B1 · Intermediate
11 min
environmental scienceclimate changeecologynatural disasters
Fire Country: The Science of Wildfires
El fuego en Georgia: Ciencia de los incendios forestales
Two large wildfires in southeast Georgia destroyed more than 120 homes. Fletcher and Octavio dig into the science of fire: why forests burn, how climate is rewriting the rules, and what humans keep getting wrong when they try to control nature.
Dos grandes incendios forestales en el sureste de Georgia destruyeron más de ciento veinte casas. Fletcher y Octavio exploran la ciencia detrás del fuego: por qué arden los bosques, cómo el clima cambia las reglas, y qué hacemos mal cuando intentamos controlar la naturaleza.
8 essential B1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| incendio forestal | wildfire / forest fire | El incendio forestal destruyó más de cien casas en pocas horas. |
| combustible | fuel (also: combustible) | Las hojas secas en el suelo del bosque son un combustible peligroso. |
| quema controlada | prescribed burn / controlled burn | Los expertos recomiendan las quemas controladas para reducir el riesgo de incendios grandes. |
| sequía | drought | La sequía de este invierno hizo que el suelo estuviera muy seco en primavera. |
| desde hace | for (expressing ongoing duration from a past point to now) | Los científicos hablan de este problema desde hace muchos años. |
| evacuar | to evacuate | Las familias tuvieron que evacuar sus casas muy rápidamente cuando llegó el fuego. |
| partículas | particles | El humo del incendio contiene partículas muy pequeñas que son malas para los pulmones. |
| arder | to burn / to be on fire | El bosque empezó a arder por la noche cuando el viento era muy fuerte. |
Governor Brian Kemp was out touring the damage yesterday in southeast Georgia, and the number he gave reporters stopped me cold: more than 120 homes gone from two separate wildfires burning at the same time.
Sí, es una situación muy seria.
Yes, it's a very serious situation.
Y lo que me sorprende es que hablamos del sureste de Georgia, no de California.
And what surprises me is that we're talking about southeast Georgia, not California.
Mucha gente piensa que los grandes incendios solo pasan en el oeste de los Estados Unidos.
A lot of people think the big fires only happen in the western United States.
That's exactly the thing.
California has become the mental image people have of American wildfires, and I think that image is now outdated, or at least dangerously incomplete.
Claro.
Right.
Georgia tiene muchos bosques de pinos.
Georgia has enormous pine forests.
En el sur de Estados Unidos hay millones de hectáreas de este tipo de bosque, y cuando el ambiente es muy seco, estos árboles pueden arder muy rápido.
In the American South there are millions of hectares of this type of forest, and when conditions are very dry, these trees can burn very fast.
Pine forests specifically.
Which is interesting because historically, pine ecosystems in the American South evolved with fire.
Fire wasn't the enemy.
Fire was part of the system.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
El fuego es natural en muchos ecosistemas.
Fire is natural in many ecosystems.
Los árboles de pino, por ejemplo, necesitan el calor para abrir sus piñas y soltar las semillas.
Pine trees, for example, need heat to open their cones and release their seeds.
Sin fuego, el bosque no puede renovarse de forma normal.
Without fire, the forest cannot renew itself normally.
The longleaf pine, which used to cover something like ninety million acres across the South, had a relationship with low-intensity fire going back thousands of years.
Lightning strikes, seasonal burns, all of it kept the understory clear.
Y cuando los humanos empezaron a suprimir todos los incendios, el bosque cambió mucho.
And when humans started suppressing all fires, the forest changed a lot.
Creció mucha más vegetación densa en el suelo del bosque.
Much denser vegetation grew on the forest floor.
Y esa vegetación es combustible.
And that vegetation is fuel.
This is the fire suppression paradox, and it's one of the great unintended consequences of twentieth century land management.
The U.S.
Forest Service spent decades fighting every fire.
Smokey Bear, the whole campaign.
And it made things worse.
Es irónico, ¿verdad?
It's ironic, right?
Intentas proteger el bosque, y al final creas las condiciones perfectas para un incendio gigante.
You try to protect the forest, and in the end you create the perfect conditions for a massive fire.
Hay mucho combustible acumulado durante años y años.
There's a huge amount of fuel that has accumulated over years and years.
Scientists call it fuel load.
And in parts of the South, particularly the wiregrass regions of south Georgia, the fuel load right now is enormous compared to what it was before European settlement.
Y ahora tenemos otro problema encima de ese: el cambio climático.
And now we have another problem on top of that: climate change.
En Georgia, la temperatura fue más alta de lo normal este invierno.
In Georgia, the temperature was higher than normal this winter.
Llovió menos.
There was less rain.
El suelo estaba muy seco cuando llegó la primavera.
The soil was very dry when spring arrived.
Drought conditions plus accumulated fuel plus wind.
That's the triangle you need for a fire to become catastrophic rather than manageable.
El viento es muy importante.
Wind is very important.
Un incendio puede avanzar muy rápido cuando hay viento fuerte.
A fire can advance very quickly when there's strong wind.
Los bomberos dicen que el fuego puede moverse más rápido que una persona que corre.
Firefighters say that fire can move faster than a person running.
Which is genuinely terrifying when you think about what that means for someone trying to evacuate.
You get a call, you have minutes, not hours.
Y en el sur de Georgia, muchas personas viven en zonas rurales, lejos de las ciudades.
And in south Georgia, many people live in rural areas, far from cities.
Las carreteras son pocas.
The roads are few.
Cuando hay un incendio grande, la evacuación es muy difícil.
When there's a big fire, evacuation is very difficult.
I was looking at the topography down there.
Okefenokee Swamp is right in that area.
You'd think a swamp would be a natural firebreak, but in drought conditions, even wetlands can burn.
Sí, eso es algo que mucha gente no sabe.
Yes, that's something many people don't know.
Las turberas, los pantanos, pueden quemarse cuando están muy secos.
Peat bogs, swamps, can burn when they're very dry.
El Okefenokee tuvo un incendio muy grande en 2007 y otro en 2011.
The Okefenokee had a very large fire in 2007 and another in 2011.
Esto no es nuevo para esa región.
This is not new for that region.
And peat fires are their own particular nightmare.
Peat can smolder underground for weeks or months.
You think the fire is out, and it's still burning below the surface.
Es como un fuego invisible.
It's like an invisible fire.
Y emite mucho dióxido de carbono.
And it emits a lot of carbon dioxide.
Algunos estudios dicen que los incendios de turba son muy malos para el clima, peores que los incendios normales de bosque.
Some studies say that peat fires are very bad for the climate, worse than normal forest fires.
There's a feedback loop buried in that fact that I find genuinely alarming.
Climate change creates the drought that dries out the peat.
Burning peat releases carbon.
More carbon warms the climate further.
The fire is feeding the conditions that started the fire.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y los científicos hablan de esto desde hace años, pero es difícil comunicarlo bien al público.
And scientists have been talking about this for years, but it's hard to communicate it well to the public.
Un incendio parece un problema local.
A fire seems like a local problem.
La gente no ve la conexión con el clima global.
People don't see the connection to the global climate.
I spent time in Indonesia back in 2015 covering the peat fires there.
The smoke blanketed Singapore, Malaysia, parts of Thailand.
The health cost was extraordinary.
That was a wake-up call for me about what fire at scale actually means.
Y el humo es un problema de salud muy serio.
And smoke is a very serious health problem.
Contiene partículas pequeñísimas que entran en los pulmones.
It contains extremely small particles that enter the lungs.
Para los niños y las personas mayores, el humo de un incendio grande puede ser muy peligroso.
For children and elderly people, smoke from a large fire can be very dangerous.
PM 2.5.
Particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers.
The research on this is pretty stark: wildfire smoke events are now the leading cause of air quality emergencies in parts of North America that had previously never had to think about air quality.
En España también tenemos incendios cada verano, especialmente en Galicia y en Castilla y León.
In Spain we also have fires every summer, especially in Galicia and Castilla y León.
Y cada año parece peor.
And every year it seems worse.
Los veranos son más secos, más calientes.
Summers are drier, hotter.
Los incendios son más grandes y más difíciles de controlar.
The fires are larger and harder to control.
Galicia is interesting because a lot of those fires are set deliberately.
Arson is a real complicating factor in some regions.
Is that part of the Spanish conversation about wildfire?
Or is that a separate problem from the climate piece?
Son dos problemas distintos pero relacionados.
They're two separate but related problems.
Hay gente que provoca incendios por razones económicas, para cambiar el uso del suelo.
There are people who start fires for economic reasons, to change land use.
Pero aunque no hay intención criminal, el clima hace que esos incendios sean mucho más destructivos que antes.
But even without criminal intent, the climate makes those fires much more destructive than before.
Right, so you can't separate the human behavior from the environmental conditions.
Both variables have shifted.
People haven't necessarily gotten worse, but the consequences of any ignition are now much larger.
Y hay una solución que los científicos recomiendan desde hace mucho tiempo: las quemas controladas.
And there's a solution that scientists have been recommending for a long time: prescribed burns.
Quemas pequeñas, planeadas, para eliminar el combustible del suelo antes de que llegue el verano.
Small, planned burns to eliminate fuel from the ground before summer arrives.
Prescribed burns.
Which Indigenous peoples across North America practiced for millennia before Europeans arrived and decided that any fire was a bad fire.
The knowledge was there.
We just refused to inherit it.
Es verdad.
That's true.
Y en Australia también hay una larga tradición de quemas controladas de los pueblos aborígenes.
And in Australia there's also a long tradition of controlled burns among Aboriginal peoples.
Los científicos modernos estudiaron estas prácticas y confirmaron que funcionan muy bien para reducir el riesgo de incendios grandes.
Modern scientists studied these practices and confirmed that they work very well to reduce the risk of large fires.
The problem with prescribed burns in places like Georgia is that they require planning, they require community buy-in, and they produce smoke, which upsets people in nearby towns even when the burn is intentional and controlled.
There's a political friction to the obvious solution.
Siempre es así, ¿no?
It's always like that, isn't it?
La solución científica existe, pero la política es complicada.
The scientific solution exists, but the politics are complicated.
La gente ve el humo y piensa que es peligroso.
People see smoke and think it's dangerous.
No entiende que ese humo pequeño evita un humo mucho más grande después.
They don't understand that that small amount of smoke prevents a much larger amount later.
And then you add climate projections into this, and the picture gets harder.
The models suggest that fire seasons in the American South will lengthen significantly by mid-century.
Wetter winters followed by hotter, drier springs.
That combination is almost perfectly designed to grow fuel and then ignite it.
Y las 120 casas destruidas en Georgia son una consecuencia real de este problema.
And the 120 homes destroyed in Georgia are a real consequence of this problem.
No es solo teoría científica.
It's not just scientific theory.
Son familias que perdieron su hogar.
These are families who lost their homes.
Eso es muy concreto.
That's very concrete.
That's the part that I keep coming back to.
The science is fascinating, and I think it genuinely helps to understand the mechanisms.
But at the end of that chain of chemistry and physics and climate modeling, there are people who woke up yesterday with nothing.
Por eso la ciencia importa.
That's why science matters.
Porque si entendemos el problema, podemos hacer algo.
Because if we understand the problem, we can do something about it.
Pero primero tenemos que aceptar que el clima está cambiando y que los incendios son una consecuencia directa de ese cambio.
But first we have to accept that the climate is changing and that fires are a direct consequence of that change.
You used a phrase a few minutes ago that I want to circle back to.
You said los científicos hablan de esto desde hace años.
'Desde hace.' That's a construction that trips up a lot of English speakers learning Spanish.
It's not how we express time duration in English at all.
Ah, sí, es una diferencia importante.
Ah yes, it's an important difference.
En español decimos 'desde hace' más el tiempo.
In Spanish we say 'desde hace' plus the time.
Por ejemplo: 'Vivo en Madrid desde hace diez años.' Significa que empecé hace diez años y todavía vivo allí ahora.
For example: 'I have been living in Madrid for ten years.' It means I started ten years ago and I still live there now.
In English we use 'for' with the present perfect for that same idea.
'I have lived in Madrid for ten years.' But in Spanish you use the present tense, not a past tense, with 'desde hace.' That's the part that catches people.
Exacto.
Exactly.
'Los científicos hablan de esto desde hace años.' No 'hablaron,' sino 'hablan.' El presente porque la acción continúa ahora.
'Scientists have been talking about this for years.' Not 'talked,' but 'talk,' present tense.
Es lógico cuando lo piensas, pero al principio sorprende.
Present because the action continues now.
It is logical.
Once you see it that way, the Spanish version is almost more honest.
The action is still happening, so you use a tense that reflects that.
My Spanish teacher would be thrilled that I just said that.
Sí, bien.
Yes, good.
Y puedes usarlo con muchas cosas: 'Estudio español desde hace dos años,' 'No llueve desde hace tres semanas.' Muy útil para hablar del clima, especialmente en un episodio sobre incendios.
And you can use it with many things: 'I have been studying Spanish for two years,' 'It hasn't rained for three weeks.' Very useful for talking about the weather, especially in an episode about fires.