This column appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

Thankfully there has been rain this morning in the Cairngorms. But the wildfire is not dead. With winds picking up again as I write and gusts of 30-35 km/h drying off the welcome damping, the danger to human and other life is not over yet.

Bear in mind that when a wildfire swept through Cannich in May 2023, though the flames were extinguished within weeks, it took till September for the hotspots, pockets of residual heat in smouldering roots and deep peat, to cool enough that it could officially be pronounced over.

Even from afar, this Cairngorms fire, like others before it, has been a tough watch. We see the images and footage of inferno-like flames, or pass, as I did last Friday distant plumes of smoke across the park, and our hearts go out to those living close to the devastation, or those involved in fighting the flames.

We think of the people who live there. But also, what we see, whether in France, Spain or the Cairngorms, is nature burning. We think of the wildlife for which it is home.

We think, perhaps, too, of the carbon sequestered in trees and peatland that has been released into the atmosphere, blowing smoky holes in our emissions reductions, making the battle against climate change harder, even as climate change itself drives up wildfire frequency.

We think of whether more fire breaks, more preventative muirburn, a stronger more coordinated response, or more 'rewetting' could have made a difference.

We scrabble for simple answers to the causes behind a complex problem, of which we chiefly know one thing - that it is largely human-made.

We talk, almost as if switching between parallel universes, about more oil and gas licenses. Sometimes we glance at the research papers, like the State of Wildfires report, which remind us that (even if not this Cairngorms wildfire exactly) some of these blazes ripping across Europe right now are climate-change, and therefore emissions-made.

Yesterday I spoke to an RSPB Scotland spokesperson at Abernethy, where staff from reserves across........

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