Clearing the Air: Climate and Our Forests

Barbara Brown in a forest near her home. (Photo credit: Isaac Carter, of ICandyFilms.com)

Eighth in a 10-part series of columns from the West Kootenay Climate Hub, published in the Nelson Star and Valley Voice (April 2025).

By Tia Leschke

Kootenay residents really love our mountains and forests. Barbara Brown, Artist of the Forest, is well known for that love. Barbara became intimately acquainted with the forest near her home in the Slocan Valley by walking in it every day for the last twenty years. She discovered the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual healing power of the forest after bouts with depression and lung cancer. When asked how it would feel to lose the forest around her, she answers with a story about Fortis clearing a nearby right of way for several weeks. She felt ungrounded and at loose ends, and finally realized it was because she hadn’t been able to walk in her forest.

Even those without such a strong connection with our forests would feel devastated if a large fire swept through, as many experienced just last summer in our area. 

You might say, “well, it will grow back.” That’s true, but we might not get the same kind of forest. Kootenay-based conservation ecologist Greg Utzig says when fires are large enough and hot enough, there can be few to no trees left to reseed. And those trees that do grow might die young because of drought stress. According to Stephan Martineau of the Slocan Integral Forestry Cooperative (SIFCO), hotter fires can also sterilize the soil, killing off essential microbes.

It’s hard to imagine, but we could end up with dry grasslands or savanna instead of forests here in the Kootenays. If we don’t quickly phase out the  burning of fossil fuels—the largest source of climate pollution—that’s what we’re probably facing by the end of this century.

According to local forest ecologist Herb Hammond, climate change is making our area less hospitable to some trees growing here now, such as western hemlock, western red cedar and birch. Until recently, local birch were in balance with the bronze birch borers, but because of climate change, the borers are winning. 

Climate change leads to hotter and drier conditions, increasing the probability and intensity of wildfires and enabling invasive species to compete with native trees. Forest pests thrive without cold enough weather to kill them. While old growth forests have high populations of carnivorous beetles that keep the mountain pine beetle in check, those carnivorous beetles aren’t around in the tree plantations that follow clearcutting. When forests are logged or burned in wildfires, their stored carbon is released, adding more carbon to the atmosphere. According to Nature Canada, logging is the third-highest source of climate pollution in Canada, after oil and gas and transportation. It’s a vicious circle, with climate change causing increased fire activity, which contributes greatly to climate change. 

How do we get out of this circle?

Clearly, we need to phase out the burning of fossil fuels globally. At the same time, we have to change the way we do forestry to support more biodiversity. The most flammable forests are tree plantations that were sprayed to eliminate less combustible deciduous trees. We need what Hammond calls Nature-Directed Stewardship (NDS)—a system that prioritizes ecosystem protection, maintenance and restoration as well as human use.

The first priority in NDS is to maintain or restore natural ecological integrity, including biological diversity. The second is to provide for balanced human and non-human use. Nature-Directed Stewardship envisions people living respectfully within the ecosystems that sustain us. 

Years of fire suppression and outlawing traditional indigenous burning have led to denser forests with much higher fuel load. This has made it hard for local species to compete, and made bigger, hotter, more aggressive fires like those we saw last summer far more likely.

We need to reinstate routine preventative burning, and that’s beginning to happen. The Ktunaxa have been using cultural burning to clear the understory of excess fuel, helping prevent extremely hot and fast-moving fires. But without stopping fossil fuel pollution, it’s not enough to prevent catastrophic wildfires in a rapidly heating world.

The cycle of climate change making fires worse and those fires making climate change worse is scary, but there are ways out: decreasing fossil fuel pollution, changing the way we practice forestry and doing more prescribed and cultural burning can help. Let’s do everything we can in our communities to break this cycle, so we can keep our beloved forests. 

To learn about next steps, our upcoming interactive online Resilience Cafe on April 30 will feature Hammond and Suzanne Simard (details at westkootenayclimatehub.ca).

Tia Leschke gardens and makes music on unceded Sinixt lands in Winlaw. She wants a liveable world for her grandchildren.