Lessons from a burning forest
A vast section of forest that burned in last year’s fires near Heart Lake between Kakisa and Enterprise in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Bryan Denton for The New York Times
North America’s boreal forests are failing to regrow because of the more frequent, bigger wildfires that have become a hallmark of our changing climate
As a reporter, I’ve experienced the aftermath of several disasters, including dam bursts, landslides and floods. But nothing quite prepared me to witness the extent of the destruction in Canada’s boreal forests that I saw in June, one year after the record-breaking wildfires of 2023.
At one point, my colleague Bryan Denton and I drove for an entire hour and saw almost no living trees in the forests we could see from the road. Much of the landscape was covered with blackened stumps of trees that burned last year. Residents told us the burned trees revealed hills, rivers and towns that they had never seen before.
I’ll be open with you: It was alarming.
We were there reporting how parts of North America’s boreal forests are failing to regrow because of the more frequent, bigger wildfires that have become a hallmark of our changing climate. One of the strongest pieces of evidence of this shift is the gradual decline of the black spruce, a humble species that has dominated these landscapes for thousands of years.
In short, my article shows how the dwindling number of black spruce trees is deeply transforming this vast ecosystem, which is one of the planet’s biggest storage systems for planet-warming carbon dioxide. What’s troubling is that black spruce evolved to exist with fire — just not fire that happens this often.
Losing any part of the black spruce forests will make the global struggle to keep temperatures below catastrophic levels harder, and it may mean our climate models are too optimistic.
But I also want to share what researchers and local Indigenous leaders told me: There is a lot we can do to adapt, particularly borrowing from traditional fire-management practices. These won’t save the immense boreal forests from global warming, but they could help communities adapt.
An ancient practice
Georgina Fabian, an elder of the K’atl’odeeche First Nation on the Hay River Reserve in the Northwest Territories, collected spruce gum from a tree. Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Indigenous people are some of the most directly affected by this new age of wildfires. According to government figures from April, 80 percent of First Nations communities in Canada are in wildfire-prone areas.
Many First Nations elders say they have been forced to change their traditional fire-management practices. Amy Cardinal Christianson, a fire researcher and an adviser at the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, a nonprofit group based in Quebec, explained the history to me. (She has a podcast called Good Fire, if you want to learn more.)
For centuries, Indigenous Canadians burned their lands during the spring, when the grass was dry and the forest was wet, in what are known as cultural burns. Elders looked for cues that can’t exactly be marked on a calendar, like signs the local snow was almost ready to melt, or when the ducks started to nest, as elders in Alberta explained in a 1979 documentary.
These burns protected their homes from insects, induced lush sprouting that attracted animals they hunted, and, perhaps most crucially, fireproofed their communities. The flames weren’t hot enough to kill the trees, just burn branches and leaves that, if left unattended, could fuel bigger fires during summer.
But near the end of the 19th century, Canada started banning cultural burns and fining anyone who practiced them. Slowly, what were meadows became flammable forests, and blazes grew harder to control, Cardinal Christianson said. “This idea of fire suppression or fire exclusion has got us in this problem,” she told me.
The science of controlled burns
In 2020, a paper published in the journal Nature found that fire suppression increased the risk of wildfires for many communities in the Canadian boreal forest.
As evidence, the scientists pointed to one of the most expensive disasters in Canadian history: In 2016, an overgrown forest helped fuel immense blazes that burned down much of Fort McMurray, in Alberta, and 88,000 people had to flee.
A wildfire near Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016. Jason Franson/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press
Last year, the small town of Enterprise, in the Northwest Territories, suffered a similar fate.
This year, Jasper, Alberta, lost a third of its buildings to fire. But officials told reporters that prescribed burns, or controlled fires that help rid the forest of fuel, were one of the key preventive measures that helped save 70 percent of the town. Local officials had been conducting prescribed burns since 1996, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Increasing temperatures dry up vegetation and help fuel big wildfires. But if there is too much of this fuel around communities, the damage inflicted by fires can be a lot worse.
“I’m of the opinion that, sure, a lot of it is climatic, but a lot of it is due to past decisions,” said Marc-André Parisien, a senior researcher at the Canadian Forest Service and an author of the Nature study.
While many communities around Canada are still in favor of suppression, some policies are changing. The latest example was the inclusion of cultural burnings in the wildfire strategy Canada issued in 2023. There are examples of this shift in the United States, too. Jim Robbins reported on one program from California recently.
Fire management isn’t a substitute for stopping climate change. There are limits to how much fire humans can actually manage in a landscape as huge as the boreal forests, which stretches through three continents.
Still, when it comes to protecting local residents, controlled fire may be one of the best tools available. But Cardinal Christianson told me a lot of work still needs to be done to make up for decades of fire suppression.
“The knowledge has been there,” she said. “What we really need are opportunities to be able to get together to learn and exchange knowledge.”
For the past two decades, scientists have been raising alarms about systems in the natural world that might be heading toward collapse. Mira Rojanasakul/The New York Times
How close are the planet’s climate tipping points?
Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us.
We might also be changing the climate in an even bigger way.
For the past two decades, scientists have been raising alarms about great systems in the natural world that warming, caused by carbon emissions, might be pushing toward collapse. These systems are so vast that they can stay somewhat in balance even as temperatures rise. But only to a point. — Raymond Zhong and Mira Rojanasakul. Read more.