While extreme wildfire events have doubled in the last two decades due to climate change, our capacity to fight these fires has nearly halved. There have been almost 20,000 individual wildfires reported in the US just in the first half of 2024. Over two million acres of land have been scorched. This is double the number of fires reported in the whole of last year.

Far from just a disruptive seasonal reality, wildfires are now a near-constant crisis. Yet, federal firefighter positions remain unfilled because of low pay and insufficient benefits. The average salary for Wildland Firefighters is just $18 an hour, amounting to around $37,000 annually before taxes. In a country where rents average $1,713 per month, this is untenable. While the US government sends tens of billions of dollars to fund Israel’s war on Gaza, there is no serious money available to fund wildfire prevention and mitigation programs at home.

In the state of California, wildfires are often fought and managed by “hand crews” of state prison inmates—modern institutionalized slave labor. These workers receive a mere $3 to $5 per day in wages—plus a generous $1 extra when actively fighting fires. The chances of these workers entering emergency technician jobs after leaving this “rehabilitative” program with felony records are slim. As sentencing reform has decreased the prison population in California, over half of these positions have been left empty. The proposed solution? Use younger and higher-risk inmates to fill the void.

As a result of capitalist driven climate change, wildfires are more common and severe, even in parts of the world that previously didn’t have to contend with this problem.

The environmental impacts of production are well-known to the companies involved. But the drive for profits outweighs all other considerations. The meager efforts by big business and the state to ameliorate the consequences within the limits of the system are nowhere near sufficient.