Climate Change: Canada’s Forests Burn

Several of the most joyous, fulfilling days of my life have been spent hiking the expanse of meadows facing 11,033-foot Mt. Edith Cavell and its Angel Wing Glacier, just south of Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. It is high summer vacation season, but Jasper National Park is currently closed and smoldering. A devastating fire swept into the township last week, destroying 1,113 homes and other structures in the township.

One of those structures was the Maligne Lodge, where my partner and I adjourned for a patio dinner with views back at Mt. Edie, named for a British nurse executed by Germans in World War I. Fred Beckey and Yvon Chouinard did the first ascent of its formidable north face and found a flask of brandy from the park ranger when they came down from the mountain.

“The wildfire spanning 32,000 hectares is still burning north, south and east of town . . . .This is the largest wildfire recorded in Jasper National Park in the last 100 years,” Parks Canada said in its daily report on the fire situation. A total of 35,000 people were evacuated from the town, campgrounds, accommodations, and trails last week.

The symmetry was inescapable: As the fires swept into Jasper, consuming one-third of structures in the town, our planet was recording the warmest day in recorded history. The evidence of a warming Earth can be seen in an increasingly tamed Angel Wing Glacier and in the receding tongue of the Athabasca Glacier nearby in the Columbia Icefield. Canada is burning, and exporting its smoke south into “the states.”

Our major East Coast cities, notably New York and Philadelphia, were blanketed last year in late spring and early summer with smoke from fires in Quebec. The two cities, for a time, experienced the Earth’s worst air quality. A few summers back, bound for Mt. Assiniboine in the Canadian Rockies, we were blanketed in fire smoke for 568 miles from Seattle to Canmore, Alberta.

The list of fires has been formidable over a range from ocean (Pacific) to ocean (Atlantic) to ocean (Arctic). Fires have consumed forests and communities and grasslands. One monster conflagration, the 2023 Donnie Creek fire in northeast British Columbia, consumed 5,344 square kilometers, an area almost the size of the province of Prince Edward Island.

The summer of 2023 saw the McDougal Creek fire burn parts of West Kelowna, and then jump Lake Okanagan. A two-hour drive to the north, a major fire threatened recreation homes along the shore of Shuswap Lake. To the other direction, near the U.S.-Canadian border, another fire scorched portions of Cathedral Provincial Park.

Winds have caused fires to change direction and balloon overnight. Such was the case last year with Yellowknife, the largest community in the Northwest Territories. It was hastily evacuated through heat and smoke last year, although the fire was stopped at the edge of town. As the fire roared into Jasper on Wednesday night, the only safe evacuation route was west into a sparsely populated corner of British Columbia.

In northwest B.C., a warming climate spurred reproduction of pine bark beetles: Swaths of dead (gray) and dying (orange) trees furnish climate change, evidenced from the air on flights north from Vancouver to Smithers. Dead forests have fueled fast-moving fires. One consumed a portion of Telegraph Creek, on the Stikine River just upstream from the rainforests of Southeast Alaska. Such fires are the province’s “new normal,” lamented then-Premier John Horgan on surveying fire damage.

The causes and consequences of climate change have come together in the Great White North. The center of Canada’s oil production is Fort McMurray, a town in the boreal forests of northern Alberta. Its tar sands developments look like scenes of Mordor from Lord of the Rings.

In the midst of a spring heat wave, with temperatures climbing over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a human-caused fire broke out about nine miles north of Fort McMurray. It mushroomed in size, eventually covering more than half a million hectares (or 1.46 million acres) and triggered the largest evacuation in Canadian history. About 80,000 people were displaced, mainly to the distant provincial capital of Edmonton. Ultimately, the fire would consume 2,400 homes, with an additional 2,000 dwellings condemned.

Of course, the western United States has experienced a longer fire season, billions in fire damage and loss of life. A big fire threatened Chico, California, even as Jasper was burning. A big forest fire north of Lake Chelan was forcing closure of renowned summer hiking trails in the North Cascades National Park, Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, and North Cascades National Park.

Canada has seemingly gone in two directions as it responds to the climate crisis. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, rapid warming of the Arctic, and other adverse consequences. His government has instituted a carbon tax, bitterly opposed by oil-producing provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

At the same time, the Canadian government has purchased and is completing at billions of dollars over budget a tripling of the capacity of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, stretching more than 600 miles from Edmonton south to Burnaby, B.C., just east of Vancouver. The expanded pipeline has a capacity of 890,000 barrels of oil a day. The oil is earmarked for export and will mean a sevenfold increase in tanker traffic through the San Juan and Gulf Islands and Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The Jasper fire has produced a paradoxical convergence. The one safe evacuation route out of town has been westbound on Highway 16, the same path through the Rockies taken by the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion that will expand oil production at Fort McMurray.

This article also appeared in “Cascadia Advocate,” a publication of the Northwest Progressive Institute.