DURHAM - A headline last month said it all -- "Pall over the Triangle." The smoke, coming from a huge wildfire in Eastern North Carolina, didn't just affect the Triangle. It affected North Carolina beach vacationers, kept people indoors for days in Virginia and North Carolina and forced evacuations in the immediate area.

What began June 6 with a lightening strike on a Hyde County farm soon became a major fire, spreading to the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. By July 4 it had burned more than 40,000 acres and continues to smolder.

While fires occur from time to time in Eastern North Carolina, this fire was made worse by conditions in the area -- some of them man-made. The area was heavily ditched for drainage purposes. That made removing timber and farming the area easier, but it also made the area more vulnerable to drought conditions. Combining these drainage ditches with yet another year of drought leaves the peat soil very dry and susceptible to fire.

While it is always dangerous to link the weather of a few years to the influence of climate change, we do know that climate change is predicted to result in hotter, drier summers in our coastal plain. It is certainly scientifically plausible that climate change-related drought helped this fire happen, and in combination with the ditches, made it worse.

The big fire has compounded the climate problem. So far, about 2 feet of peat have burned over the entire area, putting over 10 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. As a component of greenhouse gases, that makes climate change worse.

Under normal conditions the fire area would return to marshland. We hope that's what happens here. But the area is only a few feet above sea level. As climate change causes sea level rise, drainage ditches will begin to run the wrong way, bringing in salt water and discouraging vegetation. That's already happening at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. That kind of dramatic change could lead to loss of habitat for wildlife like the black bear, forcing them out of their normal ranges, and in the worst case, into human contact.

The Nature Conservancy's North Carolina chapter is addressing both the short- and long-term issues posed by the fire. Our fire crew helped to fight the fire. We are also addressing the prospect of climate change in Eastern North Carolina by taking action now to strengthen the natural ecosystems and make them more resilient as temperatures rise. Plugging drainage canals is a piece of that project.

No one really knows how bad the fire will turn out to be. We can only guess how deep the peat will burn before it is extinguished. We don't know for sure when salt water intrusion will occur. We do know that the fire has lessons for us about the probable impacts of climate change on our coastal plain, including public trust lands of this and other refuges and reserves.

(Sam Pearsall is director of science for the Nature Conservancy's North Carolina chapter.)