Good fire, bad fire, and resiliency

By Stephanie Koroscil

In wildland fire management, practitioners use good fire as a tool to create resilient landscapes, in order to prevent bad fire. It is equally important to foster resiliency in ourselves.

Throughout my 14-year career as a wildland firefighter and fire management practitioner, I have experienced progressively longer fire seasons, more frequent bad fire events, and increasing instances where numerous, bad fires occur at the same time, resulting in responder and equipment shortages. The media often refers to these large, concurrent bad fire events as catastrophic wildfire.

“Good fires” include cultural burning, prescribed fires, and wildfires that have long-term benefits to people and ecosystems, with limited negative effects on livelihoods and properties. Good fires match the fire regime of an area. They leave behind healthy fire-dependent vegetation and reset the soils to support continued vigorous growth across the landscape, which, in turn, supports the people living on it.

Fuels have built up in wildlands over the last 150 years, because policy excluded good fire and mandated fire suppression. In recent history, climate change has resulted in hotter, drier weather, and longer fire seasons. This combination has led to increasingly large, numerous, and more intense wildfires. Unplanned, unwanted, out-of-control wildfires that do not fit within the natural fire regime, and threaten lives, infrastructure, homes, communities, and livelihoods are “bad fires”.

Fire management staff from Pukaskwa National Park have assisted during recent catastrophic wildfire events in Canada, USA, and Australia. While responding to these fire incidents, we worked long hours, spent weeks away from home, and witnessed extreme fire behaviour. We saw the effects these fires had on people, their homes, communities, and observed the impacts on public services, critical infrastructure, the environment, and the economy. We had to adapt to situations where we only had enough responders and equipment to focus on the first priority of incident response – keeping people safe. Sometimes all we can do is get ourselves and members of the public safely out of the way of a catastrophic fire; even if we wish we could do more. Repeated exposure to this kind of trauma takes its toll. Stress and fatigue accumulate over a fire season, and throughout a career. 

We are fortunate that mental health awareness is increasing within the wildland fire community, the workplace, and society as a whole. Mental health resources are becoming more readily available, with workplace wellness programs and mental health practitioners supporting incident debrief sessions. In wildland fire management, it is important to foster resilience in and among ourselves. Practitioners use ‘good fire’ as a tool to create resilient landscapes and to prevent ‘bad fire’; increasing mental health awareness and support tools are a good first step in fostering resilience in wildland fire management.

Definitions:

• Wildfire - an unplanned fire that consumes natural materials within an area (forest, grass, or other type of vegetation). This includes a fire that escapes a prescribed fire’s containment area.
• Prescribed fire - the deliberate application of fire to a predetermined area under planned and prescribed conditions to accomplish vegetation management or other land use objectives.
• Wildland - an area within which development is essentially non-existent, except for roads, railroads, utility lines, and similar transportation facilities. Structures, if any, are widely scattered.
• Cultural burning - planned application of fire to a specific area that is culturally informed, controlled, fulfils specific cultural objectives, and involves comprehensive engagement and guidance from Elders, Fire Keepers, and Fire Knowledge Holders.
• Fire regime - the frequency, intensity, size, pattern, seasonality, and severity of wildland fires that prevail in an area over long periods of time.

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