Short Wave - This Is Canada's Worst Fire Season In Modern History. It's Not New

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Canada is having its worst fire season in modern history. The fires have burnt more than 20 million acres, casting hazardous smoke over parts of the U.S. and stretching Canadian firefighting resources thin. Public officials and many news headlines have declared the fires as "unprecedented," and in the modern-sense they are. But NPR climate correspondent Nate Rott has been talking to researchers who focus on the history of wildfire in Canada's boreal forests and they say the situation is not without precedent.Want more stories on the environment? Drop us a line at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey there, shortwavers. Today we're traveling to the source of the smoke that's been affecting tens of millions of Americans this summer, including me here in D.C. We're going to Canada. The eastern Canadian province of Quebec, to be more specific, Regina. Nate Rod, hey. You were there recently to cover some of the massive wildfires burning there, right? Yeah, that's right.

So those planes that you're hearing in the background are actually firefell. fighting airplanes called scoopers that were taken off from an airfield in the town of Valdeor. Regina, can you guess why they are called scoopers? I'm going to take a wild guess and that they're scooping water from nearby water sources and like dumping that water on the fires. Ding ding ding ding ding! Yeah, I'm the best. Yeah, you got it.

No, yeah. So they are planes that fly really low and literally scoop up water from lakes or rivers and then dump them on wildfires like the ones that are burning in Canada in these super remote parts of the country. Super remote. So like, how far are we talking about? Hours and hours and hours away from major cities. So I drove roughly six hours northwest of Montreal and was still a few hours away from the closest fire. And nearly the whole drive, I was surrounded by this dense evergreen boreal forest. Boreal forest. What is a boreal forest? Okay, so you remember in your middle school science class about the world's biomes, the Tiga,

Boreal forests are the largest terrestrial biome or habitat on the planet Earth. Right. So we're talking terrestrial. We're excluding the ocean. Yeah, the ocean doesn't get to play in this game. So we're just talking about land-based ecosystems. And as far as land-based ecosystems, the Taiga boreal forests take the cake. They stretch across the northern hemisphere from Canada to Alaska to Russia. And there are these massive stores of carbon. And this year, a lot of them are on fire. Yeah, I've seen the word unprecedented used a lot in the coverage of these wildfires. Yeah, I mean, it is super rare for Canada to be dealing with such widespread fire from the eastern part of the country all the way to the west.

And a lot of contemporary records are falling. I'm sensing a butt here. You would be correct. But if you zoom out and look even further back in time, if you take off your human goggles and you look at this from a forest perspective, Some researchers I talk to say that what's happening right now in Canada is not unprecedented. It's happened before and that it's important to remember that as we try to gauge what these fires mean for the broader world and what they say about our changing climate. Today on the show, we'll look at the interesting history of wildfire in Canada's boreal forests.

And how this year's fires compare to the long-term norm. I'm Nate Rod. I'm Regina Barber and you're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, so Nate, in case some of our listeners haven't been paying attention or haven't been breathing this smoke, walk us through what's happening in Canada right now. Yeah, so Canada is seeing a whole lot of fire right now. There are more than 500 wildfires burning in the country currently, and they're spaced from the west in British Columbia to the east where I was in Quebec. Now, wildfire is not a new phenomenon in any of these places, but the scale of the fires, how big they are, how intense, how intense, how much. how widespread, that is really rare, and it's causing all sorts of issues for Canadian firefighting agencies.

But you met with some of the researchers, and they say these fires are not unprecedented. So that's right. Here's one of those researchers, a PhD student named Julie Pascal, and here's how she put it. Right now, I'm not alarmed by what's happening. I'm like, years like this happened and happened. Yeah, and that voice you hear in the background saying, yes, that is Pascal's professor at a forest research station associated with the University of Quebec. I'm Miguel Montoro-Girona.

I'm the director of the research group in ecology in ABTV. And I'm working in my research to try to reconstruct the natural disturbance regimes in forest ecosystem, but also to try to predict the future to update forest management in the face of climate change. Okay, so these researchers are trying to reconstruct past fire histories in these boreal forests, right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, because they say in order to...

understand what's happening right now, to put this in context and understand what's going to happen to boreal forests in the hotter future as human actions continue to warm the planet, we need to have a good baseline, right? We need to have an understanding of how these forests have adapted and changed naturally over time. So how do you do that? Okay, so this is where I think it gets really cool. Oh my God, this never happens. So Julie Pascal and Miguel Montoro, Jurena, took me to another building on campus and into this dark storage room, where it literally smells like fresh-cut pine. Maybe we can find one with this firestore.

Yes. They go to these big shelves that are stuffed with these cross-sections of wood. They almost look like big coasters, a couple of inches thick and the size of a dinner plate. Yes, this is this. I got the classic. Do you know, imagine the people that survived the tree COVID. He is one survivor of three fire. So this is a cross-section of a tree that survived three different wildfires.

and you can see that in the tree rings? Yeah, so they're like these little scars, these little aberrations in the tree rings. But they're not from recent fires. These are from fires hundreds of years ago, dating back to the 1700s or maybe even earlier. Because all of the cross sections we're looking at here have come from logs that have been pulled up

from underwater in Canadian lakes. Okay, so did these trees fall into the lakes? So no. So these were trees that were actually cut down when this part of Quebec was full. first being developed by Europeans in the 1700s and 1800s. And, you know, how do you move timber when you don't have a bunch of rail lines and everything established yet? Logging companies would float the trees across bodies of water, downstream in a

river or across a lake. And, you know, inevitably, some of those logs would sink. It looks old. It looks it. But look how like it's well preserved because it was at the bottom of a lake. A cold lake that freezes over much of the year, slowing decomposition. Pascal says these are like little floating and sunk chronologies of the forest's fire history. Okay. So what are they finding from these little chronologies? So these researchers and others who focus on Canada's boreal forests have actually found that there was more wildfire in these forests during many of the past centuries than what we're used to seeing today.

That seems counterintuitive. Yeah. I mean, another way to think of it is that what we are seeing today, right? Well, we think of as normal wildfire. behavior, normal wildfire frequency, is actually atypical in the past. So why is that? Well, there are a number of hypotheses that scientists have thrown out. One has to do with naturally changing climates, right? That climate does naturally change. I got one more researcher with that group that we've been talking to who will help explain what we're talking about.

My name is Milva Drigéderas. I'm in PhD in co-supervising between France and Quebec. So she's been looking at sediment records of why. wildfires in boreal forests, which lets her look even further back in time, thousands of years. And there have been some huge shifts. So, for example, after the Ice Age, after the glaciers receded, Drew Gadeevasse says we saw a lot more frequent low-intensity wildfires. Then there was something called the Little Ice Age, that was roughly from the 16th to 19th

centuries, when temperatures were actually cooler and scientists believed that the air was drier. And in this period, we had a very low frequency of fire, very, very low frequency, but huge fires. In part because less frequent fires allows more vegetation to build up. More vegetation means there's more opportunity for big fires. Right. So there's more fuel to burn when a fire does start. Exactly. So another interesting hypothesis from this time period is that the fires were actually maybe bigger because there were less indigenous management of forests as desiring. As a disease, decimated Native American and First Nations populations. So this landscape that had been co-evolving with humans all of a sudden was thrown out

a whack. Wow. That's wild to think about. Yeah. Those forests didn't have their regular custodians. Yeah. I mean, it's really sobering. And it speaks to how long people have been influencing parts of the natural world, even before,

you know, we really started changing the planet's climate with internal combustion engines and huge releases of carbon dioxide. from our cars and our energy systems and all of that into the atmosphere. So even though these wildfires are unprecedented, how is climate change playing a role in these wildfires today in Canada? So it's a good question. And one that we don't exactly have a clear answer for yet, especially as it pertains to precipitation, right?

We don't know exactly how precipitation patterns are going to change in places like Northern Canada. What we do know is that the planet is getting hotter. We're seeing with these heat waves, right, in the southwest right now, in Mexico. All around the planet, we're seeing these massive heat waves, and higher temperatures generally mean more opportunity for wildfire and longer wildfire seasons. Right, which we've been seen a lot of in the U.S. Exactly, yeah, but it's also true in Canada. So when I was in Valdor, I went to the region's firefighting base of operations and talked to a fire behavior specialist

named Norman Lacourourne. He's been working a wildfire for 35 years, and he said when he started, the earliest fire that they had on record in his region of Northwest Quebec was June 18th. Actually, we face a new one this year, May 27th. So we gained three weeks there. And when LeCour started in firefighting, the last fire they recorded was August 18th. And last year we had one. I think it was September 2nd. So you've seen this lengthening of the fire.

So in 35 years, we see the fire scene. get six weeks more than we had 35 years ago. That's a big change. Yeah, it's a huge change, and it's one that's expected to continue to grow across the world as temperatures continue to rise. Okay, so help me understand. You're saying that there's been a lot of variability, a lot of changing in fire size and frequency in Canada for a long time. So what does that mean for today, like when we're all worried about there being so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already? It's a good question.

I mean, that's the same one I asked of one of the researchers I met with. Here's Miguel Montora Urena, the academic who's leading this research on historic wildfire regimes in Quebec. For fire right now, we are in the range of availability. Even climate change, it's our wrong ass all the time. So, in other words, like Pascal said earlier, fire seasons like this have happened in the past. We're still in the range of variability for boreal forests, even if it seems totally unprecedented extended to us. So there's a lot of things that we do need to worry about as pertains to climate change and wildfires, like the lengthening of fire seasons, as we just heard, the increasing intensity

of fire seasons. There's also a big concern about how fast some of these ecosystems are going to be able to adapt, right? The climate has always changed, but it changes usually a little more slowly than we're seeing right now with all the carbon emissions we're putting in the atmosphere. So there is an open question as to whether or not these boreal forests will be able to change with the times. But we shouldn't look at this year as being something that's totally out of the realm of possibility. And even more importantly, the researchers say we need to remember as we're talking about this that wildfire is a natural process. Here's Julie Pascal and Milva Durbe de Vasse. We need fires in the forest.

We need to stop fires when they are close to the cities because that could be like very bad for a lot. of people, but like, otherwise in the forest we need fires. They take part of the life cycle of the forest. And the biodiversity. Yeah, the biodiversity. Nate, this is really interesting reporting, and it's an important perspective that we don't really think about and how we deal with the smoke and other fallout from the wildfires. Yeah, thanks.

I learned a lot about it myself. I didn't realize that there was so much history of wildfire up there. It kind of blew my mind. This episode was produced by Carly Rubin. was edited by Sadie Babbitts and our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez. Nate checked the facts. The audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Beth Donovan is our senior director of programming,

and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.