a verified quotation from Jacques Derrida. The Gift of Death is the cited philosophical source for the problem of responsibility beyond rational calculation, exchange, and a fully accountable private ledger.³⁶

Entry the Fourth examined the same failure in another domain. When care becomes a priced service, a person can refuse responsibility because the act was never included in a private contract. Wildfire responsibility receives the same treatment. A person calculates the measurable fraction of one tonne, one vote, one purchase, one job, or one jurisdiction, finds the fraction small, and declares the account closed. The calculation is useful for allocating action. It becomes corrupt when it defines the outer limit of obligation.

Derridean responsibility begins where complete calculation fails. Every decision answers one demand while leaving other demands unanswered. Responsibility cannot become perfect bookkeeping because singular others and competing duties exceed the ledger. The project extends that insight here. A person becomes responsible by answering for a shared human condition that exceeds the portion the person voluntarily claims.³⁶

This does not remove evidence, law, or proportional policy. It blocks their use as moral escape devices. Evidence identifies causes. Law assigns powers. Policy directs resources. Ethics begins when the remainder still receives an answer.

The conclusion follows without exaggeration

Human influence increased the probability of extreme fire weather and exceptional burned area in multiple regions. In Canada, peer-reviewed attribution studies measured large increases in the likelihood of the 2023 season’s duration, high-risk area, and burned area. Global reports found human influence in Canada, Amazonia, Greece, the Pantanal and Chiquitano region, the Congo Basin, and Southern California, with different methods and uncertainty ranges. Audits documented delayed emissions policy, adaptation, mitigation, measurement, and emergency support. Other studies documented the consequences of suppression and barriers to Indigenous fire stewardship.^12348121417

The record does not calculate an exact preventable count of deaths, evacuations, structures, or hectares for every omitted measure. It establishes amplified hazard and unresolved vulnerability. That is enough to establish responsibility for risk. It is also enough to reject the statement that nothing could be done.

We changed the probability. We knew practical measures existed. We allowed responsibility to circulate until every hand appeared empty.

Entry the tenth. The ledger contains no nonhuman defendant who can sign for us.