Jasper: Learning From the Burning
By: Robert Sandford, Published by United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health
'Grizzly bear 222,' runs through the charred remains of Jasper National Park in this undated photo. (Jasper National Park, Facebook)
“This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place – a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years. ”
Let’s start with the fire’s ferocious origins. The fire weather index that week had been rising right across Canada. It had been particularly hot in Jasper. On July 9th, a new high temperature record of broke the the previous high temperate record set in 1926. That day the temperature was 35.8°C. And wildfire was warming to those high temperatures. There was smoke and fear in the air.
At 7:00 PM on Monday, July 22nd, an American couple returning from a holiday in Alaska was driving south on Highway 93, known as the Icefields Parkway, on their way from Jasper to Lake Louise. It was raining, they later reported, and very windy. They were 27 kilometres south of Jasper when they saw a flash of lightning ahead that appeared to strike the ground. A few minutes later they saw to their left that the forest was ablaze and that the strong wind appeared to be feeding it. They were right and reported it. At 8:00 PM, Parks Canada issued an Evacuation Alert for the entire park, including Jasper Townsite. At 10:00 PM that Evacuation Alert became an Evacuation Order. All many of the evacuees had with them was what they were able to throw into their cars.
Fire fighters found themselves facing the conditions fire experts call “crossover,” the point at which a wildfire can become a fire storm. Fire fighters soon confronted a 500°C sky high tsunami of fire and dangerously toxic smoke driven by winds of up to 125 kilometers an hour moving 5 kilometres an hour coming right at them. Later research revealed that the Jasper wildfires were so hot they may have also spawned as many as two rare fire tornados. It was as if hell had come to Earth.
The next morning the fire entered the town. The smoke was so thick that firefighters without auxiliary oxygen supplies were forced to leave the front line. By the end of the day 358 of the 1113 built structures – one-third of the town – had burned down. Miraculously, no lives were lost. Despite later off-gassing by painfully partisan pundits to the contrary, the coordinated response of the Jasper National Park Field Unit and the Municipality of Jasper can only be described as heroic.
Could the same thing happen to Canmore or to Banff or other communities in the Mountain West and the Canadian boreal? Absolutely. We are every bit as vulnerable here as Jasper was. All we have to do is look up to see why. We live at the bottom of a stone cauldron with a sliver of river flowing through it, and that cauldron is filled nearly to the rim with firewood. If you look at where we live through the eyes of fire, this entire valley, including the town, is nothing but fuel. There were days on end this past summer when we were only a lightning strike or a lit match away from a potential firestorm that, with the right wind, could very easily have burned into our town.
One might well ask how we got ourselves into this situation. The fires that continue to burn in Jasper are an answer to that question. They are also an answer to many other questions.
The truth is that we brought a lot of this grief upon ourselves. Following the Enlightenment scientific objectivity triumphed over traditional and local ways of knowing and caring about forests. Europe became a centre for modern science that drove an age of European imperialism. Educated European elites dismissed the Indigenous use of fire as a stigma of primitivism. Europeans brought these prejudices with them when they colonized North America.
Because temperate Europe was possessed of a completely different fire regime, it is perhaps not surprising that the forestry practices upon they exported to control fire over most of the last century were utterly wrong. While the attitude that we had to fear fire gave the forestry profession an enemy to fight as well as markers for success, the result was that there were too few “good fires” and the number of “bad fires” increased over time.
The Earth’s fire crisis, then, is not just about bigger, hotter, fires that obliterate the countryside and burn towns down. It is equally about the good fires that have vanished because they were actively extinguished or no longer lit. The result was fuel build-up and with that build-up, the most destructive fires in history.
Over time, however, our forestry practices have evolved, but not fast enough. The value of “good fire” is finally being recognized but, unfortunately, not before we entered a Pyrocene of our own making. We are left now to manage the legacy of our colonialist attitudes toward fire.
So, what are we dealing with here that is so alarming? This: all the warm assurances to the contrary, there is absolutely no way now that average mean global heating will be limited to 1.5°C or even 2°C. We won’t come even close. The implications for Canada are enormous. Because of the extent of warming in its north and its continental extent, Canada is already warming at twice the global average. As there has not been enough international cooperation and coordination to halt or adequately slow the rise of global mean temperatures, presently it appears there is nothing whatsoever to prevent Canada from reaching 3°C, or more, of warming by later this century.
While the fires currently attract our attention because of their extent, what is being missed in the news is the understanding of what they are telling us. What we are already beginning to see is exactly what scientists predicted long ago. If we did not act immediately on the climate threat, we would find ourselves in a situation where we cannot keep up with the frequency of climate related disasters. As the number of these events multiply, we will not be able to recover from one before the arrival of the next. The already record-breaking economic and social costs are staggering. And those costs are about to spectacularly rise.
On August 28th, 2024, the New York Times reported that, according to a paper published in Nature, because of the extent of its wildfires in 2023 alone, Canada became the 4th largest emitter of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the world, behind only the United States, China and India. A vicious circle of fires creating uncontrollable emissions has been ignited in our west and in our north. More alarming is the entirely new calculus of combustion that has emerged. Places and things burn now that didn’t burn before.
As John Vaillant concluded in Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, “This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place – a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.” A storm is coming for which we are unprepared.
If Jasper fires teach us anything, it is that we need to wake up to just how destructive climate breakdown will be. We now face the prospect of a future none of us wanted to see. Either we catch up and get ahead of climate change now; or it will forever be out of our control. So, what do we do?
Practical Measure 1: Stay Calm and Positive
The rapid acceleration of climate disruption we are witnessing and its impacts on our physical and mental health are about to become a permanent part of the human condition. We need to fight apathy but we also have to be on guard against feelings of helplessness and despair.
We avoid despair by remaining focussed on what brings us joy in our lives: the beauty and sacredness of where we live; the love we have for our families and the rewards of our good works.
Practical Measure 2: Support Action
Rather than despairing about the climate threat, we need to put anxiety to work for us and for the future of our community. We need to act in the interests of meaningful hope.
We do that by persistently pressing politically for more funding support for grossly under-resourced municipal and Provincial regional fire protection measures including a greater number of initial attack crews, more prescribed burns, Indigenous cultural burning and the establishment of concentric fire breaks surrounding the town as proposed by former Banff fire ecologist Cliff White.
We do that also by supporting all efforts that urgently focus on restoring natural system function and resilience where we have the most power to effect change; in our community and our immediate surroundings.
Practical Measure 3: Take Personal Responsibility
We take personal responsibility by doing everything in our power to reduce the fire risk to our own homes and neighbourhood by Fire Smarting wherever possible. In its initial findings on the effectiveness of fire protection measures leading up to and during the time the Jasper Complex fire entered the town, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction found that Fire Smarting, where it was applied worked, especially where fire breaks were created as part of Fire Smarting. Half measures, they observed, won’t do. It is not a matter of prioritizing one or other, both are needed.
The real lesson, again, is that it is up to home and business owners to meaningfully Fire Smart their properties if they want to protect them in the event of a major wildland-urban interface fire. In that regard, at the community level, Jasper is both an example, and a lesson.
Practical Measure 4: Build Community
One indelible learning from the burning in Jasper is that, in the end, all we have is one another. Perhaps the most important thing the watching and waiting world can take away from COP 28 and its failures is that the global climate solidarity cavalry is not coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.
This, however, should not be seen as the end of the world, only the beginning of another. There is enormous power in realizing the power of community – for it is at the local level – the level at which all of us live and work - that we have the most power to effect change and to act most effectively in service of where and how we live and who we love, now and in the future. I am asked this question all the time. What can I do? I am only one person. The first thing may be to stop being one person. Be part of a community.
We are at a critical moment in history. Never before has our country so needed a passionate, committed, connected, hyper-aware and accurately informed citizenry – and visionary and inclusive leadership at all levels than it does now. In the regard, Jasper is again not only a lesson but an example.
Practical Measure 5: Get To the Root of the Problem
One clear lesson that the fires in Jasper has taught us is that we are not in control. We have to plan for the worst and hope for the best. A larger overarching lesson, however, lingers in the ashes. We eventually have to get to the root of the growing fire problem. It is time for the social licence granted to fossil-fuel producers to be reviewed.
Conclusion
I am sure that many readers will wish more than anything that what we face now didn’t happen in our time. But it has, and those of us who care about the future have no choice but to deal with it.
It is up to us now to do what we can, where we can, with what we have and what we know, while at the same time aiming to create the conditions in which we may discover the most enduring qualities in ourselves, in others and in our community. We simply cannot fail. This can and must be our finest hour.
Bob Sanford is a FLOW member and Senior Government Relations Liaison for Global Climate Emergency Response at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. He lives in Canmore.