Wildfires: What are the Drivers?

Last summer was a record-breaking wildfire season for Canada. As smoke blanketed major Canadian cities and even portions of the East Coast and Midwest of the United States, media coverage soared.  
This year, wildfire season has already started. Experts are warning of another series of catastrophic impacts. What is driving these unprecedented, longer wildfire seasons? Is there something missing in the public narrative? In this episode, we’re looking for answers.
This week, we set the stage for our wildfire inquiry by asking some of the pressing questions with a fire ecologist expert. We sit down with Jen Baron from the University of British Columbia for some insights. What are the main drivers? What is the role of forest management policies, and is there a disconnect between the two?

Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.

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Transcript

Janet Sumner: 0:00

Welcome to the Clear Cut. Hi, I'm Janet Sumner, Executive Director at Wildlands League.

Kaya Adleman: 0:08

And I'm Kaya Adelman, Carbon Manager at Wildlands League.

Janet Sumner: 0:14

Wildlands League is a Canadian conservation organization working on protecting the natural world.

Kaya Adleman: 0:21

The Clear Cut is bringing to you the much needed conversation on Canadian forest management and how we can better protect one of Canada's most important ecosystems, as our forests are reaching a tipping point.

Janet Sumner: 0:40

Yeah, so we're starting this episode knowing that wildfire season has already started in Canada, which is incredibly. It's heartbreaking to see it's happening in Western Canada, BC and Alberta, and towns are being evacuated, people's lives are being upset and certainly the species that live there are being impacted and, of course, on a climate level it's also impacting. So, just on every possible way, it is heart-wrenching to see the forest fires that have already begun in Canada and, yeah, just very sad to see this.

Kaya Adleman: 1:18

Yeah, me too. It is very heartbreaking Anytime I read a news article or see images about those wildfire impacts to communities and to species and ecosystems. It is very sobering as well and, just you know, all the more reason to be having these conversations and to finally be doing this investigative dive into the root of the issue.

Janet Sumner: 1:44

Investigative dive into the root of the issue. Yeah, because we had resisted that for a period of time and we talked about this a little bit is that for Wildlands League, we acknowledge that forest fires are becoming you know, we had unprecedented year of forest fires last year. They're becoming it's a longer season, it's very intense, it's all those kinds of things, and we wanted to actually unpack it and understand it a bit more. The essential narrative that we've been hearing is we need more forest firefighters, which is okay. Yeah, we probably do need more of that.

Janet Sumner: 2:18

And then the other one was that it's being caused by climate change, and, yes, we agree that's making things drier and hotter, et cetera.

Janet Sumner: 2:27

But what is the role of how we manage our forests, or forestry very specifically, in all of this dynamic seems to have been missing from the conversation. And even internally in Wildlands League, we decided that we really needed to kind of, uh, put our heads together and have a conversation about this and, uh, what? What's interesting and kaya can attest to this is it's it's the first. The first section of this is going to be with dave, and this is the sanitized version of that conversation, because anything that we have internally when we're trying to decide something or figure it out. It is a robust argument, slash discussion and, and that was exactly what we had here, and so you're going to get the more sanitized version and and kaya's going to cut it down from the almost hour that we spent on it and turn it into something that has a sharper, tighter narrative, where you can hear from dave, but it starts with what are the things that we need to understand, and that's where Dave kicked us off.

Kaya Adleman: 3:31

A real kicking of the tires, as we say on the podcast sometimes.

Janet Sumner: 3:39

Okay, so today's episode we're going to talk about wildfires. What role does forestry have in wildfires? What are wildfires? Is there an increase in wildfires? We have a lot of questions and we don't necessarily have all the answers, and we're looking to start generating the questions because we want to go out and find the answers. So we've invited Dave Pierce, our senior forest conservation manager, to the podcast and we're going to be having a discussion with him Right, Kai.

Kaya Adleman: 4:12

Yeah, we've probably talked about on the podcast before about how the role of forest management in the wildfire discussions has been relatively absent from the mainstream media, especially this past summer when we saw wildfires raging across Canada at unprecedented levels. So, yeah, I think it's a good time to start generating that conversation and maybe exploring some of those ideas, because it does seem like an important factor when you look at some of the existing research that's out there.

Janet Sumner: 4:50

It's certainly worth asking the question. As people were, you know, suffering from smoke-filled skies and couldn't go outside certainly people with any health issues, elderly, young, children, etc. It was detrimental to one's health to go out and exercise. These were all challenges during the wildfire season, and it was megafires across Canada, and this was, as you said, unprecedented. So I think we have more questions than answers at this point, but it is definitely something that we need to start drilling down into. But it is definitely something that we need to start drilling down into and, from my perspective, I saw the response of many of my colleagues in the environmental movement, which was, to you know, quite rightly point the finger at the increased greenhouse gas emissions which were accelerating climate change or causing climate change, and that climate change was leading to an increase in these megafires, both the severity and the frequency, and so that was certainly in the media, it was covered. So that was certainly in the media, it was covered. The response of many politicians was we need to have more firefighters, which I don't dispute and certainly protecting hearth and home and people's lives.

Janet Sumner: 6:17

One of the challenges we did not see, though, as you quite rightly point out, was we did not see well, what's the role of other activities that we have going on in the forest? What's the role of forestry how we manage forest? Maybe it's not even forestry, maybe it's just how we manage forest. And what does that look like? Does it mean that we can? Does it mean we can actually manage forest, or should we have more intact or natural forest? And these are some of the kinds of questions that we didn't see covered in the media or the conversation and the reason that we want to do the podcast. Dave, maybe you can start to weigh in on some of this or maybe some of the questions that were kind of occurring to you and what your thought process was.

Dave Pearce: 7:01

Yeah, I think I mean without getting. We can delve into a couple more examples, but again we have this um forest management on the one hand, the potential to increase the number and severity of fires at different time scales, and then the potential forest management to actually help. But as I did this thought experiment, it seemed to me that a lot of the helping of forest management was helping to mitigate the impacts of forest management. So at the you know, you know, without having, uh, empirical data at my fingertips, you kind of think well, maybe at the best it's kind of neutral, right, it's, it's harming, but then it's helping enough to maybe reduce that harm when it comes to the frequency and severity of fire. So maybe we're at a, in the best case scenario we're kind of at a stalemate because it's helping, yeah, but we don't actually know right.

Janet Sumner: 7:58

We just know that there are activities that help and there are activities that hurt, and we haven't actually come up with a strategy on what that looks like and what we've been seeing or what. And you know I'm not going to say this is the definitive take on it, but I have seen in media reports that it means we need to get in and harvest more, faster, faster, and I think there's a lot of questions around that, especially if harvesting is actually increasing our greenhouse gas emissions and so it's like okay, so you've got an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Your actual forest management practices may be neutral if you do them in the right way, and it all happens and it evens out, but we don't know that but at the end of the day, we're still adding fuel to the fire, quite literally yep, yeah, and we haven't even gotten into the conversation of um biomass.

Kaya Adleman: 8:54

And I mean that all those emissions get transferred to the electricity um sector, I'd imagine. But then there's also the transport of biomass around the world. That's greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. And then there's what is the trade-off of keeping forests standing, or what is the trade-off of transitioning what biomass is burning to a renewable energy source?

Janet Sumner: 9:26

yeah I. I don't even know if the emissions get transferred to the electricity sector, because they're deemed to be renewable all right, the trees will grow back at some point.

Janet Sumner: 9:35

right, so it's it's almost a given that you have a zero emissions store. But so, yeah, that's a challenge. But you're right, kaya, it's like well, and then the other piece is if you leave the forest standing, okay, so you prevented emissions from happening. But the other thing that you did is you kept the forest standing so that it could be absorbing carbon, and there's good science that says the older forests actually absorb more carbon than the younger forests.

Dave Pearce: 10:04

Yeah, that's my understanding that, that generally, that the older forests went out and and the you know, the natural forests are more resilient, right, when they do burn, you might not get a as as severe a fire. You have more charcoal left, as you said, which is, you know, pretty long-term carbon storage, longer than a forest product. Um, yeah, a lot, a lot of questions, I think. I think it was a good, good exercise to go through and and think um, think about um. You know the pros and cons of forest management, but we definitely need to dig into it more and get some more people that have some data on both sides. I think, to be fair, we want data on both sides, but just in my little thought experiment, it did seem like the potentially decreasing activities were decreasing problems that forest management caused in the first place.

Janet Sumner: 11:08

So how does? Because we do fire suppression. So how does that play? I mean, this is not actually a fire, it's actually suppressing fire. How does that play when it comes to forestry? Or why do we do that when it comes to forestry?

Dave Pearce: 11:24

What is?

Dave Pearce: 11:25

fire suppression uh, fire suppression is, um putting out fires, essentially trying to trying to manage the fires. Trying to put them out, uh, trying to reduce their size, frequency, intensity, and that can be to protect a nearby community. It can be because there's valuable timber and the forestry companies don't want to see that burn. You know, um, just the fuel builds up to a point where, when inevitably, a fire does is produced there, it is so hot, there's so much fuel, um that you can't put it out and it just it becomes, you know, a behemoth. You know, and just um, all you can do is step back, step back and maybe try to fight it around the edges. Try to, you know, and they have to evacuate communities because they it's so big you can't put it out, and arguably, suppressing fire for you know, up to a hundred years has produced that fuel load um, increase that fuel on the landscape so that these catastrophic fires are more likely.

Janet Sumner: 13:31

I mean, one of the things about this podcast and a couple of people have said this to me is that they like it because it allows them to see how we think through problems, and I think that this is. We are at the beginning of this and we can't make declarative statements at this point. We know there's a bunch of areas that we want to go and investigate, investigate, and we we have seen um, uh, as I said, the environmental commissioner has come out on greenhouse gas emissions and said that this sector of forestry actually has um emissions that canada is not currently reporting or accounting for we do know that and we know that fire suppression is going on.

Janet Sumner: 14:12

We know that that's that can be used to protect timber values as well as protect homes, et cetera. And we know that the forest is changed when it is harvested, that that change is the very nature of it. You know that's a fairly intrusive activity the industrial harvesting. So those are some of the things we know, but we don't necessarily know, understand all of the dynamics et cetera. So what are the questions? If you can direct us and say these are some of the things I want to know the answers to.

Dave Pearce: 14:48

Yeah, I mean, I think some of the questions were implicit in our discussion, but some of the specific questions I have, like, overall, in a particular forest management regime and a particular forest regime, and if we had expert opinion on both sides, does forest management, uh, exacerbate the, the severity and intensity of fires? Uh, and I think we want to talk about different time scales. But in, in, you know, in the severity and intensity of fires, uh, and I think we want to talk about different time scales, but in, in, you know, in the short and medium term, is what we're most concerned about, uh, does it help, right, what's, what's the, what's the balance on, you know, in each particular forest management regime. And so you'd have to look at different jurisdictions, right? So for Ontario, at different jurisdictions, right, so for Ontario, like I'd want to know, you know, I'd want to have experts on both sides weigh in and kind of say, you know, does it help or does it hurt? And then, in terms of particular activities, you know, road building, are the risks, that drying out, that edge effect, you know, or is it compensated by the fact that, oh, we can get heavy equipment in and we can fight the fires and put them out.

Dave Pearce: 15:55

You know, what does the evidence show? And then I think you brought it up that the forest company says you know, we just have to harvest more, right, we got to cut these trees down before they burn and so we can store them in long-term wood products. And on the face of it, you know, I think you know people buy into that, into that, um. But I'd like to unpack that a little bit more and say well, you know, even if it did work, we can't cut for us that fast.

Dave Pearce: 16:21

And is the premise even true are we storing? Are we storing that carbon, or is it most of it going to waste wood, right? Or are we burning it? Uh, in in, uh in biomass and so kind of like, really drilling down on on that, that question. And then, if we want to store more carbon, is it possible to manage our forest so they store more carbon than a natural forest, right? So what's the difference in forest carbon storage between a natural forest and a managed forest? And then, is it possible to take a forest that has been degraded already, in a degraded condition, already managed, and and then take that forest and have it, uh, you know, either make it more natural or have it store carbon quicker in time frames that are going to make a difference, right, which is basically before 2050, right?

Janet Sumner: 17:22

Yeah, one of the big things for me is I think we need more climate resilient forests and we need to plan to make that happen. I think there might be some agreement with the sector that we need climate resilience. I think the version that I'm thinking of is maybe a little bit different than versions I've heard, but I think we need more climate resistant forests. I like your ideas about thinking about carbon storage and really looking at how much is actually released by a fire. I mean, even there's a lot of unpacking to do and a lot of understanding.

Janet Sumner: 17:52

And then what is the role of forest management and the change of the age, class and structure of the forest and what does that do in terms of forest fires? And and recognizing it and I guess also recognizing that we now have mega fires on the horizon and I know that this year has been another dry year, with drought maps coming out that are suggesting it. It could be another dangerous year. So hopefully not and hopefully people are as safe as can be. But with climate change, we are now in a megafire reality and we have to start thinking about that and forestry plays a role.

Dave Pearce: 18:28

Yeah, absolutely. It's been kind of fun to get some of these questions out on the table and maybe in the show notes I can type up, you know, sort of explicit questions that we can sort of think about and put out there for people to weigh in on.

Janet Sumner: 18:51

And now we're going to actually start to dive into the investigation with Jen Barron and Kaya. Do you want to tee this one up?

Kaya Adleman: 19:00

Yeah, so Jen is a fire ecologist and you'll hear more about her work when she introduces herself. She's based in British Columbia and she works on wildfires, consumes knowledge about wildfires and is understanding wildfires every single day. So we thought that she would be a great person to kick off the conversation that we're going to have on the subject, and I don't want to give too much away, but it's really insightful and it'll be great to hear about all of the underlying causes of wildfires and really expanding the conversation from the more climate-focused narrative that we were seeing last summer.

Janet Sumner: 19:44

Yeah, and I think if you're listening to your podcast at a higher speed which I often do, especially with our podcast I have to listen to it three or four times before we put it out to the public.

Kaya Adleman: 19:54

Janet's busy guys.

Janet Sumner: 20:00

Yeah, and I often have it at well also, we know what we said. We've heard it before, right, but when you're listening at 1.2, or I tried to re-listen to the Jen interview today at 1.5, she talks fast and the other thing is some of the topics that she's unpacking are very dense. So if you're listening to this podcast at like 1.5 or 1.8, you better slow it down because you're going to be paying attention to absorb all of this, because it is a very dense conversation and Jen walks us through a very compelling narrative, but it's like a barrage of concepts and ideas that really have a lot of meat in the bones or broccoli in the pan or something like that. It's a lot of information, so enjoy, it's going to be a good conversation.

Kaya Adleman: 20:46

Yes, I agree.

Janet Sumner: 20:52

So, kaya, I'm really looking forward to this conversation with Jen Barron, who's agreed to join us today, and we're going to be talking about wildfires, and maybe we'll start by asking Jen to give us a little bit about who she is, what her role is and where she works. And why do you do this work? Anyway, welcome Jen.

Jen Baron: 21:12

Thanks, thanks for having me. Yeah, so my name is Jen Barron. I'm currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia and the Faculty of Forestry, where I specialize in wildfires and wildfire management. So I'm also an instructor, a lecturer, in the Masters of Geomatics and Environmental Management Program at the University of British Columbia, and I'm a practitioner. So I work as a consultant on prescribed fires, as a fire behavior analyst and fire effects monitor, so I wear a lot of different hats.

Jen Baron: 21:39

My background and how I came to fire was really from a forest ecology standpoint. So prior to being at UBC, I was in Southern Ontario and I was working on invasive species and kind of disturbance patterns, climate change impacts, and that was right around the time of the 2017-2018 fire season in BC. And so when I was looking for grad school, the timing with that fire season really made it seem like an urgent and important environmental management issue and also an issue that I could have some type of meaningful impact on in terms of my research and my recommendations for management. So that's the context within which I came to BC, right around those fire seasons, and since then we've experienced another two record-breaking fire seasons in 2021 and 2023 in British Columbia, and 2023, in particular, was record-breaking across Canada.

Jen Baron: 22:28

In addition, I've certainly always been fascinated by fire, but as a researcher, I was really drawn to it because of the opportunity to engage across a lot of different sectors. So fire is very multidisciplinary. It means we can draw from a lot of areas of expertise, like I'm a fire ecologist, but I have colleagues who are wildlife biologists or foresters or people who work in human health, and so there's a lot of different angles to come at the fire problem from which I'm really interested in. In addition, I think that there's a real opportunity to impact change on the ground. So you know, although I have done past research on climate change and I'm still involved in that research to some extent, from fire we can impact it both from the climate level, but also from on the ground, from a fuels level, and a lot of the big problems in fire are related to human management, changes that have been made on the ground, and so there's a real opportunity to work with communities and particularly with kind of local and rural and First Nations communities around some of the solutions to fire.

Janet Sumner: 23:32

So that's a rich vein to explore. I'm actually going to ask you to go back a little bit and just explain for our audience, because some people may know and may not know what geomatics is.

Jen Baron: 23:43

When you say that yeah, so geomatics is essentially spatial data science, so it's uh, esri describes it as the science of where um basically using spatial data to understand kind of patterns and also process, and I teach landscape ecology so I'm particularly interested in how spatial pattern impacts ecosystems and how information about ecosystems can be better informed through spatial data.

Janet Sumner: 24:12

I just got to geek out just for a second. So the Canada spatial inventory, I think, is at a 30 meter resolution. What resolution are you able to work with? Or what data sets do you have in a BC context? Are they better than that or what are you looking at?

Jen Baron: 24:32

Yeah, so one of the data sets I've worked with a lot that's actually quite an old data set is air photos, which we'll probably talk about a little bit more later in the podcast. But air photos have been around since the Second World War, so they're actually one of the oldest remote sensing methods. But they're also one of the highest resolution, so they can be a meter or less than a meter in spatial resolution. But the cost of that is that a lot of modern remote sensing methods we get a lot of bands with, and so there's a lot more information associated with those images. With air photos we often have only three bands red, green and blue, or we might only have one if it's a black and white image, so a historical image, but they are also very high resolution images and also what people would see if you went on Google Earth or Google Maps A lot of their photos are actually from air photos.

Janet Sumner: 25:54

That's fascinating.

Jen Baron: 25:55

I didn't know that.

Janet Sumner: 25:56

Yeah, that's fantastic. We did a project at Wildlands League called Logging Scars and we were able to get 40 centimeter resolution and that was partially from Landsat imagery and also from drone footage and essentially walking the forestry blocks and looking at things and getting photographs. So thanks very much for that explanation.

Kaya Adleman: 26:22

Hey, are you liking the clear cut as much as we like making it? Your donation helps us bring more of these important stories to life. You can actually support our work by going to our website, wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut, or you can click the link in the episode description below. Your support means the world to us. Yeah, so you were talking about the kind of the different approaches to fire management, either on the climate space or on the ground in the management forestry space. I was wondering if you could elaborate more on that side and maybe explain, like, what are fuel loads for our audience?

Jen Baron: 27:13

like what are fuel loads? For our audience, things like that, yeah. So in fire, for some reason, we really love triangles, we really love explaining things as being driven by triangles, and so when we think about fire behavior, we often think about it in terms of being driven by either the climate, the fuels or the topography, and so all of these things kind of come together to shape how fires look like, not just on a single fire event, but also over the course of fire seasons. When we talk about the way that fires are changing, there's only one of those things that hasn't really changed, and that's the topography. Of course, we have changed the lay of the land somewhat over the past hundred years, but we think of it as being relatively static. But we are making very large changes to both the fuels and the climate, and so a lot of what I study and a lot of what the conversation in British Columbia is around is the relative influence of those different factors the changing climate and the changing fuels on the landscape, on driving changes that we see in fire, and also how our different management scenarios might impact different aspects of that relationship. So, from a climate perspective, of course the climate is getting warmer and, in particular, it's getting drier and warmer at the same time, and so fire is very responsive to moisture, and so to offset the increase in temperature, we would need to see a significant increase in precipitation in order for fires to stay the same. And we're not seeing those changes. And so not just because the temperature is getting warmer and drier on average, but because we're having drought over longer periods of time. This is extending the length of the fire season and extending the period of time over which we might experience extreme fire weather, which results often in extreme fire behavior.

Jen Baron: 28:55

That's only one piece of the puzzle, though. In order for things to burn in an extreme way, there often needs to be enough fuel there to drive extreme fire behavior, and we've also been changing the fuel side of that triangle. So over the past 100 years, we've been so successful at putting out fires that, in the absence of that fire, a lot of fuel has accumulated. So in the past, more frequent, lower severity fires would have removed a lot of that ingrowth, those seedlings that are regenerating the branches in the understory.

Jen Baron: 29:22

In the absence of those fires, because we've put all of the fires out so successfully for the past hundred years, there's a lot of fuel that's accumulated and that's layered on top of a lot of other land use changes related to forest management. So, starting back in the early 20th century, with widespread harvesting practices, high grading, and then the legacies of those changes, clear cuts and replanting of forest ecosystems, and also the way that we treat residue in the forest industry, so the slash that's left behind after harvesting has a big influence on fire behavior. It can increase fire behavior and cut blocks, and so those combinations of changes, as well as our expansion to the wildland-urban interface and trends with agriculture and livestock grazing, have really changed the fuels matrix as well, and so not only are these forests burning under hotter and drier conditions than in the past, but there's a lot more fuel to consume than there was in the past as well, and that combination of factors is really responsible for driving the changes that we've seen in recent years.

Janet Sumner: 30:26

That is a fantastic explanation and really brings I love the triangles. I had not heard that before and really brings I love the triangles. I had not heard that before.

Janet Sumner: 30:34

I noticed that most policy work is focused on, or many environmental groups have been talking about, the need to reduce climate change, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. I mean we can obviously try to get we need to get our emissions under control, but the variable that seems the most and maybe that's not even an immediate but you speak about sort of the history of forest management and you talk about it as high grading. You talk about it as stopping fires. That's very commonly called fire suppression, used right across Canada where we have been artificially suppressing fires smaller fires that would have occurred and they naturally would have gone into the forest and removed some of that, what potentially becomes fuel. And then we've got how we manage slash, et cetera, that urban interface. But I also wonder if tree species has actually started to contribute to that because of what we're replanting or the. I mean, we're not necessarily replanting forests, we're replanting trees and we don't necessarily get a full, fully functional ecosystem back.

Jen Baron: 31:41

Absolutely yeah. So I think, unfortunately, one of the kind of large misconceptions in the public is kind of the motivation behind forest replanting after harvesting. I think in the public the perception is that the reason we do widespread planting and people especially associated with British Columbia and Alberta is to restore and regenerate forests. But really what that replanting is to do is to create future forests to harvest. It revolves around the forest industry and so, as a consequence of that, the decisions that we've made around this kind of sustainable yield harvest are related to the trees we might want to harvest in the future, as opposed to what was there in the first place or what's most likely to survive a fire, for example.

Jen Baron: 32:23

And so a lot of these historically fire adapted ecosystems either naturally regenerated with denser species that shifted the species composition because fire was removed, so more fire intolerant species moved in, or we've replanted them with things like lodgepole pine, which has value on international markets, and so these really dense pine plantations, in particular dense plantations of conifers, are very different from what the compositions of some of these landscapes were in the past, and that's true across different ecosystem types.

Jen Baron: 32:54

In addition, we have actively excluded deciduous species from our landscape, so through the use of herbicides and brushing and spraying we've removed deciduous species like aspen that are relatively fire intolerant, so as to say they're often described as fuel breaks or asbestos forests. And so when aspen is green, so when its leaves are out in the summer, it's known to resist fire relatively well. When it doesn't have its leaves on, then it can actually increase fire spread. So there's some complexity in the relationship between aspen and fire. But in general, the removal of hardwoods from our forests, as well as the kind of monoculturification of forestry, has also driven changes in the fuels we see on our landscapes.

Janet Sumner: 33:43

So when aspen are green, which is mostly in the summer, when we're expecting probably the highest incidence of and severity of fires, that's when they could be functioning as a bit of a fire break.

Jen Baron: 33:57

Correct. Yes, and that also explains a little bit why we see so much fire activity in the boreal forest in the early spring, because that's prior to when aspen have their leaves on. We also experienced this phenomenon called spring dip, where the foliar moisture is lower in the foliage of the conifers and so they're more prone to burning, and particularly last year like in 2023, when we have a warm and dry spring combined with these kind of fuel moisture conditions, then we can see really large fires start in the boreal that burn throughout the summer.

Janet Sumner: 34:38

Okay, wow, kaya, do you want to take a? Shot at the question Because I can see you pardon the pun burning with anticipation.

Kaya Adleman: 34:47

I guess I'm just curious. We've talked a little bit before on the podcast with some BC-based groups about how fire is kind of a natural part of the BC forest ecosystems.

Jen Baron: 35:03

Could you maybe elaborate a little bit more on that? Yeah, so absolutely, I mean across Canada. Fire is a natural part of almost all ecosystems and BC has a lot of diverse, different types of ecosystems in it. So that largely stems from the diverse topography within BC. That topography and the combinations of climate that it supports, and also kind of the distinct separation of different populations of species, really begets diversity, and that's something that we see and we often compare, for example, in tropical ecosystems. So because we have so many different forest types in BC, then we also have a lot of different adaptations to fire and so kind of on opposite ends of that spectrum might be really dry, low elevation forests and grasslands and open forests, like in the Okanagan or in the Rocky Mountain Trench, which is where I work.

Jen Baron: 35:57

These forests are essentially deserts and so historically they burned very frequently, both combination of lightning ignitions and intentional ignitions from indigenous people through fire stewardship practices, and they burned frequently at low severity, and so we would consider these to be a fuels limited system.

Jen Baron: 36:15

So essentially it's always hot and dry enough for them to burn, but because there's such short intervals between fire, there's not a lot of fuel to burn when a fire is set, and so these are the systems that are characterized by species like ponderosa, pine, interior Douglas fir, sometimes Western larch and bunch grasses, kind of open grasslands and woodlands, and so these historically burn very often.

Jen Baron: 36:37

The other side of that spectrum is something like a boreal forest or a coastal forest, and so these systems are generally considered to be more climate limited, and so there's always a lot of biomass in these ecosystems, but we rarely get the synchronous hot, dry conditions that allow all that biomass to burn, and so in the past these systems would have burned more infrequently but at very high severity when they did burn, because there was so much fuel on the site and in between that kind of gradient of burning, frequently at low severity and infrequently at high severity, there's a lot of our kind of montane and sub-boreal forests, and that's where a lot of our forest harvesting happens in these kind of these systems that are adapted to these mixed severity fire regimes, so a combination of kind of those lower severity fires, more moderate severity fires and higher severity fires.

Janet Sumner: 37:26

So You're saying that the where are the fires occurring right now in BC? Not right this second, but predominantly over the last. What is it six years that you've been studying there? Where are these, the big fires that are getting reported everywhere and are, you know, blowing debris and smoke across the continent? Where's that? Where are those fires occurring?

Jen Baron: 37:55

across the continent. Where are those fires occurring? Yeah, so I would say the fires that become high profile kind of fall into two categories. The biggest fires are certainly in the northern portion of the province and the boreal forests, and that's for a couple of reasons. One is because boreal forests are adapted to burn at high severity.

Jen Baron: 38:09

We are much more likely to find these kind of large fire events that are very climate driven, and so they're inherently often much larger. There's fewer things for them to run into in the north, like fewer communities, fewer fuel breaks, and in addition the way we suppress fires in the boreal in the north is also different. So we have a much more modified response approach to fire in the north than we have for a long time, and that's largely because of resources but also a recognition of the importance of fire to serve a natural role, and so we're much less likely to immediately suppress a fire. When it starts in a boreal forest, that's not immediately threatening a community or other health and safety values. Of course it does impact the forest industry and sometimes that impacts our wildfire management planning, but that's very different decision-making than when, for example, we get a wildfire that starts just outside Kelowna, and so that's the other type of fires that become very high profile.

Jen Baron: 39:05

So those aren't necessarily the largest fires per se, but they're often the most impactful, both in terms of the immediate impact on people living in the area but also kind of the widespread impact where we have a lot of communities in interior British Columbia that are impacted by fire evacuations every year and we get these challenges where, because we have fire complexes burning all summer, we're often evacuating one community to another, where that community is also then impacted by fires and evacuated, and so those fires, while they're not necessarily the largest, are often the least characteristic of their historical disturbance regime, because they're in the dry forests and they also often impact the largest number of people, although perhaps the largest impact last summer in terms of the number of people affected was the smoke that came from the fires largely from the boreal, and so that is also the geographic limits, or lack thereof, of those large fires is something I think we're beginning to also grapple with kind of as a society.

Kaya Adleman: 40:08

Maybe in a BC context can you speak to maybe the, I guess, the role of the forest industry in how they deal with the fires, what's the framework, et cetera.

Jen Baron: 40:21

Yeah, so across BC, bc is mostly crown land, so federal land, which is managed by the province, and BC largely has a a forest management or a forest industry that's based on a tenure system, um, and so the province relegates a lot of the responsibility for managing those lands to the forest licensees that have tenure to harvest on them, and so, as a consequence, what happens is that BC wildfire is the one who manages for fires that occur on those lands. But anything else related to fuels management, for example, or replanting after harvesting, restoration those types of things often fall on the responsibility of the forest licensees. Although the provincial government does have some programs related to wildfire risk reduction on crown land, most of the management by area that happens across BC is done by the forest industry in our managed forest. So across the timber harvested land base. So maybe.

Janet Sumner: 41:25

so I'm just going to interrupt, so can I maybe sort of parse that out. So when you say that the wildfire management is done by the government, so if there is a wildfire they get out and they'll assess whether or not they need to get in there and intervene because it might be a threat to communities, to humans, or it may be a threat to the volume of timber or things like that, or they want to prevent it from a wild spread, that kind of thing. But in terms of managing the precursors to a fire, things like fuel load et cetera, that's left to the forest management companies, and so it's kind of separated out that way. That's what you're saying, right, Just to be clear.

Jen Baron: 42:12

Yeah, that's correct, and so there's very few cases where, if a fire started in BC, bc wildfire wouldn't be the ones responding. Those cases are usually Parks Canada has their own fire response staff, and then for the railroads, they're responsible for a small strip of land on either side of the railroad, but essentially BC wildfire is usually the one responding on public land, often on reserve and on private land. So they are only responsible. Their mandate is to put out fires, and so everything else related to wildfire management is relegated to the province, which is then passed on to the forest licensees, because they're the ones conducting activities on those lands. And so, yes, that's correct. Most of the fuels management that's done in the province, or changes that would impact fuels and wildfire risk, is happening in the forest industry.

Janet Sumner: 43:01

Is the management of the fuels or the source of fuels left to the individual companies, or is there a BC strategy for that, or has there been one created and then that gets downloaded or delegated down to the forestry companies?

Jen Baron: 43:18

Yeah, so the forest companies are only required to manage for what's currently in provincial policy and so they're largely managing for what's called free to grow, essentially growing standards to ensure the forest will come back as a forest. And that kind of conduct of practice as well is managed by the Forest Practices Board. So registered professional foresters are making decisions around forest sustainability. At present that professional designation and that body does not have mandates or restrictions or professional competencies around wildfire, and so that is a bit of a gap in the system in terms of the people that are making the forest management decisions and also designing a lot of the fuel treatments that are happening which are often involved. You know silvicultural management as well, forest thinning are not necessarily experts in wildfire management and so while there's overlap between forestry and wildfire, they are distinct kind of specialties or areas of expertise. They are distinct kind of specialties or areas of expertise.

Jen Baron: 44:15

In the past we used to do a better job in the province at managing wildfire risk through broadcast burning. So in the 70s and 80s there was a lot more broadcast burning happening within the Ministry of Forests back when BC Wildfire employees were still working for the ministry year round and more kind of wildlife and forest health type positions. Those two split in the 90s. It was called the Great Divorce. Prior to that point there was a lot of broadcast burning, largely for silvicultural objectives, so to stimulate regeneration for the next cohort and also for wildlife habitat objectives, and there weren't very many regulations around it. I mean, I wouldn't recommend re-implementing that practice the way it was done in the 70s and 80s. But what happened in the 90s with the Great Divorce and also changes to fear around liability and professional standards, is that we basically stopped doing that and we started just piling slash and burning it at landings and the consequence of that is that there is a lot of fuel left over on past cut blocks that often can amplify wildfires.

Janet Sumner: 45:17

And can you explain what broadcast burning is just for the listeners and maybe for Kaya and I as well?

Jen Baron: 45:23

Yeah, so broadcast burning would essentially be like a prescribed burn. That's done in the forest industry, and so a prescribed burn is essentially any planned, intentionally set fire for specific objectives. And so a prescribed burn is essentially any planned, intentionally set fire for specific objectives. And so a broadcast burn is one we associate with the forest industry usually, so burning the residue that's left over after harvesting usually. But the difference between something like slash pile burning and broadcast burning is that when you're burning slash piles, you're only burning a pile of stuff that you've piled together and you're not burning the whole site. Broadcast burning you burn across the whole site, and so that would be the difference.

Janet Sumner: 45:58

So just to maybe give everybody listening an idea of what that might mean is we use prescribed burns in many of the parks in Ontario and I'm assuming they do in British Columbia as well, and one very famously is High Park in Toronto where they do prescribed burns and that's for wildlife and to bring back certain tree species et cetera. And those prescribed burns, you know they're very carefully done. They're also done in Algonquin Park and you basically set out an area and you decide this is the area specifically that we're going to burn and we're not going to allow the fire to go any further than this. And it is it's kind of using its natural system or its natural way of regeneration and rebuilding to to work for, in favor of what we want to see. And you're saying that they used to do that on a broadcast level in British Columbia and now they've they've ceased that.

Kaya Adleman: 46:53

They used to do that on a broadcast level in British Columbia and now they've ceased that From an ecology standpoint.

Jen Baron: 47:00

How does that generate or help with regeneration? Yeah, so it depends a little bit on the specific ecosystem and the condition prior to the burn, but in general, prescribed burns can help stimulate regeneration of native plants, germination of plants in the seed bank, specifically those that are fire adapted. It also introduces a nutrient flux to the soil and so that can give a growth release, especially if you've just done forest thinning, for example, and then you're doing a burn. So that's often why it's used silviculturally. It can also help with things like kind of broader biogeochemical cycles and hydrological systems. So there are a bunch of ecological benefits to doing so.

Jen Baron: 47:39

And one of perhaps the challenges in recognizing this and the loss of burning in British Columbia is that, particularly in the 90s and early 2000s, there was a lot of discussion towards what was termed as kind of sustainable forestry or sustainable yield forestry and increasing recognition of the importance of the ecology of some of these systems and forest management.

Jen Baron: 48:02

But that wasn't always necessarily implemented in a way that actually benefited the ecology of these systems, and so a good example of that is this concept called emulation of natural disturbance regimes, and what that concept essentially says is that by managing to try to recreate the impacts of the natural disturbance of these forests. We can do forest management like harvesting that's more sustainable. The way that that's been used in British Columbia is that most forests, other than really dry low elevation forests, were assumed to be high severity stand replacing disturbance regimes. And how do you emulate a high severity disturbance regime? Clear cut harvesting. And so we've used this framework to essentially justify clear cut harvesting over large portions of the province, which vastly oversimplifies these forest natural disturbance regimes, these forest natural disturbance regimes, and also to say that, although you are similarly killing all of the trees in a clear-cut harvest versus in a high-severity fire, the ecological impacts after that fire are very different. So the changes in the soil nutrients, for example, or the seed bank, all of those changes are not emulated by harvesting alone.

Janet Sumner: 49:13

Yeah, we have that same problem in Ontario, which you're probably familiar with, and what happens across Canada is often started in one region and then moves across. And this fire emulation piece is very interesting to me, and it is also interesting in the sense that I love what you're just saying about it doesn't replicate or it doesn't emulate fire. That happens naturally. Clear-cutting is not the same as fire, and I've often said that it's not the same as fire, because fire takes out, largely speaking, takes out the genetic, the weaker genetics in a system, whereas clear-cutting is taking out all the genetic winners. It's getting the best of the best and the other thing that it does, it leaves this infrastructure of roads and landings behind that you don't get from a wildfire. Are there any other things that you'd like to say that are maybe the differences between those two systems? And it is absolutely being used to justify large-scale clear-cut logging.

Jen Baron: 50:14

Yeah. So I would say, in general, for fire-adapted species there is nothing that can replace the role of fire. And so you know that isn't to say that we can inform our harvesting based on concepts from natural disturbance. I understand, you know that concept and where it came from, and I think it can be implemented in an appropriate way. So if we're going to do harvesting and if we've determined you know the extent to which we can harvest without continually depleting harvest, you know forest resources and you know declining the annual allowable cut, then we should try to design those harvests in ways that, ecologically, are suited to those ecosystems.

Jen Baron: 50:52

Absolutely, that concept makes sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean we can use it to justify the amount of harvesting we wanted to do in the first place. And so, particularly one of the other discrepancies between those types of systems. And this isn't always to say that broadcast burning is ecologically great or that things like salvage harvesting are ecologically great harvested systems, because of how much disturbance is in them, often introduce invasive species, invasive plants into the seed bank and that can really screw up the fire cycle in a lot of these systems. So, particularly when invasive grasses become introduced, things like cheatgrass, and they get a hold on these systems, then cheatgrass is also very adapted to fire and it competitively excludes native species, and so that additional layer of invasive species in some of these systems and the fact that we're not really managing for the long-term ecology of the systems but instead the long-term sustainability of the forest industry, means that we can really interrupt the natural disturbance cycle and ultimately kind of the composition of these landscapes as a result.

Janet Sumner: 51:58

I mean, you said something a little bit earlier. You used the term sustainable forestry and then you said sustained yield, and I think that that's actually really the nut of the problem is that we've really engaged in forest management that is meant to sustain the yield for forestry, not necessarily to sustain our forests.

Jen Baron: 52:21

Yeah, and I mean there's certainly challenges in there.

Jen Baron: 52:24

I mean I'm not a forester and I'm not a bioeconomist. I understand that. You know BC is, and continues to be, very reliant on its forest industry and will probably always have a forest industry in this province. But many of the conversations around forestry still revolve around how we're going to sustain forestry in British Columbia and this kind of conflation of environmentally sustainable with sustainable yield, which are not the same thing. And I think, particularly in the context of fire risk, there's actually a huge need for the forest industry to expand into different sectors to help us manage some of this biomass that's on these sites, that's not merchantable, that needs to be removed before it can be burned safely, and so retrofitting some of our closed mills and our machinery to deal with smaller stem trees and thinking about kind of smaller scale wood products products that could go into the in the bioeconomy or in biofuels, for example. But I see that more as as kind of fundamentally transforming and adapting the forest industry rather than sustaining it in its current but shrinking form form, all right.

Janet Sumner: 53:40

So the triangle, the topography, and that stays relatively stable because it influences your ecosystem, et cetera. Then you have the climate, and then the other piece is the forest management. That's essentially just to boil this down and summarize it. Management, that's essentially just to boil this down and summarize it, and we've had a hundred years or so of fire suppression, which has built up the fuel load. So then the other thing that actually wasn't covered in Jen's conversation, but I want to hearken back to something that we talked with Peter Wood I think we also talked with Dave and Michelle Connolly and many others which is this idea that forestry is run on a model of sustaining the yield to the mill, and what that means is that you are always expanding the forestry into new intact areas.

Janet Sumner: 54:34

And the reason I bring this up is because, if we know that forestry and how we manage the forest is actually one of the ingredients of those three, that's potentially increasing the risk and severity of forest fires or providing more of a fuel load. If we take forestry and we expand it into new intact areas, are we going to be repeating the same mistakes. And I'm not suggesting that forestry or how we manage forests. We were cognizant of this, you know, 40, 50, 60, 100 years ago or even 20 years ago. But now that we know that this is one of the ways in which we can be potentially building up the fuel load by suppressing the fire and then going in and leaving debris, should we not adjust our thinking and stop expanding into new intact areas with a forestry regime that we know is certainly part of the equation of possible problems in terms of wildfires Not that it's necessarily the only thing, but it's certainly one of the things that we could immediately start to address.

Kaya Adleman: 55:42

Yeah, especially because that's as Michelle has said on our podcast. That's one of the things that we as humans do have control over and, if we're taking the triangle analogy into consideration, again, we don't really have control over the topography of the land, but we do have some influence on the climate and we have likely even more influence in the way that we're managing our forests. So it definitely should be something that we want to address, especially since we said before in the beginning we are teed up again for another record-breaking wildfire season.

Janet Sumner: 56:21

And it's the one that can have the most immediate impact, because, you know, addressing climate change we obviously need to do, but there's always a delay factor, like in reducing your emissions. It's going to take a while for that to impact on the climate system, whereas, um, you know, not expanding into new intact areas, you can. You can, uh, start to change that, and even in terms of the I think dave referenced it in another conversation, or or maybe it came up with jenna but but this idea that if you cut into an intact forest, you've actually created the edge effect, or you've dried out that edge of the forest, which also leads to more dryness inside the interior of that forest, so at least we could be doing that. And then it suggests to me that we need to be thinking about the debris that we have built up in that forest. What do we do with it? Do we leave it as organic material?

Janet Sumner: 57:14

There needs to be a lot of investigation into the different ways, and the simplicity of the argument that I've heard to date has been certainly put forward by governments and by industry that we need to log faster and more, and I'm not sure that that's the answer.

Janet Sumner: 57:32

Maybe it's log smarter, manage the forest smarter and think about fire and not expand into new intact areas. Those are the kinds of things that I would have as questions for any strategy going forward and start to want to build out from there in my understanding. So that's kind of where I land on the conversation. We'd love to hear from you, if you're listening to the podcast and you want to send us something on the speak pipe. What are you thinking about forest fires, what is still bugging you or that you want answers to or that you need to know about? You can send us a voicemail using the speak pipe on our, on our web page. You could send us an email. Um could just let us know what you're thinking and we'd be happy to go and investigate areas where where we might find some answers, because this is a great deal of urgency to the people who live in these areas, but also the urgency is there for us at wildlands and I'm sure many, many canad, canadians and Americans alike.

Kaya Adleman: 58:35

Yeah, and I just want to add, we have been getting some responses over email, so love hearing your guys' feedback and comments on the podcast. So, yeah, if you have questions that you want answered, especially on wildfires, yeah, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Janet Sumner: 58:53

Yeah, all right, thanks. Thanks to Jan, and thanks for all your questions on this. Appreciate it.

Kaya Adleman: 58:59

Yes, thank you.

Janet Sumner: 59:02

If you like listening to the Clear Cut and want to keep the content coming, support the show. It would mean a lot to Kai and I. The link to do so will be in the episode description below.

Kaya Adleman: 59:13

You can also become a supporter by going to our website at wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut and also make sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming platform. It would really help the podcast.