“If it seems as though the world’s on fire, that’s because it is,” reads the introduction to last month’s issue of Harper’s. “Wildfires are starting earlier in the dry season and burning for longer. As of October 2017, European Union countries had reported more than 1,600 fires, which burned more than 2 million acres. In the United States, according to the Department of the Interior, there were 71,499 wildfires in 2017, which were responsible for burning 10 million acres of land and putting 4.5 million homes at risk, 2 million in California alone. Every year more than 330,000 people die from the aftereffects of wildfires." Global warming has caused both the intensity and frequency of these fires to increase. In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large,” Scott Sayare and Richard Manning discuss their articles for the magazine on this major environmental problem.