Each summer the hills seem to rehearse the same old tragedy: a flicker in the heather, a plume of smoke, and suddenly the air is thick with cant. Fire becomes prophecy; every blaze adds to the story we already think we know. Yet the land itself tells a different story — one Matt Ridley traced in last week’s Spectator, and which I summarise here. It is a tale of fuel left to gather, of old practices set aside, of moors that have been neglected, or abused.
But in the New Statesman the following week, Richard Seymour offers a counter‑argument that focuses on, and expands on, the interference in planetary systems for short-term gains. Between these two writers — Ridley and Seymour — we have a debate worth exploring, not because balance is a refuge from thought, but because understanding requires that we see the full shape of the problem.
Ridley’s Argument: The Neglected Moor
Ridley’s case is, at heart, a plea for practical
stewardship. He argues that Britain’s moorlands have become dangerously
flammable. And the reason is not climate change but because traditional land management
has been curtailed. Controlled 'cool burns', once used by farmers and
gamekeepers to keep heather short and peat intact, have been restricted or
banned. Rewilding schemes have reduced grazing. Bureaucratic caution, he says, has
replaced local knowledge.
The result is fuel: waist‑deep heather, continuous
scrub, and peat primed to smoulder for weeks. Fires that might once have crept
across the surface now burn down into the moss, releasing vast stores of carbon
and overwhelming fire services. Ridley’s lament is not ideological but
ecological: if we stop tending the land, the land will burn.
It is a story of human neglect, institutional misjudgment,
and the sidelining of rural workers who still know how to read a moor.
Seymour’s Argument: The Pyrocene
Seymour’s account starts not with
moorland practice but with planetary physics. The Saumos fire near Bordeaux, he says, generated a pyrocumulonimbus cloud: a thunderstorm born of smoke and
heat, a self‑propagating engine of fire. For Seymour, this is emblematic of the
Pyrocene, an age in which fossil‑fuelled capitalism has altered the
Earth’s fire regimes themselves.
Where Ridley sees mismanagement, Seymour sees weather
whiplash: wetter winters that encourage lush growth, followed by hotter,
drier summers that desiccate vegetation into tinder. Even a small rise in
temperature, he argues, dramatically increases the area burned. Fire‑adapted
ecosystems — California’s chaparral, Australia’s eucalyptus forests, are now
burning beyond their evolutionary limits.
Crucially, Seymour does not deny the importance of
management. He writes:
“Efforts to prevent fires rather than manage them tend to
leave fuel to accumulate while also changing the biochemical composition and
moisture retention of the soil, thus making the fires more extreme.”
But for him, mismanagement is not the cause — it is the accelerant.
The underlying fire is climate change.
Holding the Tension
Ridley reminds us that landscapes are not abstractions. They
are tended, grazed, burned, cut, and cared for. When that care is withdrawn,
whether through policy, ideology, or simple absence, fuel accumulates. Fires
worsen. Rural knowledge erodes. This is true, and Seymour does not dispute it.
But Seymour reminds us that landscapes are also systems embedded
in larger systems: atmospheric, hydrological, economic. Even well‑managed
ecosystems are now experiencing fire behaviour that exceeds historical norms.
Wetter winters, hotter summers, invasive grasses, monocultural plantations,
depopulated rural interiors: these all these have impact. This too is
true, and Ridley does not fully address it. The tension, then, is not between fact and fiction but
between scale and causality.
Ridley’s fire begins in the heather. Seymour’s fire begins
in the air. Ridley’s fire is local, preventable, a matter of stewardship.
Seymour’s fire is global, systemic, a matter of physics and political economy. Ridley’s
fire can be fought with diggers, burns, and boots on the ground. Seymour’s fire
requires emissions cuts, land‑use reform, and a reckoning with the Pyrocene.
Toward a More Complete Understanding
A balanced view is not an escape from responsibility; it is
a refusal to simplify a complex ecology into a single cause. Wildfires are not
merely the result of mismanagement, nor merely the result of climate change.
They are the product of interaction: climate dynamics meeting land‑use
decisions, atmospheric physics meeting human policy, global heating meeting
local neglect.
To understand the story fully, we must listen to
both voices — not to choose between them, but to see how they can direct a concensus.
And yet, as I read Seymour’s essay, I find myself pausing at
the point where his analysis widens into a sweeping indictment of capitalism.
There is truth in what he describes — the fossil‑fuel economy has undeniably
had an influence on the conditions in which these fires now burn — but the polemical edge of
his argument risks blurring the ecological picture with a moral one.
He claims these fires are an emblem of a single economic
system. For a mement, he sees the complexity of land, weather, soil, and stewardship simplified into rabid ideology.
Between these two columnists lies a space where the debate becomes
genuinely illuminating. Wildfires are neither purely the result of
mismanagement nor purely the result of global capitalism per se;
they are the meeting point of climate physics and human choices, of planetary
forces and local neglect.
To understand the story, we need both approaches
— but we also need to keep them clear.
Postscript
Here are verbatim the words of Martin Van de Weyer in the Spectator, in follow up to these recent articles. They encapsulate the epitome of 'both approaches'.
Combustible Neglect
I can attest to the changing climate of south-west France that’s blamed for the inferno which devastated 42,000 hectares of the Gironde. Some 120 miles to the east in my patch of the Dordogne, we used to expect rain every afternoon but now enjoy almost unbroken summer sunshine. As in everything, however, there are economic factors.
The afflicted area between Bordeaux and the Atlantic (I learn from Medieval Histories) was marshland grazed by sheep until 1857, when Napoleon III ordered it to be drained and planted with pines – which were tended by resin-tappers until that industry declined in the mid 20th century.
After which, no one cleared the ground vegetation that acts as kindling for pine plantations in dry summers. Meanwhile, declining wine demand led to the combustible neglect of adjacent Gironde vineyards. Just as the concreting of England for housing estates and industrial sheds has increased flood risks that are exacerbated by altered rainfall patterns, so zealots accuse humanity at large of burning the planet when very often what’s really changed is local topography, driven by local profit and loss accounts.
© The Spectator Aug 8th 2026
