From Chapter 4: Visions of the Pyrocene
No one fully appreciated it at the time, but the 2003 fire season was a harbinger for what a warming climate would do to wildfire activity in the northern forests and was a forerunner to the catastrophic events that unfolded at Slave Lake in 2011, the record 2015 wildfire season that made headlines in Canada and the United States, and Fort McMurray in 2016. It literally begged scientists, firefighters, and decision-makers to rethink and critically examine the way wildfire, wildlife, water resources, and trees are managed in a world that is warming as fast as it may have been cooling 500 million years ago.
Johann Goldammer, director of the Global Fire Monitoring Center at Germany’s Freiburg University, is widely recognized as the person who alerted the world to the northern forest’s inextricable link to the fate of the global environment. Following publication of a research paper in 2006 that documented what he meant by that, he likened the boreal forest to a carbon bomb. “It’s sitting there waiting to be ignited, and there is already ignition going on,” he wrote.
The link between wildfire and climate, however, had been made by Canadian and American scientists long before that. The media just didn’t notice.
Mike Flannigan and Charlie Van Wagner raised the issue of climate change’s impact on wildfire in 1990 with a report that suggested a 46 per cent increase in fire severity if the climate heated up in the way that was being forecast at the time. “These increases would not necessarily wreak havoc on Canadian forests,” they wrote, with perhaps unintended understatement. Without stating it, they seemed to imply that it might.
Brian Stocks was a lot more forthright in a report that he wrote three years later. Early on in a career that began in the 1960s, Stocks was more interested in the pure science of fire research than the policy implications associated with it. That began to change in 1985, however, when he attended a wildfire meeting in Boulder, Colo., where he met with US Forest Service scientists as well as Richard Turco and other nuclear winter thinkers. The issue of climate change was raised then.
Stocks’s eyes widened when he saw what the world’s biggest wildfire did when it killed more than six hundred people in China in 1987. That fire, the Yellowstone fires, and the fires that burned 10 per cent of Manitoba in 1989 convinced him that the worst was yet to come and that both Canada and the United States were woefully unprepared to deal with the heat that was going to dry out the northern forests in the coming decades.
“It was obvious that a warming climate in the future would require a rethinking of forest fire management priorities and a re-evaluation of fire in forest management in North America,” Stocks wrote in 1993. There would be no “quick fix solutions,” he and Michael Weber noted in another report. “Increased fire activity would strain current levels of fire suppression resources, but may also adversely affect boreal forest distribution with a concomitant reduction in plant and animal biodiversity.”
The Canadian government, however, wasn’t listening as it was rapidly moving away from fire research. In 1995, the Canadian Forest Service’s budget was cut from $221 million to just $96 million. The last experimental burning program ended in 2000. Fire eventually ceased to be a separate research program. By 2012, the annual budget for wildfire research was just $1.3 million, 40 times less than the US Forest Service was spending. As well-funded as it was by comparison, the US Forest Service wasn’t happy, because an increasing amount of its budget was being diverted to the kind of fire suppression that resulted in triaging in 2003.
In some ways, there was nothing special about the way things initially unfolded in the northwestern part of the continent in the summer of 2003. Lightning Alley in Kootenay, for example, has always been a magnet for electrical storms, as Kubian pointed out that day we met in the summer of 2016. In Glacier, there has been a big fire every year, except one (1964), since the park was established. The Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho is known as the “fire forest” for obvious reasons. It’s had more than its share of big, catastrophic fires since the 1910 fire burned a 50-mile swath of forest from the Salmon River to and beyond the Canadian border.
One might also argue that the fire seasons of 1994, 1995, and 1998 were even bigger than the one that occurred in 2003.
The 2003 season was different, though. Not only did many of the fires burn bigger, hotter, faster, and in unpredictable ways, they were threatening people, homes, and infrastructure in ways that had only previously played out in firefighters’ nightmares.
“The Kootenay fires were the ‘holy shit’ fire of a lifetime,” said Kubian. “Every time we put someone in a helicopter to have a look at it, they’d say ‘holy shit.’ Every time I flew over it, I would get a lump in my throat looking over between Banff and Lake Louise where there was a near continuous stand of old-growth forest just waiting to go up in flames.
“Only a handful of people know how close things came to lighting up the Banff side where the forest went on forever. At times, the fire had its own mind, doing whatever it wanted to do. Fortunately, we made the right decisions. We learned a lot of lessons that year.”