Elizabeth Kolbert always carries out her duty, which often makes it difficult to savor life’s small pleasures or even big victories without considering the law of unintended consequences. Give 20 minutes of your time to this one:

The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires

Strategies intended to safeguard forests and homes have instead increased the likelihood that they’ll burn.

The provincial government of Alberta defines a “wildfire of note” as a blaze that could “pose a threat to public safety, communities or critical infrastructure.” Last year, Alberta’s first wildfire of note broke out unusually early, on April 30th, near the tiny town of Entwistle, about sixty-five miles west of Edmonton. A second wildfire of note was recorded that same day, in the town of Evansburg. Four days later, an astonishing seventy-two wildfires were burning, and three days after that the number had grown to a hundred and nine. Some thirty thousand people had to be evacuated, and Alberta’s premier declared a state of emergency. “It’s been an unusual year,” Christie Tucker, an official from the province’s wildfire information unit, observed at the end of the week.

The unusual soon became the unheard-of. Owing to a combination of low winter snowfall and abnormally high spring temperatures, many parts of Canada, including the Maritime Provinces, were just a cigarette butt away from incineration. On May 28th, with flames bearing down on Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, some eighteen thousand people were told to evacuate. “Basically, all hell is breaking loose,” a fire chief in Halifax, Rob Hebb, said. Meanwhile, the largest fire ever recorded in Nova Scotia—the Barrington Lake fire—was burning toward the city’s southwest.

The fires kept hopscotching across the country. Before the Barrington Lake fire had been contained, a new monster, the Donnie Creek fire, emerged in British Columbia. On June 18th, after scorching more than two thousand square miles, Donnie Creek became British Columbia’s largest recorded blaze. Saskatchewan saw dozens of wildfires, Quebec hundreds. Evacuation orders went out to the entire city of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. Many of the blazes created their own weather, in the form of thunderstorms spawned by rapidly rising hot air. The smoke from the fires drifted across much of the United States, prompting health alerts from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. By late June, Canada had broken its previous annual record for acreage burned, set in 1995, and by mid-October nearly forty-six million acres—an area larger than Denmark—had been charred. This was almost triple the previous record and nine times the annual average…