Fighting fire with fire, or dancing with flames?

Our landscape is shaped by water and by fire. Wildfires are a part of watershed processes; they’re needed to maintain a healthy environment. But what does “good” fire look like, and how does knowledge surrounding the ecology of a watershed enable the opportunity to prevent destructive fire with beneficial fire?

These questions were just the tip of the iceberg, or should we say, the spark of the blaze, in discussions explored during When Fire Meets Water: Healthy Watersheds as a Solution for the 21st Century, the first of two webinars as a part of our Fire Files series, made possible by the support of The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS). Moderated by Dr. Ruth Waldick, lead scientist of Transition Salt Spring’s Climate Adaptation Research Lab (CARL), the below panel of experts led a fascinating conversation exploring the relationship between fire, watershed hydrology, ecological governance, and more.

The panelists picked up right where we left off at the Salish Sea watersheds, wildfire, and landscape change workshop. While the ongoing conversations have been targeted at managers, practitioners, and wildfire stewards, the panelists recognized and spoke to how this is a whole-of-society issue. 

Specifically, in the Coastal Douglas-fir zone, people are embedded in the ecosystem and live within the wildland-urban interface. Adding in the challenge of most land being privately owned in these ecosystems, the panelists spoke to the complex and novel challenges regarding governance of these landscapes. The panelists emphasized that wildfire is an essential process on the landscape and everyone has a role to play in stewarding the landscape to support healthy, good wildfire that breeds resilient forested watersheds.

It was recognized that there are many existing tools – from FireSmart to risk management to controlled burns – but many of these tools are too broad and lack a central governance agency. To combat this “shemozzle”,  there needs to be more local, targeted management approaches that are facilitated and supported by the provincial government – the only clear entity in a position to collectively move actions forward. It is evident that communities are having conversations, but the missing piece is having a table for these conversations.

Water security was a hot topic, and in a similar vein to recognizing that there are existing tools in place, the idea of utilizing existing legislative frameworks to do place-based planning targeted at water security, governance, and wildfire management was put forward. 

The panelists were in agreement that governance is a clear issue that needs to be addressed first to ultimately begin untangling the web and moving toward more meaningful action. While there is still a reality and feeling amongst the community of practice that everyone is doing everything they can do, the panel discussion provided insight on where we go from here and what the next steps should be to invoke landscape- and watershed-scale change.

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Raincoast’s in-house scientists, collaborating graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professors make us unique among conservation groups. We work with First Nations, academic institutions, government, and other NGOs to build support and inform decisions that protect aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and the wildlife that depend on them. We conduct ethically applied, process-oriented, and hypothesis-driven research that has immediate and relevant utility for conservation deliberations and the collective body of scientific knowledge.

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