Canada has over 360 million hectares of forest. The notion that controlled burns are some sort of solution seems a bit absurd.
And nothing is going to fix the fact that in some parts of the country, it looks like wild fire season is going to be six months long (that certainly seems to be the case now along the South Coast of BC). With long stretches of hot dry weather, where ignition becomes almost inevitable, I think we’re going to have to accept that annual number and intensity of wild fires is going to increase no matter how many resources we throw at forest management.
You don’t need to control burn the whole forest, but maybe control burn a 10km buffer around small communities every 15-20 years or so and when a giant fire breaks out it will be easier to focus on protecting the towns while letting the outter forests burn as they should.
Considering the large number of small communities in Canada either in the boreal zones or at least adjacent to it, that sounds like a monumental undertaking. Frankly, with increasingly hot and dry summers, and in some parts of the country, even very dry winters (huge problem in areas like south and central coast of BC), there likely is no real solution other than to get used to smoke filled springs, summers and falls. We’ve now entered the mitigation stage.
Canada has over 360 million hectares of forest. The notion that controlled burns are some sort of solution seems a bit absurd.
And nothing is going to fix the fact that in some parts of the country, it looks like wild fire season is going to be six months long (that certainly seems to be the case now along the South Coast of BC). With long stretches of hot dry weather, where ignition becomes almost inevitable, I think we’re going to have to accept that annual number and intensity of wild fires is going to increase no matter how many resources we throw at forest management.
You don’t need to control burn the whole forest, but maybe control burn a 10km buffer around small communities every 15-20 years or so and when a giant fire breaks out it will be easier to focus on protecting the towns while letting the outter forests burn as they should.
Considering the large number of small communities in Canada either in the boreal zones or at least adjacent to it, that sounds like a monumental undertaking. Frankly, with increasingly hot and dry summers, and in some parts of the country, even very dry winters (huge problem in areas like south and central coast of BC), there likely is no real solution other than to get used to smoke filled springs, summers and falls. We’ve now entered the mitigation stage.