As fires rage across southern B.C., homeowners and taxpayers wonder if there's a plan to deal with tinder-dry, beetle-infested forests.
Hundreds of thousands of homes across the province's southern half straddle the urban/wild interface, from picturesque Lake Okanagan, to the densely populated North Shore of the Lower Mainland, to Whistler, a site of the 2010 Olympics.
As climate models have predicted, smaller snowpacks, earlier spring melts, longer, drier fire seasons, retreating glaciers and the largest native mountain pine beetle infestation in modern times are the telltales for the perfect storm of the mismanaged bone-dry B.C. forests. Residents are rightfully furious the lessons of the hellacious 2003 fire season appear to have been disregarded.
The meagre clearing done at Kelowna's outskirts didn't reduce fuel loads, recently resulting in lost homes, looting and the evacuation of thousands of residents. Now, Lillooet has been evacuated.
For some 85 years, the B.C. Forest Service has imposed a Smokey Bear fire policy, interrupting the natural fire cycle and deliberately preventing wildfires. All the forests in British Columbia and throughout the nation have evolved with fire; many tree species rely upon it for survival.
The beleaguered forest industry has, for the past 90 years, dismantled most of B.C.'s 50 million hectares of working forests. With slumping world economies, it has dislocated tens of thousands of workers and isn't able to help foot B.C. residents' firefighting bill of more than $110-million. These are the very taxpayers who own the Crown land from which the forest industry has profited so handsomely.
Forest ecosystems, like humans, continuously undergo change. Fire is one of nature's agents of change. By purposely stopping fire from occurring, the B.C. Forest Service has altered the structure and composition of forests.
In southern B.C., hundreds of millions of overmature, tinder-dry lodgepole pines surround some communities – for example, Kelowna and Lillooet. Lightning-induced fire, every 35 years or so, would normally preclude conditions such as are now being faced but outdated management policies have clearly upset nature's balance.
In addition, droughts have weakened billions of mature pines. Those that haven't died lack gooey pitch, their only defensive mechanism against native bark beetles: The trees are sitting ducks for the insatiable insects.
Bark beetles are another of nature's agents of change; they are on a tear. Since fire has been suppressed from the landscape, and lethal frigid temperatures in November have not occurred for the past 15 years, billions of bark beetles are swarming in a feeding frenzy of biblical proportions.
The hundreds of millions of dead standing pines are acting as kindling and fuelling megafires like those of 2003.
Unusual times call for unusual actions: B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell would be well advised to consider following a precedent New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson – a fellow member of the Western Climate Initiative – implemented to remove millions of dead pinyon pines in his state and protect homeowners. Mr. Richardson mobilized prison inmates to clear the incendiary dead trees from forestlands.
The costs of having inmates assist in removal of dead trees, as well as thinning out overcrowded forests in southern B.C. around communities, is a fraction of the expense of the other options, including: raising new taxes, the labour bill for having foresters do the thinning, hundreds of millions of dollars spent fighting wildfires or the price tag for replacing homes destroyed by fires. And this doesn't consider the human lives senselessly lost.
The choice for removing the explosive forest kindling is clear: Would you rather your tax dollars be spent paying $1 an hour to inmates or $30 an hour to professional fallers?
Reese Halter is the founder of the international conservation institute Global Forest Science.
