Fires in California are taking place not far from huge population centers with massive resources.
Fires in Canada’s Boreal forests are so remote, thousands of miles from population centers, that bringing adequate forces to bear on them is an enormous logistical challenge.
Oregon Public Broadcasting – July 2023:
Many of the fires have sprung to life in very remote areas, leaving Canadian provinces to decide which fires can and should be fought.
“Canada is the second-largest country in the world, and almost half of that is forest,” Barber said. “A lot of that forest is remote, untouched wilderness, and it’s very difficult to manage wildfire in those areas where there is no road access or any of the infrastructure needed to support firefighting activity.”
“All provinces follow one rule above all; the No. 1 priority is human life and safety,” Barber said, citing a 2020 paper. “There are other protected values such as communities, infrastructure, and natural resources and environmental values,” he said. If a wildfire doesn’t put those values at risk, it could be monitored and left to burn.
It’s part of a natural cycle for Canada’s boreal forests to burn (more on that below). But the fires can attain dangerous intensity, particularly in current conditions.
“They burn with crown fire behavior,” Perrakis said. Driven by strong winds, he added, “they can spread out 50 meters a minute, 70 meters a minute — 20 or 30 kilometers a day. We’ve seen these multiple times this season.”
In those perilous locations, it’s not worth the risk to send firefighters into the flames’ path.
“What’s important to understand is that the only fires that are allowed to burn are those which do not threaten human lives, communities, or other critical values,” Barber said.
“We have papers from the early 1900s talking about smoky days over American cities, going back to the 1700s. So it’s been one of these things we’ve just kind of had to deal with,” Perrakis said.
Many of Canada’s fires are in the boreal forest, in remote areas north of the zone that contains the country’s biggest cities.
“Those forests are actually adapted to burn, they are evolved to burn, very approximately every 100-200 years,” Barber said. “Even if we could stop all the fires it would be a profound mistake for the ecology of the forest, and would just lead to bigger fires down the road.”
“It’s actually beneficial,” Perrakis said. “It does things like helping with nutrients cycling through the soil and overall landscape resilience. You get this mosaic of different age classes and different forest types, which is what you want.”
“Some people are like, ‘Well, this is climate change. This is terrible. We’ve never seen this before.’ That’s wrong. We’ve seen this plenty of times. But it is [also] climate change, and it is much worse than we’ve seen before,” he added.
As for the smoke, he said, “we haven’t been able to do much about it for hundreds of years. And there’s not that much we can do about it now, which isn’t to say that firefighters aren’t putting in a lot of effort. They are.”
Wildfire seasons are intensified by climate change, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That applies to Canada, the U.S. and other countries.
“Increasing heat and declining moisture from human-caused climate change are the mechanisms that people should be thinking about,” Fischer said.
Those conditions set the stage for explosive wildfires in areas where trees, shrubs, debris and grasses become fuel for blazes that can quickly blossom from an initial spark into a large wildfire.
“The boreal forest has always burned. Now the corollary to that is, we’re obviously burning more than in the past,” Perrakis said. “Climate change is very significant. We’ve got drought levels that are if not unprecedented, at least in the extreme category, and the fire season’s [arriving] early.”