As summer winds down, North America is still very much in the grips of the record-breaking wildfire season that has devastated communities and destroyed landscapes from coast to coast. With over 1000 fires burning across Canada alone at the time of writing – a number higher than it was in the scorching heat of summer – it’s time to rethink how we deal with wildfires and keep communities safe.
While building this new way forward, there is much we can learn by looking to Indigenous-led fire stewardship practices.
Indigenous communities have been living with and harnessing fire for the benefit of both the land and the people for thousands of years. The traditional knowledge and practices that are at the core of Indigenous fire management have been passed down from generation to generation.
Many of these methods are preventative, meaning they are put in place before fires even start and help to keep them from spreading out of control.
In contrast, most current non-Indigenous-led approaches to wildfires focus heavily on fire suppression – dealing with the flames, smoke, and devastation they cause after they have started to spread. These approaches are costly, with Canada spending 1 billion and the U.S. spending 2.5 billion on fire suppression efforts each year.
Incorporating more of the preventative measures rooted in traditional Indigenous wisdom can help save money and keep these costs from spiraling further out of control.
One of the most successful examples of the power of these techniques to keep communities safe happened in British Columbia, Canada in 2021. For 19 days, the Mount Law wildfire was burning a path leading it directly towards the town of West Kelowna, threatening the safety of its nearly 35,000 residents.
As it reached the edge of town, the flames immediately stopped spreading, giving firefighters the critical advantage they needed to get the fire under control. When the smoke cleared, only one structure had been significantly damaged and no one had been killed.
That’s because five years earlier, an area around the town had been treated with traditional fire stewardship methods. Under the direction of a local Indigenous-owned logging company, trees were pruned up to three metres and their crowns were thinned – getting rid of the pathways that wildfires rely on to climb and spread.
Any remaining fire fuel on the ground (dried grasses, leaves, and fallen branches) was safely burned. This created a “fire prevention zone” around the town that would lay the groundwork to keep the community safe as the flames closed in years later.
This is just one example of the ways in which fire prevention methods – especially those grounded in Indigenous wisdom – can keep communities safe. But it showcases the power that these time-tested practices can have on our path towards a climate safe future.
While retiring fossil fuels is necessary to stop the frequency and intensity of wildfires, we can uplift the traditional Indigenous fire management practices that have been keeping communities safe for generations.
As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure.