Edit: this isn’t comprehensive. There are many, many factors and feedback loops I can list. I wanted to get this post out pretty quickly so bear with the language and non comprehensive edition of forest fire knowledge.

After the Fire

There is a lot that happens after. I am not even getting into the trauma and emotional toll, the loss of life, the loss of beloved forests, fourlegged, and others… birds, insects, all things that crawl.

The fire bakes the land and it become hydrophobic – this means it will repel water- this becomes important later. The land is full of metals and minerals even on the surface, and the trees are the beings that keep those metals and materials from entering the water systems.

When the trees are burned up, erosion through water, snow and snowmelt, and rain, as well as wind pushes whatever is on the land into the lakes, rivers, bogs, muskeg. This represents a major thrust of arsenic and mercury especially that is generally contained by the vast sponge of root systems now washing into the waterways. And with the hydrophobic quality of the soil, it does not absorb and stay put like a good muck that might be useful for planting but instead resists any form stability and instead creates erosion and landslides.. This also explains why in mountainous and hilly areas, landslides become more extreme and dangerous. It’s a two part thing – no roots to stabilize, hydrophobic soil that is deeply unstable.

The other thing is that all that ash is rich in phosphorous and nitrogen. Like extremely rich. Because the stability of the land just isn’t there in boreal places this ash washes into the waterways as well and becomes a rich biome for the growth of toxic algae and increases water turbidity – ever stir ash into water? Notice how first it will not mix, but when it does it takes forever for that ash to settle into sediment? and then the first sign of any movement will kick it back up into the water. This is a doubling effect of not adding richness to water but instead another destabilizing factor that continues to kill plants, turtles, snakes, fish, crawlers, swimmers from lack of sun, lack of places to lay eggs, toxic soup water with a rich toxic algae bloom to boot.

Fire is natural, but these are definitely the result of something else. We used to see fires in the north here and there that would burn some hectares and they would get called “The Great Fire of… (insert year or location)”. This is like all the Great Fires times 20, at once.

What Got Us Here

There are several feedback loops at play

Forestry:

Monocropping by forestry:

– use of glyphosates to kill understory and broadleaf, which are important firebreaks leaves only the highly flammable pines and spruce

– destruction of old growth forest destroys any area that has deeper rooting systems that increase ground level moisture. With shallow soil, wildfire cuts trees off of soil moisture almost immediately in vast stands

– the destruction of rooting systems increases erosion which removes the shallow soil from the bedrock, making any regrowth lesser and weaker, and holds less water increasing dryness

– large clearcut scars creates vast fire zones with few firebreak areas between, regrowth is dryer, will less understory

Moss:

– critical moss is a lot of the boreal understory which acts as sponge for moisture. This is scraped up in clear cutting, destroyed and left to desiccate. It isn’t only a destruction of firebreak, it creates a tinder

– mosses are extremely flammable. It produces an extreme, hot, fast flame which is normally short lasting and in the normal wet moss conditions is out as quick as it ignites, but can work as an accelerant and source of major spread when the moss is dry, which it is in the desiccated by glyphosate and clear cut forests of the north

– moss as a tinder – it burns at 250 – 700 degrees f. Fires that ignite moss smoulder for months surviving rain, snow, and can travel underground along root systems and through peat and duff at this temperature for long distances. It can smoulder also for years waiting for dry and hot conditions or exposure oxygen to ignite at the surface (zombie fires)

– moss systems are thousands and thousands of years old and cannot be duplicated even in a few human lifetimes

– I can say a lot more about moss and how different mosses behave that normally would have the effect of rejuvenation with fire. But in these abnormally hot wildfires where the relationships in the forests are destroyed, they become a major burning source that can exacerbate fire’s intensity and length significantly

Insects:

– many insects feed off of trees in the boreal, and these usually sit in relationship with all else. Many things eat tree insects in the boreal, not least of these the incredible pileated woodpecker.

– after a fire, there is an increase in insects eating dead wood – pine beetles, pine and spruce budworm, all of these usually in a relationship to both the trees and the many other things that eat them. This increase spreads to weakened forests with ease, which many of the forests are in the north due to commercial exploitation

– increased populations of insects adds to the dry/dead biomass that contributes to flammability

– this is a loop unto itself related to the other loops – fire increases dead wood (so does clearcutting in an even bigger way), dead wood increases insects, insects increase dead and dry wood, dry wood increases fire

There is way more to say about this condition, but already you can see that these are deeply entrenched. Fixing this is going to take a very, very long time. You can also see how some factors are exacerbating these loops, and they are all caused by industry.

What Are These Industries?

1. Building lumber

2. Cellulose – toilet paper, paper towel, single use wipes. We wipe our asses with forests.

3. Paper

We can lower our use of cellulose, which I emphatically recommend, we can eliminate most individualpaper with digital documents and the like. But this isn’t a problem that will be solved with individual acts. this requires an entire change in mindset away from colonial ideas and how we prioritize and construct relationships. And people are not ready to do this. So expect not only more, but worse.

Also consider where this is, and the perfect storm of having the areas of future exploitation being made uninhabitable by the First Nations actively opposing these draconian and dangerous projects. This is ecocide – ecologically based genocide of First Nations. Canadian economy can go to hell, and it’s taking us there with it.