Thread by @Heardbeast

@TylerDucharme @RW_Crank Exactly right. Bit of a thread here.

In the case of BC, recent problematic fire seasons are certainly affected by a long-term warming trend; fire agencies know that because they have had to extend crew terms steadily for the last 20 years. That's solid evidence.

But 1/x

@TylerDucharme @RW_Crank That's not the culprit. The bulk of the problem is huge fuel loads that exist because of the Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak of 20 years ago (the dead trees are falling down) exacerbated by a number of other insect and disease outbreaks that are happening as we speak.

2/x

@TylerDucharme @RW_Crank These conditions result from policy decisions made in the 1960s and 70s, when gov decided to reduce fire losses through effective fire control and log the wood we saved to finance provincial infrastructure.

And it worked! But logging isn't fire, and logging patterns aren't

3/x

@TylerDucharme @RW_Crank Natural fire patterns. So every year the forests get a year older, and more dense, and the 'natural' pattern of fire scars that led to a largely fire-resistant landscape was replaced by a salt-and-pepper pattern of logging that didn't break the continuity

4/x

@TylerDucharme @RW_Crank of the remaining stands. Then the bugs came along and killed all the 'leave strips', turning the 'fuel breaks' into fuses that carry fire from logging block to block.

So our very well-meaning decisions are blowing up in our faces. And Mother Nature is busy 'normalizing'

5/x

@TylerDucharme @RW_Crank the forest landscape. We have a few more years of this to go through as physics and chemistry puts everything back into balance. Humans are not powerful enough to stop this process.

Our job now is to learn from this and start managing our forests differently.

6/6