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A cold spring rain spatters the deck outside a small coffee shop in Smithers, B.C., as Kevin Kriese explains why he believes people need to change how they think about wildfire.
A former assistant deputy minister with the provincial government and recently retired chair of the B.C. Forest Practices Board, Kriese is now a senior wildfire analyst with the POLIS wildfire resilience project. He’s tall and athletic (an avid skier) and a passionate advocate for land-based solutions to ecological challenges. He speaks with the confidence of someone who has spent his entire career navigating seemingly intractable problems — but admits getting people on board with the idea of living with more fire on the land is no easy task.
“Fires do have this destructive force to communities — and they should be stopped from that destruction,” he says. “At the same time, if you understand the ecology, we want more of it. It’s that dichotomy that we’re trying to get at.”
Many wildfire experts have been sounding the alarm for decades, warning we need to shift our thinking and find ways to restore a healthy relationship with fire. As the climate continues to warm and ecosystems around the globe respond to droughts and the accumulation of fuel due to aggressive and long-standing wildfire suppression practices, the size and intensity of wildfires is steadily increasing. Learning to embrace fire as a natural part of seasonal cycles and a tool to protect communities is imperative.
“This concept of beneficial fire has emerged as a way of helping change the narrative, in essence, to promote the idea and entrench in broader society this idea of fire as positive good,” he says.
Beneficial fire is “planned or unplanned wildland fire that has positive effects on ecosystem processes and functions and has acceptable risk to human communities,” according to a new report co-authored by Kriese, published by the University of Victoria. The report lays out the benefits of forests burning, including Indigenous fire stewardship practices, or cultural burns, prescribed fire and managed wildfire.
In B.C., both cultural fire and prescribed fire are slowly being reintroduced to the landscape, but there remains a collective psychological barrier to the idea that more fire is needed, not less. Putting potential solutions on the table means confronting the very real fears people have, Kriese says.
“If you want to get to solutions out there, you need to make people feel safe first,” he explains. “Don’t just tell people to be confident that the person lighting the fire is going to do a great job and it won’t burn down your house, when, in fact, your house is at risk because it’s built into a forest environment.”
He says navigating those psychological barriers means leaning into complexity.
“We tend to oversimplify,” he explains. “It’s either a lot more fire or a lot less fire. What we’re suggesting is we’re going to have to be more nuanced about yes to some and no to others. But there’s no way we can suppress our way out of the problem.”
The scale of the problem is clear. Wildfires affect every corner of the globe, whether burning through communities, choking faraway cities in smoke or putting economic strains on government budgets and the insurance industry.
Last July, a devastating wildfire burned through the town of Jasper, Alta., causing more than $880 million in insured damages. This spring, two people died after being trapped by a fast-moving wildfire in Manitoba. More than 1,000 residents in northern Alberta evacuated their community this week as multiple wildfires burn in an area northwest of Edmonton.
Since 2003, B.C. has repeatedly broken provincial wildfire records as massive amounts of forest burn up. Kriese says focusing on this increase perpetuates an idea that fire on the landscape is unnatural — and misses important context. When he started taking a closer look at the data, he was surprised the records typically used for these comparisons only go back to around the 1950s.
“It was a really cool, wet climate when we started to keep records,” he says. “So our baseline was at the lowest end of the fire cycle.”
The Canadian Forest Service dates most of its wildfire trends to 1959, skewing the data by which we judge the current fire regime. As the report notes, “these data are often used in popular media as the baseline by which fire seasons are judged: more area burned is considered worse.”
But before B.C. started collecting records, intentional burning was common on the landscape, including large fires that got out of control, Kriese says.
“At the turn of the [20th] century, the logging industry would just light slash fires and they’d go wild,” he says. In the late 1800s, for example, two intentional fires lit near Vancouver got out of control when the winds shifted and burned the city to the ground, killing at least 21 people.
As the colonial government clamped down on the logging industry and enforced a ban on Indigenous fire stewardship, it all but eliminated sources of human-caused fire while simultaneously becoming really good at putting out natural fires quickly. This coincided with a wetter climate, meaning the subsequent generations lived largely without fire around. It was in this context that B.C. started keeping the records we are now breaking as wildfire returns to the landscape.
“So we have this baseline that’s ridiculously low and is not what was natural,” Kriese says. “We’re comparing ourselves to this — and that’s misleading.”
Put another way, more fire on the landscape every year is closer to the way it once was, although a rapidly warming climate is increasing the size, frequency and intensity of those fires. Kriese says we need to get more comfortable with the idea of more fire on the land and learn to distinguish between fires with benefits and fires that we should put out.
When a wildfire burned last year near the Wet’suwet’en village of Witset, about half an hour from Smithers, smoke blanketed the community and the flames lit up the forested hills at night, forcing locals to contend with their fears.
Christian Bichlmaier, the BC Wildfire Service incident commander assigned to the wildfire, said balancing those fears and ecological benefits is a delicate act.
“I would say for sure the fire is good for these ecosystems, especially this type of fuel,” he told The Narwhal at the time, leaning against a pickup truck under a haze of thick white smoke. “It’s a heavy, dense canopy that doesn’t burn very regularly, so it does need to clean out the understory and regenerate new growth.”
The fire was burning in an area known as Corya Creek. Bichlmaier and his team consulted with community members to develop their plans for response, focusing their efforts below the fire, closer to the village and building fire breaks consistent with the local hydrology.
“Big challenge here is it’s a direct impact into the community watershed, so that’s obviously a big concern and there are some challenges associated with that,” Bichlmaier said. Working with the Witset band office, he made sure the community was regularly informed about what the firefighters were doing and how the fire was behaving. The fire burned uphill, away from the village, and was able to safely provide significant ecological benefits to the land.
Kriese calls the Witset wildfire a perfect example of how we can learn to live with fire on the landscape and how it enhances wildlife habitat and ecological values, including providing benefits to communities.
“I used to pick huckleberries on the opposite side of Corya Creek when we lived out there,” he says. “It’s going to be amazing out there now. When you start to stand back from it, the outcome was really positive.”
While many Indigenous leaders and members of the scientific community have a clear-eyed view of the ecological benefits of wildfire, putting fire on the landscape can have other benefits, too.
“Some people are less attuned to that ecological function,” he says. “If you live in an urban setting and you’re not as outdoor oriented, you might just be like, ‘I don’t like the smoke and I don’t like the fact that it’s costing a lot of money for government to rebuild’ and all those kinds of more human-centric pieces.”
Wildfire smoke is directly linked to numerous respiratory illnesses and other health conditions and as fires get bigger and more widespread, those impacts spread correspondingly. But fire can also help address health and other risks and reduce costs, Kriese says. Helping people see those benefits and creating unity around the idea that fire isn’t always bad is a first step, he explains. From there, he hopes there can be place-based conversations about what works best for communities — including letting some fires burn and using fire treatments to reduce risk.
“When you talk to the people who believe, quite correctly, in putting more beneficial fire on the landscape, they encounter all these barriers to doing it, and one of the big barriers is social reluctance. If you can help balance that social reluctance, that will give them more permission to do what they need to do.”
In other words, community buy-in is vital to getting more beneficial fire on the landscape.
“A good example is in Williams Lake,” Kriese says. “They’ve now started this annual burning at the stampede grounds downtown, burning grass with Williams Lake First Nation. And everyone’s like, ‘Cool, they’re lighting grass again and we get that that’s going to pull down our risk.’ Just the symbolism of that alone — as well as the partnership side of it and the visibility side — is really good.”
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