It’s not only people affected by the fires

Anything that bumps Donald Trump out of the news for more than hour can’t be all bad. The forest fires in B.C. accomplished that, several times last week.

The local television channel didn’t mention Trump once in a news special. Ditto for several radio stations.

But that’s about the only good thing that can be sad about the present forest fire situation.

As I write this, smoke hangs heavily in the Okanagan Valley although the nearest fire is 150 kilometres away. I can’t see across the lake. Visibility resembles the video images of Beijing during the last summer Olympics, with cars and cyclists emerging from the murk, and vanishing back into it.

The figures keep changing, but at one point, B.C. had over 230 wildfires burning, most of them uncontrolled; more than 14,000 people evacuated from their homes. Because the fires are so scattered, I can’t find a reliable figure for the number of homes destroyed.

But the number certainly doesn’t compare to the fire in Fort McMurray last year, which raged for two months straight, destroyed 2,400 homes, and forced the evacuation of 88,000 people. It doesn’t even compare with the 2003 Kelowna fire that burned 239 homes and forced evacuation of 33,000 residents.

Still, fires are always good fodder for news stories.

They’re vastly more visual than meetings where dark-suited dignitaries sit in stone circles. Stonehenge shows more animation.

The nature worshippers who created Stonehenge might, in fact, have more understanding of the causes of this summer’s fires than we do.

Amid the smoke (and mirrors), a few still small voices have whispered the words, “climate change.” The gradual warming of the Pacific Ocean affects air flow patterns over the continent. As a result, summers get hotter, or wetter. Winters get colder, or milder. Which sounds confusing, even contradictory. Which is precisely what’s happening. As the air flow loops look more and more like a snake with constipation, weather becomes unpredictable.

The only sure thing is that whatever comes, it will be more extreme than expected.

So a few years back, we had a series of mild winters that enabled pine beetles to spread. The beetles killed huge areas of B.C. forests. Now those trees are tinder.

This last spring was unusually wet. A month ago, I commented to the dog — who, unfortunately, can’t corroborate my wisdom —that wild grass had grown taller and thicker than I remembered in the last 20 years. Undergrowth flourished.

Then we had weeks without detectable rain. Dead trees provided no shade. Leaves dried. Grass parched. Soil grew hard and dry. More tinder. And it could get worse. The fire season usually peaks in August.

After a week of what feels like wall-to-wall coverage of these fires, I’m feeling uneasy about some underlying themes.

From news coverage, I’d have to assume that forest fires are all about humans. Human lives. Human property. Human control.

“Our first priority is human lives,” a firefighter told Global News. So far, amazingly, no human lives have been lost. But many human lives have been disrupted.

The second priority seems to be human possessions. Things we think we own. Houses. Barns. Businesses. Domesticated animals — dogs, cats, and cattle.

And third, human control. Fires have to be brought under control. A burned-out trailer park becomes a symbol of failure. There’s an implied assumption that we humans have a mandate to manage nature. For our own benefit, of course.

But it’s selective control. Fires that don’t threaten human homes or industries are allowed to burn themselves out. No one risks water bombers or firefighters to save a migratory bird flyway, a salmon river, a caribou range.

Perhaps the focus on humans is a natural conclusion. Humans are the media’s audience, after all.

Moose do not buy newspapers; trees do not watch television.

Even so, I don’t recall anyone discussing the ability of charred soil to retain moisture. How will this summer’s fires affect next spring’s flooding?

What will these fires do to the natural food chain?

Will field mice overrun meadows because their predators have perished? Conversely, where will predators prowl if their natural prey have all been baked?

UBC Okanagan professor Suzanne Simard has proven, beyond skepticism, that forests are sentient beings. Trees communicate with each other through their root systems, augmented by the filaments of fungi. The forest floor is a network of neurons. Should we care that fires have given the landscape a lobotomy? I think we should. But maybe we don’t. Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca.