FYI, folks, Canada’s Boreal forests are
Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription.
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.”
I’m shocked no one has mumbled a peep over this article; if you read what’s not being said, you come away with a very real (as most of we practitioners know) sense of the big “why” for increased wildfire impacts north of the Border.
The story digs in to what (I’ll call them “indigenous”) have been hamstrung from carrying out traditional burning and cultural uses of fire for thousands of years. Then of course, the government steps in and says “you can’t do this anymore”. What could go wrong?
The disappearance of black spruce discussion scratches the surface on ecological tendencies such as “tolerance” and “succession” in prolonging, functional silviculture, that has evolved over centuries. It is truly a symptom and not a sign!
The indigenous do recognize climates are changing, but is not the driving factor in determining their destructive wildfires. It’s interesting to note that between 2005 and 2022, US net carbon release has dropped 21%, according to the EPA. So, why the heck are we still blaming carbon for a warming planet, that is increasing our wildfire risks, that may be warming … naturally? The proof is repeated on both sides of the North American Continent.
The US would be well advised to take the Canadian experience to heart, and begin treating fuels (first), then reintroducing fire into these fire-adapted ecosystems. Putting fire on a landscape, without removing residual fuels buildup is actually “fuel” for disaster. I’m not talking about continuing the piddly, mostly inflated acres treated, and do some good for a change! Call it the black spruce initiative; hopefully, it’ll be more successful than the Boeing Starliner……
“Why are we still blaming carbon for a warming planet?” Even if our carbon emissions have come down a little, we’re still emitting a lot. I also found that emissions increased from 2020 to 2022 by 5.7 percent, driven largely by an increase in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion, so the trend isn’t necessarily downward. And then there’s the 90% of emissions coming from the rest of the world.