Scientists say some wildfires shouldn't be put out. The weather is making that more difficult.

On warm summer afternoons in southern British Columbia, thunderclouds bloom over high plateaus and towering mountain peaks. A flash of light. A sharp crack. And a blast of electricity is delivered to another remote hillside.

A new wildfire has started. It won’t be detected for hours or days. But when it is finally discovered, a pivotal decision will have to be made. Should the fire be immediately put out? Or can it be allowed to clear away brush on the forest floor, potentially reducing the intensity of a future blaze while making room for wildlife?

The question, which lies at the heart of BC’s wildfire crisis, isn’t new. But the answer has never been muddier.

Fire officials know fires help foster healthier forest ecosystems and reduce the long-term risk of cataclysmic blazes. And although deliberately set “prescribed fires” can help protect communities, across most of BC’s forests, uncontrolled fires have always consumed far more ground-level fuel.

A century ago, British Columbia tried to put out every fire. Now, that approach is widely seen as a catalyst for today’s supersized fires. But reversing course is harder than it seems, thanks, in large part, to our rapidly changing climate.

Hotter, drier, and longer summers are making it increasingly perilous to allow fires to burn. And that has left fire officials—and BC’s southern Interior as a whole—in a modern Catch 22, wherein BC and its residents are potentially damned if crews tries to put out every fire, and damned if they don’t.

NOTE: This article is primarily concerned with the fire situation in BC’s southern Interior that has seen numerous large and fast-moving fires over the last seven years. The area stretches from BC’s Cariboo region to Osoyoos, while extending west into the Fraser Canyon. BC’s coastal forests have largely, but not entirely, avoided the problems discussed herein. The term wildfire is used instead of forest fire because not all Interior fires involve forests; some primarily burn underbrush or grasses.

This is a long story. If you need to take a break, take note of your chapter, then just click one of the following links when you return: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | 

1: A history of suppression

Fires are as natural as the trees that crowd the flanks of BC’s mountains and the grass that tufts the hills of the province’s southern interior.

As long as lighting has struck trees, those trees have burst into flames. Over millennia, British Columbia’s ecosystems evolved to not only survive flames, but to benefit from them. Regular fires functioned as a sort of reset button for forests, clearing out dead wood and providing room for both animals and new plants to emerge.

The lodgepole pines that dominate the southern Interior forests evolved so their cones would only release seeds following a fire: increased forest floor sunlight, less competition, and more nutrient-rich soil made growing conditions ideal. Deer and other animals, meanwhile, thrived in areas where dead underbrush had been cleared by fire and replaced by new plants and shrubs.

The behaviour of people also evolved with the fires: Indigenous communities realized that fires could help medicinal plants grow and provide paths for deer while reducing the frequency of future high-intensity blazes that depended on the accumulation of dry, dead wood and grass.

This cycle went awry at the start of the last century. Settlers in early British Columbia might have had a relatively high tolerance of natural disasters, but wildfire was something else. It didn’t just pose a threat to homes, businesses and communities. In a province whose economy was dominated by logging and dependent on a supply of continuous and uninterrupted timber, fire was understandably seen as an economic enemy to be eliminated.

The province didn’t just promote fire suppression, it required that logging companies lead fire suppression efforts to protect BC’s valuable trees before they could be chopped down.

This approach continued until the 1970s when Victoria looked to rewrite the province’s forestry legislation. For decades, the province had been cutting down what we today call “primary forests” or, in some cases, old-growth forests: natural woodlands that had existed and evolved over thousands of years. But by the 70s, with the forestry sector having chewed through much of BC’s primary timber supply, the provincial government created a royal commission to consider the future of logging in British Columbia. The

Commissioner Peter H. Pearse would change how British Columbia’s governments talked about its forests—even if its behaviour wouldn’t necessarily follow suit. In his report, Pearse wrote that logging had changed such areas forever.

“As we press further into this wilderness—building roads, logging timber, controlling fire and other natural forces, and managing the land to serve our needs—we must recognize that we are changing it permanently,” he wrote in 1976. “In many respects we know we can make it more productive, but we nevertheless lack a full understanding of the impact of our activities on natural processes.”

Decades later, a trio of UBC forestry academics would write that Pearse’s report brought a “paradigm shift” to forest management in BC. Officials began using prescribed fires (the deliberate introduction of fire) to bring back some of the benefits wildfires had once provided. Cutblocks began to be designed to simulate the way fires created natural breaks that could limit the spread of flames, and fire officials began allowing a small number of blazes to burn unhindered.

But although Pearse’s report signaled a new era and approach to fire, fully embracing the ideas it espoused was always going to be difficult when the interests of recreation users, industry, and the environment only occasionally aligned.

The UBC scientists—Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz, Shannon Hagerman and Lori Daniels—wrote that the BC Wildfire Service remained committed to controlling and suppressing fires, with the province requiring BCWS to set a defined limit on the maximum amount of timber to be burned in any one year. That target showed how officials—and the public—believed that it was entirely possible to effectively limit the scale and scope of wildfires.

That idea seems wrong-headed in retrospect. But at the time, British Columbia wildfires were relatively tame by today’s standards. Through the 1980s, it was exceedingly rare for a wildfire to burn homes, and large-scale evacuations were almost unheard of.

But the climate was changing. And so was the behaviour of fire.

2: A new era of fire

In 1994, a wildfire near Penticton burned 18 homes in what was then BC’s “worst interface fire ever.”

It was only the beginning.

Over the ensuing three decades, BC has encountered progressively bigger, more aggressive, and more damaging interface fires—fires that occur on the boundary between wild habitat and urban areas. In 1998, a blaze near Salmon Arm forced 8,000 people to flee and destroyed 40 homes. In 2003, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire forced the unprecedented evacuation of tens of thousands of Kelowna residents and burned more than 200 homes. That same year, a wildfire swept through the community of Barriere. It destroyed 72 of the town’s homes—but even that devastating total was seen as something of a reprieve, given early fears that the entire community had been consumed.

Following the 2003 wildfires, the province commissioned a report to identify ways to better protect communities. More than 50,000 people had been evacuated that year, hundreds of homes burned, and three firefighters killed in a plane crash.

“Despite the multi-million dollar expenditure and the concentrated efforts of knowledgeable and dedicated people, in some cases the forces of nature were simply stronger, costing human lives and the loss of private and public property and forest land,” the report said. “Nonetheless, the losses in all areas could have been considerably worse.”

That warning, along with many of the report’s suggestions on how to avoid such devastation in the future, went mostly unheeded. The years that followed were relatively quiet. But in hindsight, it was a moment of calm before the coming firestorm.

In 2017, hundreds of fires ravaged the province, displacing even more people than had been forced to flee 14 years earlier and leaving huge parts of BC choking on smoke.

In response, the province commissioned yet another review of how BC prepared for and managed disasters. That report, co-authored by former cabinet minister George Abbott and Skawahlook Chief Maureen Chapman, declared that: “Despite earnest efforts, BC has made disappointingly little progress on the goal of enhanced community safety since 2003.”

The new report explored the factors that had allowed for the previous year’s disastrous season and recommended ways to prepare for future wildfire outbreaks. It urged the province to recommit itself to creating community wildfire protection plans and revisit how to best address the build-up of brush and dead wood near cities and towns. And it reaffirmed that BC needed to once again consider fire’s role in forests—and the consequences that come from trying to eliminate it. In doing so it called for more use of prescribed burning to manage fuel in forests.

The 2017 fire season and the Abbott-Chapman report that followed it marked another rhetorical pivot point for British Columbia—but it didn’t result in enough on-the-ground changes as many would have liked. The situation has only worsened since, as Interior residents have become increasingly familiar with the sight of massive the appearance of massive plumes of smoke that signal a fire that is growing and spreading at uncontrollable speeds. Such “pyrocumulonimbus” plumes used to be extremely rare. Now they are a sign of summer—and the challenges that fire officials and British Columbians face.

• • • • •

Barriere. Kelowna. Monte Lake. The North Shuswap. Lytton. Venables Valley. Okanagan Indian Band. The list of communities ravaged by fire is significant—and pales in comparison to communities that narrowly escaped damage but had residents forced from their homes in traumatic and disruptive ways.

The last decade has seen an especially sharp increase in the frequency at which seemingly fires become community-devouring monsters. And many of BC’s worst fires have not started close to communities but rather in relatively isolated areas far away from the neighbourhoods they would eventually ravage.

It’s now fairly common for winds to push fires many kilometres in a matter of days. In 2021, high winds blew the White Rock Lake blaze more than 30km to the north and through Monte Lake, then, days later, a similar distance to the western edge of Okanagan Lake.

The Kookipi Creek fire in the Fraser Canyon was 2023’s prime example of how a small fire can threaten distant communities. That blaze was ignited in early July by a lightning strike on a peak on the western side of the canyon. Throughout early August, the fire continued to smolder and burn, but it didn’t appear to be going anywhere. Wildfire crews monitored the blaze, but with heavy demand elsewhere didn’t devote more precious resources to fully extinguishing the flames. Then, on August 17, the weather shifted and strong winds hit the canyon.

"I've never felt the winds and the trees moving the way that it was," Shoneena Loss, who lived some distance to the north, told the CBC last year. The winds drove the flames off of their mountaintop perch and into the Fraser Canyon.

The fire was so intense that it created a cloud of smoke that could be seen from Abbotsford and which was so large, and in such an unexpected location, that some online commenters questioned whether it was a volcanic plume. The blaze destroyed a fire lookout, and raced into and through the Fraser Canyon, burning six homes and shutting down Highway 1. For weeks, the flames threatened several First Nations south of Lytton, setting nerves on edge in communities still reeling from the 2021 fires.

3: The modified response

BC’s devastating infernos have demonstrated the immediate need for the province to do whatever it can to reduce the intensity and threat of the wildfires that break out in the southern Interior.

Much of the energy to immediately address BC’s wildfire crisis comes down to how BC manages its forests—and flames.

The intensity and behaviour of fires is influenced by three things: topography, weather, and fuel. Topography, for the most part, is unchanging and unchangeable. It speaks to how fire interacts with the slopes of mountains and hills. Weather, thanks to climate change, will continue to change as long as atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise—and while British Columbia can cut its emissions and do its part to reduce future climate change, those efforts aren’t going to significantly impact the summer heat this decade or next. So reducing the severity of fires will largely depend on BC finding the best balance between short- and long-term forest and fire management

If extinguishing every fire as quickly as possible once primed BC’s forests to burn, logic dictates that the opposite could help address the province’s wildfire crisis. Ever since the Pearse report in 1976, the British Columbia Wildfire Service has refrained from putting out fires that officials believe will perform their natural role in forest ecosystems without harming people or property. In recent decades, the push to allow for the “return of fire to the landscape,” as it is often phrased, has gathered momentum—even as on-the ground progress has been slow.

Here’s how it works today:

Within minutes of discovering a fire, BCWS staff work on figuring out how to respond—and if doing so is even possible. If a fire was started by lightning and is not an immediate threat to the surrounding area, the BCWS may choose to undertake what it calls a “modified response,” where crews don’t attempt to extinguish at least a portion of a fire.

Sometimes fire crews attempt to stifle flames in one area, while allowing other parts of the blaze to burn. In other cases, unthreatening fires may be simply monitored—this is most common in remote coastal areas or when firefighting resources are in short supply.

Full suppression efforts are typically undertaken if the fire was started by human activity, if upcoming weather is conducive to the development of extreme fires, or if there are property or other values——a catch-all wildfire-management term for anything deemed worth protecting from flames—nearby.

Those two choices—modified response or full suppression—are assigned to every fire detected by BCWS officials. The response type is then listed on the wildfire’s heavily used public mapping and fire-cataloging system, where ordinary folks can check to see what, if anything, is being done in regards to the smoke or flames in the area.

On paper, it looks like an A-or-B choice. In reality, suppression is anything but, with crews often fighting part, but not all, of a blaze receiving a modified response.

The rationale for a modified response also varies. Sometimes a modified response is used because a full-on attack is impractical or impossible, or because other, more-threatening fires are more of a priority.

Weather forecasts, mountain slopes (and whether they face south or north), wind direction, and natural firebreaks all have to be considered when deciding how hard to pounce on a new fire. Access is a crucial consideration, given that many fires are started by lightning on remote mountaintops. If reaching a fire is unsafe for ground crews—often because of a combination of steep terrain and lack of access routes—BCWS may choose to wait a blaze out, sending crews to do more pressing work elsewhere. And while aircraft can be used in such situations, extinguishing a fire completely requires boots on the ground.

“There is a common perception amongst the public that if we just put more water on a fire, it’ll go out,” Alan Berry, a senior wildfire officer for prevention in BC’s coastal fire centre, told The Current. “But you always need a ground crew to go and actually put a fire out.”

Complications lurk everywhere. On steep slopes, for instance, a bucket of water can help to stymie a stubborn blaze—or it can send a burning log rolling downhill, creating more headaches for crews.

One factor can outweigh everything else: the availability of resources. When fires are few and far between, officials can focus purely on determining whether a fire will endanger people and property. But once summer hits with full force, officials have to start triaging fires, focusing on those that pose the most danger or where crews have the best chance of success.

Berry spoke to The Current in late July, as fire crews across the province dealt with the consequences of a prolonged heat wave. When there are few fires in the province, fire managers might try sending crews to put out a backcountry fire where there was a low-to-moderate chance of success, Berry said. But as multiple fires start to encroach on cities, towns, and farms, the use of resources shifts to trying to contain the most dangerous fires.

4: Modified criticism

In recent years, the BC Wildfire Service (BCWS) has been frequently criticized by locals who worry that officials aren’t devoting sufficient resources to extinguishing nearby fires. Some of that criticism is related to the use of modified responses in handling a fire.

The Kookipi Creek fire, and the perception that officials prioritized other blazes, left some Fraser Canyon residents feeling neglected.

“We were not a high priority given some of the other efforts and maybe the lack of resources to tackle all the events that were occurring at the same time,” Bryan Fogelman, the owner of a rafting resort whose business was destroyed by the fire, told the CBC. “I feel like we were left to burn on this side of the Nahatlatch.”

Berry told The Current that wildfire crews were quickly deployed to the blaze after it was detected, even though access was difficult and the flames were a considerable distance from any homes. By the end of the month, the fire was listed as “held” by the BC Wildfire Service. Berry said that, with larger priorities in the region, ground crews were assigned elsewhere.

The fire was seemingly contained, but the remaining flames were in a hard-to-access area. So, with other priorities during the fiery 2023 season, the blaze was left to continue smouldering. In many cases, such a fire would very slowly burn until fall when, unnoticed by the general public, it meets a rainy end. The Kookipi Creek fire, though, was brought back to life by high winds that whipped its flames into an inferno and sent it hurtling west into the canyon.

Berry says the response to that fire prompted an internal review. But he noted that the small blaze was one of more than a dozen that could have behaved in a similar manner.

“Would we take a different approach to responding to [the Kookipi Creek] fire in the future?” Berry asked. “There could have been 15 fires on the landscape that could have done the same thing at that time, and we can only get to the ones where we can safely access and have resources available.”

Some criticism is aggravated by how the BCWS’s much-used website describes modified responses. The website declares that crews aren’t trying to extinguish a fire when a modified response is used, and often doesn’t describe what suppression activities are being undertaken. That can understandably create anger in instances like 2024’s Shetland Creek wildfire that burned dozens of structures in the Venables Valley near Spences Bridge. The BCWS website reported that a modified response was being used days before the blaze took off to the north.

BCWS officials said that concentrated suppression efforts were being undertaken during that time. But anyone relying on the website could have come away with the impression that the fire was being left to burn unhindered.

5: The heavy lifting

In recent years, the BCWS has spent considerable time, effort, and money promoting the use of prescribed fire—carefully managed controlled burns—to reduce wildfire risk near communities. But natural fires, including those receiving a modified resposne, continue to do the vast majority of fuel-reduction work in BC.

In 2023, prescribed fire was used across about 2,400 hectares of land. This year, more than 3,000 hectares were treated with prescribed fire.

But fires receiving a modified response burned more than 40 times that territory. In 2023, BC’s wildfires burned nearly three million hectares. One-third of those hectares were burned by fires that weren’t fully suppressed.

The vast majority of those fires are mostly slow-moving, low-intensity blazes that clear underbrush from forests but don’t evolve into firestorms.

The challenge, though, in allowing more such fires to burn largely unhindered—as academics and scientists suggest is needed—is that the year 2024 is not like 1924, or even 1974.

In BC’s Southern Interior, the approach is increasingly challenged by safety concerns, the presence of people and their property, and human-caused climate change.

It’s one thing to allow wildfires to burn, unhindered, away from communities, properties, and other human values. It’s another thing to actually do that in today’s southern BC, where there are more people living, working and recreating in and around BC’s forests than ever before.

“In the early 2000s, when I was on a crew, I was based in Hope and we would go into a drainage, there’d be a couple lightning strike fires in there and we would work them and most people probably didn’t even know that a fire even occurred,” Berry explained. “Now there could be an independent power project, there’s likely some recreational trails, there’s more access for harvesting occurring.”

And the spread of people might not be the largest obstacle. The weather is also challenging the ability to let low-intensity fires burn—and changing what might be considered “close” to any one fire.

Fires don’t grow at a steady rate. Instead, the bulk of fire growth takes place during a handful of “fire weather” days when the high winds that follow prolonged dry spells blow flames into the crowns of forests and push them across immense distances. As heat waves become longer and more intense, and as they start earlier in the year and last longer into the fall, the odds increase that a simmering fire will encounter the conditions necessary to turn it into a mega-blaze.

And, as many British Columbians have already witnessed, a faraway plume of smoke can arrive on their doorstops at shocking speed.

6: Climactic challenges

But it’s not just letting fires burn that carries risk. Stopping them is risky too. Stopping a low-intensity fire that might reduce the danger of a future blaze can also have long-term negative consequences, even if those are harder to assess as the climate changes.

That change is happening much faster than it has in previous eras, when greenhouse gas emissions weren’t impacting the earth’s atmosphere. And the changing climate is not just increasing the frequency of heat waves. It’s lengthening the duration of warmer periods in the spring and fall, and it is also broadening the areas that encounter hot dry weather.

The result is that more places are more at risk of a damaging wildfire than before. That can be seen in the Fraser Canyon, in the region around Yale and Boston Bar, and in other ecosystems that straddle BC’s coastal and Interior climates. Berry pointed to a 2015 fire between Whistler and Squamish that grew to 20,000 hectares—a massive footprint for a blaze so close to the Pacific Ocean.

“We’re starting to see [large] fires in those locations where maybe historically they haven’t been,” Berry said.

What one might call the danger window—when a spark has an elevated potential to end up as a firestorm—is widening as the climate warms, as summers get hotter and drier, and as fall and spring occasionally also brings heat waves. And as that window widens, there becomes less time to allow fire to naturally clear forests of the dead wood that could fuel a future inferno.

Some leading experts question just how effective fuel-reduction efforts can be in reducing fire danger, given the role played by severe weather. Mike Flannigan, one of Canada’s foremost wildfire experts, is generally a skeptic about the idea that changing fire suppression and fuel management tactics can do much to quell the increasing wildfire threat.

“Many people believe that the success of our firefighting has led to the incredible increase of fire we see. And that’s largely not the case. The reason we’re seeing [fires increase in severity] is our weather is changing.”

Flannigan has been on the forefront of measuring the number of those extreme fire weather events, when winds can push flames a dozen kilometres in a single afternoon and evening.

“We’re seeing more and more of these spread days,” Flannigan said. The intensity and duration of heat waves—with temperatures climbing toward 40C not for days, but sometimes weeks at a time—leaves summers with a larger number of days for things to go catastrophically wrong, he said.

Some of the calculations used to inform wildfire decisions decades ago no longer apply, he said.

“You’ll hear old fire guys say ‘Oh, if we get the June rains, we won’t have a problem.’ Well, maybe it was true in the past, but that’s not true now.”

Still, Flannigan says the role of fire in creating forests can play a role in particular ecosystems, including those in arid southern BC, where the absence of regular, natural fires has allowed for the growth of denser fires than might previously have existed. Flannigan said even high-intensity fires are natural and, in the end, good for forests—they can, for instance, limit the spread of pests and disease.

“It’s part of the ecology,” he said. “These species have adapted to this regime of semi-regular, high-intensity, stand-replacing fire. And that’s not a bad system.”

But allowing that healthier, more natural fire regime to flourish is harder to do in today’s southern Interior.

“It’s nice in principle to say we’ll let fire burn when and where possible because it’s closer to our natural system. And you can get away with it in a large part of northern Saskatchewan, northern Manitoba, northern Ontario, northern Quebec, where there’s very little infrastructure, very few communities,” Flannigan said. “But that’s not quite the same deal in California or Alberta or BC, where a fire grows fairly large and it bumps into societal values.”

7: Practical adaptation

Berry says the wildfire service is being forced to adapt.

“We still assess the same way as we always have. If we have the ability to do full-suppression and get containment within the first 72 hours, especially for front-country fires, that’s still a priority for us,” he said. But, he added later in the interview, “I do sense that as an organization we’re much more aggressive at the initial attack phase and throwing a lot of resources at things in the initial phases of response.”

In other words, the BCWS is realizing that for many fires, it needs to control and limit the spread of flames sooner than it may have needed to in the past.

The statistics bear that out. In 2023, about 80% of all fires started in British Columbia ended up receiving a full-suppression response, with crews focused on extinguishing all the flames, rather than allowing a blaze to burn naturally. Through early-September of 2024, only 14% of fires had received a modified response.

“Rather than have the variation that we’ve had in the past, it seems like we have hotter temperatures for longer times, more lightning when lightning has been occurring,” Berry said. “That’s part of our risk assessment—to be less risk-tolerant, I would say, in how we’re approaching managing fires on the landscape.”

When Berry was a crew leader in the valley years ago, he said firefighters would reach a fire that had just been started by lightning and it would often be a single tree. Today, fires seem to spread much more quickly.

“Now, quite commonly, they get out there and it’s half-a-hectare or a hectare in size and rank one or rank two—it could be rank three, rank four.” (Click here for an explanation of forest-fire ranks, which describe the intensity of a blaze.)

But as the weather is changing, so too are the tools used to detect such blazes. This year, the BCWS began using new night vision technology that enables helicopters to fly at night and firefighters to spot new blazes that may not otherwise have been detected until they grew in size.

8: A prescription of, and for, fire

Attacking new fires more agressively is a natural—and potentially necessary—reaction to the increasing chances that a tiny blaze will turn into a huge one. Still, it flies in the face of recommendations to allow more natural fire in BC’s forests and prompts a dismal question: is there anything BC can do to protect communities in both the short- and long-term?

One frequently discussed strategy is prescribed fire.

Modified response fires are not the only way humans have attempted to allow flames to restore balance to BC’s forests. As British Columbia has recognized the usefulness of fire in reducing fuel loads, it has also moved to increase the use of prescribed burns.

But in British Columbia, prescribed burns in British Columbia tend to be tiny compared to both the scale of land burned through fires handled with a modified response—and the scale of BC’s forests as a whole.

Flannigan and other experts note that American officials routinely burn exponentially more land than in BC. Arizona regularly conducts prescribed burns that dwarf those in BC. In October, it finished a project that saw 2,800 hectares of land purposely burned. That amount of prescribed fire is unheard of in BC. In lieu of larger burns, BC undertakes highly planned and carefully orchestrated burns that last a day or two. Although the number of burns has been increasing the last two years, their average size remains under 100 hectares.

The contrast with modified response fires is notable. If a fire is started by a lightning strike in a random area, it might be allowed to burn through thousands of hectares of underbrush unhindered, while being monitored by a small contingent of firefighters.

When a prescribed fire is started, the first flames are lit after weeks or months of planning and coordination. The fire will be rigorously monitored by large crews at significant cost, but may only burn a couple dozen hectares.

There are reasons—some better than others—that the province’s on-the-ground activities have yet to catch up to its rhetoric. The Current has previously reported on the bureaucratic and political hurdles that have obstructed efforts to increase prescribed burning in the province. But while prescribed fires may be useful, it’s also probably impossible for them to be more than a small component of what needs to be done to reduce wildfire risk.

“I think there’s a misconception that you can just replace large landscape fire with prescribed fire,” Fons Raedschelders, BC wildfire’s superintendent of cultural and prescribed fire in the southeastern part of the province, told The Current. “It’s not quite that simple.”

Prescribed fire not only requires significant resources; it can also only be used in certain climactic conditions. And it requires significant manpower to manage—in part to maintain the social support for prescribed fire.

BC has been increasing the amount of land it burns through prescribed fire. Through 2024’s spring burning window, more than 3,000 hectares had received prescribed fire treatment—nearly double the total burn amount from all of 2022. But it’s still a tiny amount compared to the need.

“It’s very hard to do the significant scale that we’re talking about,” Raedschelders said. And because of that he said “natural wildfire is going to have to and will take a large part of the rebalancing of ecosystem fire cycles.”

Across BC as a whole, modified response fires will have to continue to do the bulk of the burning of excess fuel.

At the same time, the constraints upon allowing fire to burn unhindered will increase the need and usefulness of prescribed fire, even if that provincewide scale may be impossible to achieve.

“The big picture dream is that if you can start to develop a prescribed fire program that targets regions where we cannot risk managing wildfire in another way, then that [program] allows you to [manage fire risk] where you have the luxury to do so,” Raedschelders said.

9: The ‘fruiting body’ and the new fire breaks

If neither modified response blazes nor prescribed fire can address the fuel challenge in BC’s forests, Raedschelders said they still give reason to hope that the province’s future will feature less devastating wildfires.

Raedschelders calls prescribed fire the “fruiting body of a mature fire management agency.”

In his metaphor, the prescribed fire is a visible indicator of the health of a larger body—in this case BC’s fire agency—and its ability to reduce long-term risk and foster healthier forests.

Prescribed fire demands modern land management policies and agencies, positive relationships with communities and first nations, and training of a variety of experts and workers, he said.

Raedschelders suggests that the use of prescribed fire is both a tool towards accomplishing long-standing goals, and completing basic tasks like training new firefighters, and a measure of the progress that has been made. For decades, BC has commissioned reports to figure out what needs to be done to reduce fire risk, only to fail to be able to actually fulfill the various recommended goals and actions.

“If you have a prescribed fire program, that means you have professionals that understand fire dynamics, ecosystem dynamics, fuel type dynamics,” he said. All that knowledge can be used in every part of wildfire work—be it assessing fuel danger in forests, determining what fires to extinguish when they arise, or attacking a blaze that threatens a nearby community.

The other reason for some optimism—at least in BC’s central southern Interior—might ironically be the region’s recent history. Having been hit with a series of massive fires, the southern Interior has huge expanses of land that have been scarred by flames. Each of those scars will impact, and possibly reduce the severity of, future fire behaviour.

The use of fire to mitigate future fire sis predicated on the fact that fuel consumed by one blaze won’t be available the next time a spark arises.

“By far, without a question, the best way to stop a significant fire on the landscape is with an old fire or a recent fire,” Raedschelders said. “That’s how, naturally, the ecosystem managed itself pre-colonization. And that is a large principle that’s behind wildfire risk reduction prescribed fire.”

Fires of all scales mitigate the severity of future events in a range of ways.

One manner is by increasing the diversity of ages and sizes among trees in BC’s mostly homogenous pine forests. A 20,000-hectare fire is not a wasteland, even as it may have burned at high intensity in certain places. Across most of its footprint, many trees are likely to have survived. The result is that forests impacted by recent fire have a mix of tree ages, sizes and species.

Severe fires often take hold in forests with large blocks of near-identical trees that become dry and ready to burn at the same moment. Fire can break up that uniformity by allowing room for different species within a forest. And that variation—that “mosaic of uneven age,” as Raedschelders put it—can reduce the severity of flames while bringing more ecological diversity to forests. (Imagine throwing a bunch of very green, just-cut wood onto a small campfire—the wood can actually reduce the heat of the fire.)

Both low-intensity fires and moderate-and-high intensity fires can play useful roles in moderating the severity of future blazes. (Severe fires reduce the density of trees and fuels in the crowns of trees that can lead to firestorms, while low-intensity fires reduce the ability of fire to jump from the forest floor into those crowns.)

This does not mean BC, or Canada, as a whole will start to become significantly more fireproof.

In some parts of the province, and across Canada’s northern boreal forest, large chunks of forested land have remained untouched, leaving the potential for more massive blazes. Some areas where fires used to find it difficult to grow are becoming more vulnerable because of warmer, drier summers. And in the boreal forest of Canada’s north, fires are moving through recently burned areas with less difficulty.

But in the Okanagan, Thompson, and Cariboo regions of BC, so much territory has burned that it can’t help but impact the path and growth of future fires.

Blazes have consumed tens of thousands of hectares of forests across southern BC in the last decade. Those burned forests will influence the pattern of future fires. Yesterday’s inferno can become tomorrow’s fire break—or at least a fire cushion—as BC resets its relationships with the trees.

10: New beginnings

British Columbia’s southern forests are at a crossroads. But nothing is permanent—even, probably, the current difficulties.

For a century, the province and its forest and fire agencies focused on putting out every fire. After 1970s-era officials decided that strategy was flawed, BC dithered while the world warmed. Now, the path toward what Raedschelders calls a “healthier relationship with fire” has become harder, with mountain fires that can bring long-term benefits also posing considerable and increasing short-term risks.

Confronting that dilemma will be one of British Columbia’s greatest modern challenges. The hope, though, is that in the scars of past fires and in the skills and knowledge of a new generation of foresters and firefighters, BC will find a path forward.

Just as a fire can clear a path for wildlife or allow light to break through a forest canopy, the seeds of hope for tomorrow might still be found in yesterday’s infernos. You just have to know where to look.