I’ll always remember the summer of 2023 as the smoky summer. Each day I wake up and check the air quality. Before going outside, I ask myself: is it dangerous to breathe? Climate change is no longer just a scary possibility on the horizon. It is part of our everyday lives.
The idea that we should fight forest fires with more fire sounds counterintuitive. But Joe Gilchrist, a member of the Skeetchestn Indian Band in central B.C. and co-founder of the Interior Salish Fire Keeper’s Society, makes a convincing argument for regular, controlled, prescribed burns in his recent story for Maclean’s. For generations, he says, Indigenous communities lit cultural burns as a tool for land management. In early spring and late fall, fire keepers would set small fires, renewing the soil for future growth and cleansing forests of invasive plant and animal species. The burns would incinerate the needles, branches and seeds that fuel wildfires.
Prescribed burns do happen now, in co-operation with provincial and federal governments, but the process, Gilchrist says, is often delayed by red tape. “Without more burns,” he says ominously, “the future is easy to predict.”
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
