Ever since the Mount Underwood forest fire cut off power and direct road access to the community of Bamfield and Anacla on August 11th, the town has been abuzz with talk on what it all means. For better or worse, Facebook has been the primary conduit for information sharing and discussion. While I’ve personally discussed with other community members the role that climate warming has in making forest fires like this more likely, the discourse online hasn’t seemed to reflect this, which feels like a strange disparity given that we see the impacts of the climate crisis the all around us.
While we don’t yet know what caused the spark that lit the Mount Underwood fire, we can be certain that climate warming made it vastly more likely to spread out of control. The evidence is clear that heatwaves on this coast are up to 9°C warmer and 10-times more likely due to climate warming, while summers on average are almost 2°C warmer than last century. Droughts are now far more likely as a result of climate warming as well, which paired with warmer conditions has made forest fires four times more likely to spread out of control, independently of what caused them to start. These conditions are only going to increase as our climate warms, with this coast projected to be 4-9°C warmer and 20-40 per cent drier by 2100, depending on our actions today. Increasing levels of carbon emissions in our atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels are unambiguously making our climate warmer. Average global temperature has increased by 1.3 C since pre-industrial times, which may double by 2100, rising to 2°C to 4°C, depending on how soon we stop burning fossil fuels and transition to safer sources of energy. While these global temperature differences sound small, local temperature and weather extremes will be far more severe, jeopardizing ecosystems and communities worldwide.
In addition to climate warming, the legacy of colonial forest mismanagement has also made fires far more likely to spread out of control. Since colonization, a large majority of primary forests have been cut down across this coast and replaced by tree farms, including the area where the Mount Underwood fire has spread. All the while, the forestry industry has shifted from local milling to mechanization and raw log exportation, sending jobs overseas and enriching shareholders while local workers get laid off, with over 50,000 jobs lost province-wide since the late ‘90s. Along with destroying the pre-existing ecosystem, tree farms grown from clear cuts are far more likely to burn out of control than primary growth forests. Overlaying the Mount Underwood fire with a map of remaining old growth makes it clear that this fire has burned almost entirely through tree farms or recent clearcuts that have replaced primary forests.
Grimly, the effects of climate warming and clearcutting reinforce each other, creating a well-established feedback loop that makes the effects of each other worse. Clearcutting forests emits huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, which will take at least half a century and up to three centuries for a tree farm to neutralize through sequestration. This is time we don’t have to spare as our window for a lower-risk future climate narrows, and in which time these secondary forests may be cut down again to harvest, resetting the clock. Thanks to climate warming and clearcutting, all managed forests across Canada now emit more carbon than they sequester (140 million tonnes per year, on average), which compared to other sources would make it the third-largest carbon emitting sector nationally, as much as all passenger cars, trucks, airplanes, and houses combined. On the flipside, this means that adapting forestry practices can make them less damaging to our future climate, which in turn can make them less likely to burn in the future. While CEOs and shareholders chasing the bottom line are threatened by bringing jobs back to B.C.’s forestry sector, workers stand to benefit from forestry that promotes sustainability and respects Indigenous sovereignty.
Sooner or later, Bamfield and Anacla will have power and road access restored, and a sense of normalcy will return. But we’re moving into a future where such normalcy will be constantly threatened and shifted due to the climate crisis. While lowering one’s “carbon footprint” may be impactful if it’s high-emitting, it will do little to reverse systemic reasons that our economy continues to be one of the highest emitting globally, despite shovel-ready pathways to decarbonize that promise to raise standards of living. To really understand what a forest fire like Mount Underwood means to this community, we must look at what’s in our power to change locally as we move toward a post-fossil fuel economy, and how we can build power towards turning the tide regionally and globally. Whether this is by protecting old growth and reforming forestry practices, or by fighting the BC NDP’s plans to divert renewable energy from our grid to an economically risky and highly polluting fracked gas (LNG) export industry, we have options to apply our power as a community for a safer and less fiery future.
S. Clay Steell is a marine scientist living in Huu-ay-aht Territory (Bamfield, BC) and works at the intersection of habitat restoration and climate change. He also chairs the Bamfield Huu-ay-aht Community Forest Society.
