In wildfire-prone B.C. and California, urban sprawl and bad planning are fuelling future infernos. What can we do?
By Tamsin McMahon
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Climate change bears much of the blame for longer, drier and more lightning-prone fire seasons. But other aspects are under more immediate human control: Decades of forest-management policies that called for extinguishing naturally occurring fires as quickly as possible have made forests denser and more susceptible to major blazes. At the same time, urban sprawl is pushing housing development farther into the wilderness.
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For decades, standard practice in the United States and Canada was to put out all fires in public forests as quickly as possible to protect communities and resource industries. Researchers sometimes refer to fire suppression as a “Smokey Bear policy,” after a cartoon mascot dressed as a forest ranger that appeared in PSAs. But over time, scientists have begun to understand how important regular fires are for the forest ecosystem and how government efforts to prevent burning had actually made forests more susceptible to larger, more dangerous fires.
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Arguably the most significant cause of the rising number of devastating wildfires has been urban development that has pushed new housing farther into fire-prone natural areas.
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Researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimate that nearly 12 million new homes were built in the wildland-urban interface across the United States between 1990 and 2010. During the same time, the number of buildings burned in wildfires has more than tripled.
Similarly, Canadian Forest Service fire scientist Lynn Johnston estimates that roughly 60 per cent of municipalities and First Nations reserves in Canada have been built within 5 kilometres of large fire-prone areas.
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