In this summer of extreme heat — the hottest the world has ever known — with wildfires running amok, we are all painfully aware of the effect humans have had on climate change.

We listened intently in late June as several of the New York State forest rangers who had volunteered to fight Canadian wildfires talked about their experiences on a call to reporters.

“We raise our hands because it feels good to help other people. It feels good to work hard. It gives you purpose and meaning,” said ranger Chester Lunt of why he volunteered.

A father of four, he credited his family and other rangers for picking up the slack while he was in the wilds of Québec.

Ranger William Roberts said he had family in Canada who had been “heavily impacted by the smoke and air quality” and he was happy to be able to help.

The answer that most struck us was from a ranger based nearby in Green County, Anastasia Allwine.

“You hear about a lot of things happening in other countries,” she said, “that’s a concern to you but you can’t directly affect so having the opportunity to go up, have a direct — however big or small — effect on the situation was really a privilege I couldn’t pass up on.”

Would most of us think it “felt good” to leave our homes and families and risk our lives to quell fires? Would we see it as a privilege? An opportunity?

Oddly, we think the answer may be: yes. 

“We’re trained for this,” said Allwine.

Most of us would like to use whatever we’re trained for to help others. Not that we’re detracting from the heroism of these rangers, and others like them, who volunteered for this mission.

As Basil Seggos, the environmental conservation commissioner said, forest rangers are “always the ones that run into danger when everyone is running the other direction.” He also said, “I think it’s pretty clear there are such things as heroes.”

We recently spoke with Holly Cameron, a New Scotland minister who has been pastor to the town’s Presbyterian Church for a quarter of a century and is a scholar of the human condition.

“I think that we are all created with a desire to be known for who we are,” Cameron said, “to use the gifts that we have been given for something bigger than ourselves. I really think that we are born with that desire to be connected to one another ….”

Most of us have had the same experience Allwine described — reading about or watching or listening to news from other places where we can do little to help. Being able to act, to make a difference, is empowering.

When it comes to climate change, as we’ve written for years on this page, there are many things each of, as individuals, can do to make a difference — from using public transportation or cycling instead of driving, to composting our waste to fertilize our gardens, to planting native species instead of fertilizing barren green lawns with harmful chemicals, to reusing and recycling, to using renewable energy sources like solar for powering our homes and businesses rather than fossil fuels.

And, of course, as we’ve also written many times on this page, we need the sort of government leadership that we now have at the state and federal levels to fund and require the needed change from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Right in our midst, here in Albany County, is a stellar example of what can be done to mitigate wildfires like those still raging in Canada — 50 fires, out of more than 500 so far this year, were still active in Québec on Tuesday.

As we were reporting on the haze that kept us indoors for several days last month, we came across new research, showing wildfire smoke downwind affects not just health but also wealth and mortality.

Research from Cornell University, Nanjing University, and the University of Houston, “Quantifying the premature mortality and economic loss from wildfire-induced PM2.5 in the contiguous U.S.,” was published in June in Science of the Total Environment

The researchers found not only do emissions from wildfires worsen air quality and adversely impact human health, but quantified economic losses as well as rates of premature deaths caused by the emissions.

The study used data from 2012 to 2014 and concluded, “Results indicated that wildfires could lead annually to 4000 cases of premature mortality in the U.S., corresponding to $36 billion losses.”

The study also said, “Results suggest that impacts from wildfires are substantial, and to mitigate these impacts, better forest management and more resilient infrastructure would be needed.”

Québec’s fire prevention agency, Société de protection des forêts contre le feu, says the fierce start to this year’s fire season has in part been due to high temperatures and dry conditions in the province. Those can be the result of global warming, which countries around the world have to combat together.

“Climate change is leading to weather extremes like more storms and hurricanes, but it can also lead to more wildfires,” Oliver Gao, a Cornell professor and senior author on the study, told Blaine Friedlander of the Cornell Chronicle. “The Quebec wildfires in early June affected human health hundreds of miles away in the distant cities New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.”

Gao also said that laws and regulations — such as planned events to thin forests — could reduce and mitigate the harmful effects of wildfires.

“Wildfire affects our health,” Gao told Friedlander. “In this era of climate change, if we remove flammable vegetation and do things like create green fire breaks and reduce the fuel for the fires, we can substantially decrease the harm of smoke downwind in populated areas.”

So, yes, the lightning strikes that started many of the Canadian fires were beyond human control while the high temperatures were part of human-induced climate change. But, beyond that, humans can manage forests in ways to reduce the fires and decrease the harm.

The Albany Pine Bush Preserve in Albany County has just drafted an update to its fire-management plan after using prescribed burns for more than three decades.

A draft of the updated plan will be discussed at a public information meeting on July 18, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Pine Bush Discovery Center at 195 New Karner Road; the public has until July 28 to comment on the plan at .

“The risks posed by wildland fire in the preserve are greatly mitigated by 30+ years of fuel treatments, a robust training program and sound investments in wildland fire resources,” says the report, prepared by Conservation Director Neil Gifford and Fire Manager Tyler Briggs.

The commission has applied prescribed fire to more than 3,407 acres with 2,251 acres burned since 2010 and has learned much in the process, the report says, giving this example: “Using mechanical and fire treatments to convert pitch pine oak forest and pitch pine-scrub oak thickets to pitch pine-scrub oak barrens, has dramatically reduced woody fuel loads, nearly eliminated litter and duff, exposed mineral soil and increased fine fuels (grasses and wildflowers).”

However, challenges persist.

One of them is, as the preserve has grown, meeting “a minimum maintenance threshold of applying prescribed fire to 10 percent of the inland pine barrens ecological communities annually.”

When the preserve was 2,000 acres, 200 were to be burned each year; now that it is more than 3,000 acres, more than 300 have to be burned. Since the vision is to preserve over 5,000, over 500 acres will need to be burned annually.

“The growth of rare wildlife populations also present unique challenges to achieving desired fire effects,” the report says, “since fire management activities increasingly need to navigate the complex life histories of more rare species across more preserve area.”

Finally, the report says, climate change presents a challenge “not only because of increasing temperatures, but more importantly due to increasingly frequent extreme (high and low) temperature and precipitation events.”

Gifford and Briggs consulted with various agencies in New York state and outside of the state to come up with solutions to the challenges and also attended workshops put on by the North Atlantic Fire Science Exchange.

The draft makes detailed recommendations on five subjects: windspeed, fuel moisture, relative humidity, drought index, and not prescribing burns if the National Fire Danger Rating System level for the Albany area is at or above a “Very High.”

“The consensus of our peers,” the report says, “suggests that 30 years of preserve management has reduced hazardous wildland fuels, litter, and duff while increasing fine fuels, mitigating risks of uncontrollable wildfire, while improving smoke management, and expanding prescribed fire opportunities across the preserve.”

We commend the Albany Pine Bush Preserve on its more than three decades of responsible fire management. Over those 30 years, we have covered many of those fires and the state forest rangers and Pine Bush Preserve staff who manage them, frequently focusing on the preservation of endangered species in the globally rare pine barrens.

But now we have a renewed appreciation for these prescribed burns as we urge the public to read and comment on the draft and to attend the July 18 informational meeting.

We’re saving more than the Karner blue butterfly and other endangered species with these burns; we’re saving ourselves.

Most of all, we urge those in a position to manage other forests, whether in the United States or Canada or elsewhere in the world, to follow the lead of the Pine Bush Preserve.

That way, we can keep our heroes at home — doing proactive rather than reactive work.

And we’ll all breathe easier.