Lots and lots...and lots... of snow

Our driveway a couple days ago. More snow falls every day -- about six inches a week.

 We are now at a meter of snow (about three feet) on the ground with more coming every day. That's the case here in Nolalu which is just southwest of Thunder Bay, but it is the same for Red Lake and all of Northwestern Ontario and for Northeastern Ontario as well. By the time March comes to a close we could have four feet on the level. This is actually good news.

It is good because it should thwart an early start to forest fire season. In the past several years forest fires were already on the go by the end of May. The ground should still be soggy from all the snow melt this time around.

Did your ears perk up when you heard the forest fire forecast from the United Nations Climate Report yesterday? Fire danger in Canada is increasing exponentially every decade. If you don't know what exponentially means, it is an increase by a factor of 10.

If you live in Illinois or Kansas or some other wide-open space you may not care about this but there was something in the report for you too: floods and tornadoes are going to keep match with the increase in forest fires up here. So, good luck.

I would like to go on the record for pointing out in advance of this summer that it is oxymoronic to refer to "100-year" or "500-year" storms when they happen every few years now. Just sayin'.

Anyway, the climate forecasters advocated humanity should start taking proactive steps knowing what is coming. Here in the Boreal Forest, that presents a conundrum. Our problem is the Boreal Forest. It's everywhere and large chunks of it now are going to burn all at the same time, not in little mosaic patterns like what has happened for the past thousands of years but in gargantuan swaths, like from Red Lake all the way to Thunder Bay -- hundreds of miles. 

And to all the sage, old foresters who are now getting up out of their Lazyboys ready to wax poetic about how the Boreal Forest has always been renewed by fire, how every part of the forest burns, on average, every 200 years, let me say, "WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!" There hasn't been this much forest burning at one time since a meteor hit the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs. Cripes! Go back to your reading of Walden for the umpteenth time.

We need solutions that fit the times. One such thing that the report authors noted was what they called native cultural burning, in other words, prescribed burning to remove hazardous fuels like branches and needles and to keep areas open from trees. First Nations were famous for this. It is how they managed all their farming regions from Southern Ontario to Florida without even needing a wheel. It also let them keep the Prairies green and full of bison. They did likewise in alpine areas. But the farming regions, the Prairies and the mountains are not the Boreal Forest. To my knowledge, First Nations didn't purposely burn the Boreal Forest. I can think of two very good reasons why they didn't: 1. they couldn't control those fires in a sea of fuel and 2. the benefits that come from fire like blueberries and better grazing for wild animals could be reaped just from nature's lightning-caused blazes.

Boreal tree species may be renewed by fire but they are also killed by it. They are not like the thick-barked, long-needled trees of the southeastern U.S. or the alpine regions of western Canada. In those places fires along the ground burn up the thick mats of long pine needles and the trees keep growing. In the Boreal, ground fires kill all the trees, even if they didn't go up like Roman candles. 

We do have a few prescribed burns for forestry purposes in Ontario each year but the areas are tiny and are far-removed from towns. The danger of the fires getting away is immense. It just doesn't seem likely we could ever prescribe-burn enough to protect communities. 

A professor from Lakehead University suggested we have 1.5-kilometer clear buffer zones around every town. The cutting of the trees could be done quite quickly with modern timber harvesters but keeping the area open would be practically impossible, probably needing heavy annual spraying of herbicides, something that nobody would tolerate and with good reason.

I think the best answer is to enhance our current fire suppression system that attempts to put out new fires as soon as they happen. We already are using a system that maps every lightning strike in the province and that sends surveillance aircraft to see if those strikes created ignition. If they have started fires then water bombers and fire crews are sent in.  We just need a colossal expansion of that system. As it stands there are times when so many fires are started at once that we can't suppress them all. In drought conditions some of those tiny blazes that aren't hit the first day grow to gargantuan infernos that are impossible to contain.