Commentary: Hollywood fires will cause harm long after they burn out

Every year, however, nearly 100,000 people die from inhaling PM2.5 released by such disasters, with the worst effects in less affluent corners of Central America, Southeast Asia and Southern Africa.

Even in California, it’s the pall of smoke that will do the most damage to human well-being. A drought-prone, densely populated strip of land strafed by seasonal winds which act like accelerants on a bushfire, it’s unusually prone to such disasters and their after-effects.

Somewhere close to 55,000 premature deaths in the state between 2008 and 2018 were caused by PM2.5 from fires, according to a study last June led by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles. That makes such particulates a bigger cause of death in the state than road accidents, and a far more serious risk than homicide.

This blanket of soot extends around the globe. Singaporeans routinely inhale the burnt-up remnants of Indonesian jungles and peat bogs, while New Yorkers see the sun blotted out by the dust lofted when Canadian boreal forests go up in smoke. In Delhi, the fumes from thousands of hectares of rice fields ignited to clear the ground for new planting cloaks a city of 33 million, in a perennial disaster that’s been worsening for many years.

The burden of lung and heart disease these disasters engender will be with us for decades to come.

It’s a toll that will never go away entirely. Humanity’s use of fire to cook food and clear the landscape may have had a crucial effect on our evolution, but wildfires have been going on for millions of years before we showed up on the planet and will continue for millions more.