There’s nothing ‘wild’ about most wildfires – humans start them and have made them more dangerous

A wildfire needs a name long before anyone knows what caused it. When the pines of the Gironde in southwestern France caught light in July, the fire was being reported within hours under the name of the ground it was burning. By the time it had taken 40,000 hectares, that name was fixed in every bulletin in Europe. The investigation into how it started took longer, and the scientists working out why it ran so far took longer still, publishing into a news cycle that had already moved on. Every…