How Fire Suppression Contributed to the Fires in Eastern Canada
Part One of a history of Canada Fire and ecology
Fire has always been a part of Canada’s ecology, but many have forgotten (or never known) its presence and historical significance.
But you wouldn’t know that by reading the news. Recently, the Washington Post published “Why Canada’s are extreme and getting worse, in 4 charts.” Here, there is no mention of fire suppression except to say that:
“Over the past 20 years, there have been more than 2,000 fewer fires per year in Canada compared with the first 20 years in the modern record. Although Canada’s wildfire-fighting abilities lag those in the United States, the decrease observed is probably an indicator of improved prevention.
But while the number of fires is decreasing, the average size of any given fire has substantially increased.” - Ian Livingston via WaPo
This “improved prevention” (and suppression) could in fact be a contributing factor to increased fire size, along with other factors such as climate change and the increased presence of humans in places that were previously scarcely populated.
It’s not all bad. This BBC article mentions the importance of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous fire, and there are many reporters out there trying to understand the complexity of these situations.
As a writer, I don’t claim to know every single factor contributing to each seasonal fire event, but as a former hotshot and as someone who studies fire and ecology, I do see patterns. One pattern is the media’s capitalization on these events for clicks.
For the next two weeks (or longer) I will be writing about fire in Canada. Past, present, and future.
This is the first of a series about the current state of fires in Canada, Canada’s fire histories, Indigenous fire and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, pre-colonization fire regimes, climate change, and ecological compositions. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting this work.
For the past several years, the west coast of the United States has spent weeks or months shrouded in dense layers of smoke from wildfires. Naively, wildfire has been primarily perceived as a western problem. But nearly all ecosystems in the U.S. and Canada are fire adapted, meaning they evolved with the presence of fire, either due to seasonal lightning or human-caused (anthropogenic) fire.
In the whole of Canada right now, there are 235 uncontained (called “out of control” by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC)), 84 fires “being held,” and 118 fires “under control” (the equivalent of “contained” or fully extinguished in U.S. fire terms).
Firefighters from Australia, the U.S.A., Costa Rica, South Africa, and France are currently stationed in Canada. This isn’t necessarily an unusual occurrence: I can remember several seasons when I bumped into Canadian firefighters, though clearly this fire season is a huge event.
The entire Northeastern seaboard is submerged beneath choking layers of wildfire smoke, painting skies in dirty shades of tangerine. Dread abounds. How can one escape the feeling of impending apocalypse when so many of our narratives tell us that the presence of smoke can only foretell doom?
It’s the reverse that’s most true: the absence of smoke is what’s created larger and more volatile fire events. Without smoke, there’s no fire.
We need fire, and fire needs to be a part of our lives. That means a certain level of comfort with low-level smoke is essential to prevent larger events like this one.
But also: these fires are meant to be big.
Let me tell you why.
Nearly every North American ecosystem has a fire regime.
A fire regime defines how often fires burn, the severity at which they burn, typical size, burning season timing and lengths, fire intensity, and fire type.
For instance, fires in the boreal forests of Canada (where most fires are now occurring) are typically wind driven crown fires, occurring every 30-500 years.1
These fires consume entire stands of trees (proven from tree-ring and charcoal data which can help scientists understand historical fire regimes). It is not catastrophic that these trees are killed, but a natural part of the fire regime.
After burning the land can appear dead and barren, but the fire’s heat is like a regeneration cleanse for the land, clearing away the old in preparation for a new ecological cycle. Tightly compressed cones melt in its presence, shedding their seeds into the mineral-rich soil, where they will sprout soon after the next rains. Post-fire, winds carry seeds from unburned stands of trees, dropping them onto the receptive ground.
Sunlight warms soils previously darkened by tightly woven canopies. Within weeks, or even days, grasses and flowers begin to sprout, knitting the ground together and priming the soil for another cycle of life. In boreal forests birch, willow, and aspen are often the first trees to sprout again.
These natural fire regimes have been interrupted by the enactment of fire suppression throughout the U.S. and Canada. This can lead to the buildup of brush and trees, declining tree health (which makes trees more vulnerable to pests like bark beetles as well as drought, and therefore more flammable), and an absence of the fire mosaic.
The fire mosaic is just like it sounds: look at the pictures below to see how a fire burned in the boreal forest of Alaska. The first picture is from a low-severity burn site— you can see that the fire has left living, green brush and green ground cover in a mosaic pattern. The second picture may look barren to some, but look closely and you’ll see that there are islands of duff remaining. Under the surface there are still root systems in some areas, which will regenerate.
To the naked, uneducated eye, both pictures may look “catastrophic.” Many colonizers, when seeing both fire and burned land, lamented the loss of, well, timber and agricultural land. They saw fire as taking away something that could be sold. But fire is a natural process, and a process that many Indigenous people practiced, both culturally and agriculturally.
We also must remember that the land burning throughout Canada has not only been subject to fire suppression for over a century. Despite what the Washington Post article said about the “lag” of Canada’s fire suppression apparatus, Canada’s fire history virtually mirrors that of the United States in many ways. C.E. Van Wagner writes:
“There is no mystery about the bad reputation forest fires acquired in Canada’s past: early logging, settlement, and fire went hand-in-hand, culminating in some awful holocausts that incinerated whole towns and hundreds of people. Even by the 1880’s lumber interests were deploring the uncontrolled fire losses in the valuable pine timber of the Ottawa River and Lake Ontario watersheds…So, for many decades after organized fire control began in Canada, fire was viewed as an essentially negative phenomenon, to be eliminated if possible or otherwise to be kept to minimum.”
In many, many ways, the Canadian firefighting system follows the blueprint of the United States, with its fire danger rating system. James G. Wright and Herbert W. Beall were the founders (Beall was Wright’s student and then peer) of much of Canada’s fire suppression and fire science systems. As Van Wagner notes in “Six Decades of Forest Fire Science in Canada,” Beall and Wright, “Paid careful attention to the similar work begun about a decade earlier in the United States.” That work began around 1915, and was primarily conducted by the U.S. Forest Service.
What’s burning now is not what existed then.
Nearly all of the land currently burning in Canada is land that has been logged, replanted, and logged again. That’s an important thing to remember as we consider this and every fire season. In the next part of this series, I’ll examine what existed before the land was logged, and the Indigenous fire and agricultural that shaped some of the area’s ecology.
Have something to say? Resources to provide? First-person thoughts on what’s happening in Canada (for instance, are you there?)?
Tell me in the comments.
Part two is coming on Thursday. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber and supporting my mission of educating others about fire history, conceptions of wilderness, and ecology.
Thomas T. Veblen, et al. Fire and Climatic Change in Temperate Ecosystems of the Western Americas. Springer, 2003. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=nlebk&AN=108059&site=ehost-live.