An
NFB film on forest fire in which I played a peripheral role as a researcher in
the 1980s, perfectly illustrates the point I made in yesterday’s Chronicle: our
knowledge about nature and how it works is extremely fragile. I discovered not
only that what I knew about this subject
was minimal, but so also was the knowledge of the nation’s experts. (This
should have been no surprise to me: I had already discovered that in the vast
armoury of information at the command of the Canadian government, only one guy
was assigned to keep watch over the quality of Canada’s soil, the very soil on
which the nation depends for everything. And this at a time when our top-soil
was disappearing at a record pace.)
The film in question, Ashes to Forest, directed by Tony
Ianzelo, was one made for the National
Parks service to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of
Banff National Park in 1884. It showed something that took almost all its
audience by surprise, and totally freaked out some of them. The opening shot
was the usual thing, showing a plane flying over a major forest fire dropping
water, in an effort to put the fire out. But the end shot of the film was what
counted: it showed a helicopter flying over Banff National Park, dropping fire
in the hope of creating a blaze among the tinder-dry undergrowth that had
become consolidated as a result of our many years of determination to stamp out every fire that
occurred. How could this be? An effort to set fire to our glorious National
Park? What were these guys hoping to discover? “We really don’t know,” they
replied when I asked the question. “We are just experimenting.”
Further questioning brought from them
the reluctant admission that all these years, decades, of relentlessly putting
out forest fires, appeared to have created a veritably unliveable situation
across the length and breadth of the land. Fire remission had become almost a religion; its symbol, accepted
everywhere without question, had been the Smokey the Bear fire-prevention
campaign, invented somewhere in the United States years before. The problem was
this: forest fire was a natural occurrence that had always existed, long before
Europeans entered North America and began to build towns and cities that had to
be defended against fire, come what may. And our massive interference in the
natural system had created a totally unnatural situation which the experts were
only slowly beginning to understand.
To judge the health of a forest, I
was told, one had to think big, not just
about this patch of forest close to a town, but other adjoining patches
stretching for miles. Of course, there were few areas in the country left where
forests had been allowed to develop naturally, according to the original
fashion. But where they existed, they were perfectly designed --- by Nature ---
to resist all attacks by whatever pests might
be willing to destroy them. Imagine a
large slice of forested country that had been subject to multiple forest fires
over the centuries, fires that were usually started by electrical activity descending
during thunderstorms as lightning strikes.
Forests were never destroyed by such fires: they would quickly begin to
regrow. So in this imaginary landscape, the trees, regrown after fires at
different places and at different times, would be of varying age, some of them
rather elderly, some of them twenty or thirty years of age in full process of
regrowth, and others just sprigs shooting up out of the ground immediately after
a recent fire. This, I was told, would
be the model of a healthy forest, ideally suited to resist its enemies. Bugs such as, for instance, the pine bark beetle, are always in the forests, but can only become
infestations in areas where the trees have lost their energy and are therefore
vulnerable to attack. Younger trees can resist, and do. But if huge areas of
our forests have been denied fires over decades by assiduous fire-fighters,
then presumably there would be vast areas of trees of one age that as they aged
would become vulnerable to attacks that
they do not have the energy to resist. In fact, this has happened, as anyone who
remembers the shots of acre after acre of dead and dying trees in the foothills
of the Rockies a few years ago will remember, a disaster caused, basically, by
the suppression of forest fire.
In areas of maximum concern, such as
the Banff National Park, the undergrowth has become so tinder-dry that the risk
of an immense fire has been immeasurably increased by our years of fire-fighting:
a conflagration, one might think, is inevitable, however long delayed it might
be.
Of course, I have only a sketchy
knowledge of all this stuff, but I do know that this is just one of many areas
of interest in which the nation appears to be heading full steam in a direction
the results of which are only slowly becoming evident. Loss of top soils is
another; clear-cut forests are another; mono-agriculture with its polluting
factory farming is another; the escape of fertilizers and pesticides into our
water streams is another…..I could go on and on in this vein…Suffice it to say
that global warning has not occurred by accident, but rather by design, as
represented by our collective behaviour.
In the late 1950s I was asked to
write a series on pollution, and then I discovered to my surprise that every
town and village along the Ottawa river
was putting its sewage raw into the river from which each of these towns and
cities was drawing its life’s blood. How could that be in an educated country?
I was totally appalled that Montreal, a huge city, was disposing of its waste
in this way and that a few years later when we had started to build some sort
of treatment, we invested only in the mos rudimentary, so-called primary
treatment. I have no idea what the situation is now, but I certainly hope we
have learned something in these last sixty years.
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