Lessons From Last Year’s Record-Breaking Wildfires

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Controlling Canada’s worsening wildfires

From Greece to Canada to California, wildfires that ignite with ever-increasing frequency and burn with greater intensity suggest more than a metaphorical warning that the planet is overheating. As the Detroit Free Press reported in Record-Breaking Canadian Wildfires—North America's New Normal?, a project supported by the Pulitzer Center, Canada didn't just break its wildfire records last year, it obliterated them. Nearly 58,000 square miles of Canadian forest burned in more than 6,500 wildfires. That more than doubled Canada's previous wildfire record and was more than seven times the nation's historical average.

"Sometimes we have bad fire in the west, sometimes in central Canada and occasionally in eastern Canada. But at times in 2023, the whole country was basically on fire," said Michael Flannigan, a professor specializing in wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. "I've been working fires fairly closely since the 1970s. I have never seen a situation like we saw in 2023."  

The smoke from those fires brought unhealthy air quality to U.S. cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and Plains throughout the spring and summer of 2023. Will this be the new normal? What, if anything, can be done?

To answer those questions, Detroit Free Press reporter Keith Matheny and photographer Eric Seals traveled across Canada from Nova Scotia to British Columbia to interview residents of the wildfire zones, scientists, policymakers at all levels of government, and knowledge-holders from Canada's First Nations. The resulting series provides a comprehensive examination of the wildfires, their changing nature, what we can expect in the future, and what this means to both the Canadian wilderness and the air we breathe.

Matheny and Seals are the Pulitzer Center’s 2024 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellows. The Fellowship aims to connect Midwestern readers with international stories that impact their daily lives. The program, now in its fifth year, is supported by a generous grant from the Clinton Family Fund to honor Longworth, a former Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent.

Best,

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Impact

Three Pulitzer Center-supported projects are finalists for the 2024 Online Journalism Awards. The global prizes have been awarding excellence and innovation in digital journalism for 25 years.

• Amazon Underworld, a cross-border investigation led by journalist Bram Ebus, is a finalist for OJA’s Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award in the small-newsroom category. The project uncovers crime dynamics in the Amazon region and analyzes the social, cultural, and environmental impacts of illicit economies that are changing the face of the rainforest.
• The Price of Plenty, a project by student journalists at the University of Florida and the University of Missouri, is a finalist for OJA’s Student Journalism Award. The series analyzes how the manufacturing and use of synthetic fertilizer threaten human and environmental health.
• Misplaced Trust, by a reporting team at Grist, is a finalist for OJA’s University of Florida Award in Investigative Data Journalism in the category for small and medium newsrooms. The series has located millions of acres of land taken from hundreds of Indigenous nations by U.S. land-grant universities, land that provides revenue to universities through fossil fuel exploration, mining, timber harvesting, and other industries. The project explores how stolen wealth transforms public institutions.

The Online Journalism Award winners will be announced on August 16, 2024, during a virtual event. 

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This message first appeared in the August 16, 2024, edition of the Pulitzer Center's weekly newsletter. Subscribe today.

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