Massive Fires in Nova Scotia and British Columbia
...and it's only May
Hi All,
Many apologies for my extended absence. I have several longer, detailed newsletters in the works, plus an announcement about what to expect with this newsletter as fire season kicks up. I appreciate you all hanging in while I’ve been overloaded with work.
I was recently in Chicago, at the Edward E. Ayer Collection in the Newberry Library archives. I received a small grant which paid for my flight there. The archives are amazing. I could have stayed there for much longer than a week, and I am sure I only scratched the surface.
I’ll be sharing some of my findings here in the next month or so. I’m also taking on a reading project and have piles of library books stacked all over my apartment, including The Death of Nature, Biodiversity and Native America, Mountains of the Mind, and The Mushroom at the End of the World. Suffice to say I’ll be writing about a lot of books this summer, exploring themes of nature, ethnobotany, conceptions of wilderness, eco-criticism, and colonization.
Personally, I think it’s impossible to look at fire in the United States without understanding the histories of anthropogenic (read, Indigenous) fire, colonization, botany, biology, and ecology, as well as the industrial ages and age of enlightenment.
There are many places on the internet to find fire updates and people’s opinions on fire policy in the U.S.. While I will be a source for this throughout the season, I want to focus on holistically understanding everything that created the moment we’re in environmentally.
So, that’s where we’re at. I’d say you can expect a weekly newsletter from me starting next week, written essay-style. Depending on my own bandwidth, I’ll engage with current fire events as much as I can. I have a feeling this season is not going to be a good one, with the massive rains that soaked California and the longer, drier summers as well as the fires already happening in Canada.
Spring is often the time for fires in the Southwest; late summer and fall is when Canada usually burns. It feels a little bit like the upside-down. For those of you who have been keeping up, what are your thoughts on the current Canada fires?
For now, I’m going to post a bunch of links for you, in case you’d like to learn more about what’s happening up there and in the fire world.
Links:
State Farm insurance is no longer insuring fire-risk homes in California.
Contractor in northeast Oregon denied wildland fire workers fair pay.
Thousands of Canadians forced to evacuate due to Nova Scotia wildfires. -NPR
Northeast coast cities in the U.S. face air quality alerts due to Canada wildfires (with smoke map).
Fire in Scottish Highlands visible from space (NASA imaging).
This Reddit thread proves that the wildland fire world still has a lot of work to do when it comes to inclusivity.
Small fire in Michigan extinguished, but DNR says: forests are “ready to burn.”
Out of control fires on Vancouver Island, B.C. do not bode well for the PNW fire season.
Hi everyone. IMHO, we should completely overhaul wildland fire policy in America. Current policy is shaped by fear. We should try to reduce fear through education, and shape policy more pragmatically. It is natural for most of North America's native ecosystems to burn periodically, and in most cases, very frequently. Instead of fighting fires so much, we need to accept them, and even ecourage/prescribe them. (I know, easy for me to say, I am a longleaf pine ecosystem manager in the Southeast, where on our preserve, long ago, we eliminated our hazardous fuels with frequent ecologically prescribed fire). Fire is essential in the maintenance of biodiversity. Instead of putting out fires, we should focus more on education of the public about the importance of fire, how to protect your structures from fire if you live on the urban-wildland interface, and deploy fire personnel more so to help protect property than to put out fires....IOW, in general, let fires burn, but protect people from losses through grant assistance, personnel deployment, and education. Thank you for this opportunity to voice my opinion.