Residents of the Northeast United States are not accustomed to worrying about drought. Indeed, the Gulf Stream reliably dumps moisture on the region — except when it doesn’t. Lately the Northeast, along with large swaths of the rest of the country, has been afflicted by unusually dry conditions; parts of some states, including Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut, have even reached “severe drought” status. And when long stretches of dry weather combine with heat and wind, you also have to worry about wildfires. In a guest essay published on Monday, the author and journalist John Vaillant, who grew up in Massachusetts, describes the baffling transformation of the region this fall into a place battling hundreds of wildfires, some of them thousands of acres in size, with no end in sight. While brush fires in the fall are common in the region, what’s different this year is that there are far more than usual, and bigger ones than usual, and some are proving unusually difficult to fight. When a newspaper reporter from Provincetown, Mass., asked Vaillant if the pitch pine and scrub oak forests of Cape Cod could burn like the Western forests he wrote about in his book “Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World,” Vaillant said yes, though it felt “strange, almost traitorous” to do so. “The idea of those trees burning never occurred to me before this year,” he writes. Shifts like these are not a blip, according to Vaillant. “We must recognize this moment for what it is: the beginning of a new era of civilizational retreat, contraction and consolidation.” Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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