Through snowflake-speckled
windows I watch stately trees sagging beneath the weight of the early November
snowfall. It is a winter picture that denies the existence of wildfires.
Yet the wildfires are there,
on the television screens, in newspaper stories and photos and on social
media sites. Walls of flames consuming
huge pieces of California, its people and their possessions.
The images are only camera
views, and they come from 2,000-plus miles away, so they are no threat and can
be forgotten easily. They shouldn’t be because wildfires are an increasing
threat to our country, and the world.
This year alone there have
been 6,845 wildfires in Canada, more than double the 25-year average of 3,000.
They burned 2.2 million hectares of land and forests. Last year 5,305 wildfires
burned 3.4 million hectares.
Ontario alone had 1,325
fires that consumed 276,356 hectares in 2018, and that’s close to double the
annual average of 757 fires burning 111,487 hectares. A July fire was close to
home, burning 11,000 hectares in the Parry Sound area, threatening to shut down
Highway 69.
We Canadians tend to think
of wildfires as forest fires that burn bushes, trees, and cause grief to
wildlife. In fact, they are becoming more of a threat to the places where we
live, our homes and our other possessions.
A most recent and terrifying
example is the Fort McMurray, Alberta fire of 2016. Upwards of 88,000 people in
the city and surrounding areas were evacuated – the largest wildfire evacuation
in Canadian history. Also, it was the costliest disaster in Canadian history.
No one died directly in the
fire, however, thousands of lives were changed.
My own family history tells
a lot about how wildfires change lives. My grandparents and their young family
escaped from the Great Minnesota Fires that destroyed their hometown of Cloquet,
near Duluth, in 1918. I remember a photograph of my grandmother holding my
father and his older brother as she stood in water (likely the St. Louis River)
as flames engulfed their town.
Hundreds of people died in
the fires and many hundreds more lost their homes and jobs. The paper mill
where my grandfather worked was destroyed. He moved the family to Canada to get
work in another mill.
The Cloquet fire that
changed my family history was touched off by human activity - sparks from a train.
Roughly one-third of wildfires are started by human activity. Lightning strikes
cause the rest.
The increase in wildfires is
not just a North American thing. The
number of fires this year across Europe is up 40 percent on average.
With statistics showing
wildfires becoming more frequent, we must work harder to reduce human causes,
plus find fresh ways to control fires when they start and reduce the areas that
they burn.
The best way to achieve that
is to listen to the experts. There are thousands of wildfire and climate
experts with the science backgrounds and experience needed to find solutions.
They need to have a bigger voice in saying how we can lessen the threat.
One person who thinks he is
an expert, but definitely is not, is the president of the United States who says
that wildfires can be prevented by raking the forest floors.
“We gotta take care of the
floors, you know, the floors of the forest. Very Important.” he said during a
tour of the California devastation in which he mistakenly called the burned out
town of Paradise, ‘Pleasure.’
One
of the scientists worth listening to is Australian David Bowman, a global wildfire expert often quoted in the world
media.
“Growing cities, poor planning, recurring heat waves, more people
living closer to forests and more combustible landscapes have together created
a more fire-prone world,” Bowman has said. Add in climate change, which is
accelerating ecological instability.
“It is causing fire seasons to start earlier and finish later. We
are seeing more severe, more intense and longer lasting wildfires causing more
loss of life and property. Fires used to be seen as local, but we should see
them as part of a global-scale phenomenon.”
Wildfires are a threat to
our future. We need to take that threat seriously.
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