Anthropologically Speaking: Wildfires When most of us look at a wildfire, our attention is understandably drawn to the flames. We see burning forests, destroyed homes, exhausted firefighters, frightened animals, and long lines of people attempting to evacuate. Those are the most immediate and dramatic images. As anthropologists, however, we must also look beyond the fire itself. We ask what happens to the people who live in its path, how risk is distributed, who receives protection, who can afford to rebuild, and what it means when a community begins to wonder whether it can continue to exist in the same place. That is what I would like us to consider here. Wildfires are environmental events, but they are also profoundly human events. They alter relationships to land, disrupt communities, reshape housing and insurance markets, threaten livelihoods, and sometimes compel people to move. In that sense, a wildfire does more than burn across a physical landscape. It changes the human map. Let us begin with the scale of the current emergency. As of July 26, 2026, the United States had recorded 42,157 wildfires that burned approximately 4.07 million acres. The number of fires stood at 128 percent of the ten-year average for that date, while the acreage burned stood at 121 percent. Ninety large fires remained uncontained, with 25,310 firefighters and support personnel assigned to active incidents. The United States had reached National Preparedness Level 5, the highest level in the national system (National Interagency Fire Center 2026a, 2026b). Canada has been confronting hundreds of fires at the same time. By July 20, approximately 5.9 million acres had burned across the country. Ontario alone reported 190 active fires, with approximately 1,800 people evacuated from threatened communities. Smoke from these fires moved southward and produced unhealthy air in parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan (Reuters 2026a, 2026b). This is an important anthropological point in itself. The fire may begin within a particular province, state, or country, but smoke does not recognize political borders. The consequences of an environmental event can cross territories much more easily than the people affected by it. Europe is facing a similarly destructive emergency. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre reported that 254,388 hectares had burned within the European Union by July 22. Although this was slightly below the area burned by the same point in the record-setting 2025 season, it was already above the twenty-year average. The European Forest Fire Information System had detected 1,254 fires, more than twice the long-term average of 569 for the same point in the year (European Commission Joint Research Centre 2026). Conditions deteriorated further during the following days. By July 26, approximately 220,000 people had been evacuated in France and another 75,000 in Spain. More than 150,000 hectares had burned in Spain, approximately six times the area recorded by the same point in 2025 (Reuters 2026c). In southwestern France, fires approaching Bordeaux had burned approximately 42,000 hectares and forced roughly a quarter of a million people from their homes by July 26 (Associated Press 2026). The totals reported by news organizations changed throughout the day as additional evacuation orders were issued. That is why dates matter when we use disaster statistics. These figures are snapshots of a rapidly developing emergency rather than final totals. Hectares and acres can be measured. A destroyed relationship to place is much harder to calculate. Climate Change and the Conditions of Fire There are people who remain skeptical about climate change or about the degree to which human activity is responsible for it. We should acknowledge that disagreement without pretending that the evidence itself is evenly divided. We also need to be careful about what climate science does and does not tell us. It would be too simplistic to say that climate change ignited every wildfire. Fires begin for many reasons, including lightning, damaged electrical equipment, machinery, accidents, negligence, and deliberate acts. Climate change usually operates at a different level. It changes the environmental conditions into which those sparks fall. Higher temperatures, warmer nights, earlier snowmelt, reduced summer precipitation, prolonged drought, and drier vegetation can make it easier for an ignition to become a fast-moving and destructive fire. Historical fire-suppression policies have also allowed fuels to accumulate in some forests. Wildfire severity therefore cannot be explained by climate alone. It develops through an interaction among climate, weather, vegetation, land management, settlement patterns, and ignition sources (NASA n.d.). NASA reports that fire seasons are beginning earlier in the spring and extending later into the autumn. In parts of the western United States, Mexico, Brazil, and East Africa, fire seasons are now more than a month longer than they were thirty-five years ago. NASA also reports that global carbon emissions from forest fires increased by approximately 60 percent between 2001 and 2023. Emissions from boreal forest fires in Eurasia and North America nearly tripled during the same period, driven by warmer and drier conditions (NASA n.d.). The United Nations Environment Programme projects that climate change and land-use change could increase extreme wildfires globally by as much as 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by 2050, and 50 percent by the end of the century (United Nations Environment Programme 2022). We can therefore distinguish between two different claims. Climate change does not necessarily provide the spark that begins an individual fire. It does, however, contribute to the hotter, drier, and longer fire conditions that allow some fires to become more severe. This is why the traditional idea of a short, predictable “fire season” is becoming less useful in many regions. Wildfire as a Cause of Migration Now we can turn to the question that is especially important for anthropology: When do people decide that remaining in a place is no longer possible? One of the best-known approaches to this question is the push-pull framework of migration. It is most closely associated with sociologist Everett S. Lee, who formalized the model in his 1966 article “A Theory of Migration.” Lee described four broad elements involved in migration: conditions at the place of origin, conditions at the destination, obstacles between the two, and the personal circumstances of the potential migrant (Lee 1966). His work developed ideas with earlier roots in geographer Ernst Georg Ravenstein’s nineteenth-century “laws of migration” (Ravenstein 1885). Using Lee’s framework, we can identify several potential wildfire-related push factors: immediate physical danger, smoke exposure, repeated evacuations, housing loss, disrupted employment, damaged infrastructure, and rising insurance costs. Pull factors might include safer environmental conditions, affordable housing, employment, medical care, functioning public services, or proximity to relatives and social networks. Insurance is particularly important because it can begin to affect migration before a home is actually destroyed. A 2026 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that moving from a medium to a high level of wildfire risk was associated with an 8 percent increase in homeowners’ insurance premiums. The report also concluded that increasing disaster risk can reduce the availability of insurance altogether (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2026). Imagine what that means for an ordinary family. The house may still be standing, but insurance premiums are rising. Coverage may be reduced or cancelled. Smoke may return every summer. Schools may close periodically, and family members with asthma may become ill. Eventually, the decision to leave may occur not because the flames have reached the front door, but because remaining has become economically, physically, or emotionally unsustainable. The Limits of Push and Pull Lee’s framework helps us organize these pressures, but anthropology asks us to go further. People do not simply place the advantages and disadvantages of two locations on a scale and select whichever one appears safer. A home is not only a financial asset. It may contain family history, cultural memory, livelihood, identity, and a sense of belonging. A forest can be an ecosystem, a workplace, a hunting territory, a sacred landscape, a source of medicinal knowledge, and an ancestral home at the same time. When fire transforms that landscape, the loss cannot be calculated only through property values. This is especially important when considering Indigenous communities. Land may be inseparable from collective identity, oral history, subsistence practices, ceremony, and relationships with previous and future generations. Relocation might protect people physically while simultaneously endangering cultural continuity. Nor does everyone have the same ability to move. A wealthy household may have insurance, transportation, savings, flexible employment, and somewhere else to stay. A poorer family may recognize the danger just as clearly but have no realistic means of leaving. Older adults and people with disabilities may depend upon local support systems that cannot easily be recreated elsewhere. People with insecure immigration status can face additional barriers. Research conducted with undocumented Latino and Indigenous immigrants affected by California wildfires found that economic marginalization, limited access to linguistically appropriate information, exclusion from some forms of assistance, and fear of deportation increased disaster vulnerability (Méndez, Flores-Haro, and Zucker 2020). Federal Emergency Management Agency guidance states that crisis counseling and some emergency services are available regardless of immigration status, but eligibility for certain forms of individual financial assistance is limited to U.S. citizens, noncitizen nationals, and qualified noncitizens (Federal Emergency Management Agency 2026). Mobility, then, is unequal. Some people can choose where and when to move. Others are driven out suddenly. Still others become trapped because they lack the resources either to remain safely or to leave. Wildfire within a Larger Geography of Displacement Wildfire is only one part of a much larger global geography of human displacement. War, political instability, drought, flooding, declining agricultural productivity, coastal erosion, and sea-level rise often interact rather than operate separately. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre recorded 32.3 million new or repeated displacement movements associated with conflict and violence during 2025. Disasters produced another 29.9 million movements. These figures count movements rather than necessarily representing separate individuals, because one person may be displaced multiple times. At the end of 2025, approximately 82.2 million people were living in internal displacement. Of that population, 68.6 million had been displaced by conflict and violence and 13.6 million by disasters (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre 2026). Drought provides an important example of the relationship among environmental pressure, livelihood, and migration. Across the Sahel, severe droughts and cyclical flooding have affected agriculture, water access, human mobility, and political stability. These environmental pressures interact with poverty, armed conflict, weak institutions, and competition over productive land. Climate change should not be described as the sole cause of conflict or migration in the region. It is better understood as one factor that can intensify existing economic and political vulnerabilities (International Organization for Migration 2024a). Similar patterns are visible in Central America’s Dry Corridor, where increasingly unreliable rainfall and declining agricultural productivity affect rural and Indigenous communities. Migration may become one means of adapting to environmental uncertainty, but it is rarely caused by the climate alone. Household debt, employment, violence, family connections, land ownership, and immigration policy also shape who moves and where they go (International Organization for Migration 2024b). Sea-level rise and coastal erosion raise comparable questions. In the United States, Newtok, Alaska, and Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, have undertaken relocation efforts because erosion, thawing permafrost, storm surges, and land loss threaten their continued habitability (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2020). These cases remind us that relocating buildings is not the same as relocating a community. A government can construct new houses, roads, and water systems, but it cannot automatically reproduce the relationships, histories, and meanings that made the original place a home. The World Bank has estimated that changes in water availability, agricultural productivity, and sea level could produce as many as 216 million internal climate migrants across six world regions by 2050. That number is a modeled upper-range projection, not a predetermined future. The same study concluded that coordinated climate and development policies could reduce the projected scale of internal climate migration by as much as 80 percent (World Bank 2021). The Anthropological Question If I were discussing this with a class, I would ask everyone to resist seeing migration as a single moment when someone packs a suitcase and leaves. Displacement often begins much earlier. It can begin when insurance becomes unaffordable. It can begin when smoke repeatedly keeps children indoors. It can begin when a farmer no longer knows when the rains will come, when employment disappears after a disaster, or when rebuilding means accepting that the next fire may arrive within a few years. The physical move may come last, after a much longer process of uncertainty and loss. This is why wildfire must be examined through class, race, age, health, citizenship, political power, and historical relationships to land. The same fire does not create the same experience for everyone. The most important question is therefore not simply how many acres will burn or how many people will move. We must ask who will be able to move safely, who will be expected to absorb repeated losses, and who will be left behind. We must ask what happens to cultural identity when people lose the landscape through which they have understood themselves. Anthropologically speaking, the wildfire crisis is already changing the human map. Our responsibility is to determine whether those changes will be managed through preparation, equity, and meaningful consultation with affected communities, or imposed upon them through repeated catastrophe. References Associated Press. 2026. “Wildfires in France Drive 250,000 People from Their Homes and Creep toward Wine City of Bordeaux.” July 26, 2026. 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