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Arrow Lakes News
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Vol. 90 Issue 20 • Wednesday, May 15, 2013 • www.arrowlakesnews.com • 250-265-3823 • $1.25 •
PM40036531
Prevention is the morel of the fuel treatment story Claire paradis Arrow Lakes News
Morels seem to feed on chaos, often showing up after fires or a disturbance of the land. SIFCo has been tromping through the forest to help reduce the impact of fire. Either way, it’s a win for the morels. As part of Columbia Mountains Institute of Applied Ecology Researchers’ Meeting held on May 10 at the Memorial Hall in Silverton, B.C., Tyson Elhers (Tysig Ecological Research) and Stephan Martineau Slocan Integral Forestry Cooperative (SIFCo) led a field trip about interface fuel treatment and morels. A long stretch of forest from Winlaw to Silverton is held in tenure by Slocan Integral Forestry Cooperative (SIFCo). The Cooperative has a 25-year tenure on the forest, a considerable amount of which is interface forest (where the public has easy access to the forest). In one area near Silverton they have been working to prevent forest fire destruction by reducing the burnable material in the forest. “Fires are getting hotter each year,” Martineau told the group, “so hot they’re not defendable.” But when fighting fires is not an option, prevention can be. There are different fire behaviours: surface fires travel along the ground and are fuelled
by low-lying shrubbery and debris; ladder fires eat and spread via under growth, fallen logs, small trees, etc.; crown fires burn at the canopy level and can move very quickly in windy conditions. Bushes growing near trees can become ladder fuel, moving the fire into the crown, and once fires reach the crown level of the forest, they’re more destructive, said Martineau. “The Kootenay landscape is a time bomb waiting to happen,” added Ehlers, citing unnatural build up of fuel as a danger. Fire prevention efforts in interface areas works to protect both towns and forests, creating a zone where fire coming from either direction will be slowed and hopefully halted. Reducing the hazard of forest fires means reducing the crown density, ladder fuels and surface fuels. One of the best way to do this is to chip fuels, returning the biomass to the earth and reducing the regrowth of brush that could become fuel for a forest fire. SIFCo has done this on a 47.5 hectare area near Silverton, an interface forest. It’s a small example of what needs to happen, said Martineau. The cost of preventative measures like this one? Six to seven thousand dollars a hectare for this project. But treating the land again to reduce fuels is much cheaper, he added, because it’s so much faster once the chipping has been done. And much cheaper than a for-
Stephan from SIFCo explains the importance of clearing out fuel for forest fires to prevent massive destruction. Claire Paradis/Arrow Lakes News est fire burning out of control. Chipping isn’t a blanket treatment. There’s a metric used to determine how much wood to leave on a site, as both firewood and habitat for forest dwellers. After treatment, you can see the forest for the trees: sight lines are much clearer once the brush has been cleared
away. “In relation to what we had before, it is a park,” admitted Ehlers, but it’s not an unpopular change. Human visitors to the woods like being able to easily see what’s further
See Morels page 7
Artist finds quiet stillness Under Box Mountain Claire paradis Arrow Lakes News
Debra Rushfeldt explores stillness found in objects around her Crescent Bay home. Claire Paradis/Arrow Lakes News
There is a quiet stillness to the objects captured in shades of charcoal that make up Debra Rushfeldt’s most recent work “Under Box Mountain.” Evidence of human hands are shown in stones sitting balanced on posts or in gardens. Peeling paint on an unopened door, a shovel adorned with the beginning cups of three wasps’ nests hangs on a wall, a well-used washtub fades into dark corners: solitude and familiarity and the ghost of work past fill the frames. Rushfeldt’s exploration of her neighbours’ property and the objects on them led her to deeper themes of isolation and protection.
“People are there, but they’re not seen,” she agreed. What initially began as a series of sketches showing the beauty in the discarded became an emotional journey as Rushfeldt discovered she was responding emotionally to her surroundings. A pile of bricks was like a marker of a project that was started and not finished, an old birdhouse now missing its roof epitomized decay and the march of time. Changing the scale of the images Rushfeldt found has changed the importance of the objects, giving them new significance. When made larger than life, the simple work done of placing stones on top of posts becomes totemic and important, as though the structure is an important and mysterious artifact
like an Easter Island statue. Rushfeldt spent a long time choosing from the vast number of photos she took to create the quiet moody feel in the charcoal drawings. “I wanted to isolate the stillness of an object,” she said, capturing the quiet of living in the country. The artist isn’t finished with the series that she started in 2010. She is now in the process of creating multimedia versions of some of the images and feels there is still a lot of work to be done. Debra Rushfeldt’s show “Under Box Mountain” opens at Studio Connexion May 17 and runs until June 8. Her studio will be open again for the Saturday Art Tours during July and August this year.
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