Wildfires: Let Them Burn Backcountry?

"It’s a few extreme fires that cause all our problems, at least from society’s point of view."
"This is where the appropriate response … allows you to concentrate on problem fires and hope to get to them while they’re still small, while allowing Mother Nature to take its course in the back 40."
Dr. Mike Flannigan, professor, University of Alberta

"That fire [a 1976 backwoods wildfire] could have probably been allowed to just burn and it would have put itself out. But in those days, the mantra was: All fire is bad, so we got to suppress it."

And that’s what we did."
"As a society, we have to recognize that if we’re going to manage this problem appropriately, we’re going to have to accept the fact that, at times, we may have to have a little smoke in the air that we may not like. But it’s going to a better outcome than what we’re seeing in the Chilcotin [region of British Columbia] today."
Brian Simpson, retired, former head, B.C. Wildfire Management Branch

A wildfire burns on a mountain behind a home in Cache Creek, B.C., in the early morning hours of July 8.  DARRYL DYCK/THE CANADIAN PRESS

"This huge grief that’s come from Fort Mac [ferocious 2016 Fort McMurray, Alberta wildfire] came from less than 10 per cent of the loss of that town and, really, what would we be looking at if we lost half of that?"

"We could have been looking at a staggering loss on the financial side and how we didn’t lose hundreds of people, I don’t know."
"If you look historically at some of the 19th-century fires: fire got into Fredericton [New Brunswick], fire’s gotten into Timmins [Ontario]. We even had one around Halifax [Nova Scotia] just a couple years ago where a few homes were lost. And the big fire in Tennessee late last year just shows we can have big fires in the East."
Glen McGillivray, managing director, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, Toronto

Last year’s Fort McMurray wildfire, shown in this May 7, 2017 file photo, destroyed nearly 1,600 buildings.  Jonathan Hayward/THE CANADIAN PRESS

There is now general agreement among scientists involved in ecological research that suppressing wildfires hasn't worked to the advantage it was meant to reflect through best forestry practise in response to these natural phenomena. The realization that a different kind of forest management is required is not new, it has been considered for quite some time, but old practises thought to be the logical reaction of authorities to fires threatening great swaths of forest and any towns and homes increasingly in their path are difficult to set aside.

However, a new approach involving backcountry fires permitted without human intervention to burn across millions of hectares is beginning to make sense to those tasked with the monumental job of husbanding these natural resources. Wildfires across North America still routinely see a response owing to the tradition of gathering fire-fighting resources to attempt to control them as they burn their way through valuable timberland. Now, the focus is to restrict firefighting activities to those areas where towns are threatened, and to simply allow wildfires where no human habitation is to burn themselves out.

Biologists are now recognizing that plants and animals appear to thrive in blackened, burnt-out forests, that renewal swiftly takes place, and that indeed some species of flora require that scorched-earth situation to enable them to renew and flourish. It is when human lives, and the livestock they maintain are threatened by being in the pathway of an out-of-control wildfire that the alarm bells bring in all the massive equipment and experienced wildfire-fighters to ward off catastrophe and then the lives of firefighters too are at stake.

Public safety where communities have established themselves in close proximity to forests, or communities that have long been in existence in those vulnerable forested areas remain the driving force behind firefighters answering the call to battle wildfires. An estimation of how often forests went through the natural process of burning out before the era of human habitation, hazards estimates of between eight million to 12 million hectares annually. At the present time that burnout is estimated at 1.5 million to two million hectares, with fire suppression action.

Around the 19th century the prevailing view was that forests ideally should be represented as economically valuable standing timber. Industrial scale techniques to battle wildfires gave firefighting agencies the capability of fighting wildfires by the 1930s, maintaining the landscape by suppressing wildfires. Even then a small grouping of environmental scientists felt that this type of response gave little benefit to the natural surroundings. The nature of wildfires has undergone a not-too-subtle change attributed to climate change; they have become more savage, more difficult to suppress and as such more dangerous to those fighting them.

Now, additionally, it is well understood that hundreds of species live, and some prefer to live in forests that have been recently burned, becoming by far the vastly preferred habitat. And with that realization the recognition by many more environmentalists that the health of the forests is maintained when fires thin them out of their climax condition, inviting the resurgence of the forest as saplings regenerate from the dead ash which in fact, enriches the forest soil.

It doesn't take long before trees begin sprouting, butterflies return to flit through shrubs when the density of a forest opens to the wind, sun and air and certain plants find their ideal growing places. The 'dead' forest in the wake of a wildfire becomes full of standing charred tree trunks called 'snags', many up to 24 to 30 meters in height, a sad and sorry sight, but a natural one. Environmentalists have noted that the black-backed woodpecker for one, included in the U.S. Endangered Species Act as threatened thrives under these conditions.

Environmentalists urge governments to help people living in forest-fire-vulnerable communities to think before they build there, or to withhold licenses to build. Alternately, taking steps in fire-prone areas to make homes fire-resistant, as for example, installing metal roofs on homes, enabling people to take partial responsibility for their choices and potential outcomes.

A wildfire burns on a mountain in the distance behind a house that remains standing on the Ashcroft First Nation, near Ashcroft, B.C., on Sunday July 9.  DARRYL DYCK/THE CANADIAN PRESS