Good morning,

Climate change has robbed this spring of some of its pleasures. The beautiful, but unusually warm weather in British Columbia these past few weeks has pushed authorities to take proactive measures in anticipation of a combustible fire season.

No beach bonfires for graduating teenagers. No watering for lush green lawns: Vancouver skipped over Stage 1 restrictions and imposed Stage 2 starting May 1, meaning watering for trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetables only, and even then, with strict timelines.

As Emma Bolzner and Raamin Hamid reported last week, the first weekend in May saw temperatures topping 30 degrees in the Interior. Vancouver hit 23.9 degrees, breaking a May record that had stood for 128 years.

The beautiful weather has a sinister tinge. Environment Canada forecasts show that combined with the already dry environment and the possibility that precipitation could be limited in May and June, this year’s wildfire season could be catastrophic.

Last year was Canada’s second-worst wildfire season on record after 2023, when 15 million hectares were consumed by flames.

In recent years, Canada’s two westernmost provinces have borne the brunt of the destruction, with dozens of communities coming under threat and thousands of people forced from their homes.

Elisa Houchen, a fire information officer at the BC Wildfire Service, said water restrictions are more stringent than they normally would be at this time of year. But she said they are necessary to prepare for what is to come this fire season.

Earlier this month, Sandy Beach, a village 65 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, was hit by an early-season wildfire. The town was placed under a state of emergency after the fire destroyed three homes, but the order was rescinded a few days later.

“It definitely caught us off guard. We had four inches of snow last week,” said Sandy Beach Mayor David Noyes.

Things are worse in the U.S.

Nathan VanderKlippe travelled to Oregon, where winter normally brings towering snowfalls. The biggest snowfall ever recorded fell in the northern reaches of the Cascade range, 29 metres in a single season. In the southern parts of the state, determined skiers can often find suitable slopes in July.

Not this winter. Where there would normally be several feet of glittering snow, this season saw bare ground. The forest floor was not springy and wet, but crunchy and audibly dry.

“As you’re walking, you hear your footsteps on the ground fuel. Hear it. It’s like walking in cornflakes. It’s a crackle,” said Joe Stutler, 76, a former smokejumper who is looking ahead to his 58th forest fire season with disquiet.

Never before has so much of the American West seen so little snow. Eight states − Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming − reported record-low snowpack levels in April.

Jesse Winter is a reporter in the Globe’s B.C. bureau and he has devoted years to covering and photographing wildfires. His photographs, beautiful but dangerous, are the result of Jesse’s persistence in working with BC Wildfire so readers can see up close the terrifying power of the blazes that have wrought so much damage the last few years.

This month, Jesse’s book Wild Fire: Dispatches from a Country Ablaze was released. In an essay extracted from the book, he notes that wildfires are inevitable and necessary for the health of many North American ecosystems.

“Trying to eliminate them is as futile as trying to dam the heavens, and such efforts have helped set the stage for a new kind of wildfire we are not prepared to face,” he writes.

“Confident in our ability to put out all wildfires, we grew complacent. Many of us put wildfires out of our minds, and put off doing the important, simple tasks that make homes and towns more resilient, safe in the belief that if a fire ever did threaten, an army of Nomex-clad twentysomething firefighters would show up to save the day.”

Wildfire behaviour experts call it “fire debt”: stamping out smaller, healthy fires means fuel left to burn later. And when it does, those conflagrations can be monstrous.

“There are wildfires, and then there are megafires,” Jesse writes.

“Our blanket fear of the former, and our obsession with eliminating them drove us to create the conditions for the latter, literally stoking our forests with fuel.

“Human-caused climate change is dumping gasoline on the pile. And yet we still talk of wildfires like they are all the same, all equally bad, and all equally possible to put out if only we had enough water bombers and firefighters willing to risk their lives.”

This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.