Story created by and for Forestry for the Future.
Forest fires in the past few years have consumed record areas of Canada’s forests. Part of the problem has been the perception that all fires are bad, and that we need to put out every fire as quickly as we can instead of letting lower intensity fires happen. In the vast boreal forests that stretch across northern Canada, forest fires are a natural regime. Forests have always burned, and some even need fire to regenerate.
For a century or more we have tried to snuff out any fire that catches, leading to a buildup of fuel, which makes fires all that much worse when lightning or human negligence provides a spark. The reality is that fire suppression will never eliminate fire from the forest.
Photo: Inspecting wood burned in the Elephant Hill Wildfire of 2017. This wood was left standing seven years later until a pilot project was undertaken by Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation Ltd. to see how it could utilize the fibre. Photo Credit: CCR
“Western Canada is experiencing a definite trend of greater wildfire size, intensity and severity,” says David Elstone, a registered professional forester based in North Vancouver, who has worked in the forest sector for over 30 years. “That’s concerning. It’s causing foresters and non-foresters alike to rethink forest management.”
That rethinking has picked up pace as of late, and the forest sector is leaning into its relationships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities to collaborate on wildfire strategies. These collaborations are crucial. Not only do First Nations have much to teach about managing fire on the landscape; they are also innovating, joining forces with the forest industry in rehabilitation projects for forests that have burned to turn devastation into opportunity.
First Nations have centuries of experience in cultural burning, the practice of lighting smaller, more frequent fires to encourage certain forest types and to reduce the risk of fires that spiral out of control. “There’s a lot of Indigenous knowledge that needs to be incorporated back into managing the land,” says Elstone.
Elstone, managing director of Spar Tree Group, says that we can also work to change perceptions of huge expanses of dead and dying forests across the landscape, laid low by fires. Right now, such forests are problematic as they are potential fuel that could reburn again, further adding to the destruction of the forest and threatening nearby communities. But these dead trees are also an opportunity: this is fibre the industry can harvest, through what foresters call “salvage logging,” to supply mills and other users who need timber.
“Remember, our forest industry is not just lumber — it’s a whole spectrum of forest products that use different qualities of logs and different parts of the log,” says Elstone. “We need to make sure we have policies that support the utilization of burnt timber.”
Photo: Members of the Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation Ltd. team (left to right: Daniel Persson, Joe Webster, Philippe Theriault) at the Pressy Lake pilot project site with Steve Kozuki of the Forest Enhancement Society of BC. Photo Credit: CCR
Two First Nations in the Chilcotin, a plateau region of B.C. between the coast mountains and the Fraser River, have teamed up to do just that. The Tŝideldel First Nation and the Tl'etinqox Government joined forces in spring 2017 to create Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation Ltd., initially to restore 100,000 hectares of pine forests killed by the mountain pine beetle. That summer, the pine forest caught fire; the devastating Plateau Fire consumed a whopping 800,000 hectares.
Looking at these vast expanses of blackened and burnt forests, the communities saw an opportunity to help rehabilitate the land.
“The extent of the fires here has posed a big challenge,” says Daniel Persson, a registered forest professional and Forestry Superintendent for Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation Ltd. “And we were not really dealing with, or using, all the dead wood that was out in the forest afterwards. Many of us were wondering, ‘Why don’t we use these trees as material?’”
Persson had won an award for forest research in his native Sweden before settling in B.C. Today, he and his team have found uses for forests devastated by fire, disease, and insects. “With the amount of fibre that we have on the landscape that’s burnt, it would bridge the fibre deficit that much of the forest industry is needing and talking about.”
The Indigenous partnership, with help from the B.C. government, has invested in chippers and trucks and processed 500 hectares of forest, proving that it can salvage the fire-affected trees for use in three forest industries: pulp mills, pellet mills and power plants. A power plant burns some parts of the tree to make electricity, some of which powers the city of Williams Lake.
One tricky issue is removing the char from the wood to make it acceptable for pulp and paper. “Everybody said, you can’t use burnt fibre for pulp,” Persson says. “But you can, and we proved that. It’s doable. If we scale that up, deliver more, we will get more cost-effective fibre per cubic metre.”
Forest management is crucial to ecosystem restoration, says Elstone. Often a fire leaves in its wake a vast area of dead trees that eventually fall over to form a carpet of criss-crossed logs, a landscape inaccessible to large wildlife and people that poses the threat of future fires.
In the Chilcotin, once the Indigenous partnership has removed the burned trees, it becomes possible for the community, and the wildlife, to return to the forest. The First Nations joint venture has also teamed up with Natural Resources Canada and its 2 Billion Trees Program to plant new trees and begin to restore the natural growth cycle in these forests.
“Salvaging supports (and helps fund) the restoration of burnt areas and hastens reforestation,” says Elstone.
“In doing so, the forest sector plays an important role to bring those sites back into timber production, but also back onto an ecological path, getting tree cover going again, and ensuring habitat is available for wildlife to reutilize the area.”
To learn more about how Canada’s forest sector can support a more sustainable future, visit forestryforthefuture.ca.
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