The past two years have been the worst fire years on record across the west coast of North America, with whole communities being engulfed in flames and smoke enveloping major cities for weeks. But as the airways fill once again with stories of valiant fire-fighters and people who’ve lost their homes, we answer some burning questions that seem to always fly under the radar. For example:

• How long have fires been burning on this planet
• Have our ecologies always been adapted to fire?
• What role did indigenous peoples play in lighting fires in the past?
• And how can we return prescribed burns to sensitive ecosystems?

To answer these questions, we talk to regional experts, including internationally renowned ethnobotanist Dr. Nancy Turner, in this first part of our two-part three-part series, On Fire.

Find shownotes, sources, and musical credits at https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe1-5-on-fire-pt-1

Ready for Part Two? https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe1-6-on-fire-pt-2

– – –

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Hey, everyone. This is Adam.

This is Mendel.

And this is Future Ecologies. And we want to tell you a little story about how this podcast got started. So about a year ago, the lovely summer that we were waiting for through the difficult winter and basically live for, up in British Columbia was sort of called off by wildfire and wildfire related smoke, which blotted out the sky for months, couldn't see hardly 100 feet off into the distance down here in the city. And it was even worse, of course, in the affected communities. And the blackberries didn't even ripen. They were sour.

Yeah, there was lots of mummy berry.

And so Mendel and I sat down and we decided to try to make a podcast that told stories about the natural world and ecology and how we could design things different. And we used fire as a jumping off point. And so we've been working on this one episode about fire for...

...almost a year.

And, you know, it began in this unprecedented season of wildfire here on the west coast. Last year, as many of you know that the wildfires were terrible and pervasive and dominated the summer. And here we are, again, just a couple days ago, the smoke moved in on us. And, of course, for weeks now, we've been hearing about the devastating wildfires in California, and now here in BC and their impacts on communities and first responders. So this is on our mind again, and we're going to finally air this story. And thankfully, we don't have to tell the whole story.

A couple of our favorite podcasts 99%, Invisible and Outside/In, recently published their own episodes about fire, fire ecology, and the design of fire-safe communities. And they're great. You should check them out as soon as you can. But happily, we're here as an ecology podcast, to take the story in a slightly different direction. We want to tell you a little bit about the history of fire, the evolution of fire, and the evolution of the plants, animals and human technologies that go along with fire. So, without further ado, we present:

On Fire.

Stories this old always have multiple tellings, regardless of which you choose. Before the gift of fire. Humanity was wretched, a pale, ghostly shadow of itself. When the Titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods on Olympus and bestowed it upon mankind- or at least upon the Greeks- it was a pivotal moment, maybe the pivotal moment, depending on the telling. This was either the birth or the downfall of humanity, or both. For Prometheus, the punishment was swift, condemned to stand chained to a mountain, his liver devoured daily by a ferocious bird, only to regrow each night for the next day's torment.

Fire was never ours. Not really. In nearly every story told by Indigenous people around the world, fire is a gift secured for humanity by animals or supernatural allies. And yet to be human, is to use fire. It's thought we evolved to become who we are, in part, as we learned to cook food, and gather around the fire at night, as our internal worlds grew in the fire light, so too, our external world expanded through flames, which we use to clear land and warm ourselves in colder climes.

But fire would not be mastered. Have we always feared it? Or was it when we chose to gather in cities practicing more and more intensive forms of agriculture that we began to see fires in a new light.

[News Anchor] Good evening, wildfires continue to burn across BC Tonight.

In recent years, it can seem like much of the world is on fire. And in western North America 2018 recently surpassed 2017 as the worst year on record. in British Columbia, over 600 fires are burning, covering the Pacific Northwest in a blanket of smoke. In California, devastating wildfires, the largest in the state's history are destroying whole communities. It's natural to fear fire. But why have things gotten so bad recently? If you've been keeping your ears open, maybe you've heard something like this:

[Unspecified news reporter] 80 years of fire suppression hasn't worked for centuries, wildfires have been a natural part of the evolution of forest ecosystems

[Unspecified Interviewer] They're letting in burn? [Unspecified Interviewee] It's not necessarily our policy to put these things out.

[Unspecified Interviewer] Putting out fires isn't necessarily our policy?

[Unspecified Interviewee] Fire is good for the environment under certain circumstances. Forests have a natural cycle that requires purging burns to reinvigorate growth.

[Unspecified Interviewer] Someone just said that to you, huh?

Even over a decade ago, on the hit show the West Wing, there was a growing sense that maybe the Smokey the Bear approach to fire safety wasn't the whole story. But if you're like most people, the idea that we should be allowing or even promoting wildfire might sound like fringe environmental policies. How can wildfires be good?

[Unspecified Speaker] Letting this fire burn is good for the environment. You know how I know?

[Unspecified Speaker] How?

[Unspecified Speaker] 'Cause smart people told me

So in this episode of Future Ecologies we'll be talking about how our ecosystems became adapted to fire how people have used fire as a technology for food production and land management and the effects of our current climate of fire suppression. Hopefully by the end of this two-parter, we'll have answered all of your burning questions.

Broadcasting from Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. This is Future Ecologies. Where your hosts Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski explore the future of human habitation on planet earth through ecology, design and sound.

Chapter One: Origins of Fire.

So Mendel,

Yes, Adam?

I'm about to blow your mind. Are you ready?

I'm so ready.

Great. So, question. What do you need in order to produce fire?

Well, you'd need something to burn. So a fuel. Plus you need oxygen and an ignition source.

Right. So, when was the first fire on earth?

Uhh.. Sorry?

When did these elements come together for the first time?

Well, there have always been ignition sources: lightning, lava flows, friction.

Right.

But there hasn't always been oxygen.

For most of the 4.5 billion year history of the planet, there was no atmospheric oxygen. So there was no fire.

Wait, you're telling me fire just didn't exist before? Wait, what?

It wasn't until 2 billion years ago that our favorite photosynthetic waste product, Oxygen, accumulated in the atmosphere in what scientists call the great oxygenation event. But even then, oxygen levels were a fraction of what they are today.

Which is about 20%. Right?

Right. It wasn't until the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago, when most modern animal lineages started to appear in the oceans, that oxygen levels in the atmosphere became high enough to support fire.

So, that just leaves fuel which means plants, land plants.

Yeah. The first vascular land plants show up in the Silurian period, a little over 400 million years ago. And with them the first charcoal fossils, fire and plants have been together since the beginning.

So the saying where there's smoke, there's fire...

... should be where there's plants, there's fire. How much fire? Well, that depends on how much oxygen is in the atmosphere, which has fluctuated over time. And we can see the evidence of plants adapting to being eminently combustible everywhere.

Uh, are we really gonna get into this right now?

Uhhm, well, I was, yeah, I mean, plant evolution and adaptation.

[Chuckling] Let's save it for the next episode.

Oh…

Sorry, dude, we don't have that much time.

[laughs] Okay.

Let's skip a few hundred million years and talk about people.

Okay. It's always about the people.

I know.

Why can't it be about the plants?

[Laughs] That's just how I am! Let's cut to Marlow.

Sure. My name is Marlow Pellatt, I am an Ecosystem Scientist with Parks Canada, I have a PhD in Ecology more specifically Paleoecology.

We're gonna follow Marlow, back in time.

How far back are we gonna go?

Yeah, so basically, you can picture going back 12,000 years ago or so most of this landscape covered with ice.

That's ice anywhere from one to four kilometers thick, so heavy that, as this ice sheet retreated at the end of the Pleistocene, the land under it was depressed below sea level, and it took many years to isostatically rebound- come to the surface. Anyways, we've been having these recurrent ice ages for a while because of something called Milankovitch cycles.

Milankovitch Orbital cycles, it's a position in the angle of the earth where it sits, so it drives these glacial cycles. And as, as we pull out of these glacial cycles, we entered into a warmer, drier period.

That's when humans start to show up in the Pacific Northwest.

Yeah, Indigenous people have been here at least that long, if not longer, although that's another story for another time. But they weren't alone.

Oh, I know where this is going.

Pleistocene Megafauna. Can you name 'em?

Alright, there were giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, giant beavers, big armadillos, camels, tapirs, dire wolves, lions, saber-toothed cats, and enormous terrifying short face bears. But wait, what does this have to do with fire?

Post glacial landscapes were wet and dominated in some places by evergreen spruce forests, and then others by grass and sedge dominated mammoth prairies. There's very little fire. Why? Well, it's still kind of cold and wet. But also there are all these giant mammoths and ground sloths eating all the vegetation before it has time to burn, creating these open landscapes. That is until...

Oh, I know what happens next.

Go for it.

Most of the megafauna went extinct, pretty much all at once.

Yeah, so what happened?

Uh- Wha-what did happen?

Oh, I thought- I thought you were gonna research this one.

Oh, was this on me? Oh damn, [laughter] Okay, hold on.

All right, Mendel, you ready?

Yep. did my research.

Alright, and now it's time for a segment that we call:

Mendel Explains a Thing.

Modern paleontology attempts to peer back through the ages and tease out history from tiny clues. As grains of dust fall to become mud on the bottom of a lake. They trap stories from their era in layers of sediment.

So how do we read these stories in the mud?

Well, scientists extract these long narrow cylinders called cores from Lake beds. The top layer is the present day and deeper layers are older and older.

We do sediment cores. So we find a lake or a bog or something we take a sediment core. And why we do that is because we have a layer of mud where we can date with radioactive isotopes, such as carbon-14, or lead-210 and get an idea of how much time has passed. Each centimeter of Lake core can describe a year or more by way of the various particles contained within it. And thousands of years can be told over mere meters.

So what are paleontologists like Marlow looking for in these layers of sediment?

Well, basically, they're just sorting and counting particles.

Like, by hand?

[Chuckles] Yeah, I mean, what else are grad students for?

[Laughs] What are- what particles are they looking for?

They're counting pollen, charcoal, and fungal spores.

So each of these must be special. Right?

Exactly. Different plants make different shapes of pollen. So, the relative proportion of different types of pollen demonstrates the relative proportion of the various plants and trees. For example, spruces, pines, alders, cedars, Doug firs and Oaks.

All these trees around here and it's nice in the Northern Hemisphere because most of these trees are wind pollinators so they dump billions of pollen grains into the air. They float around, they land on here and they're deposited. So we can reconstruct fairly well what the-what the plants were like that time.

So by looking at the pollen, we can see what the forests were made of. I got it. But what about the charcoal?

So paleoecologists actually have to distinguish between different types of charcoal, by size.

So there's two types of charcoal we look at, bigger pieces of charcoal- which is still pretty small, but you know, say you know, above 150 microns in size, which tend to be a little heavier and come from within the watershed. And then there's smaller charcoals, which are just, it's like the plankton of the air. They're there all the time. You could you know, when we're getting these particulate warnings in the air for the fires this summer, that's that particulate matter. That's settling all the time. So there's this back, round layer of charcoal is just coming from giant regional fires, we're not as interested in that.

It's those large grains of charcoal that are interpreted as a sign of local fire, distinguished from the smaller background charcoal that floats in the atmosphere. Put simply, the larger heavier grains tend not to travel as far or stay in the air as long.

So if-if we ignore the tiny charcoal grains, the bigger pieces tell us how often there were fires nearby. But what's the deal with the spores?

Animal fossils are actually pretty rare. using them to directly measure population over time would leave some serious gaps. In order to determine the population density of those big plant eating animals. Scientists have to use an indirect measurement, counting the spores of a fungus called Sporormiella.

Oh you beautiful mushroom nerd. Tell me more!

[Chuckles] Gladly. Spores function in a similar way for fungi, as Pollen does for plants, and we can infer that spore density in a sediment core tracks with fungal populations. Sporormiella is especially useful because it is a Coprophilous fungus.

What is a Coprophilous fungus?

[Laughter] Coprophilous means dung-loving! In order to complete its lifecycle, Sporormiella has to pass through the gut of a grazing animal. And then it forms a mushroom on the animal's stool. All that's to say, more spores signals, more mushrooms signals, more poop signals, more large grazing animals.

Pretty cool life history strategy. I like it. Okay, so what now? You've got a record of all the pollen, and charcoal and fungal spores year by year and layers of sediment for a given region. What then?

So next, we can start to construct a timeline to see how the life and fire in a region changed over the millennia. This timeline doesn't explain precisely why any particular species rose or fell in numbers. But the order of events can hint at causal links.

Like some sort of Pleistocene who-done-it. So what did we learn from the lake cores?

Suddenly, around 11,000 years ago, the Sporormiella spores disappear from the record.

So.. the megafauna just vanish?

Yeah. And shortly thereafter, we see a major shift in pollen types, and a huge increase in charcoal.

What is going on!?

After the extensive trampling and grazing of the megafauna disappeared, forests changed dramatically. New types of trees and shrubs could grow to maturity, and fuels for forest fires became abundant.

So fire replaced the megafauna. But why did they disappear in the first place?

Well, if it wasn't environmental change, then it was probably people. All around the world we see the same trends. Humans arrive in an area, the megafauna go extinct, and often we get enhanced fire regimes. Fire, essentially fills the role of megaherbivore, consuming all the excess vegetation. And all around the world, from Australia to the Americas, people start to set fires of their own. Why? We'll get to that after the break.

Chapter Two: Camas meadows.

So, where there's plants, there's fire, and where there's fire, there's fire adapted species and ecosystems. And when there aren't any megaherbivores fire rides shotgun. Now we're going to talk about why, in this context, you as a human might want to proactively light fires. To do that, we're going to zoom in on the south coast of British Columbia, which is on the west coast of Canada. This happens to be where we're broadcasting from, but it also provides an excellent example of human fire ecology. The Indigenous people here are collectively known as the Coast Salish and we live on their territory. To learn more about how and why the Coast Salish used fire, I talked to world renowned ethnobotanist Nancy Turner.

My name is Nancy Turner. I'm an ethnobotanist and ethnoecologist Professor Emeritus with the school of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria.

And she's been awarded the Order of British Columbia and Order of Canada. No big deal, anyhow.

Well, I first started in working with Indigenous knowledge holders in the late 60s. And at that time, the predominant view of fire was very bad.

[Unspecified archival clip] Only you can prevent forest fires.

The first teacher that I had was Christopher Paul from Tsartlip , and he was one of the last people who actually was growing and cultivating Camas, and he was the one who told me that they used to burn over those areas.

Okay, hold up. What is Camas and why would you burn it?

Right? We're so fortunate to have Camas here. There are actually two species to be found in this area on Vancouver Island. One is the common Camas and one is the giant or leichtlinii Camus. They're both in the genus Camassia. And they say that the name might come from čamas- which is the Nuu-Chah-Nulth word meaning sweet.

Is it sweet?

The closest thing I can think of is that it's like a roasted sweet chestnut. The main carbohydrate in Camas bulbs is not starch, but a complex sugar called inulin. And inulin, despite the name sugar is not very sweet tasting. It's kind of mucilaginous and it's- it's not easy to digest for people. Long ago, whenever people started eating Camas- I guess going back thousands of years- people developped this amazing way of processing and cooking the bulbs, to make them edible from a largely inedible form, with pit cooking. Slow cooking in an underground pit with vegetation around sort of a combination of baking, steaming and smoking, you could say all together. And the slow process of cooking actually chemically broke down the inulin into fructose, fructose and fructans. Fructose is a sweet tasting easily digestible sugar and it's the main-- those are the units that inulin is made up from. And so when the Camas is cooked in that way, usually it takes 24 hours to properly process it, maybe longer. The the bulbs turn dark sort of caramelized, you could say, and they become sweet tasting. Camas bulbs, next to salmon, was the most frequently traded item in this region.

So it's like a super abundant chestnut flavored onion that takes forever to cook. Where does fire come in?

So you go to a place with lots of Camas...

...and you use a digging stick, as almost like a lever..

..And you flip over the sod.

Right below you in the pit are the big bulbs, and you select out those...

...and you flip the sod back!

And so you've loosened the soil, you're also knocking a few seeds in,

...and finally...

..then you'd quickly do a quick burn over the whole thing. And all of the little ash and, the remains from the burning, would fall down into the crevices in the ground and provides kind of an instant fertilizer, and the little bulbs are still left intact in the upper layers. And then they're going to just continue growing in this nicely loosened soil. So the actual harvesting and the way it's done the timing of it, the selection of it actually promotes the growth of the plants themselves. And that's why if you want to see Camas growing at its best, you go to places where people have been harvesting the bulbs for generations.

And the fascinating thing is this process of cultivation and burning, it actually creates and maintains the Camas ecosystem, which is also known as a Gary Oak prairie.

What's a Gary Oak prairie?

So going to a Gary Oak prairie in the springtime is just breathtaking. Especially if you go in late April when the Camas are blooming. And the Oaks are just coming out. The leaves are light green color. There's usually a lot of wildlife around. A lot of birds a lot of bees pollinating the Camas. A few butterflies, there used to be way more and it is kind of like a place in a dream.

As James Douglas said, a perfect Eden, and that's the way I think of it. And then in the summertime the grass is all dried and it's yellowing, but you see the seed capsules, they're brown and kind of straw like and when you brush them you can hear the crackling sounds. Yeah, it's, it's hot and dry but it still has its own charm about it. And then this time of year in the fall, the young grass is coming up. The Oaks are brown, this beautiful kind of creamy chocolate brown color of the leaves. You often have the Steller's Jays coming all around the Oak trees at this time of year because if it's a good acorn year, they know that, you can hear them calling and scolding each other. That's pretty special too.

Oh, and then of course to follow through in the winter time. It's magical too when there's snow on the ground and snow on the trees and especially in the sunset/sunrise times of the day, and even, even late at night, you can often see the stars really brightly if you go out into an Oak Savannah into the meadow areas, you can look up and see these sparkling stars and it's, it's really magical.

So how do we know that Indigenous burning maintains these ecosystems?

By following the Oaks, we have to go back to just after the glaciers retreat.

And the megafauna die off. When there weren't any Gary Oaks at all in British Columbia. As they move North from California, their pollen starts to show up locally around 9000 years ago.

They really do well, probably around eight to 6000 years where the-the precipitation and the climate is just, you know, that nice spot...[speaker fades out]

So Gary Oaks are widespread. But t hen about 5000 years ago, the climate starts to cool. And there's more precipitation, and the characteristic evergreen Pacific Northwest cedar and hemlock forests, close in on the open territory. And yet, even as the climate changes...

The Oak still persisted. So, you know, why were the Oaks persisting? And when you look back, you see this fire record as well. It persists locally, not as much on a regional scale, though, that's that's where, you know, you can see on a broad scale, we're not getting these fires, but we're seeing indication of fire at a local, local level.

Ahhh, so Indigenous communities burning essentially prevents these open ecosystems from disappearing when the climate gets wetter.

Yeah, and we can see evidence of this and cultivation even as far back as three and 4000 years ago, in places like Whidbey Island and Vancouver Island and San Juan island.

Fire was an important tool for management and you know that may be for management of just open spaces; we like to be in open environments. Obviously, Camas was an important food source and you know you're also creating meadow habitats for things like deer or whatnot to go hunting and protection.

And the Coast Salish are only one example. Indigenous peoples around the world use fire for many of the same reasons. Clearing land, improving fertility, preventing wildfires, cultivating useful plants, promoting game species, and making it easier to hunt and defend areas. You see this with the Mayan milpa in Central America, with native Californians, with Australian Aborigines with swidden agriculture in the Mediterranean. This is the sophisticated effective system. When the Europeans arrived in the Salish Sea, even Captain George Vancouver himself remarked that:

[Quote from writings of George Vancouver] "I could not possibly believe any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture."

And yet, that's exactly what European colonists chose to believe.

Chapter Three.

Terra Nullius: a legal term for 'nobody's land' was applied as a willful blindness to the extensive land stewardship of the First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

You know, you land in a place and it becomes Terra Nullius, and then you declare manifest destiny to your expansion of the world. And it becomes, you know, nation building and all the wonderful things we do. And the best way to feel great about the things you do, is to diminish and ignore the importance of those people that were there before you. It's this typical mindset that, at the time, as we've come here and whenever people were here, had no impact on anything. Well, most of them had been decimated by disease and smallpox and population-you know the things that reduce the population- and we just assume that these wonderful clearings and oak systems and all these nice places to habitate were, just naturally there.

Of course we now know, that they were the product of a long history of careful management.

There's a lot of people occurring in the Georgia Depression, it's a good place to live. There's, lots of food, there's, you know, there's different resources, the climate is mild- all the reasons that we want to live here as well, right? You'd be foolish to think there wasn't a human footprint on the landscape. But we did we, you know, we come in with our blinders on and say, 'Oh, this land is wilderness' and that we managed accordingly and ultimately, we're learning we managed wrong. And we managed wrong because we just ignored something because we were just arrogant, nothing else. You know, take the racist-take everything out of it, we're just a bunch of arrogant people that thought what we were doing was the best way, because that's how we do things, right?

The traditions and technologies of indigenous peoples were outlawed, and knowledge built over millennia was lost in a few generations.

From then on, everyone I talked to, especially up in the Interior, but also on the Coasts here, people talked about the negative impact of prohibited burning, and how things are getting bushy and brushy. And, and the bulbs and the plants aren't growing as well, the berry bushes aren't growing as well.

And not only has fire suppression impacted Indigenous communities' food security, it's also put the Gary Oak ecosystems themselves at risk.

It's changed as I said, there are not nearly as many songbirds so there used to be, not as many ground nesting birds especially, like the chipping sparrows. I remember lots of them from when I was younger, and you don't see those very much anymore. Killdears used to be everywhere and you don't see them. There are even Meadowlarks around here, and you don't see those anymore, which is really sad. And especially sad for me is butterflies. There used to be so many different kinds of butterflies. Ones that, you know, there would just be all over and the- in the spring, the meadows would be just buzzing with bumblebees and different kinds of flies, syrphid flies and lots of other insects.

And scientists were noticing not just that species were disappearing, but that the Meadows themselves were disappearing. Instead of open Meadows with a handful of mature, well-spaced oak trees, there were suddenly Oaks everywhere.

So the Oaks were acting just like any deciduous successional trees. They started to pop up in these Meadow environments. And then eventually they, you know, succession would occurr and Douglas fir would go in, and so we're like, oh, we're losing the species we're losing these Oak Meadows. What are we doing wrong? Well, you know, it seems quite obvious but it's funny how now we're only starting to, to manage fire in these systems.

So now even the Oaks are getting crowded out by Douglas fir.

And people are actually worried that these ecosystems with all of their unique and endangered species, might disappear entirely into the forest.

Chapter Four: Tumbo Island.

So Tumbo Island is this really cool little island just off of Saturna Island, you can probably see it if you're standing out in Tsawwassen or White Rock and you look over and its this little nondescript Island right at the edge of things. Settlement has been fairly limited there, there's been some history of a bit of mining on it. It's quite common in the Gulf islands, is somebody has owned these islands and that, so they decided to sell it off to Parks Canada when it became a National Park Reserve.

And Marlow and his team chose this island because:

So one, it has a nice set of Oaks, not huge because it's a small island but well represented Oak habitats on the island. Two, it doesn't have any people living on the island and Parks Canada owns it.

Good to go. Right?

Well, we thought it would be fairly easy. Parks Canada has this island and then we can develop the fire program for this and start thinking about it. So we did the the tree rings to understand the stand age, we got a good handle on it. We started monitoring for vegetation on that. And we started consulting and that was, as a scientist where I really learned that's where the hard work starts. It's building the partnerships, and in doing that the science was like, yeah, it's like, okay, you got all the science now you got to go convince people.

Yeah, that's always the hard part.

It took a while, you know, my goodness, and it was a good eight years, you know, from beginning to end to, you know. First we would go out, the ResCon manager at the time Rob Walker, myself, we do the dog and pony show around Saturna or Saltspring and, you know, talk about fire and talk about how safe it would be over in Tumbo because we're not going to burn down your areas, but fire is important and you know, basically educate 'em and..

… So they finally get everyone together. Local, Provincial, and First Nations fire crews, community members, press, and then, they wait for the stars to align for conditions to be just right.

I honestly thought it was over. We were well into September, and it's like okay, we're going for a holiday. Things look like they're not happening, there's letters going to the Prime Minister and I get a call from the park saying we have a one day window...

... And we have to pull this all together so, it sounds like- like it was just organized chaos. I came back, parks just doing a wonderful dance we...

So they pull it off?

Yeah, and then...

We were so impressed, we went out, we were out there this spring doing the post fire. And what we were really- the fire went quickly through the grass environment, it behaved exactly like we expected. It moved through the grass- the Oaks, you wouldn't even know hardly that they were impacted- it moved around, but when it got into that forest edge, because it was dry last year, it sort of caught into the the Douglas fir a little bit more and the salal. It burned around those areas a little hotter than we expected and created this bare ground. So we were quite concerned that this might come back with invasive species. What's fascinating- and the jury's still out whether they survive till next year- but when we were out there doing the surveys, thousands of Arbutus seedlings, just little tiny covering this bare soil.

Arbutus being a beautiful native tree with peeling red bark, one of my favourites.

Western scientists and public institutions are starting to catch up to what Indigenous people have known and have been saying all along. But it's painfully slow.

But other than that, very little in BC, we're very conservative in Canada over things like fire. It's been a hard push.

And it's not just homeowners. There's a theory out there that pyrodiversity promotes biodiversity, that a range of different types of fire on the landscape can create more diverse habitats. But conservationists are also concerned that we might be, instead of burning for biodiversity, literally burning up, biodiversity.

And again, fair enough, if you're in the small what's left of the Gary Oak ecosystems and you're concerned over a species at risk and some guy, or people come out and say, 'we think we should burn this', they look at you like, 'yeah, I think you should go away, we're like really far out of reach of this site'. [jubilant laughter] And we know your name, if anything bad happens here. [more laughter]

Chapter Five: The Penelakut

And then there's this other problem of cultural appropriation, and the reality that Indigenous knowledge and Western science have different goals, operate in different ways and can produce dramatically different results. Parks had invited members of the Penelakut tribe, whose territory encompasses the southern Gulf islands, to be present. Last year, I got a chance to sit down and talk to Penelakut elder, cultural expert and residential school survivor, Auggie Sylvester about the burn. We were in a noisy place so you'll have to listen really closely to hear what he's saying.

They were asking permission to burn and I said, well it's gotta be a very controlled burn. That wasn't too controlled to me, we gave 'em hell about. So yeah, they don't listen, they're big boys so .. [unintelligible] Parks, Parks eh? Parks Board. To top if off, the company, Ottawa complained, they all complained- to do that burn- and they didn't listen to anybody.

He sounds pretty disappointed.

Yeah, I asked him if he'd do another burn with Parks Canada and he wasn't sure. He didn't feel listened to and he felt that the fire got too hot and caused damage, which Marlow mentioned as well. Augie told me, 'you want a fire that you can slow down by hitting it with conifer boughs'.

Wait, a fire that's so light, you can literally discourage it by hitting it with a flammable object? Yeah, and Nancy Turner backs this up.

The burn was very quick, and there was one famous colonial reference to what you do. You can just run through the fire if you're caught in it, you just run through it because it's- the flames aren't that high or moving that fast. They're just kind of moving across the field. That's the way they described it and that's the way I envision what it was like.

Whoa. So these really were carefully controlled burns.

And when we asked Marlow about what Augie had to say:

That's a fair criticism, you know, we definitely have work to do, to build it into a more meaningful project. That is the absolute goal. The crew works in there and that's who's in there right? You've got fires, you've got things happening and you know, anybody who isn't part of it is on the sideline, unfortunately. And there is, there's an element of our need to manage around species at risk, there's an element of our need to manage around ecological restoration. And there's more and more, which is a good thing, you know, of bringing in our First Nations partners to say, you know, what do you see in this site? You know, what are the plants? We know what we know, because you've shared knowledge and we've learned knowledge from the science, but you know- this is really-this is yours. Right?

The cool thing is, Tumbo is only the first step.

And now the next step is to select sites of more cultural significance and work with the Indigenous partners to say, okay, we're bringing fire back in the ecosystems. We can do this in a dry, shallow soil site, which probably was never an important camas harvest site, but the fire is important ecologically. But let's move this over now to sites of both ecological interests, but also cultural interests.

Indigenous knowledge and Western science together at last.

Yeah, I think that's the fundamental step. But it's going to take a lot of healing and a lot of relationship building. There are examples of co-management frameworks for working with fire, particularly in Northern California, but they can be fraught with power inequalities and mutual distrust. To achieve their objectives, Indigenous people have to work both inside of and around these kinds of institutional arrangements.

And what about the rest of us?

Well, many people are justifiably still afraid of fire. In Australia, where they've been doing prescribed burns for a lot longer than we have in North America, there's research coming out that's 50 years in the making, demonstrating that a consistent, targeted program of prescribed burning can significantly reduce the incidence of catastrophic wildfires. Especially if burns are strategically placed to interrupt continuous areas with built up fuels. But even in Australia, prescribed burning can be quite controversial. And many people think that controlled burns that escape…

... The "not so controlled" burns

... Pose more of a threat than wildfires. And both proponents and opponents of prescribed burning are using science to defend their views.

Wait, so one side says burning is bad for the environment, because: science. And the other side is saying burning is good for the environment because: science?

Yeah, I guess it's marginally better than discarding science entirely. But it's worth noting that while there is broad agreement that fire adapted ecosystems require fire to be healthy and to persist and that Indigenous Peoples widely employed fire to manage ecosystems, there isn't necessarily an agreement within the scientific community on how best to reintroduce fire. It's actually difficult to tell sometimes how often and how intensely fires burned in the past and how much influence people had on fire intervals, depending on the ecosystem, we're talking about.

Chapter Six: Partnerships.

Okay, so it's complex. But let's say that we're accepting that prescribed burns are a good idea, even if we're not exactly sure how they're going to be applied in every situation. How do we move forward?

I'm convinced that the strongest way that we can move forward with these ideas and restore landscapes is through partnerships. Through mutual respect, mutual recognition of the best that there is in different knowledge systems and that includes all of the different Indigenous knowledge systems and scientific knowledge, which has its own power, and should never be ignored because there's lots that we can learn from measuring... and in all the different technologies that we have now. From drones, to GPS, and everything- all of those are very powerful forms of knowledge as well. And it would be foolish to ignore them. So what we need to do is to combine our knowledge in ways that are respectful.

I love that. Let's do that.

Yeah. But as Marlow said, there's a whole history of colonialism and broken trust between Indigenous Peoples and resource managers, scientists and farmers, urban and rural, you name it.

And we can try to leverage the legal system, or science or politics, or even economic arguments against those who we perceive as our opponents. But it's going to come down to long term relationship building in communities. Cease Wyss, who we spoke to in our very first episode actually has a great perspective on knowledge sharing.

Well, sometimes it starts with helping somebody wash their dishes and do their chores because if you want them to get out, you've got to help them get there. If you want them to help you get to your goals, you support them in whatever way they ask. So, you know, some people will say, 'okay, but the knowledge', and I'm like: 'and I've helped do dishes and errands and...[laughter] and it still gets back to: 'it starts there'.

Bringing it all back to the kitchen. It makes sense. If we lack trust, we need to build trust, and then expanding on that we need to support each other on multiple fronts.

And this all takes time. I know that in the past with projects I've been involved in, I've been impatient. You get to thinking, 'these are pressing environmental issues, we don't have time!'

That reminds me of something Marlow said.

When we're talking with a bunch of ecologists of how we're going to have our systems adapt and you know, I'm meanwhile picturing Mad Max in my head. [laughs] Not so much what kind of Protected Area Network we're having, right? [laughs]

Changes of this magnitude don't happen on timescales of funding cycles or grad studies. And if we rush, it's the most vulnerable people who won't be able to be involved. And in this case, it really is Indigenous knowledge that is central to these solutions.

It can't be abstracted.

This is what I learned from them, this is what I understand. If it's something that I've experienced myself I can say that but, I consider it a responsibility that was put on to me when people shared their knowledge with me because they knew that, well, they they wanted to make sure that knowledge wasn't lost, for one thing. And they knew that I had that interest and love of plants- I call it a mutual love of plants that created a bond between us- but I take that responsibility seriously to promote their knowledge, but as, their knowledge.

Now it's our responsibility too.

So anything else?

Well, maybe we've really zoomed in on fire here. And since we're nearing the end, let's zoom out a bit. Fire and knowledge around fire is just a piece of a much larger whole.

To me, if you're going to turn things around, you have to do it cumulatively too. And you're doing that you're starting with one part, but you're recognizing that it's only one piece of a huge complex puzzle. And so you're doing exactly the right thing by looking at one part, but recognizing that that's just the start. That there are many other components to this, that go into education, food security and many different activities that have to be done cumulatively. And we're all part of a team here, we're all part of a team and so working together is the only way that we can manage all of those different cumulative activities that we need to do.

Augie Sylvester actually said something that really drove this home for me.

No I think all- everything's important to us. You asked, is there something that's important? That didn't sound right to me. Like the government always asks us 'Oh, which land is important to you?' And I say well you close your eyes and look around, close your eyes and look around, when you can't see nothing but Indian people talking. That time. That was a long time ago when the Indians only, the Indian people lived here. But if you close your eyes and you say well that's only the Indian people that's here again, then all everything here. It's a medicine that's been with us as we grew up, and grow up.

We need to think about Future Ecologies.

You have been listening to Future Ecologies.

I'm Mendel Skulski.

And I'm Adam Huggins.

And this is just part one, of a two part series on fire.

In part two, we'll pivot from fire ecology and restoring fire adapted landscapes to design solutions that we can start implementing right now.

In this episode, you heard Marlow Pelatt, Nancy Turner, Auggie Sylvester and Cease Wyss.

This has been an independent production of Future Ecologies. Our first season is supported in part by the Vancouver Foundation. If you'd like to help us make the show, you can support us on Patreon. To say thanks, we're releasing exclusive mini episodes every other week. To get in on the action head to patreon.com/futureecologies.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and iNaturalist. The handle is always futureecologies.

Special thanks to Ilana Fonariov, Alex Dundas, David Skulski.

That's my dad.

Nicole Jahraus. Natalie Ban, Access to Media Education Society, the Galiano Conservancy Association, and Riley Byrne of Podigy.

Music in this episode was produced by Sunfish Moon Light, PORTBOU, and Radioactive Bishop. You can find a full list of musical credits, show notes and links on our website: futureecologies.net

[unspecified media clip] Through the darkness, future past, the magician longs to see. One chance out between two worlds, fire, walk with me...