STEWARDSHIP OF THE LAND

This summer, during the height of the Alberta spring wildfires, I landed at the Edmonton airport in a thick haze of smoke

The smoke was so thick you could not see other planes across the tarmac, or even planes parked at other gates. The outbreak of forest fires, so early in the spring, has led to many politicians and journalists using the term unprecedented to describe the scope of the wildfires. It’s true that the fires this year are early and are already huge, but the use of the term unprecedented may obscure the fact that this scenario has been predicted for decades by climate change research and by problematic colonial wildfiresuppression policies. In addition, the term unprecedented obscures the potential to prevent so much suffering, by changes to how we manage fires and mitigate climate change.

Although wildfires are natural and are an important ecosystem process, their intensity and frequency has been increasing rapidly in recent decades.

I think many of us can attest to how it feels, every year, when fires dominate the summer news. Since the 1980s, the extent of the area burned by wildfires has increased across North America, and each year, the peak fire season is shifting to earlier in the year. Large volumes of research have concluded that climate change has led to warmer springs, longer summer dry seasons, drier soils and drier vegetation. Earlier spring melting and reduced snowpack has contributed to less summertime moisture. Furthermore, research conducted here in the Yukon has shown that the ecological aftermath of wildfires is becoming more unpredictable, with dramatic changes to habitat following successive fires (see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: pnas.org/doi/ epdf/10.1073/pnas.2024872118).

Many researchers (including Dr. Mike Flannigan, the Science Direc- tor of the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science [Canada Wildfire] located at the University of Alberta) have studied fire for over 30 years and have consistently concluded that we can expect more and more wildfires in the future. Dr. Flannigan’s research predicts that the number of dry, windy days that exacerbate wildfire conditions will increase by 50 per cent in Western Canada, but that Eastern Canada could expect a 200 to 300 per cent increase

(see “Environmental Research Letters”: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa5835/ pdf). If we turn our attention to the fires burning in Québec, we can see more real-time evidence of those climate shifts.

The role of climate change is further exacerbated by our firemanagement and -suppression policies. Canada spends approximately $1 billion, per year (see asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellites/wildfiresat/), suppressing wildfires in

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Canada—yet there is little investment in wildfire risk-reduction policies. Prior to European settlement, many Indigenous nations systematically used fire as a critical tool for forest maintenance: today, that set of tools is referred to as Indigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS). Although Indigenous Peoples have maintained fire-management practices for millennia, there are significant barriers to re-engaging with those practices within current government policies (from FACETS, a multidisciplinary open-access science journal: facetsjournal.com/doi/10.1139/ facets-2021-0074). Furthermore, those policies that make efforts to emulate natural fire regimes but don’t acknowledge the role of Indigenous fire-management techniques as natural. The lack of engagement with these traditional management methods further perpetuates the uneven harms associated with uncontrolled wildfires (see “Engaging Science, Technol-

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ogy, and Society”: estsjournal. org/index.php/ests/article/ view/429/323), as Indigenous communities living in close proximity to forests are at the highest risk of being impacted from wildfires. Now those communities are faced with the increased risk of fires from climate change.

Many communities and researchers are now calling on governments to allow and support IFS. This is a fundamental shift from western forms of fire management that not only emphasize fire suppression but that also emphasize the preservation of a certain view of a forest as a uniform and mature stand. The term cultural burns is often used to describe prescribed burns used to maintain the health of an ecosystem and to reduce fuel sources in a forest. Recent ecological research has pointed to the success of cultural burns for increasing biodiversity, by increasing the variability of light in a forest and by creating complex soil conditions. Many First Nations are now in the process of developing pilot programs and planning groups to begin to reintegrate IFS on their territories.

So, is it unprecedented if we know that climate change is rapidly increasing the intensity and frequency of wildfires and that, as a community, we refuse to acknowledge that prior to European settlement, consistent and deliberate action was taken to mitigate fire risk? I would say that these fires are both precedented and predictable and are another example of colonial regulatory policies and the lack of necessary emissions reductions. It is time we acknowledge that the human and financial cost of the business-as-usual approach is too high and that we need to make fundamental changes in our approach to wildfires.

The house in the What’s Up Yukon logo was our very first o ce and is a famous structure in Whitehorse. It’s actually a photocopy from a sketch on a napkin of the Log Skyscraper. Follow

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