IT'S UP TO YOU

I’ve been writing for some time about the sudden and curious rejection of our age-old understanding that humans cause much, and in many places virtually all, our wildfires. We recently decided to transmute Smokey’s message that “only YOU can prevent forest fires” into what I see as its opposite: “only THEY…” We did so when someone determined that it was industry and government whose policies and practices were responsible for fomenting climate change, gifting us an everwarming world with longer and more extreme wildfire seasons.

My sense was that this was an unwarranted theft of people’s agency and repudiation of so much historical data. Though the fire situation may have been open for debate for some time, all reasonable refutations have been extinguished. Our abundant, though only recent, data on fires (including their number, burn area, severity, property damage, and fatalities) just do not support the assertion that there are more fires or that those are meaningfully worse today than in the past. Add to this picture our tragic policy of forest fire prevention, resulting in a terrible build-up of fire fuel that can only yield catastrophic conflagrations when they inevitably ignite. And then pair all that with the fact that we’ve been pushing our habitations and industrial projects (and, of course, all those power and gas lines and roads that service them) farther and farther into what was just recently uninhabited wilderness. Right.

Suddenly you see how silly this whole thing looks. And it looks only more ridiculous when you notice the shocking evidence yielded by our accidental nation-wide wildfire experiment. As you’ll recall, immediately before the 2020 fire season we restricted people’s movement while also shutting down access to outdoor areas, including regional, provincial, and national parks, historic and recreations sites, hiking trails and campgrounds due to fears about spreading COVID-19. The result was a matching of the fewest number of fires on record and not a major reduction of wildfire burned area but a staggeringly unprecedented reduction in area burned. We went from a decade average for annual burned area of 3,000,000 hectares down to 200,000, which is even a small fraction of the burned area compared to the years with the least amount of burn on record. Fewer people than ever in the woods results in the lowest number of fires ever and by far the least amount of wildlands burned. Is all of that that pure stochasticity? Correlation? Or maybe causation?

That’s my biased perspective on fires. With that on the brain, this Spring I was reading about federal authorities threatening that the whole country was likely in for the worst ever year for wildfires — after a truly terrible year in 2023. Four federal ministers even held a press conference on Parliament Hill, forecasting catastrophe predicted by extended drought and warmer-than-usual weather all enhanced by El Niño. They warned the nation that we were in for the worst but that authorities were anticipating this and would be prepared to help.

I heard nothing about fires for the rest of the year and then just came across this article talking about the 2024 wildfire season in Nova Scotia. So what happened in Nova Scotia? Well, 2024 was that province’s least active wildfire season on record. The Department of Natural Resources and Renewables reported that, by contrast to the 10-year average of 3,277 hectares of land burned annually, they only saw 47 hectares burn during this latest fire season. And to what did authorities attribute this very significant decline? While noting that 97% of wildfires in that province are started by human activity, Natural Resources Department explained how improved public awareness of fire restrictions along with increased fines, up from $240 to $29,000 per infraction, and a zero-tolerance enforcement policy kept things under control.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, the folks who report on this stuff, don’t yet have numbers up for a national overview of the 2024 season. It will be interesting to see how the year that was predicted to be the worst on record will pan out. And I wonder what might happen to what is said to be our worsening climate-induced fire regime if other provinces adopted the policies found to be so effective in Nova Scotia? (I also wonder what would happen if fines for speeding, distracted driving, and driving under the influence went up by two orders of magnitude? I have a hunch.)