The cook, complete with hair net, lays the red patty down on the grill and gives it a press with a spatula. And there, that unmistakable sizzle and smell. She flips the patty and gives it another press, lets it sit, presses it, and pulls it off the grill and onto a bun.

This is no diner, and this is no ordinary cook. She's wearing not an apron, but a lab coat and safety goggles, standing in a lab-kitchen hybrid in a Silicon Valley office park. Here a company called Impossible Foods has over the last six years done something not quite impossible, but definitely unlikely: Engineering a plant-based burger that smells, tastes, looks, and even feels like ground beef.

There are other veggie burgers on the market, of course, but Impossible Foods wants to sell consumers a real meat analog—one that requires a very different kind of engineering than your Boca or black bean burgers. So WIRED wants to take you on the deepest dive yet into the science behind the Impossible Burger.

Biting into an Impossible Burger is to bite into a future in which humanity has to somehow feed an exploding population and not further imperil the planet with ever more livestock. Because livestock, and cows in particular, go through unfathomable amounts of food and water (up to 11,000 gallons a year per cow) and take up vast stretches of land. And their gastrointestinal methane emissions aren’t doing the fight against global warming any favors either (cattle gas makes up 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide).

This is the inside story of the engineering of the Impossible Burger, the fake meat on a mission to change the world with one part soy plant, one part genetically engineered yeast—and one part activism. As it happens, though, you can’t raise hell in the food supply without first raising a few eyebrows.

The Lean, Mean Heme Machine

What makes a burger a burger? The smell, for one, and taste and texture, all working in concert to create something animal. It’s loaded with all manner of proteins that interact with each other in unique ways, creating a puzzle of sorts. But Impossible Foods thinks the essence of a meat lies in a compound called heme, which gives ground beef its color and vaguely metallic taste—thanks to iron in the heme molecule. In blood, heme lives in a protein called hemoglobin; in muscle, it's in myoglobin.

Interestingly, you’ll find globins (a class of proteins) not just across the animal kingdom, but in plants as well. Soy roots, for example, carry a version called leghemoglobin, which also carries heme. Leghemoglobin in soy and myoglobin in meat share a similar 3-D structure consisting of what's known as an alpha helical globin fold, which wraps around the heme.

So what if you could extract the heme from a plant to obtain that secret ingredient in ground beef? Well, the main problem, Impossible Foods found, is that you'd need a heck of a lot of soy: One acre of soybeans would yield just a kilogram of soy leghemoglobin.

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Impossible Foods founder and CEO Pat Brown figured out how to hack together a better way. Technicians take genes that code for the soy leghemoglobin protein and insert them into a species of yeast called Pichia pastoris. They then feed the modified yeast sugar and minerals, prompting it to grow and replicate and manufacture heme with a fraction of the footprint of field-grown soy. With this process, Impossible Foods claims it produces a fake burger that uses a 20th of the land required for feeding and raising livestock and uses a quarter of the water, while producing an eighth of the greenhouse gases (based on a metric called a life cycle assessment).

Now, engineering a “beef” burger from scratch is of course about more than just heme, which Impossible Foods bills as its essential ingredient. Ground beef features a galaxy of different compounds that interact with each other, transforming as the meat cooks. To piece together a plant-based burger that’s indistinguishable from the real thing, you need to identify and recreate as many of those flavors as possible.

To do this, Impossible Foods is using what's known as a gas chromatography mass spectrometry system. This heats a sample of beef, releasing aromas that bind to a piece of fiber. The machine then isolates and identifies the individual compounds responsible for those aromas. “So we will now have kind of a fingerprint of every single aroma that is in beef,” says Celeste Holz-Schietinger, principal scientist at Impossible Foods. “Then we can say, How close is the Impossible Burger? Where can we make improvements and iterate to identify how to make each of those particular flavor compounds?”

This sort of deconstruction is common in food science, a way to understand exactly how different compounds produce different flavors and aromas. "In theory, if you knew everything that was there in the right proportions, you could recreate from the chemicals themselves that specific flavor or fragrance," says Staci Simonich, a chemist at Oregon State University.

Then there’s the problem of texture. Nothing feels quite like ground beef. So Impossible Foods isolates individual proteins in the meat. “Then as we identify what those particular protein properties are, we go and look at plants for plant proteins that have those same properties,” says Holz-Schietinger. Plant proteins tend to taste more bitter, so Impossible Foods has to develop proteins with a cleaner taste.

What they’ve landed on in the current iteration is a surprising mix. Ingredients include wheat protein, to give the burger that firmness and chew. And potato protein, which allows the burger to hold water and transition from a softer state to a more solid state during cooking. For fat, Impossible Foods uses coconut with the flavor sucked out. And then of course you need the leghemoglobin for heme, which drives home the flavor of “meat.”

For something that so accurately mimics the taste and look and feel and smell of meat (and trust us, it does), the Impossible Burger is actually not all that complex. “Earlier iterations were much more complex because we didn't fully understand it,” says Holz-Schietinger (experiments with cucumber and the famously smelly durian fruit didn't … pan out, nor did trying to replicate the different connective tissues of a cow). “Now we understand which each component drives each sensory experience.”

At the moment, the Impossible Burger is only available in select restaurants, though Impossible Foods just opened a plant with the idea of increasing production from 300,000 pounds a month to a million. But as they focus on expansion, some critics are raising questions about the burger of tomorrow.

Government, Meet the Future. The Future, Government

In 2014, Impossible Foods filed what’s known as a GRAS notice, or “generally recognized as safe,” with the FDA. In it, the company listed the reasons it considered soy leghemoglobin safe for humans to consume. Leghemoglobin, they argued, is chemically similar to other globins considered safe, so it should carry the same confidence with consumers. Food companies aren’t required to tell the FDA when they’re introducing new ingredients, and filing this sort of self GRAS determination is not mandatory, but Impossible Foods says it did so in the name of transparency.

“Leghemoglobin is structurally similar to proteins that we consume all the time,” says Impossible Foods’ chief science officer David Lipman. "But we did the toxicity studies anyway and they showed that that was safe.” They compared the protein to known allergens, for instance, and found no matches. The company also got the OK from a panel of experts, including food scientist Michael Pariza at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

But the company didn't get the blessing it was looking for from the FDA. As detailed in documents FOIA'ed by environmental groups and published by The New York Times in August, the FDA questioned the company’s conclusions. “FDA believes that the arguments presented, individually and collectively, do not establish the safety of SLH [soy leghemoglobin] for consumption, nor do they point to a general recognition of safety…,” the FDA wrote in a memo. That is not to say the FDA concluded leghemoglobin to be unsafe, just that it had questions.

The FDA also noted that the company's engineered yeast doesn't just produce leghemoglobin—it also produces 40 other normally occurring yeast proteins that end up in the burger, which "raises further question on how the safety argument could be made based solely on SLH." Impossible Foods insists these proteins are safe, and notes that the yeast it has engineered is non-toxic, and that its toxicity studies examined the whole leghemoglobin ingredient.

Impossible Foods withdrew its GRAS notice in November 2015 to perform a new study. They fed rats more than 200 times the amount of the leghemoglobin ingredient than the average American would consume if the ground beef in their diet—an average of 25 grams a day—was replaced with Impossible's fake meat (adjusted for weight). They found no adverse effects.

Meanwhile, the Impossible Burger is on the market, which has some environmental groups peeved. That and there's the larger question of whether GRAS notifications should be voluntary or mandatory. “The generally recognized as safe exception was meant for common food ingredients, not for the leading-edge products, especially the innovative like the leghemoglobin,” says Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, which was not involved in the FOIA. “We don't think it should be a voluntary review, we don't think the law allows it.” Accordingly, the group is suing the FDA over the agency’s GRAS process.

Others are concerned that leghemoglobin—again, a new ingredient in the food supply, since humans don't typically eat soy roots—hasn’t gone through enough testing to prove it’s safe, and agree with the FDA that Impossible Foods’ GRAS notification came up short. “The point of some of us that are being critical of this is not that everything that's engineered is unsafe or anything like that,” says Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist at the Consumers Union, which was also not involved in the FOIA. “It's like, look, any new food ingredient, some new food additive, of course it should go through a safety assessment process.”

Hansen takes issue with the idea that leghemoglobin is similar to other edible globins are therefore safe. “As the FDA pointed out in their response, just because proteins have similar functions or similar three-dimensional structures, doesn't mean that they're similar," Hansen says. "They can have a very different amino acid sequence, and just slight changes can have impacts."

This is what happens when the future of food lands on the government’s plate. The central question: Should Americans trust companies to do their own food safety testing, or should that always be the job of the feds?

The reality is, different kinds of modified foods attract different levels of regulatory attention. "It is a patchwork system with little rhyme or reason," says crop scientist Wayne Parrott of the University of Georgia. "It depends on what is done, how it is done, and its intended use." You hear plenty about the crops, and most certainly about the long hullabaloo over that GM salmon. But not engineered microorganisms, which are extremely common. Why?

"Out of sight, out of mind," says Parrott. "And people also get more emotional over animals than they do over other things. With the salmon it was political. Very, very political."

Really, there's no inherent danger in genetically modifying a food. After all, the FDA wasn't raising its voice about soy leghemoglobin because it comes from genetically engineered yeast. The agency's job is to determine the safety of foods. "Any risk that's associated comes from traits," Parrott says. "It doesn't come from the way you put those traits in there."

This is only the beginning of a new era of high-tech, genetically engineered foods. Because if we want to feed a rapidly expanding species on a planet that stays the same size, we’re going to need to hack the food supply. Our crops will have to weather a climate in chaos. "We want to improve efficiency so we can feed 9 billion people without more land, without more water, without more fertilizer or pesticides," says Parrott.

And humanity will sure as hell have to cut back on its meat consumption. “We'll change the world more dramatically than any company possibly in history has ever done it,” says Impossible Foods founder Brown. “Because when you look at the impact of the system we're replacing, almost half of the land area of Earth is being occupied by the animal farming industry, grazing, or feed crop production.” That system, of course, will not give up ground quietly.

But who knows. Maybe shocking the system isn’t so impossible after all.

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It took a decade for British biotech firm Oxitec to program a self-destruct switch into mosquitoes. Perfecting that genetic technology, timed to kill the insects before they could spread diseases like Zika and dengue fever, was supposed to be the hard part. But getting the modified mosquitoes cleared to battle public health scares in the US has been just as tough. It’s been six years since the company first applied for regulatory approval—and it has zero mosquito releases to show for it.

That’s because square-shaped technologies like Oxitec’s don’t neatly fit into the round tangle of rules that govern US biotechnology. To federal regulators, mosquitoes are pests. But also animals. And disease vectors. Mosquitoes that lead to fewer mosquitoes are also, technically, a pesticide. So a handful of federal agencies can all claim the right to decide their fate.

But at least for Oxitec, that’s now changed. Earlier this month, the US Food and Drug Administration, which had been evaluating the company’s skeeters since 2011, transferred approval power to the Environmental Protection Agency. In short, Oxitec’s bugs have been deemed more like a pesticide—used to suppress wild mosquito populations—than a drug used to prevent disease. And that promises to speed up how quickly the company can get its product on the ground, especially to hurricane-prone areas, where big storms can exacerbate mosquito-borne diseases.

The switch from FDA to EPA oversight means an end to Oxitec’s endless waiting. That’s because the EPA is required by federal law to review new pesticides “as expeditiously as possible,” which the statute defines as within 12 months after the submission of an application. “Every year since 2011 I’ve been saying we’re going ahead with a pilot project that year,” says Derric Nimmo, an Oxitec scientist who leads the company’s work in the US. “Up until now that was just me being optimistic. The FDA had no timelines it had to hold to whatsoever. Now we can actually be confident about when we’ll get a decision.”

Nimmo hopes to get permission to go ahead with releases in the next six months, just in time for next year’s mosquito season. The need is especially urgent in places hit by this hurricane season. Before Harvey covered the Houston area in 33 trillion gallons of rain, Harris County public health officials had been in talks with Oxitec about a possible field trial. Monroe County, where Irma destroyed more than 600 homes and left a dozen dead, is the site of the company’s long-stalled first experimental release—the FDA approved a 22 months-long trial, but no neighborhood wanted to be the site of the mosquito dump. Both locations are now waiting to see what the EPA says before resuming negotiations with Oxitec.

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It’s still too early to say whether residents’ reservations about the safety of genetically modified mosquitoes have been blown away by this year’s hurricanes. The storms left behind acres of debris where rainwater can pool, creating ideal breeding grounds for disease-carrying Aedes aegypti. Without a massive cleanup operation, Houston and the Florida Keys are likely to be smacked with swarms next summer. Instead of blanketing those areas with pesticides, Oxitec’s mosquitoes could tamp down local populations. In 2015, the company published a paper showing its release of GM mosquitoes in the Bahia state of Brazil reduced wild Aedes aegypti by as much as 90 percent, enough to prevent dengue epidemics.

EPA will be looking at those published studies, as well as all the safety and efficacy data Oxitec compiled for the FDA over the years. But it will be asking some different questions. The FDA was interested in how the mosquitoes’ lethal protein acted in the wild—could it harm humans, or other animals? Could it make disease transmission more aggressive? But the EPA will focus on things like how fast the protein degrades in the environment. Oxitec says it has that data, it’s just a matter of presenting it in the way the EPA wants it. If that’s true, and the agency is satisfied, the company could open the door to other applications of genetic sterile insect technologies.

Scientists who work on genetically modified insects to combat other human and animal diseases welcome the change. But they have reason to be skeptical. The FDA still has the power to put the brakes on a mosquito-based technology, according to the guidance, if its goal is to reduce disease transmission. Reminder: That’s pretty much all modified mosquitoes.

“It is still hard for me to understand why they are insisting on regulating mosquitoes at all, given what should be the obvious fact that they are neither food nor drug,” says Zachary Adelman, an entomologist at Texas A&M. He works on a technology called a gene drive—where a detrimental gene is driven through a wild population—to curb disease-carrying mosquitoes. It’s an approach that wouldn’t require releasing millions of sterile male mosquitoes into people’s neighborhoods every few days. But the guidance doesn’t mention gene drives at all, and just about every one of their applications could reasonably fit both the FDA and EPA’s definitions.

Is it better than having nothing at all? “Sure,” says Adelman. “But this creates a lot of uncertainty; basically the opposite of what their purpose was. If the goal is to release something into the environment, one might think the environmental protection agency would be the proper regulatory authority, regardless of intent.” Clarity may have come to Oxitec, but for everyone else it looks like the waiting has just begun.

In Tampa, the conference center’s roof leaked. In Austin, the airport flooded. In Reno, conference organizers had to wait until a motorcycle rally was over before they could do some setup.

During preparation for the SC Conference, a supercomputing meeting, there’s always something getting in the way of networking. But the conference, held annually in November, is perhaps more sensitive to water, delays, and herds of bikes than your average gathering. Because every year, a group of volunteers shows up weeks in advance to build, from the literal ground up, the world’s fastest temporary network. The conference's attendees and exhibitors—from scientific researchers to industry bigwigs—need superfast, reliable connections to stream in the results of their simulations and data analysis. Called SCinet, the network “takes one year to plan, three weeks to build, one week to operate, and less than 24 hours to tear down,” according to its catchphrase.

After all, what good is high-performance computing if its results can’t reach the wider world?

This year, in Denver, one difficulty was elevation—not of the city itself, but of the exhibit hall. The 188 volunteers built up the networks' 13 equipment racks on the floor below the big, main space, constructing the infrastructure that could eventually handle around 3.6 terabits per second of traffic. (For reference, that's probably around 400,000 times more powerful than your personal connection.) And then, after construction, they had to move those millions of dollars of delicate equipment—down a hall, into an elevator, up a floor, and across the exhibit hall.

On November 8, volunteers moved the equipment on customized racklifts. “Welcome to the crazy,” someone said, unprompted, as he rushed past. The SCinetters moved like tightrope walkers, servers in tow, toward the elevators.

One floor up, a guy wearing a Scooby Doo hat pulled up with a forklift, gingerly skewered one rack, and began to lift it to the central stage. As the rack approached the platform, other volunteers put their hands on it, like digital pallbearers. When they were done, eight racks sat on the stage—the beating, blinking heart of the network. Among other duties, it coordinates with the five other racks scattered strategically around the room, ready for the exhibitors that needed 100 gigabit connections, and those requiring mere 1 or 10 gigabit hookups.

The demonstrations started on November 13. NASA brought out a simulation of how shockwaves from meteorites affect the atmosphere—and then how their effects reach the ground, from impacts to tsunamis. Also on board: a simulation showing how person-transporting drones could work, and a global weather prediction model. The Department of Energy presented about particle accelerators, quantum computing in science, and cancer surveillance.

The company Nyriad Limited, meanwhile, has aligned its stars with the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research, to develop a "science data processing" operating system for a telescope called the Murchison Widefield Array, which itself is a precursor to the Square Kilometer Array. The Square Kilometer Array will require more computing power than any previous one: Its data rate will exceed today's global internet traffic. Nyriad, at the conference, revealed its first commercial offering, spun out of its SKA work: a fast and low-power storage solution useful beyond the world of astronomy.

But their talks would have been all talk were it not for the homebuilt network that let them show and tell. In the weeks leading up to the actual conference, the SCinet volunteers laid 60 miles of fiber and crafted 280 WiFi access points for the nearly 13,000 attendees and their attendant devices. Oh, also, they had to have a network service provider crack up a road to illuminate a dark fiber connection.

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SCinet requires lots of physical and mental labor, but people keep coming back because it's their brand of fun—and the kind of professional development they could never get at an individual institution. “They get to touch and play with equipment that they normally wouldn't get to touch and play with in their day jobs,” says Jackie Kern, former general chair of the whole conference and of SCinet. They learn new networking tricks, bring back big-kid versions of their knowledge base, and meet some of the world’s top network types. “It’s a Rolodex moment,” says Jeffrey Schwab, current SCinet chair.

Also, it’s summer camp for people who like to tape fiber to floors. “Everyone wants to be here,” says Schwab.

And the organization is trying to help make it more welcoming to more different kinds of people. Kate Petersen Mace helps run the Women in IT Networking at SC program, which has fully funded 19 women volunteers' attendance since 2015 (around 22 percent of the total number of volunteers, this year, were women). In the male-dominated networking network, that kind of professional opportunity can be rare. Mace says she has often been the only woman in a given professional space. “I got kind of used to it and didn’t think about it,” she says. But the differences and the deficits snap into relief once there are more women in the exhibit hall (real and proverbial), watching the blinking lights on a set of server racks together alongside their male colleagues. "You feel more empowered to speak up," says Mace.

A few hours after the first rack lift, Jim Stewart of the Utah Education and Telehealth Network, who co-chairs the architecture team, treks up to the exhibit hall. All of the equipment is on stage, and SCinet volunteers have installed mirrors behind it, so passersby can appreciate the effort in all dimensions. It won’t last long, though. Remember the catchphrase? “…less than 24 hours to tear down.”

Stewart surveys the hall, thinking, apparently, of creation and destruction. “We’re not even done turning it up, and we are talking about getting out,” he says.

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The West is burning, and there’s no relief in sight. More than 80 large wildfires are raging in an area covering more than 1.4 million acres, primarily in California, Montana, and Oregon, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Taken together, that’s a wildfire larger than the state of Delaware.

California has declared a state of emergency as wildfires burn outside Los Angeles and threaten giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park. In Oregon, the Eagle Creek fire is tearing through the scenic Columbia River Gorge. Seattle, Boise, and Denver are socked in under a haze of smoky air and ash that experts predict could linger until the first snowfall in the mountains.

But nowhere are the fires more devastating than in Montana, where more than 1 million acres of forest burned this summer, and more than 467,000 acres are currently burning in 26 large fires that line the mountainous western side of the state.

Philip Higuera, a professor of fire ecology at the University of Montana, is used to seeing smoky air from his office window in September, but nothing like the thick smoke filling Missoula Valley right now. He recently spoke to CityLab about the fires raging across the West, what we can do about them, and why this year’s big burn might be the new normal.

Breathing the air in Missoula today feels like chain-smoking Chesterfields. Schools aren’t letting the kids out at recess, and public health authorities are saying active adults and children should avoid outdoor exertion. It’s easy to get the impression that this is an extraordinary and unprecedented fire season. But you study forest fires over a timespan of thousands of years. How unusual or unique is this fire season?

It’s not—even in the context of the 21st century. In the Northern Rockies, we had a very large fire year in 2012, in 2007, in 2000, and to an extent in 2003. In this region, 1910 remains the record-setting fire season. If we surpass that, I would be surprised. Events like these are not common on a year-to-year scale. On the other hand, when you look at the role fire plays in ecosystems, you have to look at a longer timescale, and these rare events are what’s expected every once in a while.

Why is this fire season so dramatic?

The main reason there is so much burning right now is the strong seasonal drought across the region. The term we use is that these fires are “climate enabled.” The drought makes most of the vegetation, live or dead, receptive to burning. In Missoula, we had the driest July and August on record and the third-warmest July and August. With those types of conditions, we expect widespread burning. But people underestimate the role that seasonal climate plays in these events, and we start to grasp at lots of other things to explain it.

Aside from the bad air, are most urban residents in fire-affected parts of the West safe?

Aside from that really important impact, I give a cautious yes. There is a risk. And that risk is highest in the wildland-urban interface. If you are living there, you should know that you are living with a much higher risk for exposure to wildfire. And part of the job of educators and U.S. Forest Service outreach is to make that risk known. Eventually insurance companies will also get on board. Floods are obviously on insurance companies’ radar front and center. Wildfire is still not frequent enough that they design programs around it.

Should people in the fire-prone West be living in places like that—in the suburbs and exurbs out in the forested edges of urban areas?

Every place on our planet has some natural phenomenon that is not friendly to humans. If you live on the East Coast, you are going to experience hurricanes. If you live in the Midwest, you are going to experience tornadoes. If you live across forested regions in the West, you are going to experience wildfires. We need to develop in a way that is cognizant of these processes—that is not ignorant of the way the planet, and the environment you live in, works.

Why are these fires so hard to put out?

This goes back to why the fires are happening. The fuels are extremely dry. And most areas burn during extreme weather conditions—the days when it’s hot, humidity is low and there are high winds. These are the conditions in which fires quickly double in size. They are also the conditions where it’s most dangerous to put people in front of the fire. Also, a lot of these fires start in very remote areas with rugged terrain, and just putting people on the ground comes with some risk.

Montana alone has already spent tens of millions of dollars trying to suppress wildfires this summer, and two firefighters have been killed. Is that having any impact, or is it like driving down the expressway throwing bags of money out the window?

When you say it’s not working, the key question is, What’s the goal? “It’s not working” assumes the goal is to have no fires. We will fail if that is the goal. Most of these ecosystems that are burning have evolved with fire. We expect them to burn. We need them to burn if we want them to continue to exist.

So it’s like trying to stop rain?

It’s like trying to stop an earthquake. Trying to stop a volcano. To me, the goal can’t be to have no fire. That’s gotten us into trouble when we pursued that goal. I think the metric should be how much area has burned that we wanted to burn compared to how much burned that we didn’t want to burn. Or closer to the nugget, how many resources were harmed—how many houses were lost, how many people were either directly or indirectly killed?

You don’t see raging forest fires as a failure of suppression efforts?

No. Knowing how climate enables and drives these large fires, I think that it would be impossible to put these fires out.

There is a school of thought that says we should not suppress wildfire because it allows smaller trees and underbrush to accumulate, which leads to larger, hotter fires later. So why not just let it burn?

I think as soon as you live in these environments you will quickly abandon that too-simplistic view. Maybe when I was a graduate student living in Seattle that seemed more like a possibility, but you can’t just let it burn. That would not be wise. It really comes down to what you can afford to burn and what do you want to protect. If the fire is in the wilderness, that’s great. If it’s burning toward a community, that’s not so good.

There’s good fire and bad fire?

There is a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum would be the wilderness fire that is not going to impact anyone—good fire. The fire that burns down your house or kills people—bad fire.

Another school of thought says we should allow more logging to clear trees and help prevent wildfires. Does that hold water?

I don’t think that holds water. That is based on the assumption that fires are occurring because there is more fuel available to burn than in the past. That’s generally not what’s driving this. It’s the drought. It’s true that if cut, there is less fuel in the forests. But in a lot of cases, there is what’s called slash—woody debris—left on the ground that will carry fire across the forest floor, which is what you need for it to spread.

The simple answer—if you want to eliminate fire, then pave it. There will be no fire.

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Is climate change partly to blame for this year’s fires? Are wildfires in the West set to get worse because of it?

That’s what future climate models project. We can’t say this individual fire was because of climate change. We can’t say this year was because of climate change. But these types of years are what we expect to see more frequently. I heard an analogy that I think is useful. If a baseball player is using steroids and hits a home run, can you attribute that home run to steroids? You can’t—but you know that at some point some component of that was brought to you by this artificial input to the system.

There was a study that came out last year, which looked at fire occurrence in the Western United States over the last 40 years using climate modeling. The conclusion was almost half of burning we have seen over the past several decades can be attributed to climate change due to anthropogenic sources. The fire season has gotten significantly longer across the West, on order of 30 days or more during the past few decades.

What are you and your family doing to live through the fire season?

Personally, I made the decision to not live in the wildland-urban interface. I live in the urban part of Missoula. We had one HEPA air filter. Last week we ordered two more. That’s our adaptation.

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