Eric Klinenberg, “What It Takes to Save a Town from Wildfire”| The New Yorker

On November 9, 2026, IPK Director Eric Klinenberg published a piece for the New Yorker titled “What It Takes to Save a Town from Wildfire” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

The Marshall Fire showed that the danger of wildfires is broader and more serious than most people realize. Once wildfires reach dense residential areas, their spread resembles that of infectious diseases: no household can be fully protected unless surrounding properties are protected, too.

For much of the past century, urban conflagrations seemed, like polio or measles, a scourge that science and government had conquered. Modernized fire departments, safer building materials, hydrants, and building codes had largely eliminated catastrophes like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. But, by the nineteen-nineties, housing developments were spreading into forests and grasslands increasingly parched by climate change, bringing structure-to-structure fires back. The 2018 Camp Fire, in Paradise, California; the 2023 Lahaina Fire, on Maui; and the 2025 Palisades and Eaton Fires were devastating examples. Communities abroad face similar dangers, from Australia’s bushfire-prone suburbs to parts of Europe, Asia, and South America.

Some residents whose homes were engulfed by fire understood that they lived on a combustible landscape; others were surprised. Balch, the ecologist, spent a decade building a data set that combined satellite information about the speed and spread of more than sixty thousand American wildfires from 2001 to 2020 with daily incident-command reports from fire-suppression teams, and two hundred million housing and property records. “The trends are remarkable,” she told me as we walked through the foothills near her neighborhood, grass crunching beneath our feet. “Here’s the main thing: Forget megafires. It’s fast fires that do the most damage.” Balch and her colleagues reported in Science that, among the conflagrations in their database, fast fires—those growing by more than sixteen hundred and twenty hectares on any single day—made up less than three per cent of the total but accounted for almost ninety per cent of the structures damaged or destroyed.

Read the full article here. Photography by Benjamin Rasmussen for The New Yorker.