Down below me are the forests of British Columbia, BC for short.
They're home to people - a few, anyway - wildlife, and
basically every alien planet that Stargate SG-1 ever went to.
Now I don't want to be too simplistic here,
but forests are made of wood. And wood is flammable.
Very flammable.
Just over that ridge is the site of the Elaho wildfire,
which in 2015 burned an area the size of Manhattan
over 10 weeks.
And that was just a small one.
In 2017, 19 wildfires combined together to burn an area 130km end-to-end.
- Since about 2003, we have been having continuously record-breaking temperatures,
record-breaking droughts, and record-breaking fire seasons.
The fires that we have observed in the last decade
are large, aggressive fires that are very difficult to control.
Often, when we see fires, we look at them and think they're destructive, but in truth,
many fires do more good than harm.
We see, in our northern forests,
trees are actually adapted to release their seeds
and to grow back after a major fire,
which burns from tree top to tree top
and kills those trees, creating large openings.
In our drier ecosystems, they're kind of a lower intensity surface fire
that cleanses the forest, takes away the dead grasses,
the branches that have accumulated down on the ground,
but leaves the big trees that are resistant to that fire
and create a very healthy ecosystem that is dependent on fire.
- Now, I grew up in England, where there's not much woodland left
and what there is is carefully managed and controlled.
So to me, the idea that fire could be a good thing is counterintuitive.
And don't get me wrong, playing with matches in a forest
is still a very bad idea.
But it turns out that having a professional
set a precise fire at a precise time and place
could actually be a good idea.
- In absence of fires, the fuels have built up in the forests
and now, when we have fires, they're even more intense than they were in the past.
Historically, we know that fires, in parts of the province,
especially in the dry forests of British Columbia, were really frequent.
So these are fires that would burn through the understory of the forest
and in those forests,
we have thick-barked trees that are adapted to fire.
So they resist the fire and they survive.
Each of these marks down at the bottom that you can see
is a fire scar embedded in the tree rings and it is showing
the history of fire in this particular environment.
There are enough fire scars embedded in the tree rings
that it burned 42 times over its lifetime.
Up until 2010, our policy in BC was 100% fire suppression.
So we would try to detect and suppress fires as quickly as possible.
As of 2012, we changed to allow managed wildfires
on the landscape, allowing some fires in remote areas
where it doesn't put human lives or values at risk.
Those managed fires are trying to get
the ecosystem to function as it did historically.
So if we go into those areas that have dense forests right up to our backyards
and if we assess those forests and remove some of the trees,
in particular, the small trees in the understory,
and then come in and use a prescribed burn
to clean up all the small fuels on the ground
and stimulate all those fire-adapted plants in the understory,
we can not only reduce the risk of fire damaging our communities,
but we can restore our ecosystems and improve ecosystem health.
- My pilot today has been Bradley Friesen, along with--
- Mr. Bentley, the dog. - Co-pilot back there.
And you're starting a channel soon called?
- Destruction by Gravity. - That's gonna be a fun one.
There's not much there yet, but check it out.
I think there's gonna be some fun stuff.
Thank you to you, thank you also to Dr. Lori Daniels at UBC.
- A lot of fun, I liked it.