“What if fixing fire really means fixing ourselves, fixing our relationships with each other, and the relationship we basically have with the earth?”
That was the question Toddi Steelman asked a roomful of concerned Bow Valley residents gathered in September to hear about what a future that combines wildfire and climate change might look like.
Dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, Steelman has worked on the human dimensions of wildfire and its management in North America for 15 years and her research has led her to that very question.
Her query was introspective and insightful – what if the way as a society we have framed the issue of wildfire and its risks to communities like Canmore and Banff is part of the problem, and instead we need to question everything we have done as a society so far that has actually put ourselves at risk?
“One of the challenges we have is the way we govern ourselves right now is filled with incredible contradictions about what we want,” Steelman said.
“For instance, we want a thriving economy, including building in the wildland urban interface and we want that tax base that goes with it, even though that creates more risk for us.
“We want our tax dollars to fund suppression to protect us, even though that is going to create more risk in the long run because we won’t do the things we know we need to do to protect ourselves … we want our individual property rights respected even though sometimes those rights defy what is in the collective good.”
She emphasized that the growing number of deaths, property damage and fire-related costs are distracting people from the much larger problem in front of them.
“They are symptoms and they are not our actual problem,” said Steelman. “This type of framing keeps us focused on the short-term technical solutions that are weighted toward experts, engineers, modellers, economists and scientists that seek to provide answers for us in the hope we can master or control what may lay beyond our control.”
The past two years have been record setting for wildfires in North America – with 40,500 square kilometres burned in the United States in 2017, 28,000 people deployed to fight wildfires and $2.9 billion US spent. This past fire season saw the largest wildfire on record for California, the Mendocino Complex, burn more than 1,858 square kilometres.
Hot, dry and windy conditions have resulted in larger and more catastrophic wildfires not just in Canada and the U.S., but Australia and Europe have also been affected. Even the wildfire season has changed – starting earlier in the year and lasting longer.
There is a direct link between catastrophic wildfire and climate change, Steelman said. The recent report released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this month supports her argument.
In the special report, the panel warned that limiting global warming to 1.5 C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes to all aspects of society. The result if society fails to take action, however, will be more extreme weather events including wildfire.
“One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1 C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes,” said Panmao Zhai, co-chair of the IPCC working group.
The threat of wildfire due to climate change is compounded with the fact that in places like the Bow Valley, fire suppression has been the standard response to potential threats in order to protect people and places that have been developed on the landscape.
Steelman said ecosystems like that found in western Canada’s Rocky Mountains are connected to wildfire naturally – fire has a natural role to play and by suppressing it, our society has only increased the fuels available for future catastrophic events.
“The consequence of that is basically you end up seeing the build up of a lot of trees and shrubs and all sorts of vegetation, so when the fire does come there is a lot of vegetation that will ultimately burn and when it does burn it will burn very big,” she said.
“Ecosystems that have basically evolved to coexist with wildfire have had fire taken out of them, so when they are allowed to burn finally, they are burning very big.”
Allowing fire to play its ecological role on the landscape has been at the foundation of Parks Canada’s prescribed fire and vegetation management program for over a decade. Banff National Park’s last 10-year fire management plan, for example, set out annual targets for wildfire to occur on the landscape. The target for Banff is 50 per cent of the historic fire cycle, or 1,400 hectares a year on average, but the agency has not met those targets in recent years.
Allowing fire to burn inside the national park didn’t happen overnight, and took a lot of ground-breaking work at the time by Parks Canada staff like Cliff White and Ian Pengelly.
Not many other land management agencies are able to engage in large scale prescribed fire planning, said Parks Canada’s fire and vegetation management specialist Jane Park.
Park said it is important to understand the natural fire cycle on the landscape in order to plan prescribed burns to re-establish that ecological process after it has been suppressed for more than a century.
“If you have a look at the natural fire regime of the area we live in, there are a lot of places even in the Bow Valley where smaller fires in the valley bottom and montane are part of the fire regime,” she said.
“As you move up into the sub alpine and alpine, those places were more typical of a longer fire cycle of larger more intense fires that would come from lightning strikes.
“In order to keep a healthy balance (of vegetation), you need to balance those smaller shoulder seasons and more frequent surface fires and larger stand replacing fires.”
That also means burning and re-burning areas with prescribed fire in order to establish more of the montane open meadow, aspen and Douglas fir landscape that was more predominate in valley bottoms prior to European colonization.
The Fairholme prescribed burn in 2003, which burned 4,500 hectares, is a good example of an area Parks Canada plans to burn again in the next 10 years as part of its fire management plan.
“We have to burn multiple times in a lot of places to get back to the ecosystem we had before,” Park said. “Because our program is so long standing, I have the benefit of inheriting that landscape and being able to do the second and third iteration of these burns and convert it to grassland.”
While the Bow Valley did not see any wildfires over the past two summers, it was significantly affected by smoke from wildfires burning on the other side of the Continental Divide in B.C. In 2017, the Verdant wildfire sent smoke into the valley and 2018 was a record breaking year for wildfire in B.C. The nearby Wardle wildfire created smoky conditions for residents and visitors this past summer.
Park said smoke from prescribed burns has less effect on local populations than when larger wildfires take hold on the landscape and burn for weeks out of control. She also said Parks Canada has tracked the public perceptions around prescribed fires over time.
“Another great thing about our program, is over the years since the early 1990s we have done a number of social science research papers in conjunction with the Canadian Forest Service and other social scientists and we have tracked people’s perception of fire and fire management over time,” she said.
“You can see through those studies over time how the public and residents of the Bow Valley have increased their acceptance of prescribed fire on the landscape.”
Those who study the historic fire cycle in the Rocky Mountains have come to realize over time that it wasn’t just lightning caused fires that were occurring, but Indigenous populations were managing vegetation through early season burning regimes.
For White, the human role in the long-term fire regime and cultural burning practices are important to understand the natural ecosystem processes for places like the Bow Valley.
“We all know there is a real legacy of fire in these valleys,” he said during a recent talk on wildfires and smoke.
“We also know it has been a homeland for native peoples for the last 10,000 years and the Stoney Nakoda were the most recent.”
The last 300 years on the landscape, White said, has been a different story when it comes to fire. In addition to climate change, there has been fire suppression, a loss of human caused ignition and changes to the make up of vegetation.
“We need new approaches to understand the past and present fire regimes and they must integrate climate and culture because the elephant in the room is probably the cultural change over the past 100 years,” White said.
“When we look at our ecosystem model here, we can see humans have been burning for a long time … to create habitat for ungulates and to make good places for hunting and gathering and that then circulates through the ecosystem.”
For Steelman, it comes back to the question of our relationships with the landscapes where people are choosing to develop and inhabit. As more people move into places where they are at risk from wildfire, there are more structures at risk and firefighters to protect them and as a result they too are at risk.
She pointed to the June 30, 2013 death of 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots in the Yarnell Hill fire. The firefighters were killed when the fast moving fire burned over them and is one of the deadliest wildfire accidents in North American history.
“There has been a lot of attention to the immediate decision making in the days, hours and minutes before the Granite Mountain Hotshots died and I think what is important to recognize is this is a tragedy that was really a distillation of many different kinds of actions that preceded (their death) in the previous years, if not decades,” Steelman said.
“In other words, it was a human tragedy in the making for many years, not just in that immediate moment when it happened.
“Just like the deaths of these particular firefighters might have been predictable, so to probably are future deaths of firefighters if we don’t really recognize the current tide we are on in terms of the trajectory of history.”
That trajectory includes the effects of human-caused climate change, she said and extreme weather is predicted to increase according to climate models.
Whether it is fire season length, hot dry windy conditions, lack of precipitation for long periods of time – the risk to places where humans and forests meet is real.
“Where we live is different now,” Steelman said. “We live in this wildland urban interface and our landscapes are different now and these problems are not about narrow technical or scientific insights, but rather they have to do with our values.
“What if we accepted a proposition that we actually know enough now to deal with this problem and the lessons are right in front of us? That the problem doesn’t really lay in the realm of science, but rather it lays in the reality of our relationships with each other and how we see the earth and how we govern ourselves in relationship to the earth.”
Those are the kinds of discussions Laura Lynes, president of the Canmore-based non-profit organization the Rockies Institute, hopes the community can have with respect to climate change related issues like wildfire.
The institute hosted several engagement opportunities this fall around the issue of climate change for mountain communities, as they are at a higher risk to the effects of climate change.
“This year was the first year I actually thought to myself, ‘I am really thankful my house didn’t burn down,’ ” she said. “And I was thankful I wasn’t evacuated and I never used to think of that before.
“We have had two years in the valley filled with smoke and the question is: is the lighting going to hit close to where I live?”
