Waking up to smoke for the last week or so in lovely Fraser Lake.
With a couple of instant lightning-caused fires over the weekend, and my house being roared over by water bombers, my initial reaction was: are those climate guys and global warming experts really right? Is my province really burning up?
I do agree with the experts like Todd Whitcombe that say that the world is on a warming trend. Just by observation, 2023 is turning into an unusually hot and dry summer that started early.
But I read an interesting opinion piece by Tristin Hopper of the National Post this morning: "Forests used to catch fire like this all the time." He goes back 100 to 200 years and quotes oral histories of Indigenous people and other sources and talks about forest fire reality in Canada.
The forests in B.C. and Canada used to burn more frequently, bigger areas used to burn and human ignitions were used to keep our forest in check. In the 1950s, the forest services across Canada started aggressively fighting fires and telling Indigenous peoples to not burn.
According to Hopper, "a Canadian wildfire season of this size is pretty normal for the pre-industrial era." He goes on to talk about a fire deficit. There is too much debris on the forest floor. The large fires of recent years are starting to clear up some of the excess fire load, but more needs to be burned.
Yes, Todd Whitcombe is right. The climate is changing and I would agree that a world population of eight billion that is burning fossil fuels is a factor in climate change.
Yes, Tristin Hopper is right. A different type of forest management in the past 100 years has also changed things and that is a factor in the current wildfire season.
There are different opinions in the world and sometimes both can be right at the same time.
Get used to the smoke.
Wayne Martineau
Fraser Lake
