By Christopher Harper
It didn’t take long for the “experts” to proclaim that climate change had caused the Canadian forest fires that rained down smoke on the United States.
It took me only a few hours of reporting to get some truth about the Canadian fires. A combination of too few firefighters, lousy forest management, and Mother Nature had much more to do with the fires than climate change.
As philosopher Marshall McLuhan put it: “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
In a 2020 journal article in Progress in Disaster Science, the authors found that various problems existed in managing Canadian forests.
“Wildfire management agencies in Canada are at a tipping point. Presuppression and suppression costs are increasing, but program budgets are not,” the analysis stated. “To co-exist with wildfire, agencies in Canada must also strengthen and adjust their wildfire management capacity and capability. This necessitates stronger horizontal collaboration, enhanced resource sharing, investments to develop innovative decision support tools, and an increased focus on prevention and mitigation.”
Most firefighting is handled on the provincial level, so no national strategy for battling the blazes exists. Moreover, most provinces have had to cut budgets to prevent fires before they start. Also, the budget cuts have meant that few areas have enough full-time fighters and hire untrained people when fire season comes around.
While there is no shortage of young people ready to take up a hose, shovel, and hard hat for the summer, there have been countrywide problems hanging on to senior-level firefighters with the training and experience needed to fight against the flames.
The government owns most Canadian forest land, which it leases only a tiny percentage to forestry companies. These companies must use practices to prevent fires by keeping the ground clean and seeding and planting saplings after a harvest. Such an approach works far better and is less costly than fighting a blaze.
Seth Kursman, an executive for the Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products, told the Toronto Star: “As public policy has gotten more restrictive and more land has been set aside for preservation, there is less harvesting of mature trees and less cleaning of the forest floor. Trees in unmanaged boreal forests usually die of disease, insect infestations, or fire. When lightning strikes where there is a lot of dry tinder, the fire is worse.”
Greater use of Canadian woodlands by forestry companies could reduce the risk of catastrophe. “About two-tenths of 1% of the boreal forest is harvested annually, while more than 25 times that amount of forest is impacted by fire, insects, and disease,” Kursman said.
It’s essential to remember that lightning has caused more than three-quarters of the damage in Canada, with no indication of manmade causes, such as arson or carelessness. That means that manmade climate change has had little to do with igniting forest fires.
Chalk up the latest barrage of climate change “experts” to a misinterpretation of the facts on the ground!
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