For weeks now, more than ninety per cent of the Northeast has experienced abnormal dryness. In some places, such as New York and New Jersey, the deficit of rainfall is nine inches and soil moisture is ninety-five-per-cent below average. The result is that the Northeast has become extremely combustible. Typically, the region’s wildfire season is in April and May, but maps of recent fires in Maine, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island resemble maps of California in August, with hundreds of red dots. The Associated Press reported that Massachusetts typically has around fifteen wildland fires each October; this October, there have been about two hundred. Last week, the biggest wildfire in the country was in California, but the second biggest was a fire outside Sundown, New York. So far this year, around a hundred and forty thousand acres have burned across the East—roughly double the amount at this time in 2023.
For thousands of years, before European settlement, the Northeast burned frequently. Native Americans intentionally set many of these fires; colonizers said that the “sweet perfume” of forest fires could be smelled at sea long before the land itself was visible. The historic memory of these fires, as well as the folk traditions of past generations who burned for agriculture, hunting, and wild foods, has nearly vanished. But this year is a reminder that fire is not something that only happens in other, faraway places. “Historically, for as long as we have records, fire was always around,” Stephen Pyne told me. “So it’s not that the Northeast doesn’t burn. It’s just that we’ve eliminated the conditions and now we may be restoring some of those conditions.”