Pyroterrorism?

This essay follows directly from a previous entry, based on Quand la Forêt Brûle: Penser La Novelle Catastrophe Écologique by Joëlle Zask (Premier Parallèle, 2019). (When the Forest Burns : Thinking about the New Ecological Catastrophe), about megafires. It made the point that, in the globally-warmed future, there will be no small fires, whether control burns or natural fires. They will all be big and destructive.

Toward the end of the book, the author mentioned a possibility that I had never considered, or even heard about: Pyroterrorism. That is, terrorists could start huge fires, believing that these fires would disrupt whatever little social cohesion that we have and leave us vulnerable to their other acts of terrorism. Apparently this idea has been published on foreign terrorist websites, to which I will not provide any connection.

It gets even worse. The terrorists do not even have to start the fires. They can wait for the fires to start in some other way, and then claim credit for them. They could say that, See, Allah is great, because He destroyed Paradise, California and surrounding areas in the 2018 Camp Fire, and He destroyed Maui in 2023. They would not have to say that their terrorist groups had started them, something of which most people would be skeptical.

But there are a couple of major reasons that pryoterrorism will either not occur soon or will have no great effect.

First, it is easy to start a forest fire. All it takes is a match. An arsonist can start a fire and leave so little evidence of his identity that no one would ever find him or even suspect that arson had occurred. Authorities estimate that there are thousands of such cases of criminal arson every year. But in order to prove that a fire began as an act of arson, much less to find the culprit, there has to be multiple simultaneous ignitions, and probably evidences of piling up brush and of gasoline. These are the things that would be necessary in order to give a fire a good chance of spreading. Even under hot, dry conditions, with lots of dry vegetation and strong wind, most fires will not become mega-fires under present conditions.

Second, terrorists have said online that a mega-fire would disrupt our society. But that is not what has happened. One of the few good things one can say about the modern world is that natural (or human-enhanced) disasters being people together rather than driving them apart. The California and Hawaii fires ignited an outpouring of humanitarian sentiment and relief. This has left the terrorists looking like the Grinch who was astonished to see the people of Whoville celebrating even after he had successfully stolen Christmas.

Neither foreign nor domestic terrorists would have much chance of success with pyroterrorism.

Enough mega-fires would cause such financial strain that we could have a major economic disaster, but it does not appear that pyroterrorism will destroy even the little bit of altruism that we have. So the good news is that there is one less thing to worry about.