Breaking the Cycle: Wildfires

This week we return to our conversation with fire ecologist Jen Baron from the University of British Columbia. In our last episode, we explored the main causes of the severe wildfires we've been experiencing in recent years. Now we turn our focus to strategies for managing those factors within our control.
We know wildfires are driven by topography, climate, and the availability of fuel. While we can’t alter a forest’s underlying topography, we can reduce the carbon emissions fueling climate change. And in the short term, we can improve forest management practices, such as fire suppression and clearcutting, to prevent an increase in flammable material. With Jen, we explore tools that can break the cycle of a century of fire suppression. What are the opportunities for forestry and what is missing from the public discourse on wildfires?

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

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Transcript

Jan 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.

Jan 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.

Jan Sumner: 0:41

All right, so we are on to our second episode with Jen, a fire ecologist from British Columbia who also has worked and live in Ontario as well, before the wildfire season had started, and now going back and listening to it. So we can. This is also just part of the sausage making or the I don't know the quiche making, or whatever you want to call it. We record first with our guest and then Kaya and I sit down and we do our intros and outros, and Kaya does some magic behind the scenes to make sure that the narrative of the story that we recorded is is sound and we don't have a lot of extraneous bits, because you know, when you're chatting with somebody, sometimes you do. But listening to this back, uh, so that we can do our intros and outros, I'm just sick in my heart, uh, because there's a bunch of reasons. But as I was listening to it, I mean, jen does a very good job of explaining the triangle and we've had some responses as well. We've had responses on our lists where people have been writing back and saying well, you know, I think, that there's human-caused ignitions, there's arson, there's various other things that are going on and robust defense of climate change being the cause, and and I'm not saying that there is no place for that let me just I'll go right back to what jen says instead of giving my opinion. She talks about it as a triangle, that this is topography that underlies your ecosystem, that determines how your ecosystem functions. If it's high mountain terrain, it's going to be very different than if it's going to be a coastal BC forest or an interior boreal forest, etc. So that's sort of one of the fixed things that we can't really change, because it's where the forest is and what ecosystem is there. The two things that we have human contributions to or some ability to control or react with are one, climate change, which we've been affecting through our emissions, and I mean emissions beyond just tailpipe and smokestack and oil and gas, but also looking at the emissions that come from the natural world and how we are changing it. And then the third in that triangle is the fuel load or the access to fuel, and that has definitely been influenced and she talks about it in her interview as we've had over a hundred years of fire suppression and that was an ill-advised idea at the same time that we were doing and ramping up climate change.

Jan Sumner: 3:32

And yeah, I felt when I listened to this, listened to it back just a great deal of sadness. A great deal of sadness for all the people who are being evacuated, a great deal of sadness for all of the human loss that's occurring, all of the strength of the firefighters that have to pull enormous efforts to get these fires under control and, of course, the loss of all of these places and the harm that's happening to nature and species. And so it just, it just yeah. That's where I kind of landed on this, and we can unpack more of what she says, et cetera. But I had to kind of start with the very human side for me, which is just listening to this back and knowing the fires are raging, and listening to it. It's almost too much to bear.

Kaya Adleman: 4:24

Yeah, no, I, I agree. I think the I think the wildfire conversation is something that definitely strikes to the heart of a lot of people. I mean a, obviously, because it's people lose their homes, they lose communities. It's very, very sad, like like their sense of place, etc. But also, I think, just because of the visual idea of the world burning is very, very frightening. For me, and I'm sure to a lot of other people as well. It makes, you know, climate change seem a lot more real. For me, to see images and to hear you know the impacts of these wildfires that we've been seeing in recent years is very much strikes to the heart that we do need to do something, and that's why I hope that this part of the conversation that we had with Jen will provide some hope for people, because we do get into the tools that we have at our disposal to be able to better adapt and deal with these fires.

Jan Sumner: 5:27

And and I just I wanted to put this out there because sometimes you're just doing a. I don't want to be very sanitized in how we approach this. I want to be very real and who I am, et cetera. But this is for me, when I feel eco grief, this sort of climate grief, and grief for the planet and grief for the people, and these things are happening to them and it seems out of their control. It seems out of control for me watching this and I've worked on forestry now for 20 years and 10 years on climate change before that so it just is, uh, devastating to see this, this runaway. Almost that's what it feels like. And you're right, I think that what Jen gives us in the interview is a whole lot of ideas and things that we could start to implement, and she makes a rousing call to action.

Jan Sumner: 6:21

Yes, and so there are definitely there's some great ideas that she comes in here with, and I mean, one of the things I was intrigued with this idea was she was talking about small stemmed wood retrofits and taking that fuel off the land.

Jan Sumner: 6:36

So when they go in and harvest, a lot of the small stem, trees and et cetera are left on the ground, and so could you actually take some of that fuel load off the ground and be using it in mills that have now been maybe not necessarily abandoned, but they're not as useful anymore or maybe they need to be retrofitted because they were designed to actually mill large logs and there's no large logs left or large trees.

Jan Sumner: 7:00

So now you're looking at the small stem and could you retrofit that and even use it as potentially biomass in a local application, because biomass shipped around the world has a huge carbon footprint A biomass that might be used locally for, maybe, a school boiler or for home heating or for looking into basically being heat in the mill those kinds of things.

Jan Sumner: 7:26

That might be something that would be worth looking at. But certainly the current management decisions are part and she says this quite clearly are part of what's causing the problem, and so she has a big call out to start changing some of the management decisions and the forestry management decisions and just that they're not as economically viable. And so this is going to take a concerted effort by by governments, by decision makers, by everyone to say we're actually going to take this on head on and that the time for continuing with fire suppression has passed. Yeah, like we should not. Be like fire suppression to stop fires from hurting people and homes and things like that, but fire suppression to maintain forestry she's saying that's sort of a counter to good practice. Yeah, and I think that's kind of a counter to good practice.

Kaya Adleman: 8:25

Yeah, and I think that's kind of the fun part, isn't it too? Like we have these problems that are clearly laid out, and then it's fun to be able to think of creative solutions that work in everybody's interest, and I think that's what we'll get a little bit of a flavor of in this piece.

Jan Sumner: 8:42

Let's go Jen in this piece, let's go, jen. So if we were to think about what are the best things to go into the forest you talked about removing some of the fuels there the response of the Canadian like last summer when things were really bad they were bad in BC, they were bad here in Ontario and Quebec we had smoke covering large portions of the provinces and going down into the US, and so the response that I saw quite often from the industry and from the Canadian government and other governments was that means we need to get out and log more faster, sooner. So can you maybe unpack a little bit what you would see? What is a good direction for us to be going?

Jen Baron: 9:27

Yeah. So I will say that current forest harvesting practices in British Columbia are not reducing wildfire risk, and in some cases they're actually increasing wildfire risk, where we have those large cut blocks with a lot of residue on the surface where we can get a really intense burn. And so there is no situation where expanding current forest industry practices will address the wildfire problem. It will probably only make it worse. The reason that we're in this situation is because of those current practices, amongst other management decisions. So there is a fundamental role for the forest industry in addressing some of the risk, but most of that is not economically feasible under current models and markets, and so at present it's heavily subsidized, where it does take place, by provincial and federal governments, and it mostly is concentrated in the wildland-urban interface around communities in relatively small treatments, and those treatments are also not necessarily always effective. So in order to be effective at reducing wildfire risk or reducing the potential severity of a wildfire, you need to remove fuel from the system, and so that often requires forest thinning, followed by broadcast burning or removals for the bioeconomy, or something has to come out of the system. If you only thin and you rearrange that fuel to the surface floor, you're just moving the fuel from the canopy to the surface, and so that does not. It'll change the fire behavior, but it won't necessarily reduce the fire intensity in the way that's desirable. So there is certainly a need to do more treatments and also to do them beyond the wildland urban interface.

Jen Baron: 11:05

We know these fires are happening far outside of our communities and often burning into them, and so it's not just the WUI that's a problem. In addition, a lot of people also have these conversations around. I am a proponent of the FireSmart program. I think it has a role. But if all we do is FireSmart our homes and then everything around us burns to black, then there's no forest industry to employ people, there's no landscapes to recreate on. You know, our watershed quality will be shot Like. There's a lot of other values we need to manage for beyond the wildland urban interface. So there is a huge need to manage across crown land, in particular outside of the WUI. But expanding the forest industry in its current form won't address that.

Jan Sumner: 11:47

So just for everybody else, when you say the WUI, you mean the wildland urban interface, right, yeah, okay, just clarifying that. That's a fun acronym I know I love that too, the WUI. So what would you do then in this? Would you do thinning and broadcast burns in the larger landscape across the Crown Lands? Is that the way that you would approach this?

Jen Baron: 12:12

Yeah. So the way I think of it is that there's a lot of tools in the toolbox and not every tool makes sense in every situation. It kind of depends on the context. In addition, I think we realize, you know, this concept of landscape fire management. We need to increase the pace and scale of our treatments, but we cannot treat everywhere and we're spending a lot of money to treat a very small amount of land right now, and so we really need to figure out how to scale up our treatments, while also considering challenges around liability and capacity for things like prescribed burns, and also thinking about priorities.

Jen Baron: 12:45

Where are the values that we're most concerned about protecting? Because, ultimately, most of this forest will burn eventually, and our only option is to intervene to change how it will burn when it burns eventually, not to decide whether or not it burns. And so part of that process is identifying where different values are in the landscape and where different treatments might be suitable to those different values. So, for example, if an area is already written into a harvesting plan, then thinking about how we might augment that harvesting plan to reduce wildfire risk. So, for example, broadcast burning after harvesting, increasing the role of broadcast burning and also kind of the expertise within professional forester designations around harvesting with wildfire risk in mind, expanding the use of thinning and prescribed burning in and adjacent to communities, as well as reintroducing the role of cultural fire, indigenous fire stewardship.

Jen Baron: 13:48

And also expanding our use of not just modified response wildfires, which we more so do when we're triaging our resources. So we say this wildfire isn't threatening a community, so we'll let it burn, but often it's burning extreme fire, weather in ways that are uncharacteristic, but instead saying here are locations where, if a fire ignited, it would not immediately threaten resources and values, and so under these conditions, we can let fire do the work, we can let it do its job. Unfortunately, during kind of those weather windows where we might let the fire burn, that's usually when we have the resources to put it out. So being able to shift our mindset and use more fire, letting fire do the work under conditions where it's safe for it to do so, is also a big part of that toolkit.

Kaya Adleman: 14:34

As opposed to this more proactive approach that you're describing. Would you say that the government is more just reacting to the problem?

Jen Baron: 14:43

Yeah, I would say, in general, we have a very reactive approach.

Jen Baron: 14:46

20 years ago, after the 2003 fire season, the firestorm in Kelowna, there was a report that came out calling for some of these changes, and that has continued after every major fire season, essentially in British Columbia.

Jen Baron: 15:02

There are kind of some like institutional policy and governance challenges associated with that. So the mandate of the wildfire service, the scale of recent fire seasons, means that we will never be able to get rid of fire suppression. We will continue to rely on it, and probably even more so, and I certainly am not of the mindset that we need to defund fire suppression. We're already under-resourced during current fire seasons, but I think most scientists are also in agreement that we can't suppress our way out of this problem, and so, although during the fire season we hear calls for things like, you know, a national firefighting service or more aircraft, these types of things, that alone is just continuing to try to play catch up on a problem that has been ongoing for over a hundred years, and so we really need, you know, an equal or larger investment in these proactive approaches if we're actually going to get ahead of the problem.

Jan Sumner: 15:56

Yeah, I want to push on the fire suppression. So I think that there's fire suppression that we do in response to a fire that might be threatening, etc. I agree with you on that that it's not a good idea to stop that, because we absolutely need to take care of humanity and human habitation. But fire suppression like maybe I'll go at this another way If we think about what is actually increasing the fuel load, that is often the practices that are employed from forest management and that includes some fire suppression. It also includes clear cutting and the slash and how it's left, et cetera. So would now be a time to actually say we need to look at our forest management practices, not just so. The two responses are let's get more firefighters, um, and let's go out and harvest as much as we can in anticipation that it's going to burn anyway. So to me it's almost like, yes, let's keep funding the response to fires, but we also need to take a cold hard look at our forest management practices and stop doing the ones that are actually accelerating the problem.

Jen Baron: 17:12

So immediately we should stop doing the things that are making it worse, which include things like leaving a lot of slash on cut blocks or brushing and spraying aspen. I mean, that's essentially a free solution because we spend a lot of money brushing and spraying aspen. That we could just not. And that's immediately, you know, a wildfire risk reduction, treatment and then, long term, trying to implement some of these broader changes. So when people ask me, what's realistic in terms of how much can we treat each year? Right now we treat a couple thousand hectares per year.

Jen Baron: 17:44

In BC maybe 3,000 to 5,000 hectares, and we don't actually have any real records of those treatments either. They go into forest management databases and they're not flagged as fuel treatments. So I would like to argue that, given the extent of area we harvest each year, we should be aiming to retrofit the forest industry and proactively manage an equal or larger area in treatments if we're capable of harvesting that area of the land base, to shift that capacity, to address some of the wildfire risk, and that would also ensure a more sustainable future for the forest industry. I think the forest industries are concerned because they've realized a lot of their tenure is going to burn and they will lose that fiber, and so they to some extent are interested and invested in these changes, and the Forest Practices Board did come out with a special report last year on landscape fire management that articulates quite a few of these concepts.

Jan Sumner: 18:46

Okay. So in terms of the fires, I also want to get to how much burns, and I'm thinking very much in terms of carbon. So one of the things that people have talked about is the wildfires are just basically obliterating the carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere, and I have not looked at this in depth, but some of the photographic evidence that we looked around the Big Mac fire. We were looking at it and saying we're not sure that it's actually a complete removal of the carbon, because there's a lot of standing charcoal or standing trees that are you know, for all intents and purposes, that carbon's stillly using the limbs and the needles and that that really just creates an enormous conflagration kind of thing. And my question to you is have I got this all wrong, or has the intensity of the fires become so great that it is eviscerating all that carbon?

Jen Baron: 19:55

Yeah. So to be honest I don't think we have a very good idea at scale of how much carbon we're actually emitting during these recent fire seasons. So at present we don't yet have kind of national maps on burn severity. For example, Like in the US, there's the Monitoring Trends and Burn Severity Dataset. The Canadian Forest Service is working on datasets like that, and so is BC Wildfire, but they all have to be field validated, so we don't actually have a super good idea of the effects of recent fires In general.

Jen Baron: 20:28

It is true that most fires burn patchy, even high severity fires. There are areas within those fire perimeters that you know lakes or water bodies or rock that don't burn, and so we do know that our fire perimeter records generally overestimate the area burned, although there is often heterogeneity within that as well. So patches that burn at high severity, areas that fire skips, fire refugia, so areas that fire persistently skips over, that serve often as sources for seed dispersal and new regeneration. But I also think that we don't have a great idea of the long-term carbon impacts of these fires, and so when we account for that carbon you're right we often assume that it's all released immediately, when in reality some of those pools are consumed and released immediately, and some of those pools, particularly the standing immediately, and some of those pools, particularly the standing dead, are released and decay over much longer time periods. So essentially we can assume that that carbon will be emitted, but we don't know exactly when it will be emitted.

Jen Baron: 21:34

In addition, one of the big risks of these severe fires is that they might burn again at high severity.

Jen Baron: 21:36

And when a stand burns at a short interval at high severity, that's when we get all of the biomass on site essentially consumed and state or phase transition to something that is potentially totally novel from what was there.

Jen Baron: 21:49

So these moonscapes or kind of shrublands, invasive grass systems, areas that are completely novel ecosystems that we have no frame of reference for, and so one of the major concerns with those high severity fires and the carbon cycle in particular, is that they might burn again, and particularly when that standing dead starts to fall down in a couple of years. If we get another synchronous fire year at the same time, then we can have really high intensities in those stands. So it is complicated. I do think that in general we're probably still underestimating the amount of carbon that we're emitting, because most of our carbon inventory management is based on data sets that inventory merchantable timber, and we know there's a lot more fuel in these stands than what's merchantable timber, and so in general, we're under-accounting for the amount of biomass, but we're also you know, it's a large country but we do vastly oversimplify the carbon dynamics.

Jen Baron: 22:40

probably yes.

Jan Sumner: 22:41

Yeah, and I think there's also a good chance, with the increased severity of these fires, that we're losing some of that soil carbon as well, which is also not, you know, reported, and I would like to see that. So it is complex and we've oversimplified it and there's going to be places where we're releasing more and maybe places where we're releasing less, but we've got these blanket assumptions. That's interesting.

Jen Baron: 23:06

Yeah, particularly in systems that have a lot of below ground carbon. So I'm thinking peatlands and also coastal forests that have up to a foot of duff, for example. That carbon we do not do a very good job of accounting for and that is a huge concern, especially those peatlands, I think. Moving forward and potential methane emissions that result and that is something again that people are working on and looking into, but our current systems don't do a good job of accounting for and you get lots of zombie fires in those peatlands.

Jan Sumner: 23:39

Yeah, maybe we should just explain what a zombie fire is for anybody who's listening.

Jen Baron: 23:45

Yeah, the media came up with that term, I didn't.

Jan Sumner: 23:47

I know, I know, I think the scientists think it's pretty funny.

Jen Baron: 23:50

But essentially and I'm not a boreal expert or a peatlands expert, but I'll do my best to do it justice so essentially because there's so much organic matter in the peatlands that dry out over a period of time similar to throughout boreal forests.

Jen Baron: 24:08

Once a fire starts in these systems, it doesn't necessarily burn at high severity the whole time, and I think that's generally a misconception as well, like Donny Creek last summer when people were like it's 500,000 hectares, I think they envisioned like 500,000 hectares of like flaming front, like it's all on fire at the same time.

Jen Baron: 24:26

But what that really means is that 490,000 hectares have burnt and you know a couple, like a couple thousand hectares are on fire at the flaming front moving forward, and then there's little hot spots that pop up throughout the fire. And so in the case of zombie fires because there aren't, particularly in peatlands, because there aren't overstory trees that are on fire necessarily the fire is actually burning underground and when you get the conducive fire weather, then it will flare up again, but otherwise it's kind of dormant, and I think that's where the idea of zombie fires comes from and also where we get some of those images or videos from last fire season, like in Northern Quebec, where all the fires come up at once because all those ignitions occurred due to lightning clusters over the previous, you know, several weeks. But then we get a hot dry cycle, come in, they're burning underground and then they all flame up at the same time.

Jan Sumner: 25:12

They come back to life, hence the zombie term. 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: 25:29

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.

Jan Sumner: 25:45

I have two other questions that I have. One of them is you talked about retrofitting mills for smaller stemmed trees. Can you give us an example of that, or why would you do that?

Jen Baron: 26:02

Yeah, so I think this is an idea that comes out of kind of intersections between wildfire risk management and people who work in the bioeconomy. The idea on the forest industry side is that with decreases in the annual allowable cut, we have seen a lot of licensees starting to leave British Columbia or shifting their markets and a lot of closures of mills where rural economies rely on them, and those have been relatively recent. So those mills in general are still in operable condition, but they're designed to manage large trees and there are no longer large trees to harvest on those land bases. At the same time, a lot of those rural communities are facing heightened wildfire risk, with a large need for these fuel reduction treatments to reduce fire risk around communities and make it so that we can reintroduce fire more beneficially. And so what we imagine, kind of in the intermediate term over the next kind of like five to 20 years, is we'll need to remove a lot of biomass from these stands that has filled in over the past hundred years before they could be safely burned.

Jen Baron: 27:13

Have these mills that are available that are not currently operating, as well as people who are employed by the forest industry who have since had to look for work elsewhere. There's an opportunity to retrofit them to manage some of these smaller stems that would be coming out, and so that will likely require, you know, subsidies and investments. But at present the way a lot of these forest thinning treatments work is there's a lot of biomass that we can't do anything with because we don't have the infrastructure to manage it, and so that is also carbon emitted. It often gets burned, and so a way to offset the short-term carbon loss of these treatments is also to try to find other things to do with the wood, whether that's kind of small-scale wood products or chipping or paper products, kind of more creative solutions, also bioenergy options to support these communities, trying to think of how that wood could flow back into the forest industry, considering that we do have a surplus of biomass. It's just not biomass that fits within current markets.

Jan Sumner: 28:14

So small stemmed fiber and you're calling it biomass, but it's biomass is often used as a short term for biofuel and what you're really saying is that this is smaller stemmed wood products that are wood that can then get turned into either products. It might be turned into biomass for fuel that could be used to run a mill, or could be used to run a school boiler, or could be used in homes across the region, etc. So there's a there's a job opening or a a financial opportunity there to to retrofit the industry so that we can start using some of the smaller stemmed fiber that's coming out, because, quite frankly, we've basically removed all the large old trees that used to be there, so getting out and combining sort of a fire treatment regime with a potentially an economic opportunity.

Jan Sumner: 29:12

But, as you say, it's going to require some retrofitting of the industry and a moving away even from the big producers. Right, because the big producers are really about maximizing the volume of cubic meters going through a mill and this is more about doing some niche products and some niche ideas.

Jen Baron: 29:32

Yeah, and I would say it's less about directly trying to find the next thing for the forest industry and more so to say that we have recognized at a provincial scale that our current management decisions are only perpetuating the problem and that we need to act quickly at scale to reverse some of those consequences. If we would like to interrupt the fire cycle that's currently ongoing, and one of the consequences of that is that we're going to have to remove a lot of biomass, as you say, like small scale fiber, from these forests and at the same time, a lot of local and small rural communities have been the most negatively impacted by the changes to the forest industry that we've seen as a consequence of the pine beetle outbreak and kind of these other changes declines, an annual allowable cut and so is there a way to support those local economies and also find a way to not waste all of the fuel, all of the biomass that comes out of these systems by retrofitting the mills and and kind of shifting capacity and expertise?

Jan Sumner: 30:38

Do you see any opportunity to change power harvesting and what I mean by that very specifically is using full tree harvesting that might leave the most amount of slash on a site, versus, you know, stem only or select, cut or is there any kind of forest harvesting method that you would say this is going to be better because it will leave less slash or less fuel?

Jen Baron: 31:05

yeah, I think in general we are moving away, hopefully, from planning for clear cuts in the future. Unfortunately, most of what we do in BC is still clear cut harvesting and that certainly is the most negative in terms of the ecosystem impacts but also the potential fire risk. After I think you know more selective harvesting systems, kind of variable retention and kind of managing for variable age classes and also thinking a little bit more about what is actually ecologically appropriate in different systems. So that's not to say that I would, you know, make the same recommendation in dry forests as I would for harvesting and kind of like colder montane forests. But I do think in general A the less slash we produce, probably the better, and B the more we manage that residue.

Jen Baron: 32:03

So, for example, what we do mostly now is either clear cut or sometimes seed tree harvesting, but we'll often leave as seed trees the species that aren't merchantable, so things like Western Larch, for example.

Jen Baron: 32:16

So it's very common to see a young plantation with Western Larch in the overstory and the plantation has a bunch of slash underneath it.

Jen Baron: 32:22

That's very common to see in Southeastern British Columbia and the Rockies, and so what we'll often do with that slash is, instead of even piling it on site, they pile it at landings and they burn it at the landing, and so there's a ton of residue left on site. And so I think thinking about both what makes sense ecologically in terms of which species we should be taking from those systems and what we're retaining, as well as making more strategic decisions about how we manage the slash and the residue, would be more adaptive, moving forward. And you know, I will say there are some regions or models or licensees that do that quite well. I think, in particular, in the community forests across British Columbia, they do a very good job of trying to manage for multiple values, including creating revenue to manage the forest, as well as managing for wildlife, habitat, wildfire risk, you know, recreation for the community. Many First Nations also do a very good job of this as well, with very small budgets, but it's not something we've really seen at scale.

Jan Sumner: 33:33

I guess, when I sort of think about the fact that we've got an acceleration of wildfires, both in severity and frequency and intensity, and that's very much being driven from a climate perspective, as you were saying, but then we also have this fuels increase.

Jan Sumner: 33:54

We're not going to harness or prevent climate change from continuing for for some time. You know we we might be able to reduce our emissions and hopefully we do and hopefully we get a handle on that but it's going to continue for the next little while. Is the best, or is part of the best, strategy to stop expanding our forest management and harvesting into new intact systems? Is that should we start to allow some of these intact or natural forests to have their insect breaks, their you know, their fires, et cetera, and give them more space to do that and stop trying to manage with forest management? I mean, obviously, if it's going to affect human life or communities, we need to go in and suppress the fires. But should we just stop expanding into these new intact areas, give them more space, take a precautionary approach, allow the systems themselves to have a response back and forth? Is that kind of one of the things I've been thinking about?

Jen Baron: 35:04

Yeah, so I think that, in general, reducing expansion of the forest industry in its current form is probably a proactive approach. Unfortunately, even in areas that we haven't been harvesting, things have changed in those systems, and that includes other industries like oil and gas, but it also includes the indirect consequences of fire suppression. So there is no area where we haven't suppressed fires, and so those consequences are felt everywhere. So I think it's not we're far past the point where we can just leave things alone and they'll respond naturally. We've changed too many elements of the natural environment to expect forests to respond in a way that's resistant or resilient to future disturbance. But I do think that if we are going to do any management activity in those forests that haven't previously been harvested, it certainly shouldn't be more harvesting the way we've been harvesting.

Jen Baron: 35:57

Do think that if we are going to do any management activity in those forests that haven't previously been harvested, it certainly shouldn't be more harvesting the way we've been harvesting, and so that can include things like allowing fire to re-enter into those systems, so things like fuel treatments, and that's where it's very important that the fuel treatments are well designed and that we're not using fuel treatments to actually, you know, take merchantable biomass out of those sites that we actually are removing the fuels that are at risk, and also things like looking at regeneration strategies after fires that occur in those types of forests.

Jen Baron: 36:31

Will they regenerate in a way that we would consider to be desirable, or do we need to intervene and manage for things like invasive species or to encourage the you know regeneration of native plants? Or should we be introducing kind of climate adapted seedlings as opposed to the seedlings that might regenerate naturally on those sites? Those types of strategies, I think, can be fairly adaptive. But I also I think I guess I worry that there are no systems that are untouched or unmanaged. I mean, the impacts of our management practices have been so widespread that even in areas that have been kind of safe from harvesting per se, we've still removed the natural disturbance from.

Jan Sumner: 37:15

Yeah, I think there are some forests in BC, but you're right, it is fairly widespread.

Jen Baron: 37:20

I'm thinking the northwest, with the Casca territory, where they don't really have any mining oil or gas and they haven't had forestry so there are some areas in particular, where we have these very large landscapes, and we have been managing fire differently in the north that's also true, so we have been letting fire burn more regularly and certainly in those cases I would advocate for discouraging continued industry expansion, kind of from Prince George South. We've had such widespread impacts in terms of the forest industry that I think there is no stand back and let it do its thing, unfortunately, but I do think, particularly in boreal forests that there's, there might still be a space for that, although one of the challenges is whether those forests are going to be resilient to climate change going to be resilient to climate change, and that's where it becomes very important for us to monitor, because we really don't know how they will respond and whether they will respond in ways that are desirable or undesirable or unexpected.

Jan Sumner: 38:36

I have one last question, and you may not be able to speak about this, but I want to ask because we've seen it in the news what's your thoughts about? They want to get in and log Stanley Park before it burns.

Jen Baron: 38:51

Yeah, so I have been paying attention to the conversation around Stanley Park. I would consider Stanley Park to be a novel ecosystem. Stanley Park is not a pristine piece of old growth forest that we're managing for for diverse habitat values. It's a park that's visited by millions of tourists and so we have to manage it that way. I mean, if there is a lot of fall down, for example because of mortality from the insect outbreak that went through, that is a public safety risk and so ultimately you know, sometimes I struggle with these conversations around wildfire risk on the coast.

Jen Baron: 39:35

Sometimes we get these questions about Vancouver Island as well, and it certainly is possible that we could experience a bad wildfire on the coast. Sometimes we get these questions about Vancouver Island as well, and it certainly is possible that we could experience a bad wildfire on the coast. You know, never say never. Every time you say that during a fire season, then that thing seems to happen. You know, you say it won't jump the lake, it jumps the lake, right. So crazy things happen every year.

Jen Baron: 39:54

But of all the places I'm concerned of, certainly the lower mainland has a dense population, but it's still a relatively wet system. We get enough precipitation in the winter that we're rarely faced with really heightened wildfire risk and when we are, our response is so quick. I mean, if a fire ignited in Stanley Park, our suppression response would be very rapid. So I think the questions around public safety in Stanley Park are important. Fire risk certainly, but I'm not sure I would even consider that a wildfire. To be honest, considering the size of the park, that would be like an urban forest fire in my mind.

Jan Sumner: 40:32

Would you think maybe a prescribed burn might work in that situation?

Jen Baron: 40:36

Again, it's really hard to say actually because the species composition is so unique. I mean it's so overstocked with hemlock, which is part of the reason why they've had the looper moth problem in the first place. It's possible it might make sense. I have a hard time making recommendations in systems that don't have a frame of reference for, so it's much easier for me to make recommendations for dry interior forests where they used to burn a lot. We know they used to burn and they haven't burned, and so that makes a lot of sense ecologically. If we're trying to do some type of restoration and also adapt it to climate change, we want to go back towards those more open conditions. We know that the native species are adapted to fire, and so that's actually easier.

Jen Baron: 41:19

Making these decisions in things like coastal forests, urban forests, boreal forests is actually more challenging because we don't have a frame of reference for when the climate was like this, when they burn, this frequently be. So, particularly if we're thinking about thinning and burning in coastal and boreal forests, we also potentially risk, when we open up the canopy, increasing wind speeds and solar penetration to the understory, which can dry out a lot of those really dense ground and surface fuels, that duff layer, and so it could actually increase wildfire risk, and so I think that's one of the things we're trying to better understand. But that's kind of a case separate from Stanley Park. Stanley Park is a totally unique can of worms. We would never be doing this type of management intervention there if it was, you know, in the backside of a mountain somewhere. Right, this is a very specific place that we make management decisions for.

Jan Sumner: 42:14

Yeah, no, that's a lot to think about.

Kaya Adleman: 42:17

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.

Jan Sumner: 42:40

Your support means the world to us I always just have one more question, don't I? Uh, I'm actually going to stop for a second and let kaya kaya. Are you have your last few? Yeah?

Kaya Adleman: 42:53

um, I guess, as a fire ecologist, what are your thoughts on the conversation around last year's wildfire season?

Jen Baron: 43:04

Yeah, that's a great question. I think I have noticed changes in how we talk about fire, even over the past five years, and in general I would say that some of those changes are positive. So, for example, when I do media interviews, I now get asked about things like the role of fuel treatments and whether we should be doing more prescribed burning or what should we be doing kind of long term to address this. But I do think that our conversation is still very reactive and so we don't spend a lot of time unpacking the nuance during the fire season, when everything's crazy and there's evacuation orders and there's smoke and people are stressed, and so I think we can probably still do a better job.

Jen Baron: 43:50

And I also think that in general, in public communications and media, there's always going to be oversimplifications and some nuance lost. I mean communications and media. There's always going to be oversimplifications and some nuance lost. I mean most of these topics we've talked about today. People have spent their entire lives studying and there's like you could spend your you know the next like 10 years reading all the papers that have been written about all of these things. So we have to oversimplify or we have to simplify things to some extent. But the conversation last year around climate versus fuels was very frustrating to watch because it essentially seemed to come from a point where people who wanted to deny climate change were saying it's all the fuels opposed to kind of the ecological nuance of the fact that both factors can be changing and driving changes in our forests and that our solutions can be multifaceted and also look different in different forest types. I think that that's been left out a lot of the conversations.

Jan Sumner: 44:52

Yeah, and I think you really, when you talk about simplification, it's actually interesting Sometimes when you simplify something, like you did at the beginning of this conversation, turning it into this triangle, it really helps create the right frame. And I think that that's one of the things that I would suggest in communications is, maybe the singular change needs to be. The frame is this triangle. We're not going to change the topography, but we certainly have climate, driving fires and we have the fuels load, and those two aspects are things that need immediate attention and addressing. Is there anything left for you to say? I mean, if you want to talk about the railway that was my one last question. I thought about that when you were saying it in the beginning is that sometimes that's an ignition switch? Right, that's an ignition.

Jen Baron: 45:49

Yeah, so one thing. So there are multiple triangles, like there's also kind of the fire triangle which is separate. But anyways, one of the things we didn't really talk about is ignitions, and so ignitions also control fires, not just the frequency of ignitions, but kind of the spatial pattern and the like temporal pattern of ignition. So, for example, in Canada we actually have two fire seasons. We have our human fire season, which usually happens in the spring, and then BC. We get a little bump up in the fall again, and then we have our lightning fire season, which happens in July and August, especially in British Columbia, and so the patterns and the mechanisms and prevention tools we might use, as well as the locations of where fires start, are very different.

Jen Baron: 46:35

Human fires happen where people are, so mostly in our communities and also along our roadways. A really good proxy for where to expect human ignitions is roads. Wherever people can access, you'll find human fires. And I think sometimes the public's understanding of what a human-caused fire is is also very different from what they look like in practice. So there certainly are still a number of haphazard ignitions that can be prevented. Things like throwing a cigarette out a car window is everyone's favorite visual example of what a human fire is, or arson although those cases are usually quite rare but it does happen or leaving a campfire unattended, but there is a level of human ignitions associated with having people on the landscape that is just very challenging to prevent. So that includes things like industry, and there are area restrictions for industry during extreme fire weather, but inevitably if we have a forest industry on the land base with heavy machinery, we are eventually going to have some ignitions associated with it. The railroad is also responsible for a lot of ignitions and there's also litigation that's associated with that, and they're aware of this and they do monitor for fires and they actually action fires within a certain band on either side of the railroad Things like power lines going down during high windstorms, which are also very good conditions for a big fire to start when it's super hot, dry and windy, and so there are other ignitions that I think are not necessarily associated with negligence per se, but just a product of people existing on the land base, having industries that we have to become accustomed to. And then the lightning ignitions we tend to get kind of in the backcountry, in clusters and areas where they're really hard to action.

Jen Baron: 48:14

I think there's sometimes this assumption still that if we'd have more technology and faster detection we can put all these fires out. If we knew about that fire, like the second it started, we still couldn't do anything about it. It's still not safe to put crews on the ground, we still don't have equipment to action it there, and so that's where it becomes kind of important to understand the kind of ecological role but also the strength of fire in some of these systems especially. We get these narratives sometimes coming out of like Toronto or New York, of like why can't they just go put them out? What are they doing, right?

Jen Baron: 48:50

This idea that we can just control everything, people who live in really urban landscapes, who maybe aren't familiar with the size and strength of a boreal forest fire, this idea that we could, you know, lay this like hose down the length of 40 kilometers. It'll do a 40 kilometer run in one day and someone could go in on the ground and action that right. So, yeah, the ignitions piece is also important and an important nuance and also something that's changing.

Jan Sumner: 49:19

Yeah, I think it's a little ludicrous to think that we can go in and stop these fires, and certainly having sat on a patio in the summer, last summer, where the smoke was filling the skies and it was coming from the boreal forest in northwestern Ontario or in Quebec. Fire crews were out but we couldn't stop those. It was all the way down to Washington. Everybody was feeling it.

Jen Baron: 49:50

Yeah, and I think that that mindset is still a relic of that 20th century. People aren't used to fires burning and they assume that we have the technology to deal with them, like this idea that we've mastered mother nature and we can ultimately control things, when really we're just starting to feel the consequences of this kind of false perception that we thought we did that and we didn't. And so I think that's why it's important in the solutions space. I mean, you know, I've seen a lot of people in private industry and in the tech world become really interested in wildfire solutions. I think that there's a role for that, for sure, but it's really important to understand what factors are actually limiting right now. I'm not convinced that early detection is the solution, as well as how that fits into kind of this longer term vision to manage fire more proactively, so enhancing suppression only to the extent that we need to, to allow us to do some of these more proactive strategies, as opposed to once and for all winning the war on fire.

Jan Sumner: 50:46

Yeah Well, Jen, you did not disappoint. That was an amazing conversation. Is there anything? Anything that we have left off the table, that you want to put back on the table or that you want to say just in conclusion, because that was an amazing conversation.

Kaya Adleman: 51:04

Yeah, or any advice that you have for people listening who maybe want to learn more about fires.

Jen Baron: 51:11

Yeah, so I certainly like to think of fire as an all of society problem. It affects everybody and it affects a lot of different parts or aspects of society. A lot of fire management also does happen at the kind of local, municipal, regional level, and so, if you live in a fire exposed ecosystem, becoming involved in your region's local fire smart committee, attending those meetings, talking to your representatives about their strategies towards fire management, is never a bad idea, because it impacts you directly. Right, if you're a constituent, then it's important to understand what what your, your representatives, are doing.

Jen Baron: 51:54

I also personally am not a pessimist. I also personally am not a pessimist. I see a lot of really good work happen on the ground, especially led by, for example, some of the community forests or Indigenous communities and First Nations, to try to revitalize fire and put it back on the ground. This idea that fire is not necessarily a bad thing and that, at the same time, while we're facing some of these challenges, we can use it as an opportunity to try to undo some of the harms of the past century, and so, you know, that also gives me a lot of hope and kind of perspective for the future.

Jan Sumner: 52:33

So we've just finished the interview with Jen. I think Kaya asked a great finisher question before. I have, of course, a couple more questions, but she finally gets a chance to ask a really great finisher question, which is you know, what did you think of the last fire season? And Jen was really good talking about just what has changed in terms of the public literacy. That's the other thing. Well, in previous years have been like oh, that's really terrible, that wildfire, but now that we're seeing this and it's becoming part of people's vocabulary and knowledge base that they can talk about all of these things, it's really quite astounding, and so I was interested to hear that from from Janet. That was a really great question.

Kaya Adleman: 53:22

Oh, thank you. Thank you for the compliment, but no, what she was saying there struck me as well, because it's kind of like during the pandemic, when the pandemic first started and no one knew anything about like viruses or diseases, and then all of a sudden everyone becomes an expert, um, in infectious diseases, um, people that didn't know the difference between, like, a viral infection or a bacterial infection. So, yeah, I think, for better or for worse, it's uh, that's how I would make an analogy to it. But yeah, I just want to maybe add a few things, kind of to jump off what you were saying in the beginning of this episode, jan, is that I think it was really helpful to hear from Jen for me personally, because I don't know, even up until now, the discourse about wildfires that I was familiar with and you know Jen alludes to people increasing their literacy and their knowledge about wildfires.

Kaya Adleman: 54:21

But what I was familiar with was there is kind of like a binary between the causes there is. So, oh, it's either climate change or forestry or, you know, topography or human caused ignitions. I guess that's not a binary, because a binary is two things. Have four things maybe. Um, there's a word for that? Would love to love to get some feedback.

Kaya Adleman: 54:43

But, um, anyway, from what I gather, it kind of seems like these points on the triangle really work together to create a perfect storm for these like unprecedented severe fires that we've been seeing. You, climate change creates the conditions for drier, hotter seasons which allow fire to thrive, and then forest management provides the built-up timber or fuel for the fire to burn, and then you have the topography which dictates whether a landscape naturally burns or doesn't naturally burn, and then you have a spark to set off that chain of events. Either it's lightning or ignitions associated with heavy machinery which I personally wasn't aware of from forestry or the railroad that was very interesting to learn or other industrial activities or different factors are kind of all building off of each other and that because we can kind of understand that these factors are playing into each other, we have a better idea of how these tools will work to maybe help us better adapt and change.

Jan Sumner: 56:03

Yeah, I had thought there was more caused by human ignition than what Jen is saying and I was very surprised by that. I mean, I knew that nature, these firestorms and lightning storms, were causing some fires, but I hadn't. I thought there was more kind of oh, I dropped a cigarette in a place where I shouldn't have, or I had a campfire, or things like that. So I thought that was more common than it actually is and these fire ecologists have studied the causes. So that was really interesting. And, like you, I did not understand the role of the railroad. I did not understand the role of all the industrial activities, because we are very focused on forestry and et cetera. But just having heavy machinery in the landscape building roads, mining, mineral exploration, forestry all of those are bringing new elements into the forest that you might even just have metal machinery and sunlight hitting it and creating a very heated patch through its reflection, etc. Right, and that being a potential ignition switch. So all of these were new ideas to me. The other thing that she talked about was that there are some places where we're doing really well with this and that is community forests, forests that are being run by some of the first nations. But these, these places are not at scale. The large operators, the industrial operators, are still using much of the traditional methods and are not able to get at it. It's almost incompatible. This large-scale clear-cutting and she calls out clear-cutting quite a bit and that the less slash we produce, the better, and so looking at systems that can produce less slash Even when we're burning it at roadside she talks about that, and the other place that we veer into and almost create a bit of foreshadowing is the urban forestry with Stanley Park, and we're going to get into more urban forestry when we talk to Kim Statham from the city of Toronto. So, yeah, it was a really good conversation.

Jan Sumner: 58:24

I would love to see some of these proactive approaches as she talks about. There's been three years of reports and we haven't yet implemented all of those things, and we can't just, it's not enough to just be reacting to forest fires. We actually have to start being proactive in our management decisions and there's some big decisions for us to start making to get to that less slash, the better, and finding a way to reduce the fuel load in the forest While at the same time reducing the emissions that are causing climate change, because Wildlands League is not myopic and we don't just see the problem as being how we manage the forest, but it's. It's a there's two points on the triangle that we have some control over. We cannot control the topography, but we definitely can control our response to forest fires and how we are managing the fuel load and bringing it down and not expanding into these new intact areas with the same old, same old and certainly not using fire suppression.

Jan Sumner: 59:27

And then the other piece for us is fire suppression to maintain forestry. Fire suppression to maintain homes is obviously something we need to keep doing. But what's that word she used? Wowie the wild wilderness urban interface.

Kaya Adleman: 59:45

Yeah.

Jan Sumner: 59:46

And the other is the climate change piece. So all of those need to be addressed, those two points in the triangle that we have control over is the fuel and the climate.

Kaya Adleman: 1:00:01

Yeah, or could we? Could we?

Jan Sumner: 1:00:03

could if we decided to act proactively on it.

Kaya Adleman: 1:00:07

Mm-hmm, and I will just say I think it's as an aside. It's funny that the railroad has seemingly come up in our podcast so many times, come up in our podcast so many times. I think it came up in our conversation with Anastasia Harvey and now our Wildfire episode with Jen Barron.

Jan Sumner: 1:00:29

Yeah.

Kaya Adleman: 1:00:29

Interesting, isn't it Always sneaking its way in there somehow?

Jan Sumner: 1:00:33

Yeah Well, thanks, kaya. Another great conversation with one of our guests. A huge shout out to Jen Barron, and I know you'll be very busy, with wildfire season already underway.

Kaya Adleman: 1:00:44

Yeah.

Jan Sumner: 1:00:44

Our thoughts go out to all the people who are suffering from wildfires, the evacuations, etc. The human cost and the natural world cost. So our hearts go out to you.

Kaya Adleman: 1:00:55

Yeah, and thanks Jen, and thanks everyone. All right, see you next time.

Jan Sumner: 1:01:01

Bye. 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: 1:01:15

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Jan Sumner: 1:01:36

That's at Wildlands League on Instagram, twitter and Facebook or LinkedInin, of course see you next time.