Last week, the eyes of the world were on Jasper, Alta., as a fast-moving wildfire swept through the Rocky Mountain community, razing historic buildings, homes and businesses.
Firefighters on the ground reported meeting walls of flames 100 metres high. More than one-third of the Jasper townsite was destroyed, while approximately 325 square kilometres of the national park — close to three per cent — have been scorched to date. The townsite is now secure, but the out-of-control Jasper wildfire is still burning through forests in the iconic park.
As the Jasper disaster continues to unfold, many Canadians are pointing fingers, looking to blame a single source for what happened. Some say it was the mountain pine beetle, which killed off significant sections of forest, leaving dry, dead trees. Others say not enough was done to thin the forest and build an effective fire break near town.
The reality, however, is more complicated.
Decades of highly effective fire suppression in and around national parks have left them more vulnerable to large fires, according to Pierre Martel, the director of national fire management for Parks Canada.
Forests across Canada, and beyond, have been without fire for too long, setting the stage for uncontrollable mega-fires, with seemingly limitless fuel, in a dryer and warmer climate.
And it’s not just parks that are primed to burn.
In B.C., the town of Lytton burned to the ground in 2021 and has yet to be rebuilt. In 2017, a fire swept through Paradise, Calif., claiming 85 lives. That same year, another Rocky Mountain jewel in Alberta, Waterton Lakes National Park, was hit by a massive blaze.
Research suggests logging leaves boreal forests more susceptible to fire from both lightning strikes and increased human activity in the woods.
Without small-scale prescribed burns and brush removal to periodically clean the forest floor of natural detritus, parks and other places can quickly succumb to massive wildfires beyond our control.
Add in climate change, with its increased heat and chaotic precipitation, as well as dead trees from mountain pine beetles — themselves a byproduct of warmer winters and past forest management — and the conditions are prime for a devastating firestorm.
Reversing decades of fire suppression in Jasper and other parks
Forest ecosystems in parks have unique histories and issues — and also unique opportunities for solutions that can help mitigate wildfires.
Before colonization, Indigenous Peoples managed fire to clear the forests of fuel, promote the growth of traditional and medicinal plants and restore habitat for large mammals and other wildlife.
In some ways, Martel and others say we’re playing catchup, trying to reverse the consequences of management practices of the recent past and mitigate climate impacts so as to reduce the risk of wildfires in protected areas and improve wildlife habitat.
“Historically, and probably still today, there would have been more of a tendency towards overprotection of protected areas,” Wesley Ball, a conservation policy specialist with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, says in an interview.
After all, parks are managed places. Fire suppression — which has changed the composition of the forests and altered the natural ebb and flow of wildfires — is one aspect of that management.
Natural Resources Canada says multiple considerations are taken into account in deciding whether to let a fire burn or to fight it, with a focus on saving “high-value commercial forests,” residential areas and recreation sites. The federal department notes, “Protection of rare habitat, culturally significant areas and similar values will influence suppression decisions.”
But leaving things to nature, or undoing the management errors of the past, isn’t always possible, particularly in an increasingly fragmented landscape across vast areas of Alberta and B.C. Even activities like prescribed burning have to be carefully thought out.
Bell points to caribou in Alberta, noting there isn’t much undisturbed habitat left and it’s difficult to justify burning it in order to manage the risk of wildfires because the caribou have nowhere else to go.
“I think one of the difficulties in the current landscape, with the amount of industrial disturbance through forestry and mining and everything, is that you can’t manage a protected area on its own. It needs to be within the broader landscape,” he says. “And that’s particularly challenging with the extent of the disturbance that there is in Canada, but in Alberta especially.”
Parks Canada takes similar factors into account when deciding how to confront a fire, according to Martel.
“In the areas that are within a certain zone, that is tied to the highest risks to people and infrastructure and communities, … we have to continue the suppression history because we can’t afford to have fires freely burning on those landscapes; it’s just too risky,” he says.
There is also the tension between recreation, tourism and protection that is ubiquitous in popular parks — particularly in Jasper, which saw 2.48 million visitors in 2023 and Banff, which saw 4.28 million. The parks are there to be enjoyed, but that must be balanced with the mandate to prevent ecological harms.
It’s one reason Bell’s organization advocates for expanding Canada’s network of protected areas — to provide more room for recreation and habitat protection as human populations swell and wild spaces become less wild.
But it’s challenging to balance all those factors.
Learning to prevent fires — by setting them
Kira Hoffman, a fire ecologist and researcher with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, says restoring balance on the landscape isn’t going to happen overnight.
“The situations that we’ve seen in British Columbia and Alberta and throughout Canada in the last seven or so years have been the accumulation of many things that have gone wrong,” she says.
According to BC Parks, 13 provincial parks were closed in early August due to wildfires, with another three partially closed. In Alberta, only one provincial park was closed as of Aug. 1, while 12 have been impacted by fires this year, according to data collected by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. They include Jasper and Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta.
Hoffman says many provinces are taking more proactive approaches, including supporting Indigenous-led fire stewardship and cultural burning, but more needs to be done at a larger scale.
In many ways, Parks Canada is ahead of the curve when it comes to fire management in Canada, she adds.
“Parks Canada probably has the most advanced fire program out of anyone,” she says, including the use of prescribed burns.
“They get a lot of pushback and I feel for them, because they’ve done so much. And they’ve done it on their own before the provinces really came into the picture.”
Parks Canada says it initiated eight prescribed burns in six different areas in 2023, burning 5.3 square kilometres across Canada. That’s cumulatively less than one per cent of Jasper alone, by comparison, but the agency notes planning for those fires can take years, with consultations and peer review — and then waiting for the right weather conditions at the right time to move forward with a burn.
Martel says prescribed burns focus on areas that can’t be allowed to burn out of control, including Jasper. He notes the personnel who light controlled fires are the same called on to fight wildfires.
“These fire seasons are getting longer — they start earlier, they end later,” he says. “And so then it doesn’t leave us much for a window to make progress on prescribed fires.”
In the off-season, the agency focuses on building fire breaks and removing vegetation that could pose a greater fire risk.
BC Parks has a program dedicated to fire management, focusing on wildfire planning, prevention and cultural and prescribed burns. The parks branch also conducts regular assessments of hazard trees and tailors approaches to each individual park, a spokesperson said in an email.
A spokesperson for the Alberta government did not respond to questions by publication time. On Aug. 1, the government listed two prescribed burn projects on its website.
Hoffman says, “letting fires burn under more moderate fire conditions” helps clear out fuel on the landscape. The challenge, she says, is that wildfires are happening under extreme conditions. Exacerbated by climate change, they can spread rapidly.
Deeply ingrained public perceptions need to shift, Hoffman says. A greater acceptance of prescribed burns as a tool to prevent fire and more education to overcome concerns about them is necessary, she adds.
Jasper and other areas managed with fire in the past
When settlers drew the lines on the map in 1907 to set Jasper’s park boundaries, they were attempting to box in the area’s iconic mountains, glaciers and forests — and keep out the First Nations and Métis peoples who had lived in the area for millennia. Efforts to preserve the awe-inspiring views didn’t take into account the landscape was always evolving and sometimes burned.
“One of the misconceptions is that those places should be free of fire,” Hoffman says. “The reason we create a lot of parks and protected areas is to save that kind of old-growth structure that we love in those places we like to spend time in. Those places were probably managed with fire in the past — and that’s why they look the way they do.”
In other words, the landscapes settlers fell in love with in Jasper and other parks across the country were shaped by fire, but the park conservation model saw fire as a threat, so blazes were quickly extinguished.
Hoffman thinks the necessary adaptability goes beyond burning and will require bringing on new partners to thin the trees and starve future fires.
“This is incredibly controversial: forestry really needs to be part of this conversation,” she says. “We cannot do this without forestry.”
Forestry companies understand the landscape, she says, and have the equipment and skills to thin forests and support fire prevention.
Building back from Jasper wildfire, and learning from disaster
When the smoke clears in Jasper and the fires begin to die down across Western Canada as winter approaches, the process of rebuilding and re-evaluating will begin.
Waterton Lakes National Park, nestled southwest of Calgary along the spine of the Rockies, provides a glimpse into the future for Jasper.
The Kenow fire burned 44 per cent of the vegetated area within Waterton, according to Parks Canada. It destroyed the tree canopy in many areas, leaving ash and mineral soil behind.
But plants soon started to sprout. Wildlife returned to develop new patterns as Parks Canada stayed on high alert to monitor the landscape and fight invasive species.
“From an ecological perspective, a landscape can be very sensitive to use after fire,” Bell says. “In terms of soil stability, in terms of introduction of invasive species, a lot of this stuff can happen in a post-fire environment.”
Martel calls Jasper “one of the leading communities” in preparing for wildfires and trying to mitigate their impacts. Among other initiatives, Jasper implemented fire-smart practices and built a community fuel break to slow any potential fire.
“There is just so far you can go and then sometimes you have a situation like the one we’ve had this past week, where even with all that preparation work, it only gets you so far, unfortunately,” he says.
He takes solace in the fact most of the town was saved and it appears much of the critical infrastructure remains in place, making it easier to rebuild. But he acknowledges it’s hard to ignore the question whether more could have been done.
Martel says reviews will take place and Parks Canada will dive deep into what happened, and why, and try to learn from the fire, but that will come later, not while the fire still burns.
Bell says it’s critical to listen to all voices that want a say in how Jasper builds back, but agrees it will take time.
“I think it would be unfair to start pointing fingers or to kind of think about any big take-home messages without waiting to see,” he says. “It’s still really fresh.”
This story was originally published by The Narwhal.
