As toxic smoke drifts towards Manchester the public health Cost of wildfires has never been more stark.

Nearly three weeks. That is how long firefighters have now been fighting the wildfire on Tintwistle Moor above Glossop, and on Sunday Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service declared it a major incident. The blaze, which began on 24 June, has torn through around 260 hectares of moorland and woodland, and crews were called back to the scene in the early hours of Monday morning as high winds drove the fire on once again.

Let that timeline sink in. This fire started in June, during the first heatwave of the summer, when temperatures reached 34C. Firefighters left the scene on 2 July believing it was under control. They were called back last Thursday as a third heatwave took hold. Now, more than a fortnight after it first ignited, it has escalated to the point where a major incident has had to be declared, five fire engines and specialist equipment are committed, and the service is warning that operations will continue for "some time".

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern, and it is an entirely predictable one.

Tintwistle is not burning in isolation. Over on the Saddleworth side, the Arnfield and Crowden moors are burning furiously, with RSPB Dovestone caught up in an incident where the heat, wind direction, slope and fuel loads are all stacking against the crews fighting it. Satellite images captured on Sunday showed the smoke from Tintwistle itself drifting towards Manchester.

In north Wales, 36 homes have been evacuated near Conwy Mountain. This is what a British summer now looks like across our uplands: recurring, resource-draining, landscape-destroying wildfire, several fires at once, competing for the same finite crews and equipment.

Ellie Gillatt, area manager at Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service, described it as "a significant and complex incident, requiring a protracted, multi-agency response". She is right. But we should ask the harder question that too rarely gets asked when the smoke is still rising. Why are these fires taking hold so ferociously, and burning for so long?

The heatwaves are not within anyone's power to prevent. The wind is not within anyone's power to prevent. But the third ingredient in every one of these fires, the fuel load on the ground, absolutely is.

Moorland that is actively managed, with controlled cool burns carried out in the right conditions by people who know the land, carries far less of the dry, tinder-ready vegetation that lets a spark become a 260-hectare catastrophe. Rotational burning breaks up the fuel, creates natural firebreaks, and gives crews a fighting chance when the worst happens. Moorland left to grow rank and unmanaged does the opposite. It becomes a fuel store waiting for a hot, dry, windy day. This summer has provided plenty of those.

Look at what is stacking against the crews at Dovestone: heat, wind direction, slope and fuel loads. Three of those four are fixed by nature and geography. The fourth, the fuel load, is the one thing land management can change, and it is the one thing current policy has made worse rather than better.

We have said it before and the evidence keeps proving it. Where managed burning has been restricted or abandoned, the fuel builds, and when fire comes it burns hotter, spreads faster, and takes longer to put out. Tintwistle, three weeks in and still going, is a case study in exactly that. Arnfield and Crowden are another.

Here is something the coverage rarely tells you. Alongside the fire crews, it is shooting estate teams and gamekeepers who have been putting in a huge shift on the Arnfield and Crowden wildfire, in relentless wind and heat, at no cost to the public purse.

Moorland estates in the area have come together and pooled their resources as the fire threatened to spread on an apocalyptic scale. Wildfire has no regard for ownership boundaries. On the right flank, teams back-burned across the Pennine Way, and the decision was taken to bring in earth-moving machinery to cut vegetative fuel breaks heading out towards Swineshaw Reservoir.

Toxic smoke drifts towards Manchester

These are precisely the techniques, back-burning and fuel breaks, that managed moorland practises as a matter of routine, deployed here in an emergency by the very people who know the ground best.

There is a local kindness in it too. Two of the gamekeepers play for Micklehurst Cricket Club, and the club has kept the teams supplied with regular food and water drops through the ordeal. This is what rural communities do when the moor is burning. They turn out for one another.

It is worth holding that picture in mind the next time managed moorland and the people who work it are painted as the problem. When the fire came, it was these teams, with their machinery, their knowledge and their willingness to work through the night, who stood between the flames and something far worse.

Note who is carrying this. Five fire engines and specialist equipment, tied up for the best part of a month on a single moor. As the fire service itself has warned this summer, these fires often demand resources that could otherwise be answering life-threatening emergencies elsewhere. Every hour spent on Tintwistle is an hour, and a crew, not available to the wider public.

And once the fire is finally out, the bill does not stop. We have seen at Langdale on the North York Moors what comes next: millions of pounds of public money spent repairing peatland, habitats and rights of way that need not have been destroyed on this scale in the first place. We are paying twice. Once to fight the fire, and again to repair the damage. All while the policies that leave moorland unmanaged and fuel-heavy remain firmly in place.

The cause of ignition is only half the story. Whether a spark fizzles out or becomes a three-week major incident depends on what it finds when it lands. A well-managed moor starves a fire. An abandoned one feeds it.

Parliament heard this argument only last month, when the upland community told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in plain terms that those setting policy had not taken the people who actually manage this land with them. Tintwistle Moor is the price of not listening.

We do not have to keep watching our uplands burn, our fire crews stretched to breaking, and public money poured into repairing the wreckage. We can choose prevention. We can back the people who know how to manage moorland for resilience. Or we can carry on as we are, and declare another major incident next summer, and the summer after that.

The choice really is that simple. The smoke drifting towards Manchester should be all the argument anyone needs.