[The serial ice ages that erased and repopulated Canada like a
palimpsest have yielded to a fire age that is rewriting history with
flame. An interglacial period has morphed into an epoch in its own
right. Call it the Pyrocene.]
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CAN CANADA CONTAIN CONFLAGRATION?  
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Steve Pyne
June 18, 2023
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ The serial ice ages that erased and repopulated Canada like a
palimpsest have yielded to a fire age that is rewriting history with
flame. An interglacial period has morphed into an epoch in its own
right. Call it the Pyrocene. _

Flames reach upwards along the edge of a wildfire as seen from a
Canadian Forces helicopter surveying the area near Mistissini, Quebec,
Canada June 12, 2023., Cpl Marc-Andre Leclerc/Canadian Forces/Handout
via REUTERS

 

Eleven thousand years ago, all of Canada, save the Yukon Valley, was
under ice.  The country was literally a blank slate.  Then warming
set in, the land vegetated, people entered, and white Canada evolved
into a green Canada.  Lightning and torch kindled fires.  Green
Canada burned—and has burned ever since.  Climate is the grandest
of the themes that frame Canadian history.

The primordial rivalry between ice and fire has deepened in recent
years: the fires are more savage and frequent, the ice is melting more
swiftly.  This time the tempo is set not by Milankovitch cycles that
regulate the intensity of solar radiation but by anthropogenic fire.
People have escalated from burning living landscapes to burning lithic
ones – once living, now fossilized into coal, gas, and oil. Canada
began burning its combustion candle at both its ends. 

The serial ice ages that erased and repopulated Canada like a
palimpsest have yielded to a fire age that is rewriting history with
flame.  An interglacial period has morphed into an epoch in its own
right.  Call it the Pyrocene.

You might think that a place so vast, and so combustible, would be
filled with fire traditions, a fire literature and fire art, fire
institutions, a fire culture in the fullest sense.  But while
colonized Canada has a first-world fire establishment, and displays
developed-world fire pathologies, it shows a remarkable disconnect
between fire’s presence on the land and its manifestation in the
culture. This is particularly true among elites who live in cities,
not the bush. Only over the past couple of decades has fire entered
common currency. Canada may be a firepower, but it punches below its
weight internationally.  Its muted presence makes a striking contrast
to Australia.

One explanation points to the character of boreal Canada, and two
others to how fire fits with Canadian ideas and institutions.

Begin with the boreal environment.  The boreal forest, which houses
the major burns, is a landscape informed by extremes, not averages,
now exacerbated by global warming.  Burning obeys rhythms of boom and
bust.  This makes planning, budgeting, and general bureaucratic
operations difficult.  Yet they are expected to stand between the
extremes of boreal fire and ordinary life.  Taking the pounding can
make them unstable.  Still, Alaska has managed, and Mediterranean
climates present similar challenges. 

The other explanations derive from the character of Canada as a
confederation.  The great question of culture and politics (and
national identity) was how to reconcile colonies that did not want to
unite, but were compelled by force, geopolitics, or economics to join
together. The Anglophone-Francophone bond was both the largest and
softest of these welds. There was little reason (or bandwidth left) to
contemplate the boreal backcountry, other than as part of a northern
economy of fish, fur, minerals, and timber.  Fire control existed to
keep the timber flowing.

The second is that the colonies, now provinces, retained control over
their landed estate and its natural resources.  Those provinces
carved out of Hudson’s Bay Company lands originally held a hefty
proportion of dominion lands, which were organized into national
forests on the American model.  In 1930 these lands were ceded to the
provinces.  The Canadian Forest Service imploded, surviving as a
research program. Fire protection resided with the provinces. A
national fire narrative disintegrated into provincial and territorial
subnarratives.  The closest American analogy to the provinces may be
Texas (imagine a U.S. consisting of 10 clones of Texas).

The provinces struggled to muster enough resources to handle the big
outbreaks of fire.  Nearly all had a northern line of control beyond
which they let fires burn.  Not until a round of conflagrations
between 1979 and 1981 pulverized western Canada and Ontario did
pressure build to create an institution that would allow provinces to
share firefighting resources on a national scale.  A mutual-aid
agreement with the U.S. stumbled because the U.S. wanted to sign a
treaty between nations, not between a nation and separate provinces.
The compromise was to craft a Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center
as a corporation (not a government entity).  If the U.S. too readily
nationalizes fire policies better left to local authorities, Canada
fails to nationalize what exceeds provincial interests.

The Canada-U.S. Reciprocal Forest Fire Fighting Accord granted Canada
access to a continental-scale cache of firefighting resources (and the
U.S. access to Canadian aid when needed).  But the fires have grown
meaner, larger, and more frequent, well beyond the capacity of even
wealthy nations to corral.  Fires have blasted through Fort McMurray,
Slave Lake, and Lytton.  They burrow into organic soils, the major
reservoir of carbon in the boreal biome. Now their tag-team smoke
palls have flooded Toronto and New York, Ottawa and Washington, D.C.
The burning of lodgepole pine and tar sands are measurably perturbing
the global climate.  Canada’s fire practices have leaped well
beyond its provinces.

 

_Image Natural Resources Canada_

 

The argument grows, moreover, that relying solely on fire suppression
only aggravates the crisis, that excluding fire leaves more of the
living landscape available to burn even as climate change powered by
burning lithic landscapes bolsters its propensity to burn. Most
analysts plead for better forest, land, and fire management programs
that work with fire. Forty years ago Parks Canada began this
transformation, and now fields a world-class fire program. The
Canadian Forest Service continues to publish stellar science.  Most
of the larger provinces have fire control organizations that rival
anything of their peers; on fire technologies like pumps and aircraft,
Canada excels. Ongoing reconciliations with First Nations promise a
recovery of indigenous fire knowledge. Yet the whole seems less than
its parts.

It’s not enough.  The Pyrocene is coming to Canada with the scale
and power of the Laurentian ice sheet.  The country needs to find
ways to leverage its many fire talents not just to advance a global
good but because Canada may become ground zero for a fire age.  A
shift will mean burning some woods rather than logging them, and not
burning bitumen and oil that Canada has in the ground.  It means
matching firefighting with fire tolerating or outright fire lighting.
It means kindling in the minds of its literati and elites an
appreciation that fire is an indelible – and fascinating - part of
living in Canada, as recent books by John Vaillant, Alan MacEachern,
and Edward Struzik demonstrate.  It means accepting that, in the
global economy of carbon, Canada is a superpower that needs to craft a
confederation of institutions, ideas, and tools that can grant it a
cultural and geopolitical presence commensurate with its
conflagrations. 

On the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857, Henry Hind
observed of a massive fire that “It is like a volcano in full
activity; you cannot imitate it, because it is impossible to obtain
those gigantic elements from which it derives its awful splendor.” 
We still can’t control those elements, though we have managed to
disrupt them and so boosted their power.  But we can control our
response. 

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_Steve Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University and
the author of _Awful Splendour
[[link removed]]: A Fire History of
Canada_._

 

* Canadian Natural History; Canadian Fire; Forest Fires;
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