fires

The Yellowstone fires that burned more than a million acres in and around the park in 1988 were the signal fires of a new world. They signaled that we would live in a different world in the American West at the beginning of the 21st Century. The fires and ecological processes we assumed were natural had already fallen under the influence of human civilization's dependence on fossil fuels. The 1988 fires also signaled that our world was getting dryer and hotter. The drought that year across North America was the worst since the 1930s.