FYI, folks, Canada’s Boreal forests are
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Canada’s boreal forests are burning faster than they can regrow, but controlled fires may be one of the best ways to protect local communities.
Excerpt:
For centuries, Indigenous Canadians burned their lands during the spring, when the grass was dry and the forest was wet, in what are known as cultural burns. Elders looked for cues that can’t exactly be marked on a calendar, like signs the local snow was almost ready to melt, or when the ducks started to nest, as elders in Alberta explained in a 1979 documentary.
These burns protected their homes from insects, induced lush sprouting that attracted animals they hunted, and, perhaps most crucially, fireproofed their communities. The flames weren’t hot enough to kill the trees, just burn branches and leaves that, if left unattended, could fuel bigger fires during summer.
But near the end of the 19th century, Canada started banning cultural burns and fining anyone who practiced them. Slowly, what were meadows became flammable forests, and blazes grew harder to control, Cardinal Christianson said. “This idea of fire suppression or fire exclusion has got us in this problem,” she told me.
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Increasing temperatures dry up vegetation and help fuel big wildfires. But if there is too much of this fuel around communities, the damage inflicted by fires can be a lot worse.
“I’m of the opinion that, sure, a lot of it is climatic, but a lot of it is due to past decisions,” said Marc-André Parisien, a senior researcher at the Canadian Forest Service and an author of the Nature study.
While many communities around Canada are still in favor of suppression, some policies are changing. The latest example was the inclusion of cultural burnings in the wildfire strategy Canada issued in 2023. There are examples of this shift in the United States, too. Jim Robbins reported on one program from California recently.
Fire management isn’t a substitute for stopping climate change. There are limits to how much fire humans can actually manage in a landscape as huge as the boreal forests, which stretches through three continents.
Still, when it comes to protecting local residents, controlled fire may be one of the best tools available. But Cardinal Christianson told me a lot of work still needs to be done to make up for decades of fire suppression.
“The knowledge has been there,” she said. “What we really need are opportunities to be able to get together to learn and exchange knowledge.”