Fire has always been part of the land. But the question is: how do we live with it?
On September 25 in Nelson, the West Kootenay Watershed Collaborative hosted an evening with experts Dr. Kira Hoffman, Simon Shave, Erik Leslie, and Dr. Rachel Holt to explore how to live alongside this powerful force – how we can fight fire with fire.
Dr. Kira Hoffman got the evening started.
“Fire is what makes us human,” she said. “It’s one of our greatest achievements. And controlling it is a very, very big deal evolutionarily.”
Hoffman said fire has always been part of her life. She was taught to burn the grasses for healthy pastures, and the Saskatoon bushes for plump juicy berries.
“I was taught that fire is a really healthy component of our ecosystems, and it’s actually a tool to care for our land,” she said.
But it was while fleeing a wildfire in California that she was confronted for the first time by a fire that couldn’t be controlled.
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The most impactful fire seasons in BC on record have all happened since 2017, with more than 9.5 million hectares of forest in BC burned in that time. Fire is the reality now, she said. Smoke fills the skies, communities are routinely on evacuation alert, and life gets put on hold while the province fights to survive another summer.
“But what if I was to tell you that fire isn’t just catastrophic?”
Part of Hoffman’s work as a fire ecologist involves bringing beneficial fire back into the landscapes and communities that need it. One of her dearest-held projects has been working with the Gitanyow Nation.
For millennia, the Gitanyow Nation used fire to protect the community, increase the abundance of food and medicine, and create accessible spaces for people and wildlife. Hoffman has been working alongside the Nation to bring back cultural burns.
“We’re using old wisdom and new technology to find a path forward,” she said.
Hoffman worked alongside Darlene, a Fire Stewardship Leader with the Gitanyow Lax’yip Guardians,
“The land is our food table, and fire helps fill our pantry,” Darlene shared with Hoffman before they lit the first legal fire in Gitanyow territory in over 100 years.
Fire was banned across much of North America about a century ago, said Hoffman, and many Indigenous peoples were confined to reserves.
“Fire, like language, suffered loss,” she said.
Fire-dependent landscapes are gone, filled in with conifers that have since been impacted by clearcut logging and fire suppression. Values have changed, with the primary interest being timber.
And these dense forests do not have the food needed to support Darlene and her community. For a Nation that lives hours from the nearest grocery store, it’s about survival.
“We often talk about the risks of fire, and worry about escaping it,” said Hoffman, “but there’s also a huge risk of not using fire – of not having these staples, these foods, these medicines available to the community.”
After Hoffman’s talk, filmmaker and former BC Wildfire Service firefighter Simon Shave shared an excerpt from his documentary series, Wildfire, available for free on Knowledge Network. Episode five highlighted prescribed burn work happening around Cranbrook.
Both Hoffman and Shave are trying to help the public understand fire.
The community of Cranbrook knows the importance of prescribed burns, welcoming it to keep their community safe. However, Hoffman has been trying to burn within her community of Smithers for years, but there’s much more resistance. She’s trying to bring people out to experience burns – seeing and feeling the fire, being a part of it, and witnessing the benefits.
This is all necessary work, said Dr. Rachel Holt. But she worried that the information is being hijacked.
“The forestry industry is using the ideas that are wrapped up in the work that we just heard about, and saying we have to log the forests to save us all from fire,” she said.
Hoffman admitted it’s not likely that we’ll be able to prescribe burn our way out of the problem. The scale and pace aren’t there yet.
“But it’s about shifting our forestry approaches to be adaptative and really place-specific,” she said. “I can’t say that enough: place-specific.”
Erik Leslie’s work with Harrop-Proctor Community Forest (HPCF) is an example of this site-specific approach. Leslie, Manager of HPCF, described their partial harvest methods. Leslie takes the time to assess each site and work within the ecosystem that exists there.
“But we just don’t operate on that scale in the logging industry,” said Hoffman. “We operate at the 1,000-hectare clearcut scale and miss all the different ecosystems and micro-sites that exist in that.”
Shave worked with BCWS for ten years, from 2007 to 2016. Even from that period to now, he said, there’s been a drastic cultural shift.
“The change is happening… it might feel static, but we are at a point where we’re changing our scope and becoming less reactionary.”
Simon created the documentary with the hopes of continuing this shift.
A new silviculture innovation program is in the works. The new online dashboard will compile practitioners’ work from different backgrounds into one central source, where forestry professionals can explore work happening around the province.
“We need practitioners working together – and with other community-minded people outside of forestry like biologists, glaciologists, etc. – to better understand tools that might work,” said Hoffman.
And to not be afraid to try new things.
“We’re so afraid of messing up, but that’s really how we learn.”
Much of the crowd was made up of first-year Selkirk College forestry students. The energy of the room was palpable: a new generation with a fire in their hearts to take better care of BC’s forests.
Ramona Faust, Chair of West Kootenay Watershed Collaborative, closed the evening with a challenge. She urged the crowd to write to their MLAs, the Premier, and the Minister of Forests, telling them about what they heard.
“Tell them: business as usual isn’t usual anymore. It’s inappropriate in the most extreme fashion,” she said. “I think that a lot of us think that our little voices don’t make a difference. But when there’s hundreds of you saying the same thing…”
That’s where change can start.
