Leonard Lopate at Large: Richard Manning & Scott Sayare

Leonard welcomes Richard Manning & Scott Sayare today with a conversation on fires raging across the world today.

If it seem to you like the world is on fire, it’s not just your anxiety over the future of democracy and the state of the republic; the world literally is on fire. The August issue of Harper’s Magazine offers two examinations of the causes and the costs of recent wildfires at home and abroad, a package  called AS THE WORLD BURNS.

Richard Manning’s examination of the fires that raged across Montana last summer, “Combustion Engines,” blames global warming, a century of fire mismanagement, and the building of homes in fire-prone areas. Scott Sayare, in “There Will Always Be Fires,” describes the conditions in Portugal—notably the heavy planting of eucalyptus—that led to the catastrophic blazes there.