Each summer these days, 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 chaos. Fire becomes prophecy; every blaze is folded into the story we already think we know. Yet the land itself tells a different tale — one Matt Ridley traces in this week’s Spectator, and which I summarise here — a tale of tinder left to gather, of old practices set aside, of moors that are managed by a diktat of ignorance.
Wildfire season arrives each summer with its familiar choreography of smoke, panic and political certainty. Bordeaux and Madrid glow on the evening news; the Cairngorms and the Peak District smoulder closer to home. Within hours, the refrain is ready‑made: this is climate Armageddon, the bill for our failure to build more turbines or breed fewer cows. Yet the picture, Matt Ridley argues, is far less tidy than the headlines allow.
For all the drama of this year’s fires, the global trend points in the opposite direction. NASA’s satellites show that the acreage burned worldwide has been falling for decades; by mid‑year, 2024 is on track to be one of the quietest wildfire seasons since records began. Europe, too, has seen less than half its average burn area. Hot, dry spells matter, of course, but they do not explain why a warming world is witnessing fewer fires, not more.
Ridley’s contention is that climate change has become a convenient alibi for political neglect. In fire‑prone landscapes, the danger grows not from temperature charts but from fuel: the slow, silent accumulation of heather, scrub and moss when regular, low‑intensity “cool burns” are discouraged or banned. Farmers and gamekeepers have used such burns for generations to keep heather short, encourage biodiversity and prevent flames from penetrating deep into peat. When these practices are curtailed, the land becomes a tinderbox.
He points to Natural England, the RSPB and the National Trust, whose shift toward rewilding and “rewetting” has meant fewer burns and, in some cases, less grazing. But rewetted moors dry out in droughts, and when they catch fire — as at Tintwistle, Dovestone and Abernethy — they burn fiercely, releasing vast stores of carbon and overwhelming local fire services. Time and again, Ridley notes, it is gamekeepers who end up cutting emergency firebreaks with diggers, even as they fear prosecution for breaking habitat‑management rules.
The human cost is not abstract: long nights on the hill, strained families, volunteer crews fed by cricket clubs, and a fire service whose numbers have fallen by a quarter in seven years. Meanwhile, government departments remain largely absent, partly because the financial burden of firefighting falls elsewhere.
Perhaps the most striking irony, Ridley suggests, is that the very organisations most vocal about climate risk are also those restricting the one tool known to reduce wildfire severity. Even the Cairngorms National Park’s own wildfire plan acknowledges that reducing burning and grazing will increase fuel loads for years to come. Yet policy continues unchanged.
Ridley ends with a rueful note: he warned last year that restricting cool burns would worsen fire risk. The summer’s events, he says, have proved the point.