What happens after the smoke clears? What does recovery look like when the disasters never end?

In this episode, we're visiting the sites of some of BC's biggest burns of 2017 and 2021 – making the link between the mega-fires and the floods and landslides that followed. We'll hear about how the land is (and isn't) recovering, and the factors that spell the difference.

This is the 4th instalment in our series of indeterminate length, "On Fire", but don't feel obliged to listen to parts 1-3 beforehand.

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You're listening to Season Five of

Future Ecologies.

I don't usually do this, but I have to know if

you're willing to tell me. How did you meet?

She got cursed to be here.

Yep.

Cursed?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh.

I'm originally from Northwestern Germany from

a, if you want, a sort of minority in Europe. So my

ancestors right down to my parents spoke Plautdietsch as we

call it, or Plattdütsch. It's closer to Dutch than to standard

German. So that's where I was born and raised and then as a

young adult, traveled to Haida Gwaii and lived there for a

number of years. When in 1982, my mother was visiting and I had

a toddler, my daughter, Jessica, and we were driving to the

interior. I'd never been east of Hope. So we traveled for hours

through the sagebrush, bunchgrass ponderosa pine, if

even there were some. And finally, it was when we were

right at the mouth of like the highway here – by the mouth of

Deadman Creek. We turned to each other, and I said "What a

godforsaken area is this anyway?"

We've said ever since that's when I cursed myself for the

rest of my days, and of course, I you know, I came to Secwépemc

territory just a bit after that.

I was raised and lived in this valley here. I was

adopted by my great grandmother, Sulyen. I was fortunate Shuswap

great grandmothers have the right to look amongst all their

grandchildren and adopt one and raise it as their own. And I say

that I won the lottery ticket. And as a result, I got some

understanding of our language and our ways in our knowledge,

traditional knowledge. And I mean, I remember my great

grandmother's Sulyen would have her her old saddle horse and her

birch bark baskets, and we would jump on the horse — me riding in

the back — and we'd be riding all these hills picking the

Saskatoonberries off of horseback.

But one of the things that my great grandmother, she told me

before she left this place, she said, "I want you to go out into

the world and study it. Once you do that, then you come home and

help your people." And I tried to not live up to the

admonishments, but to forget about them and do my own thing.

But nonetheless, I ran away from the Kamloops Indian Residential

School with an incomplete grade eight, went traveling around

working here on ranches and farms and things of this nature.

But I went back to university and got my master's degree from

there.

My sort of mentor, supervisor of my

postdoc, was Ron's thesis supervisor.

Right!

So one time he mentioned, "oh, yeah, you gotta

meet this guy. He wrote a really good master's thesis, you should

read it. Maybe look him up one day." You know, since those

days, we've co-authored many times and working together with

Dr. Nancy Turner from UVic took us to begin studying the wider

context in which plants and animals interact with humans and

vice versa, but also how our ecologies are rapidly changing

through fragmentation and destruction of our lands, our

homelands. And in more recent decades, the impacts of drought,

climate change, floods, and of course fires.

Look at this dashcam video you're seeing

here. One family trying to flee a wildfire engulfing parts of

Canada. The flames and smoke... The smoke from the wildfire

western Canada. We are facing the large wildfire ever recorded

in EU history... Devestating wildfires are ravaging part of

the Big Island and the island of Maui... An astonishing milestone

this week. Monday and Tuesday, the hottest days ever recorded

on Earth... Severe weather yet again, from an atmospheric river

that has dumped rain in the central part of the state

tonight, causing massive flooding... For the third time

in a week an atmospheric river is drenching Southwestern BC,

where flooding and landslides have already disrupted the lives

of 1000s of people.

Fire and water were heads and tails of the same coin

really. Because if you don't respect and honor fire, it will

cause you great harm and danger, likewise with water. Water can

be equally as destructive. So it's how you respect and honor

the land and we have what you know, like our word

[Secwepemctsin]. If you don't honor the land, the land will

turn on you. And you experience great grief and sorrow through

floods and fires. And basically, that's what's happening with us

today.

Welcome back, my name is Mendel.

And I'm Adam.

And to cap off another record season of floods

and wildfires. We're dipping back into the hottest topic in

the more than human world. And it's a perennial favorite of

ours on this show.

This is the next installment in our long running

series on fire. We're calling this one under water.

We've spoken about fire at length three times

before this, but don't worry if you're just joining us for this

one.

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design, and sound.

So, Adam, another year, another record

shattering fire season, and a seemingly endless list of

disasters close to home, and around the world.

Mhm

Plus unprecedented heat waves, with

scientists reporting, the hottest day ever recorded.

Three straight days in a row in July.

And then beyond fire, we've witnessed

catastrophic floods ripping through communities on

practically every continent.

And of course, in my home state of California,

which was literally underwater for most of the winter.

Yeah. So we're all living out the climate

crisis right now, together in different ways. How are you

feeling about it?

To be honest, I'm feeling pretty angry about it

right now. I just traveled to the Rockies and back. And

everywhere that I went, there were fires burning, could see

them from the road. We could see them progress over time, as we,

you know, went out and then came back. And my community has been

fine so far. But I can't say the same for some of my friends.

Yeah.

Honestly, I feel like we're living in the world

that we were warned about decades ago. And watching our

neighbors get burned and flooded out of their homes.

Yeah...

It just seems like it's gonna get worse. And, you

know, usually when there's a disaster, we grieve, we recover.

The mayor makes some statements in the local newspaper about

rebuilding, and we move on. So I guess the question that we have

to ask ourselves under these circumstances is, what does

recovery look like when the disaster just never ends? When

it just keeps going? What does recovery mean, when the crisis

that we're experiencing is chronic?

Well, to start to answer that question, I think

we have to rewind the clock a little bit. We're gonna go back

to 2021 in my home province of British Columbia. Where during

the summer, another unprecedented heatwave or heat

dome, which is a word we now all know, but at the time had never

heard before.

Yeah.

That heat dome hit the Northwest.

That was the summer that the town of Lytton,

in the interior of BC, experienced the highest

temperatures ever recorded in Canada.

Coincidentally for three straight days in a row

in July.

Yeah. And then was razed to the ground the next day

in a massive wildfire. One of hundreds that would burn

throughout the province that summer.

Then later that Fall, an atmospheric river!

Which is another term that most of us learned for

the first time in 2021.

Yeah. That resulted in massive floods

across the Northwest and in BC they were so bad that they

literally severed major highways, cutting Vancouver off

from the rest of the country for a time.

And both Mendel and I were living through all of

this and trying to make sense of it as well. So we turned to

someone that we knew might have some answers.

Yes, my name is Dr. Lori Daniels. I'm a

professor of forest ecology at the University of British

Columbia in the faculty of forestry. And I do research on

wildfire science and management.

Longtime listeners will recognize Lori

from the previous installment in this series. So there we were,

in the spring of 2022, still reeling from the disastrous

floods of that previous Autumn, and thinking back to the fires

from that Summer. And so we asked Lori to help us understand

the connection between fires, landslides, and floods.

So there's a really amazing well documented

relationship between fire and hydrology and the types of

landslides and slope failures that we observed in November.

Normally, under normal circumstances, when we get a lot

of rain onto the steep slopes of mountainous environments, the

forest kind of acts like a sponge that absorbs a lot of

that moisture into the organic material on the forest floor,

which can hold a lot of water. The water slowly trickles down

into the soil...

But when a wildfire sweeps through and

removes all of that organic material, it dramatically

reduces the landscape's ability to intercept, absorb and retain

that precipitation.

The heat of the fire also takes all of the

material in the vegetation that burns.

Vegetation, which around here would mainly be the

needles of coniferous trees.

Those needles have waxy coatings on them – that are

adaptations that make them survive well in this

environment.

And all of those oils and fats and waxy coatings,

in the heat of the fire, not all of it burns away,

It merges together, it sinks down into the

soil, and then it re-solidifies kind of like wax paper.

Creating an impermeable, hydrophobic layer

across the burned forest floor.

So, imagine dropping water onto wax paper.

It forms beads, instead of soaking down into the paper. The

soils did the same thing. Hydrophobic soils caused by the

intensity of the fire meant that the water that came down onto

those surfaces now sat and pooled instead of infiltrating

down into the ground. And eventually, on our steep

mountain slopes, it begins to flow overland, carrying with it

the ash and the debris that was left after the fire.

And during the megafires of 2021, and as we're

seeing again in 2023, entire watersheds were burned. Add all

of this up together...

And so now we have this intense rainfall onto these

ecosystems on these mountain slopes that are highly altered.

And we've created a situation where we have excessive rain, we

have excessive runoff, and then you get this huge erosion power,

the amount of power in those rivers as the water collects in

the headwater streams, and moves down slope, gaining volumes of

water, amounts of debris, and gaining energy as it flows down

slope. We saw those catastrophic effects.

So case closed, you get massive wildfires. And

you can pretty much expect there to be massive floods afterwards.

It's all interconnected. It's a classic

disturbance cascade, you know, that started in June and

culminated in November and will have lasting impacts... for

years if not decades in British Columbia.

But then, when we were wrapping up the

interview, Lori planted a little seed.

I'm gonna do a little sales pitch here. Sarah

Dixon oil is one of the PhD students that I co supervise.

She told us Sarah was working with an

organisation called the Secwepemcúl'ecw Restoration and

Stewardship Society.

And they have just released a big report on the

Elephant Hill Fire

Detailing and the recovery efforts jointly led

by this Secwepemc First Nations and the province of BC.

It's like a 200 page report – could probably be

the topic for an entire podcast. I think you guys would do a

fantastic job with it.

Which just goes to show how susceptible we are

to flattery!

Well, we actually didn't follow up on this tip

immediately. I mean, she really did have me until she said the

words 200 page report.

Yeah, well, you're only human.

But fast forward another year, another round of

global climate disasters. And you'll never guess who gets in

touch.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle.

And she's now a postdoctoral research fellow

with the faculty of forestry at the University of British

Columbia and still working in partnership with the

Secwepemcúl'ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society. She invited

me to visit her and the communities that she works with

up in the interior, to see how the post-fire, post-flood

recovery was shaping up. That little seed that Lori had

planted was finally getting some light. So I took her up on it.

Earlier this summer, before the latest disasters in Maui,

Kelowna, and Yellowknife, among others, I made the drive through

the Fraser Valley from the coastal rainforest up into the

coast ranges, east of Hope.

Which is a town by the way, not just an

expression.

And winding my way through the scenic Fraser

Canyon, which was still undergoing repairs from the 2021

flooding, by the way.

Mhm

I went past the former village of Lytton, which

still doesn't have any structures two years later. And

that's where I forked off of the Fraser River and headed up the

Thompson. Pretty quickly the dry Douglas fir forests of the

interior gave way to sagebrush bunchgrass and ponderosa pine –

really some of the driest country I've seen anywhere in

the province. And as I camped out right beside the Thompson

River in the evening light, with these massive freight trains on

both sides of the river, rattling my tent about every

hour or so, I finally cracked open that 241 page report that

Laurie told us about.

... you, you waited until the night before

your interviews to read the report?

In my defense, Sarah had only sent it to me a

few days before.

Okay...

And I actually burned right through it.

Oh my god.

Anyway, the report raised lots of questions and

made me really excited to see Sara the next morning, so got up

early rolled down to the village of Cache Creek, surrounded by

dry hills and irrigated fields of hay and alfalfa. But what

immediately caught my attention, Mendel was the flood damage all

through the center of town. Everywhere I looked, there were

sandbags, huge piles of rubble, washed out roads and busted

culverts. It was so striking that when I finally met Sarah, I

forgot to ask her to introduce herself. I just took her

straight over to Cache Creek.

You're talking about the creek that the whole

town is named after.

Exactly. And when it isn't flooding. It's actually

not that much to look at.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Yeah, I've driven over that creek so many

times and barely even glance to that. It's amazing. It can do

that much damage.

How much damage are we talking about here?

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: I mean, this used to be a bridge. This

used to be a road into town.

We were standing at what used to be a road and is

now essentially just a bunch of riprap with Cache Creek running

through it. The asphalt has collapsed in on either side, and

the culverts are buried in rubble. I actually tried to

drive over this, because Google Maps routed me that way.

Oh no...

And this damage is much more recent than just 2021.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Yeah, this entire town was flooded out

maybe a month ago.

Cache Creek has been flooding regularly for the

past several years. And this is a direct consequence of climate

driven extreme weather events repeatedly hammering a burned

landscape.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: We saw that with the atmospheric river in

2021 that fires and floods often go hand in hand. It's just crazy

seeing these roads you've driven so many times, suddenly, you

know, completely under rubble, or these, you know, rivers and

creek lines just spilling out over the banks. We're staying at

the RV park just up the road. And it's right on the river. And

you can see just off to the edge. They've done a lot of

work. But there's just still cars tipped on their side and

RVs kind of everywhere. And the creek just completely

overflowed.

Wow. So you didn't even have to get out of

town to see the damage.

No, not at all. But eventually, I hop into

Sarah's car and she took me for a ride up this steep grassy

slope above the town through an active landfill, actually.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Take a drive up the lovely dump road,

as it's called, to give you access and a bit of a viewpoint

down over the fire.

And pretty soon we start to see some trees. But

they've seen better days.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: I look around we're in this incredibly

dry, you know almost desert ecosystem. It's sagebrush. It's

a bunch grasses, you look up on the hills that used to be forest

and now it's really just burnt sticks.

So we make our way up through those burnt sticks.

And then we step out of the car and into the footprint of the

2017 Elephant Hill Fire – six years, almost the day from when

it ignited. We're actually squinting a bit through the

smoky haze from another wildfire farther north — par for the

course in a summer like this. And Sarah points across the

valley to a cleft in a dry hillside.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: See there's kind of a deep gully running up

the flat back of that hill? Right above that house down...

Yes, that's what I'm looking at too

The base of the hill looks a little bit like the rear end of

a large animal

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Or the tail perhaps! And then you go up and

it's the elephant's back. Then it's kind of hot through this

haze, but you can almost see like a big elephant ear and then

a trunk. So this big hill here is Elephant Hill.

I see... Elephant hill looks like an

elephant.

Yes, it does.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: And that's where the fire started down near

Ashcroft on a really hot, dry, windy day.

Wait, isn't Ashcroft where?

Yeah, the fire ignited just a few kilometers

from the Ashcroft Indian Band and burned right through the

reserve.

Which we heard about from Chief Maureen

Chapman, back in part three of this series.

Yeah. Yeah, it was an awful day.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Just the heat and the wind on that day,

just pushed that fire up over the provincial park, up over

Elephant Hill, down to Cache Creek. And then it jumped the

After burning around the village of Cache

highway and was off.

Creek, the fire found its way into the forest and plateaus of

BC's interior, consuming almost 200,000 hectares, and releasing

about 38 million tons of greenhouse gas. It happened so

quickly that people who are out on the road just doing errands

that day, got trapped on the wrong side of the fire, and had

to camp out until they could get around again. So Sarah and I

were basically staring at the epicenter of one of the largest

megafires of 2017 — a fire season that put the term

megafire into our collective vocabulary. And now here it was

six years later.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: We're walking in what used to be an

Interior Douglas Fir forest, and now really is quite a weedy

grassland with the remnants of those trees. So we have these

really tall, completely blackened trees. A lot of them

have been falling down, coming down over the last few years.

I'm sure we're actually still seeing some mortality from the

fires. You know, you look around here and I can't see a single

green tree anywhere.

And not only are there no green trees, I couldn't

see any tree regeneration. Like at all. You've got to remember

this was a Douglas Fir forest. And it's been...

Six whole years.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: You know, it was burnt right down to

mineral soil. There were these big treacherous holes that you

had to be careful of when fire had just burnt out the roots

under the soil. And completely right down, consuming all

organic matter. So we're not seeing a lot of natural tree

regeneration in these forests here at all, particularly in

these really dry sites here.

Eventually, we do bump into a few Ponderosa Pine

seedlings, but they've been planted as part of the recovery

efforts. Otherwise, it's sort of a mix of weeds.

Such... such as?

Knap weeds, annual grasses, typical stuff.

Right.

And then there are these really cool patches of

naturally regenerating native bunchgrass and wildflowers and

some shrubs too

Pretty!

It's actually pretty patchy. We see some

Mariposa lilies, lots of Yarrow, Roses, some Saskatoonberry,

Arrowleaf Balsamroot...

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: This is Arrowleaf Balsamroot. It looks

like it's been grazed,

Uh... grazed by what?

Most likely cows.

There... there are cows... on the fire

footprint?

Everywhere we went,

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Yes, I mean, this is all so-called

crown range tenure. So they did rescind some of those licenses

after Elephant Hill. Essentially meaning that they worked with

the range holders, the ranchers to take cows off this landscape

because it was so impacted.

So this pasture was mostly ungrazed for the

first three or so years after the fire.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: You can see cows back out all over this

landscape, you can see it's quite weedy, particularly up

these roads.

But why were the cows put back on? Wouldn't that

really affect the regeneration?

Sure. I mean, it's a trade off for what is

basically an economic imperative in the region. Actually, range

recovery was one of the three so called "great goals" of the

immediate post fire recovery process. And range recovery

basically meant rebuilding range fences.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: So when the fences are gone, you know, they

had cattle roaming out into the highway, cattle congregating

around water sources, maybe over-grazing some areas. So they

had to really quickly rebuild a lot of those fences. But you can

see here, I mean, these have just been super heavily grazed,

all these bunch grasses are really grazed down. And then you

see Kentucky Bluegrass, which is a Poa species. It's an

introduced species. It's not actually from Kentucky. Although

it is the floral emblem, I think. But it's really tolerant

to heavy grazing. And so it's just naturalized throughout

these landscapes.

And the Bluegrass seemed to be doing just fine.

Whereas most of the native shrubs that I was seeing were

being heavily browsed by cattle. And we were walking through a

landscape that completely absent any shrub or tree cover was

actively eroding with these big gullies forming wherever water

collects.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: You know what is the impact of cows when

you've got no vegetation cover? When you got incredible erosion?

When you're concerned about invasive species spread across

these fire guards? I really don't think that's a lot of

understanding.

Wait... what's a fire guard?

It's basically a fire break.

Okay, yeah.

They were constructed to contain the fire.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: They're about 600 kilometers of fire

guards, so essentially roads, put in across this landscape.

And actually you talk to a lot of community members who say,

you know, we saw fire guards been put in or access roads

being punched in in areas where there was already access, or

where there were natural fire breaks. You know, we didn't need

600 kilometers of disturbance across this already quite

impacted landscape.

Right, I guess some of those fire guards are

critical for stopping the fire from traveling further. But not

all of those breaks end up being actually necessary. And once

you've ripped out all the vegetation and the organic

material, that's a pretty serious impact on the landscape.

Exactly. And so the second great goal of the

recovery process was rehabilitating all of those fire

guards, basically, ripping them, seeding them, planting them. But

still...

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: It's not like it's back to how it was

before.

This is especially the case in areas that burned

with high heat and high severity. But that isn't the

only story for this landscape.

No?

No. So we hopped into the car and went a bit

further up hill. Sarah wanted to show me some of the areas that

burned less severely, where there were still species of

cultural significance to this Secwépemc People.

Whose territory this is.

Yes, along with the Nlakaʼpamux. So she walks me

up to this area where there's a fence and a cattle guard across

the road. And the difference from one side of the fence to

the other is just crystal clear.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Yeah, you can see on one side, it's pretty

heavily grazed, the other side, we've got really tall Fireweed,

we've got Balsamroots go a little bit further up in there

we've got these beautiful patches of Chocolate Lily.

So we walk over to this field of native wildflowers

and grasses – still surrounded, of course, by the remains of

burnt trees.

Of course.

And it's full of chocolate lilies!

You must have been in heaven.

I mean, they were all mostly gone to seed at this

point. But yeah, I could picture what they had been like when

they were flowering.

You know, it's actually really nice to get you

talking plants on the show again.

I know... it's been so long.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: So we set up a number of plots, in the

fire, outside the fire, at these different elevations, and

specifically targeted areas that had high abundance of these

culturally important plants.

And they're studying these plots to try to

understand how different severities of fire at different

elevations impact the regeneration of native plant

communities.

Mmm... so, what are they learning?

Well, nothing's published yet. But the

preliminary results are that in areas where the fire burned with

low to moderate severity, there's been a really strong

regeneration of native plants, and especially those culturally

significant ones.

That's encouraging.

Definitely. On the other hand, though, areas that

burned with high severity had much poor regeneration overall.

Less culturally significant plants, for sure, and more

introduced weeds.

Right. And since these mega fires are burning, so

much of the landscape at higher and higher severities...

It means lots of areas with poor regeneration.

And then you have to layer on all of the other variables. Some

of those are differences in elevation, microclimate,

moisture, or soils, but so much of it is variation resulting

from human impacts.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: So we're thinking not just about fire,

but how fire was interacting with these other disturbances

that are kind of layered, historically, and still now onto

this landscape.

Right, like roads and fire guards and

livestock.

And forestry. But it turns out that fire severity

is still a key variable.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: There's not just one kind of monolithic

fire, there's so many different types of fires. So we need to be

thinking about when is the fire burning? How intensely is it

burning? How much is it consuming that vegetation? You

know, what season is it burning in? And what ecosystem is it

burning in? And what are the specific adaptations of plants

or animals in that area to fire? So if we look around at an

ecosystem like this, that would have been a relatively open very

dry Douglas Fir forest. You know, historically, this is

characterized by more frequent low severity fires, maybe, you

know, sporadic more high intensity fires. But

predominantly, this was a kind of low to mixed severity

fire-adapted ecosystem. So these kinds of fairly frequent really

large and intense fires, that are killing all of the trees

like this, are probably not characteristic are typical of

what this ecosystem is adapted to.

My major takeaway from that experience is that the

areas that burn at the highest intensities just aren't

recovering that well.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: We found across all these forest types

across Elephant Hill, we're seeing fairly limited short term

recovery, we're seeing low species richness, low species

diversity. But in contrast, in areas burned at kind of low to

even moderate severity, we actually saw a really high

abundance of species of cultural significance. So species,

perhaps, that were managed with fire, or are still managed with

fire in some areas. So even compared to areas that aren't

burnt at all, we're actually seeing higher diversity and more

cultural species in those areas that had maybe some of that cool

ground fire coming through. So that really speaks to the

potential for restoring some of these areas by putting the right

fire back in the right place at the right time.

So what else can we learn from the Elephant Hill

fire?

Well, for starters, enough to fill a 241

page report. Did I mention?

Duh. Yeah.

241 pages?

Yes.

Sarah was telling me about the process of writing

the report, in the car on the way down. It actually started as

a way to follow up on the 2018 Abbott Chapman report.

Which we discussed in the previous

installment of this series.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: So I'd been doing all these interviews as

part of my PhD with community members, Secwépemc community

members, government representatives about their

experiences during the 2017 fire season, and particularly about

the joint recovery — the work between governments, between

First Nations and the province, on how to actually recover that

fire landscape.

What fascinated me the most was that she wrote that

report during the 2021 wildfires, which struck just as

the region was still recovering from the Elephant Hill fire.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: I hadn't lived through evacuations, and I

hadn't lived through a fire season like that. I think 2021

really changed things for a lot of people, but changed things

for me and how I kind of see the importance of this work. And I

can really understand why it's so important for so many of the

communities I work with to have their stories heard.

Of course, we taped this interview before so

many people would live through the same trauma in 2023.

Right... it's a really grim kind of deja vu.

But back in 2021, as she was trapped in her house,

locked down not by COVID, but by ash falling from the sky, Sarah

felt a bit helpless. She couldn't contribute to the

firefighting on the frontlines, or help coordinating

evacuations. But what she could do was write, and share the

stories that had been shared with her.

Yeah, something we can relate to.

And the question at the heart of those stories

is, I think, the same question about recovery that you and I

have been asking.

What happens after the smoke clears?

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Everyone in the city goes "We have clear

skies, amazing. We can enjoy the rest of summer." But for

everyone who's actually out here living in these landscapes that

have burned, that's really when the challenges begin. You know,

what do we do after the fire? The media attention is gone, on

the whole. But how do we begin to, not just rebuild homes or

get back into our communities, but what do we do with this

burnt landscape?

And while I can't really summarize the whole

report here, what I can do is take you a little bit farther up

the Thompson River to Skeetchestn — where some of the

key voices in the report are leading the recovery and

restoration efforts in their territory. And in 2021, when

Sarah was writing that report, they were being evacuated for

the second time in four years.

After the break.

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Okay, thanks. And back to the show.

I'm Adam.

Mendel.

This is Future Ecologies.

The fourth installment in our On Fire

series, which is of indeterminate length, kind of

like our increasingly unpredictable fire seasons.

And at this point, in this particular episode, I'm

heading from the 2017 Elephant Hill fire footprint over to the

2021 Sparks Lake fire footprint, near Skeetchestn Indian Band.

And Sarah Dickson-Hoyle has brought me here to meet Sam

Draney, from Skeetchestn Natural Resources. And the minute we

roll up to the offices, Sam packs us into her truck, and I

also forgot to ask Sam to introduce herself.

That's strikee two!

In my defense, she had literally the cutest puppy

ever curled up in her backseat.

She's got so many dog breeds in her, I just call

her a designer rez mutt.

All right, all right. That gets a pass. By the

way, did you tape all of your interviews in moving vehicles?

It was just that kind of day. Sorry, Mendel.

Anyway, the first thing that Sam does is to give me a bit of a

lay of the land.

So we have the Tremont fire over here. Sparks

Lake fire here. And then the remainder of Elephant Hill to

the North of us. So when you're sitting in my house, you can

actually see all three burns zones. We kind of have just one

side of us left that isn't burnt yet.

Three burns?

Yeah, Skeetchestn is pretty much surrounded.

Elephant Hill was basically the largest fire in the south of the

province in 2017. And then Sparks Lake actually was the

largest fire in the province in 2021, with the Tremont fire not

far behind. And there's Skeetchestn Indian Band right in

the middle. But once Sam got us oriented, we could do what I was

actually there for which was chatting plants.

Hah! You two must have been peas in a pod.

I was having a great time. Sam told me about

all of these medicinal plants that could be found on the

territory.

I harvested Arnica from the Tremont fire last year.

So I did a salve with that Arnica, and I had an older

Arnica salve. And I actually got to try them out against each

other on people. And the Arnica salve that I got the fire, you

could feel instantly. The moment you put it on, there was just

like this huge release in your muscles.

It was immediately clear that she's very

knowledgeable and passionate about plant medicines.

So we have 165 plants that we can prove are

significant to the community.

And you might notice that she said "prove"

there, because part of Sam's job is surveying whole landscapes

for these culturally significant species and features to

documents Secwépemc use, both in the past and in the present. And

if that isn't cool enough, she also gets to occasionally stop

that work and start harvesting.

If I identify something harvestable there, I'm

allowed to keep my crew there and harvest for the community.

And that's always the way at least I think and the way I

taught my crew to think is we're not harvesting for ourselves.

We're harvesting for our community and we're providing to

as many of the community members as possible. If it's something

they can touch, hold and feel or if it's information. So they go

out and practice that with their own family.

And she shared with me that it isn't just the

plant medicines that are coming back stronger after the fires.

But also species that were totally unfamiliar.

After Elephant Hill. There was plants I'd never seen

before... just being out and I felt like I'd covered a lot of

land, I knew all the plants and all of a sudden it was like...

golden corydalis, I think it was, came back and none of us

knew what it was. We sat there for a lunch break and there was

a bet going on – who could ID the planet first? I don't

remember who won the bet. I don't think it was me, 'cause I

think I was the one that bought the six pack.

I'm sure I would have lost that bet too. What's

golden corydalis?

It's a pretty little wild flower that likes

disturbance. So it often shows up for the first year or two

after a big fire. And Sam also started to see way more Tiger

Lily and even Soapberry which is an important traditional

medicine.

But I just can't get over the taste. It is not

something I can get used of. I've used it to do cleanses. But

you aren't going to catch me drinking it every day like my

kyé7e. No, it tastes like soap.

I actually really like the taste of

Soapberry...

You and Sam's kyé7e! And Sam told me it wasn't

just plants that were returning.

Everyone's noticed a huge increase in wolf in our

territory, which puts a huge pressure on moose and deer and

other wildlife

Wolves? From the fires?

Yeah, fire makes landscapes much easier for

predators to traverse and hunt in.

I guess I'd never really thought about it.

And Mendel, there were also of course, the

mushrooms.

Of course, the mushroom rush after the fires,

like none of us have ever been exposed to that, really. So that

was really interesting to get out and get to harvest those.

Because like to us that was something completely new. We're

like "what is this gross thing? That looks weird coming out of

the ground?"

Yeah, she's, uh, she's gotta be talking about

morels, right?

Yeah, you got it.

Yeah, looks gross. tastes great. Just don't

eat them raw.

Duly noted.

Yeah. Okay, so how did the regeneration at

Sparks Lake compare to Elephant Hill?

Other than being somewhat fresher? I mean, Sam's

dealing with a lot of what we saw over at Elephant Hill, and

down in Cache Creek.

My backyard is the creek. So right down in my back

door, and the creek is within 100 metres of my house. Since

the wildfires, I have had to insure the house because of

flooding. I've lived here for 32 years straight. This is the

highest water I've seen. Things were more predictable before the

fires. Now rainstorm happens, we're all on high alert. Is

there going to be a mudslide? Road washing out? Are we going

to flood? You just... you don't know. Like, I lost a large chunk

of land on my side of the creek. And it happened in a day. So

we're losing huge amounts of land, just having like huge

amounts of erosion happening on our water bodies.

So flooding and erosion

And other impacts too. Like, cows.

I would like them held off the fires a bit longer.

I've nothing against cows, I love them. But I think they

spread weeds. I think they damage the super fragile plant

community that's coming back. They over graze. The fences are

burnt down, so we have minimal ways to control where they're

at. Our water is all exposed. Cows made wallows in water,

causing more erosion. Cows overuse trails again, causing

erosion. But I don't see a way for us to keep the cattle off.

Right... more of the same.

Yep. And linear features like roads,

The amount of roads we have in our territory is a

big issue.

And fire guards.

I think most of them have been rehabbed now. That

happens pretty fast after the fire. They'll go and rip up the

guards see can't drive down them again.

But even just putting in the fire guards had

unintended consequences.

The one thing that really got to us is right here

is our community potato patch – uh, Indian Potato... Spring

Beauty.

What's an Indian Potato?

It's kind of a nutty tuber from a wildflower

that you might know as spring beauty.

Ah. I don't... but thank you.

I was just giving you the benefit of the doubt

there.

Yeah.

Anyway, Sam and her team had set up test plots

to study how different variables and treatments impact the growth

and yields of those Indian potatoes.

Hey cool!

But the province accidentally built a fire garden

right over one of the community potato patches.

Huh... less cool.

It sounded to me as though while relations had

definitely been improving between Skeetchestn and the

other various institutions of colonial government since the

Elephant Hill fire, there were still lots of sore points and a

pretty big power imbalance. For example, there was enormous

pressure in the immediate aftermath of the fires to

salvage the remaining harvestable timber as quickly as

possible.

You remember the three great goals of the recovery effort

that I mentioned?

Yep, there was range recovery, like building

fences to keep the cattle contained.... Fire Guard

rehabilitation, and... did we even get to number three?

No, I was I was saving it. Goal number three was

salvage logging.

We had to go from wildfires to "Now we got to log

it." And for me, that was a lot to handle because I just had to

watch my childhood burn down. In the last five years, I got to

watch basically all my childhood picking spots with my kyé7e go

up in flames.

So after all of that, logging what little was

left was a pretty tough pill to swallow.

There's still some sore spots, but I guess it's

just part of the machine, you have to get out and harvest this

while it's still harvestable and it doesn't just fall to the

ground. Oh, the roses are really good up here too. Wow

I was also really distracted by the roses.

Plant people... Let's stay on track. Salvage

logging?

Is pretty controversial. Even up there, in

the interior, with a variety of arguments for and against – from

the economical to the ecological, on both sides

actually. When you consider rural livelihoods, the potential

for beetle outbreaks, the risk of deadfall injury, it's not a

clear cut decision.

Ughh.

Except when it ends up being a clear cut

decision. Luckily, Sam was able to give some input into the

process, offering some guidelines so that at least some

of the potential damage could be mitigated.

So we created guidelines for the companies to

follow in their logging. And one of those was you can only log

black timber. The one thing I used against logging red timber,

although might be dead and not coming back, is that the plant

community underneath was coming back in the first year in the

form of morels – that's where they wanted to grow – or, you

know, other plants we've seen little Soapberry bushes coming

back. Some lilies, a lot of fireweed, of course.

Black timber is like, completely burned up?

Yep, those are the matchsticks

Okay, so, red timber is only like partly

combusted?

It's mostly still dead. But there are red needles

on the trees, and the bark often isn't completely blackened. It's

a real balancing act between interests.

It sounds like it. And I think this might be

the moment to point out that Lori, and a bunch of other folks

that we talked to, wanted to make sure that we mentioned that

it's not just fires and roads and cows that have contributed

to the flooding.

Right.

It's also industrial forestry, perhaps

primarily industrial forestry.

There is no doubt that harvesting and industrial

forestry across the landscape is also contributing to make these

landscapes less resilient to the impacts of atmospheric rivers

and the types of flooding that we experienced.

In 2021, even in areas that hadn't just burned,

there were still massive floods. And we can say that those were

exacerbated by forestry. Practically speaking, clear cuts

aren't really that different from intense burns, and BC is in

a league of its own when it comes to clear cut logging.

Our industrial forest management has been

designed for many decades now to try to sustain timber yield on

the timber har– We call it the timber harvesting land base. You

know, we are trying to sustain timber yield and optimize the

economic benefits from that part of British Columbia, that we

have designated or delegated to be for production of timber.

And this is all accelerated over the previous

decades of a different kind of salvage harvesting, that was

following the climate-driven mountain pine beetle outbreaks.

The logic of salvaging beetle-killed stands is pretty

similar to the logic for salvaging those burned stands.

And in doing so we've really simplified our

forests. We have simplified age structures. We've simplified the

biological legacies that are left behind after a clear cut

harvesting versus natural disturbances. We have focused on

fast growing species like Lodgepole Pine in the interior

of British Columbia. We've created monocultures.

Lori says a big part of this is the widespread

practice of replanting only the saleable species and suppressing

everything else, including the industry's ongoing use of

glyphosate

Otherwise known as Roundup.

Yeah, herbicide – sprayed or brushed onto those

fire resistant but less commercially valuable trees

Like, Aspen and Birch.

Yeah, it's an unfortunate practice. We're

still kind of entrenched in this perspective that broadleaf

trees, you know, that their only contribution to an ecosystem is

to compete with conifers that are the timber producers, and

that they need to be eradicated so that we can optimize the

growth of the conifers.

It's a feedback loop. Simplified forests are

more susceptible to fires and pest outbreaks, which then

creates an imperative to salvage those stands, leading to more

damage and more simplified forests.

Those monocultural, coniferous stands

certainly contributed to the size, and the spread, and the

intensity of all three of the fires that we've been

discussing. But that's another area where Skeetchestn is

asserting itself, because the big replanting effort is still

ongoing.

So under that we asked for a mixed tree stand to

be replanted, so like don't just plant all Pine. That happened a

lot in the past. So we asked for like a mix of Pine, Spruce,

Douglas Fir, and even deciduous – we've asked for near water and

less of the coniferous to be planted right up to the water.

So the deciduous are given a chance. And if there was a

natural patch of deciduous coming back there are spacing

away from that to give it a chance to grow.

They've also been pushing for a more selective

harvest,

We do ask for that. This would still be Douglas fir.

So I'd asked for 50% of the stand to be left up or, you

know, some upright structures. So there is still protection for

animals, shelter, and woody debris will fall, adding back to

the earth. But, you know, economics and safety usually

wins. Those are two words I hate because they're always the top

two reasons for anything to happen, usually.

I happen to dislike the words economics and

safety for this same reason.

... that could sound bad taken out of context.

But uh, maybe you mean that economics and safety aren't bad

words. but the problem is that they take exclusive priority

over community and ecological health.

Yeah, what you said.

But it's interesting that Sam is using

the word ask here, ask who?

Well, at a basic level, the Skeetchestn reserve

is surrounded by mostly burnt out Crown Land that is part of

both range and timber tenure systems. And while all of that

land is the Secwépemc territory, it's still the BC government and

the business interests calling the shots at the end of the day.

So Skeetchestn is still in the position of having to ask.

That's where I feel like that's our power. We don't

come in demanding. although it might come off that way. It's a

strong ask, a strong suggestion, a strong "you should probably do

this". But you know, we still get thrown back kind of science

and stuff like that, or they have to do it this way. Because

it's been done that way.

Whether it's economics or safety, science or

tradition, they can all just sound like justifications

sometimes for the status quo.

Right.

As far as I can tell. While there is a general

consensus on an overall improvement in working

relationships in the region, since the mega fires, it's still

hit and miss at an individual level. And a lot depends on

personal relationships and trust. Because the colonial

structures and power imbalances are still very real.

I won't lie I do not have relationships with BC

Wildfire. I had a pretty hard go with them on mainly Tremont.

Sparks Lake, they were very respectable. We went across the

river to Tremont – completely different story. I ended my

working relationship with them there. I've yet to really

rebuild that with them.

And even at Elephant Hill, things got off to

a pretty bad start.

We weren't invited on to elephant hill at the start

of it. We just went out and we were doing our own territorial

patrol. We were doing our own reporting system on the fire

because we didn't feel like we were getting the right

information and up to date information from BC Wildfire.

And that is how Sam Draney became a fire

watcher.

What is a fire watcher?

Well, starting out, actually, she says she was

a fire bug.

We've always been fire bugs in Skeetchestn. A lot

of it when I was younger was more just getting to sit back

and watch the older people do it. But then I eventually grew

up and I got my own burn rake. And that's all we usually use.

It's just a steel rake and scoop up some weeds, dry weeds with

that light it on fire, and you kind of just walk along and

start stuff on fire in a planned way. And I hear that from a lot

of people that like burning was something that we've always done

from young age, and it wasn't something scary where you... of

course you have to be safe, but you know, that the kids were

still involved.

Unsurprisingly, these fire bug activities can be

another area of friction with the province, especially on

lands beyond the boundaries of the reserve.

And that's the thing that I think holds a lot of us

back and holds back the cultural burning, is that we have to jump

through all of these hoops. And a lot of us, you know, we don't

know how to fill out the government forms or do burn

plans. But we understand fire, and we understand its connection

into the circle. And without that we're starting to lose our

culture.

She was talking about controlled burns, right?

Cultural burns. Yeah. And we're gonna come back

to that. But it was Elephant Hill that made her a fire

watcher.

I've always said I'm not a firefighter. I'm a fire

watcher. It's not in me to put out a wildfire. I have a really

strong spiritual connection to it. And I believe that it's out

there cleaning up everything we've messed up. Oh, there's the

Arnica down here. Wow that's really good. Beautiful. Still

harvestable. That's really great stuff to harvest. It's better

looking than the stuff I got.

You plant people, you're hopeless. Okay,

so again, what is a fire watcher?

Well, I think it's a great example of a concept

that was introduced to me by Ron and Marianne Ignace, called

"Walking on Two Legs".

Okay, your answers just keep raising more

questions. Who are Ron and Marianne?

Remember the couple with the academic

meet-cute from the very beginning of the episode?

Oh, the one who was cursed.

Yep, that's Marianne. She and Ron are at the

heart of a cultural and ecological revitalization that's

happening at Skeetchestn, and elsewhere as well. It involves

the fire bugs and the fire watchers, and learning how to

walk on two legs together.

We're going to dig deeper into all of that, next time – in part

five of our series On Fire.

This episode of Future Ecologies was produced

and hosted by Adam Huggins and me, Mendel Skulski. With the

voices of Lori Daniels, Sarah Dickson-Hoyle, and Sam Draney,

plus Marianne and Ron Ignace. And with music by Thumbug,

Any-Angled Light, and Sunfish Moon Light.

We want to send a big thank you to Lux Meteora for the cover

artwork, and to Daniel Pierce for speaking with us on

background. You can find links, citations and a transcript for

this episode, plus photos from Adams road trip to Cache Creek

and Skeetchestn, all at futureecologies.net

And, as always, this independent ad-free podcast was made

possible with the support of our amazing community on Patreon. To

get early episode releases, bonus behind the scenes content,

and access to our Discord server, join us at

patreon.com/futureecologies.

'til next time thanks for listening and stay safe