B2 · Upper Intermediate
17 min
climateenvironmentnatural disasterspublic policy
A Hundred and Five Fires, and Counting
Ya no hay temporada de incendios
British Columbia declares a state of emergency with 105 wildfires burning simultaneously. Fletcher and Octavio dig into why western North America keeps burning harder each year, what climate change has to do with it, and what this fire season tells us about where things are headed.
La Columbia Británica declara estado de emergencia con 105 incendios forestales activos al mismo tiempo. Fletcher y Octavio analizan por qué el oeste de Norteamérica arde cada vez más fuerte, qué tiene que ver el clima con esto, y qué nos dicen estos incendios sobre el futuro del planeta.
7 essential B2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| incendio forestal | wildfire / forest fire | El incendio forestal destruyó miles de hectáreas en pocas horas. |
| estado de emergencia | state of emergency | La provincia declaró el estado de emergencia ante la magnitud de los incendios. |
| sotobosque | undergrowth / forest understory | Las quemas controladas eliminan el sotobosque seco que alimenta los grandes incendios. |
| sequía | drought | Varios años de sequía dejaron el terreno completamente reseco. |
| punto de inflexión | turning point / tipping point | El Verano Negro australiano fue un punto de inflexión en el debate climático. |
| inercia | inertia / momentum | El sistema climático tiene una inercia enorme; los efectos se sienten décadas después. |
| es que | the thing is / it's just that | No pude ir a la reunión. Es que se me olvidó por completo. |
Have you ever been somewhere when the sky turns that particular shade of orange at noon?
Not sunset, not clouds.
Just this weird, wrong, chemical orange, and the sun is a pale disc you can stare directly at?
Claro.
Of course.
Estuve en Madrid en el verano de 2022, cuando los incendios en Portugal y en Extremadura mandaban humo sobre la ciudad.
I was in Madrid in the summer of 2022, when the fires in Portugal and Extremadura were sending smoke over the city.
El calor era insoportable, pero el humo era otra cosa.
The heat was unbearable, but the smoke was something else.
Te metías dentro de casa y seguía siendo irrespirable.
You'd go inside and it was still impossible to breathe.
Right, that's it exactly.
And the reason I'm bringing this up is that British Columbia just declared a state of emergency.
One hundred and five wildfires burning across the province at the same time.
Not over the course of a season.
Right now.
Simultaneously.
Ciento cinco.
A hundred and five.
Ese número es importante porque no hablamos de pequeños focos controlados.
That number matters because we're not talking about small, controlled outbreaks.
Cuando una provincia declara el estado de emergencia, significa que los recursos disponibles ya no son suficientes para hacer frente a la situación.
When a province declares a state of emergency, it means the available resources are no longer enough to deal with the situation.
And on the same day, down in Utah, two people died when a Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter crashed while fighting a separate fire.
So while BC is dealing with a hundred and five fires, firefighters in the American West are dying doing this work.
Los Skycrane son helicópteros enormes, diseñados específicamente para lanzar agua sobre los incendios.
Skycranes are enormous helicopters, specifically designed to drop water on fires.
Se utilizan desde los años sesenta.
They've been in use since the sixties.
Que uno caiga no es un accidente menor;
When one goes down, it's not a minor accident;
es una señal de cuánto estrés hay en los sistemas de extinción de incendios.
it's a sign of how much stress there is on firefighting systems.
Let me give this some historical grounding, because I think the number 105 can wash over you if you don't know what BC fire seasons used to look like.
Twenty years ago, a bad year in British Columbia might mean thirty or forty significant fires.
The 2017 season was a record at the time, over twelve hundred fires.
But what we're seeing now is the intensity changing, not just the count.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y hay algo que mucha gente no sabe: en la Columbia Británica y en gran parte del oeste de Norteamérica, los bosques ya estaban muy debilitados antes de que llegara el fuego.
And there's something a lot of people don't know: in British Columbia and much of western North America, the forests were already severely weakened before the fire even arrived.
Hubo una plaga de escarabajos de la corteza que mató a millones de árboles en los años 2000 y 2010.
There was a bark beetle infestation that killed millions of trees in the 2000s and 2010s.
Árboles muertos que ahora son combustible seco.
Dead trees that are now dry fuel.
The beetle kill.
God, yes.
I actually wrote about this years ago, tangentially, while I was covering something else in the Pacific Northwest.
The scale of it from the air is staggering.
Hillsides of rust-red dead timber, stretching for miles.
Y ese escarabajo proliferó precisamente porque los inviernos se volvieron más cálidos.
And that beetle proliferated precisely because winters became warmer.
Antes, las heladas invernales mataban a las larvas.
Before, winter frosts would kill the larvae.
Ahora sobreviven.
Now they survive.
Es un ejemplo perfecto de cómo el cambio climático crea efectos en cadena que no son obvios a primera vista.
It's a perfect example of how climate change creates chain effects that aren't obvious at first glance.
Warmer winters, beetle kill, dead standing timber, then a hot dry summer, and suddenly you have the conditions for a fire that doesn't behave the way fires used to behave.
The Lytton fire in 2021 is the one I keep thinking about.
A town in BC essentially wiped off the map in fifteen minutes.
Lytton registró la temperatura más alta en la historia de Canadá el día anterior al incendio: 49,6 grados centígrados.
Lytton recorded the highest temperature in Canadian history the day before the fire: 49.6 degrees Celsius.
Es una cifra que parece imposible para ese país.
It's a figure that seems impossible for that country.
Y al día siguiente, el pueblo ardió.
And the next day, the town burned.
La conexión entre la ola de calor y el fuego fue directa, inmediata.
The connection between the heat dome and the fire was direct, immediate.
49.6.
That's almost 121 Fahrenheit.
In Canada.
I'm going to need a moment with that number.
Y no fue un caso aislado.
And it wasn't an isolated case.
Lo que estamos viendo en 2026 es que estos eventos extremos ya no son excepciones.
What we're seeing in 2026 is that these extreme events are no longer exceptions.
Son parte de un patrón.
They're part of a pattern.
La Columbia Británica lleva años enfrentando temporadas cada vez más largas e intensas.
British Columbia has been facing increasingly long and intense seasons for years.
La temporada de incendios ya no empieza en julio;
Fire season no longer starts in July;
empieza en mayo, a veces antes.
it starts in May, sometimes earlier.
Which is the thing that gets me.
The phrase "fire season" implies it ends.
It implies there's an off-season.
But if you're a firefighter in BC right now, when does the off-season actually happen?
Es una pregunta muy buena.
That's a very good question.
Los bomberos forestales en Canadá ya están reportando agotamiento crónico.
Forest firefighters in Canada are already reporting chronic exhaustion.
No hay tiempo suficiente entre una temporada y la siguiente para recuperarse físicamente.
There isn't enough time between one season and the next to physically recover.
Y además, Canadá envía brigadas a otros países cuando termina su temporada, y recibe ayuda de Australia y Nueva Zelanda cuando la suya comienza.
And on top of that, Canada sends crews to other countries when its season ends, and receives help from Australia and New Zealand when theirs begins.
Es un sistema global que está bajo una presión enorme.
It's a global system under enormous strain.
There's a dark irony there that I want to name.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the American West, Southern Europe, Siberia.
These places are essentially swapping firefighters in a rotating emergency that never fully stops.
It's become a permanent condition managed on a schedule.
Y eso nos lleva a una pregunta que los científicos llevan años haciendo: ¿cuándo dejamos de llamar a esto una emergencia y empezamos a llamarlo la nueva normalidad?
And that brings us to a question scientists have been asking for years: when do we stop calling this an emergency and start calling it the new normal?
Porque una emergencia implica que hay un fin.
Because an emergency implies there's an end.
Y cada vez hay más evidencia de que ese fin no existe.
And there's increasing evidence that end doesn't exist.
Octavio, let me push back on that framing a little, though.
Because I think "new normal" can become its own kind of resignation.
It can make people shrug.
And the thing about BC's situation right now is it shouldn't prompt a shrug.
A hundred and five fires means communities being evacuated, homes destroyed, ecosystems that took centuries to grow gone in days.
Tienes razón en eso.
You're right about that.
Pero yo diría que llamarlo 'nueva normalidad' no es resignación, es honestidad.
But I'd argue that calling it the 'new normal' isn't resignation, it's honesty.
Si seguimos tratando cada temporada de incendios como una sorpresa, no vamos a prepararnos bien.
If we keep treating every fire season as a surprise, we won't prepare properly.
Tenemos que diseñar ciudades, infraestructuras y sistemas de emergencia para un mundo donde el fuego es un factor permanente.
We need to design cities, infrastructure, and emergency systems for a world where fire is a permanent factor.
Fair.
That's fair.
And it connects to something I find underreported, which is the insurance dimension.
Parts of California are now effectively uninsurable for wildfire.
Major insurers have pulled out of the market entirely.
If that starts happening in BC, in Oregon, in other parts of western Canada, you're looking at an economic crisis layered on top of an ecological one.
Es que el mercado de seguros suele ser más honesto que los gobiernos sobre el riesgo climático.
The insurance market tends to be more honest than governments about climate risk.
Cuando una aseguradora dice 'no voy a cubrir esto', no es ideología, es matemática.
When an insurer says 'I won't cover this,' it's not ideology, it's mathematics.
Están calculando probabilidades reales.
They're calculating real probabilities.
Y esas probabilidades ahora dicen que vivir en ciertas zonas del oeste norteamericano es demasiado arriesgado para ser rentable.
And those probabilities now say that living in certain areas of western North America is too risky to be profitable.
Which creates its own justice problem.
Because who can't leave those areas?
Not the wealthy.
It's the people who can't afford to move, who've built their lives in those communities for generations, who end up uninsured and in the path of the fire.
Y en Canadá hay que mencionar específicamente a las comunidades indígenas.
And in Canada you have to specifically mention Indigenous communities.
Muchas reservas están ubicadas en zonas remotas, sin buenos accesos para los vehículos de emergencia, y con recursos muy limitados.
Many reserves are located in remote areas, without good access for emergency vehicles, and with very limited resources.
En 2021, varias comunidades de las Primeras Naciones fueron evacuadas sin previo aviso suficiente.
In 2021, several First Nations communities were evacuated without sufficient warning.
Eso no es un accidente;
That's not an accident;
es el resultado de décadas de abandono institucional.
it's the result of decades of institutional neglect.
That point lands hard.
And it's not just a Canadian problem.
I was in Australia covering the 2019 to 2020 fires, the Black Summer they called it, and the story was similar.
Rural and Indigenous communities bearing the worst of something they contributed least to.
El Verano Negro australiano fue un punto de inflexión.
The Australian Black Summer was a turning point.
Quemó más de dieciocho millones de hectáreas.
It burned more than eighteen million hectares.
Para que los oyentes entiendan la escala: eso es aproximadamente el tamaño de toda España.
To give listeners a sense of scale: that's roughly the size of all of Spain.
Y mató a cientos de personas directamente, y se estima que casi medio millón de personas murieron por las consecuencias del humo en la salud.
And it killed hundreds of people directly, and it's estimated that nearly half a million people died from the health consequences of the smoke.
Half a million.
I knew the smoke mortality figures were high but I hadn't connected them to that fire specifically.
That's a number that changes how you think about what a wildfire actually is.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y ahí está el problema con cómo medimos el impacto de los incendios.
And that's the problem with how we measure the impact of fires.
Contamos las muertes directas, las casas destruidas.
We count the direct deaths, the homes destroyed.
Pero el humo viaja miles de kilómetros.
But smoke travels thousands of kilometers.
Afecta a personas en ciudades que nunca ven las llamas.
It affects people in cities who never see the flames.
La gente con problemas respiratorios, los niños, los ancianos.
People with respiratory problems, children, the elderly.
El incendio que arde en la Columbia Británica hoy puede ser el ataque cardíaco en Vancouver mañana.
The fire burning in British Columbia today can be the heart attack in Vancouver tomorrow.
Let me bring this back to something structural.
Because we've been talking about symptoms, and I want to get at causes.
The forest management debate is real.
Some fire ecologists will tell you that a century of fire suppression, snuffing out every small fire, actually made the big fires inevitable.
The forest floor built up fuel loads that would never have accumulated if low-intensity fires had been allowed to burn naturally.
Eso es correcto, y es algo que los pueblos indígenas de Norteamérica sabían desde hace siglos.
That's correct, and it's something the Indigenous peoples of North America knew for centuries.
Las quemas controladas, las quemas culturales, son parte de la gestión tradicional del territorio.
Controlled burns, cultural burns, are part of traditional land management.
Se usaban para limpiar el sotobosque, para mantener hábitats, para que el ecosistema respirara.
They were used to clear undergrowth, to maintain habitats, to let the ecosystem breathe.
Los colonizadores europeos llegaron y las prohibieron.
European settlers arrived and banned them.
Y ahora pagamos las consecuencias.
And now we pay the consequences.
Australia had the same reckoning after the Black Summer.
There was a major push to learn from Aboriginal burning practices.
Some places actually started doing it.
But the window to do prescribed burns is shrinking, because the periods that are safe for controlled fires are themselves getting shorter as temperatures rise.
Es una trampa perfecta.
It's a perfect trap.
Para prevenir los grandes incendios necesitas hacer quemas controladas.
To prevent the big fires you need to do controlled burns.
Pero para hacer quemas controladas necesitas condiciones meteorológicas adecuadas.
But to do controlled burns you need suitable weather conditions.
Y el cambio climático está haciendo que esas condiciones sean cada vez más raras.
And climate change is making those conditions increasingly rare.
No sé si hay una solución técnica para eso.
I don't know if there's a technical solution to that.
And look, the political dimension of this is something I don't want to skip over.
In Canada, this has become a federal versus provincial fight, constantly.
Who pays for suppression, who manages the land, who compensates evacuees.
In the United States it's the same friction, and it slows everything down while the fire doesn't slow down for anyone.
Y al mismo tiempo, los negacionistas climáticos utilizan cada incendio para decir que es culpa de la mala gestión forestal, no del clima.
And at the same time, climate deniers use every fire to say it's the fault of poor forest management, not the climate.
Como si fueran cosas separadas.
As if they were separate things.
Es un argumento de mala fe, porque ambas cosas son verdad: la gestión forestal importa Y el cambio climático lo amplifica todo.
It's a bad-faith argument, because both things are true: forest management matters AND climate change amplifies everything.
Both things are true at once, yes.
And that's a harder argument to make in a news cycle.
The nuanced version rarely wins against the simple version.
Volviendo a lo que pasa ahora mismo en la Columbia Británica: lo que me preocupa no es solo el número de incendios.
Going back to what's happening right now in British Columbia: what worries me isn't just the number of fires.
Es qué pasa cuando un estado de emergencia ya no es suficiente.
It's what happens when a state of emergency is no longer enough.
Cuando el sistema de respuesta está diseñado para gestionar crisis excepcionales, pero la crisis es constante.
When the response system is designed to manage exceptional crises, but the crisis is constant.
That's the institutional stress question.
And I've seen it in other contexts.
When I was covering conflict zones, you'd see militaries and relief organizations hit a point where they were permanently in emergency mode, and the quality of decision-making degrades.
People stop asking why and only ask how.
The big structural questions get deferred indefinitely.
Eso es exactamente lo que está ocurriendo con el clima.
That's exactly what's happening with the climate.
Los gobiernos están tan ocupados respondiendo a los desastres que no tienen capacidad política ni energía mental para atacar las causas.
Governments are so busy responding to disasters that they don't have the political capacity or mental energy to attack the causes.
Es un problema de diseño.
It's a design problem.
Las democracias modernas no están construidas para afrontar amenazas que se desarrollan durante décadas.
Modern democracies aren't built to face threats that unfold over decades.
Short electoral cycles, long timescales.
It's the fundamental mismatch.
Four years versus forty.
Y sin embargo, hay razones para no ser completamente pesimistas.
And yet, there are reasons not to be completely pessimistic.
Los costos de las energías renovables han caído de una manera que muy poca gente anticipó hace quince años.
The costs of renewable energy have fallen in a way that very few people anticipated fifteen years ago.
Las emisiones de carbono en Europa llevan años bajando.
Carbon emissions in Europe have been dropping for years.
El problema es que no bajamos lo suficientemente rápido.
The problem is that we're not dropping fast enough.
El sistema climático tiene una inercia enorme;
The climate system has enormous inertia;
lo que emitimos hoy lo pagamos en décadas.
what we emit today we pay for in decades.
So even a best-case scenario on emissions still means worse fire seasons for the foreseeable future.
The warming that's already baked in, so to speak.
Sí.
Yes.
Los científicos del clima son muy claros en eso: aunque paráramos todas las emisiones mañana, el planeta seguiría calentándose durante décadas.
Climate scientists are very clear on that: even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow, the planet would keep warming for decades.
Lo que hacemos ahora no es para nosotros;
What we do now isn't for us;
es para las generaciones que vienen después.
it's for the generations that come after.
Y eso hace que la acción política sea mucho más difícil de vender a los votantes.
And that makes political action much harder to sell to voters.
Which brings me back to the image I started with.
That orange sky.
Because that's what actually moves people.
Not graphs, not projections.
The moment you drive to work and the sky is the wrong color and the air hurts your lungs.
Maybe that's what finally changes the political calculus.
Ojalá tengas razón.
I hope you're right.
Pero yo he visto cómo la gente se adapta a cosas que deberían ser inaceptables.
But I've seen how people adapt to things that should be unacceptable.
El humo ya no sorprende tanto como sorprendía hace diez años.
The smoke no longer surprises people the way it did ten years ago.
Me preocupa que nos acostumbremos al cielo naranja en lugar de exigir que vuelva a ser azul.
I worry that we get used to an orange sky instead of demanding it go back to blue.
That's a genuinely unsettling thought to sit with.
And it feels like the right place to leave the main thread of this.
Before we go, though, I want to circle back to something you said earlier that caught my ear.
You used the phrase "es que el mercado de seguros suele ser más honesto." I keep hearing "es que" and I've never quite pinned down what it's actually doing.
Buena pregunta.
Good question.
"Es que" introduce una explicación o una justificación.
'Es que' introduces an explanation or justification.
Es como decir "the thing is" en inglés.
It's like saying 'the thing is' in English.
Lo usamos cuando queremos aclarar algo, cuando damos una razón que explica lo que acabamos de decir.
We use it when we want to clarify something, when we're giving a reason that explains what we just said.
"No puedo ir al cine esta noche.
'I can't go to the cinema tonight.
Es que tengo mucho trabajo." No es solo "porque";
Es que I have a lot of work.' It's not just 'because';
tiene más peso, más énfasis.
it carries more weight, more emphasis.
So it's doing something softer than "porque." It's not just causal, it's more like you're letting the listener into your reasoning.
Less argument, more explanation.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y hay otro uso muy común: cuando alguien te hace una pregunta y tu respuesta no es lo que esperaban.
And there's another very common use: when someone asks you something and your answer isn't what they expected.
"¿Por qué no llamaste?" Y tú dices: "Es que se me olvidó el teléfono." Ahí "es que" suena casi como una pequeña disculpa, una preparación para la explicación.
'Why didn't you call?' And you say: 'Es que I forgot my phone.' There 'es que' sounds almost like a small apology, a preparation for the explanation.
I'm going to try that on my son-in-law in Madrid.
He asks me why my Spanish is so bad and I'll just say, "Es que...
llevo mucho tiempo embarazado."
Fletcher, por favor.
Fletcher, please.
"Embarazado" significa "pregnant".
'Embarazado' means 'pregnant.' You've been trying to say 'embarrassed' for years and you always end up in the same place.
Llevas años intentando decir "avergonzado" y siempre terminas en el mismo sitio.
Es que you never learn.
Es que no aprendes.