Juno News - July 30, 2024


Former Jasper Park official SPEAKS OUT against Parks Canada leadership


Episode Stats

Length

23 minutes

Words per Minute

165.7962

Word Count

3,894

Sentence Count

294


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Last week, a devastating wildfire struck Jasper National Park in Alberta, one of the most beautiful places in the world.
00:00:11.580 The fire consumed 358 square kilometers of pristine forest, and over 358 structures in the town of Jasper were destroyed.
00:00:21.540 But thanks to the heroic efforts of firefighters along with the military last week, major historical buildings were saved, and critical infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and water treatment facilities were also saved in the town.
00:00:36.080 Not every historical building in the town of Jasper was able to be saved, including the 96-year-old St. Mary and St. George Anglican Church, a beautiful church which is now completely lost to the wildfire.
00:00:49.140 But just minutes after news broke that a massive wildfire had started in Jasper National Park, the usual suspects at a political level reminded Canadians that this was the fault of climate change.
00:01:00.520 But how much did climate change really impact this wildfire? And was it something else? Was it poor forest management? How much of this wildfire was preventable?
00:01:10.720 All right, joining us now on the Faulkner Show is a former senior planner at Jasper National Park, Peter Schultz. Peter, thank you so much for joining us on the show.
00:01:20.720 Pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
00:01:22.220 So on a LinkedIn post just days after the wildfire, you wrote that if the town of Jasper Burns, you pin the blame on Parks Canada leadership for failing to properly implement forest management policies and for not being willing to combat what you call eco-activists who have pushed an ideological message in ways of combating wildfires and dealing with forest policy.
00:01:50.020 Peter, I just want to ask you as an expert in this field, as someone who's worked on the ground at Jasper National Park, why do you think this fire started?
00:02:00.720 Thanks for the invitation. And just for clarity, I am a registered professional planner. I'm not a registered professional forester.
00:02:07.540 The information that was given to me was from the chief of forest fire response and prevention at Jasper National Park in 2008.
00:02:19.460 I worked as the senior planner there from January. I had a permanent full-time position. I ended up resigning after half a year because I felt my time was being wasted and I couldn't accomplish a change that would actually be effective.
00:02:33.820 And I'd basically be wasting my career. And I believe that was the correct decision.
00:02:38.820 At the time, the fire chief pulled me aside as senior planner and told me about forest management in Jasper National Park, what needed to be done,
00:02:48.280 and asked me in my position to try to communicate upward through the manager of land use planning and through to the superintendent.
00:02:55.260 And I would, they weren't responsive to what was going on.
00:03:01.920 And what was going on at the time that made the chief of wildfire management and yourself concerned?
00:03:12.260 Forest firefighting is now so well done that it's almost too well done.
00:03:21.000 If you can prevent almost every small and medium forest fire.
00:03:27.840 The unfortunate side effect of that is that trees continue to drop branches, trees continue to fall, trees continue to get older.
00:03:36.680 If you want, I can go into the life cycle of the, of a typical spruce forest, spruce pine forest in Jasper National Park.
00:03:43.980 And that you get the ground-based fuel buildup, you get all these dead twigs, branches, trees that build up and up and up year after year after year.
00:03:52.880 The trees get older, they get drier as they get older.
00:03:55.620 They have a natural life expectancy.
00:03:57.660 And you basically create a giant pile of dry wood.
00:04:02.480 And that went on for decade after decade after decade.
00:04:05.200 I worked in 2008 and it was a serious concern at that time.
00:04:09.580 I have been very active in the parks beforehand and walked off trail.
00:04:13.480 And the situation goes at least back to the mid-90s of having a severe fire fuel buildup.
00:04:21.840 Jasper National Park, since 2008, it's been 17 years.
00:04:26.700 I've been through the park every two to three years and you can see beetle kill trees now in my estimate up to 30 to 40% that is consistent with other estimates that have been made last year.
00:04:39.600 That is dry standing timber.
00:04:41.680 It's well aerated.
00:04:42.600 It's standing there.
00:04:43.340 It's ready to burn.
00:04:44.640 So the entire area that burned, anybody with any understanding of forest management saw that this was a powder keg.
00:04:52.320 All you needed was a hot day with strong winds and the whole thing was going to go.
00:04:56.700 Guess what happened?
00:04:59.520 So you're saying that there was so much confidence in firefighters' abilities to put out wildfires that the necessary steps to prevent those wildfires just weren't being taken as far back as 2008 and even before that as well?
00:05:19.040 Not exactly.
00:05:21.000 There's confidence in stopping the smallfires.
00:05:23.400 But I know that the fire team was telling upper management repeatedly, at least back in 2008 and since forward, there's a certain point we can't fight it anymore.
00:05:34.140 There's too much fuel.
00:05:35.440 It'll catch too fast.
00:05:37.160 We need to clear out.
00:05:38.480 We need to prescribe burns during wet weather.
00:05:41.700 We need to get machines in there.
00:05:44.240 We need to log.
00:05:45.600 We need to do things to remove the amount of fuel.
00:05:49.080 We're very good at this, but there's a certain limit.
00:05:52.120 And we have reached that limit.
00:05:53.540 And that limit was reached 17 years ago.
00:05:55.500 So why do you think Parks Canada wasn't addressing these concerns?
00:06:02.360 Why do you think management at Parks Canada wasn't willing to actually listen to the demands being made by firefighters?
00:06:08.620 I think there's two reasons for that.
00:06:11.220 One I'm sure about and one I'm not sure about.
00:06:12.980 The one I'm sure about is that a lot of the folks that live in Jasper or visit Jasper are in the national parks are very nature-minded.
00:06:22.300 And I appreciate that.
00:06:23.740 They view cutting down trees as very bad under any circumstance.
00:06:27.560 Last year at Kananaskis Park, I took my kids to a show and the park wardens were saying, never burn a twig because it's part of the natural cycle.
00:06:38.440 It's got to break down naturally.
00:06:42.340 Well, that's not reality.
00:06:43.460 This is a fire-based ecosystem.
00:06:44.800 We're not on the B.C. coast where it rains pretty much all the time.
00:06:48.480 We're in a fire-based ecosystem.
00:06:49.940 Fuel builds up.
00:06:50.960 It needs to be cleared out either by hand or by machine or it needs to be cleared up by fire.
00:06:55.020 And that cultural attitude that is wrong to cut down trees, that it's wrong to do timber management, is widespread across the West.
00:07:08.320 And in a national park, which is based on conservation, obviously those values get a lot stronger.
00:07:13.380 People are very emotionally attached to the national parks, and rightly so.
00:07:17.340 But it's the wrong approach.
00:07:19.060 It is the wrong attitude.
00:07:20.100 It is not for the ecosystem.
00:07:21.160 I suspect those same attitudes are at the senior level.
00:07:26.520 The superintendents may have been talking to the ministers.
00:07:29.820 They may have been talking to deputy ministers about these concerns.
00:07:33.520 And this is at the federal level.
00:07:34.860 This is a national park.
00:07:36.700 But no action, no serious action was ever taken.
00:07:40.140 This seems like, it almost seems like negligence if no action was being taken and nothing was being greenlit and the situation was getting worse, even though people were trying to speak up about it.
00:07:53.780 It seems like this was entirely preventable.
00:07:57.600 Would you agree with that?
00:07:58.280 It was 100% preventable.
00:08:00.900 Honestly, if I had been a superintendent in Jasper National Park in the last 20 years, if the minister said we're not taking action or I was getting blah, blah, blah answers, which you typically get from, you know, bureaucrats in Ottawa, I would have gone on a speaking circuit.
00:08:14.760 I am superintendent.
00:08:15.700 You know, if I had been the superintendent of Jasper National Park, I would have been speaking to the public.
00:08:19.920 I would have gone, this is the way it was, this is the way we need to take care of this management or there'll be massive fires here.
00:08:29.620 I'll segue here to when I worked for Jasper National Park, we also had an indigenous training course.
00:08:37.800 And in this course, the park staff told us, I mean, I'm now part of park staff saying,
00:08:44.440 when the Columbia ice fields retreated to their current size, they had covered the whole of the Rocky Mountains.
00:08:53.940 When they retreated to their current size, the first species to move in on the foot of the glacier was humans.
00:09:01.400 They were First Nations persons who were already very, very accustomed to the climate of the area.
00:09:07.500 They've been in the area already for thousands of years.
00:09:09.160 And this is, you know, the rice sheets retreated 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
00:09:13.860 So they had been in Jasper National Park for thousands of years.
00:09:16.700 And if you check the forest cycle through the smoke records, through archaeology and the dendritic record,
00:09:25.400 it clearly shows fires running every 30 to 60 years in Jasper National Park, at least since the 1600s.
00:09:32.980 What does that say?
00:09:34.600 That, when you see that kind of intermittency, it shows that there's willful management.
00:09:39.160 They were doing prescribed burns.
00:09:41.140 They're clearing out dead wood and they're being consistent about it.
00:09:46.700 They're doing medium, small and medium size, small and medium size fires at consistent pacing.
00:09:52.520 That creates a very complex ecosystem where mature trees cover 10 to 20% of the subalpine in the lower valley.
00:10:01.920 There are no trees in the alpine.
00:10:03.120 It's too cold.
00:10:04.460 And then you have different stands of different ages.
00:10:06.560 You have a lot of berries.
00:10:08.180 And you also have a lot of forage, which means you had buffalo.
00:10:11.940 You had elk.
00:10:12.800 You had moose.
00:10:14.380 You have a food conicorpia.
00:10:17.560 Massive numbers of wildlife.
00:10:19.000 Massive numbers of fruit.
00:10:20.100 Ability to support very large populations.
00:10:21.940 That was deliberate.
00:10:22.840 Enter contact and the disease wave killed most of the First Nations persons.
00:10:30.340 That ended the forest cycle.
00:10:32.340 And the first mega fires you see were actually in the 1900s, early 1900s, because the First Nations, their cycles had been interrupted.
00:10:39.040 At the time Pet Jasper National Park was established, there was only about 20% mature forest cover in the subalpine and lower valleys.
00:10:49.280 As of last week, before the fires, it was over 90%.
00:10:52.960 It was basically solid, thick forest all the way up to the alpine, which is the same situation that currently exists in all the other national parks and throughout the Rocky Mountains and much in the northwest.
00:11:04.620 There's no excuse for not understanding this.
00:11:06.480 There was a mega fire in Kootenai National Park about 10, 15 years ago.
00:11:09.660 There was a mega fire near Waterton, which nearly burnt down the town site of Waterton.
00:11:13.060 There was a mega fire in Glacier National Park about eight years ago.
00:11:17.040 This is repeating again and again.
00:11:19.260 There's no excuse for not knowing that something needs to be done.
00:11:22.960 There is some legitimate concern with prescribed burns.
00:11:26.480 Jasper Head did a prescribed burn in the valley between the Saw Ridge Range and Rashmiate over on the eastern side of the park, which is meant to be a small scale fire.
00:11:35.600 But there's so much fuel that they underestimated and they ended up burning the entire valley, which was about 30 kilometers by 15 kilometers in size.
00:11:45.880 And that was about 25 years ago.
00:11:48.460 That actually gave the park a bit of reprieve from the beetle, but not enough.
00:11:52.960 So once you enter the beetle, it's well known that spruce, the pine beetle, the pine and spruce fight the beetle infestation through sap.
00:12:04.160 The younger trees, like if you, you know, if you, if you pick at it with a finger, with your finger on a tree, it produces a lot of sap.
00:12:09.600 The younger the tree, the more sap.
00:12:11.720 Younger trees are able to fight these infestations.
00:12:15.020 As the trees get older, they become like older people.
00:12:17.920 They just can't fight disease well enough.
00:12:19.980 They could, don't produce as much sap.
00:12:21.520 So with the older trees, once they hit that 50 to 70 year age range, and then we're going back to 1910, we're now close to 100 years, the trees are not able to fight the beetles.
00:12:33.860 The beetles are not from Asia.
00:12:34.880 They are endemic.
00:12:36.140 The beetles get into the wood.
00:12:37.840 They kill the tree.
00:12:38.620 And then they live on the wood.
00:12:40.780 And then they reproduce.
00:12:41.560 And guess what?
00:12:42.280 Then they, then they spread to neighboring trees.
00:12:45.880 When you end up with situations in Jasper National Park and throughout the Rocky Mountains in the West, there's so many beetles coming out of these old dead trees that even the young trees can't resist them.
00:12:58.680 You know?
00:12:58.940 And then the young trees get, get, die.
00:13:03.460 So this is all contributed natural fall.
00:13:07.220 The beetle kill.
00:13:08.600 You have huge amounts of well aerated standing timber that's just sitting there.
00:13:14.020 And there's a little fire here.
00:13:15.520 There's a little fire there.
00:13:16.720 And fire, you know, the fire department swoops in.
00:13:19.000 You know, the supermen and the wonder women of the, of the fire department, they, they put it out.
00:13:23.320 But this one case, there was a, you know, 90 to 100 kilometer of wind.
00:13:27.000 It was 35 degrees.
00:13:28.160 It had been 30 degrees for about a week.
00:13:30.480 Everything's dry.
00:13:31.900 100 kilometer an hour.
00:13:33.180 The fire moves extremely fast.
00:13:36.580 It, it went from a small area near Athabasca Falls to a 40 by 20 kilometer zone in 72 hours.
00:13:47.100 Wow.
00:13:47.860 That was completely predictable.
00:13:50.220 I've been saying that for, ever since I've worked at Jasper National Park, I've said, this is going to happen.
00:13:56.400 Wow.
00:13:56.640 The one, the one good thing out of this is that the fire was so fast that I don't think it pumped enough heat into the ground to completely sterilize the soil.
00:14:06.200 That's my guess.
00:14:07.120 I don't know.
00:14:07.600 The scientists may disagree with me.
00:14:08.940 But when forest fires move more slowly, they don't, you know, there's more time for the heat to generate the soil and kill, kill the soil.
00:14:16.240 So the soil may have survived.
00:14:17.280 So we may see quick recovery like we did in Kootenai National Park.
00:14:21.840 I'll stop there.
00:14:22.660 Well, it's a sad situation.
00:14:25.400 Yeah.
00:14:25.680 Well, it's devastating and deeply sad.
00:14:27.780 It's one of the most beautiful places, I think, in the world.
00:14:30.620 And for it to be entirely preventable really makes it even more disappointing.
00:14:35.140 We're going to hear a lot, and we've already heard from some politicians, about the role climate change plays in these wildfires.
00:14:43.320 I want to ask you, what role does climate change play in these wildfires?
00:14:48.300 It seems as though we're seeing more of them in recent years, but it also seems like there was a lot of a failure to implement fireproofing policy here, and not necessarily just a warming planet.
00:15:01.640 But you're an expert here.
00:15:02.920 So what role does climate change play in this?
00:15:06.780 I'm glad you asked that.
00:15:08.380 Once the Jasper fire started, it took about 15 minutes for folks to start blaming climate change.
00:15:14.900 When I was a kid, I remember hot summer days.
00:15:18.300 And when you were a kid, you remember hot summer days.
00:15:22.180 I don't remember the smoke.
00:15:24.140 I'll tell you the difference.
00:15:25.420 It has zero to do with climate change.
00:15:26.960 It's because the trees were too old.
00:15:28.780 When I was 10, you're 10 and 12 and 20 years old.
00:15:30.900 That was 25 years ago.
00:15:31.880 So the trees weren't that old.
00:15:33.080 The beetle infestation had not occurred yet.
00:15:36.660 There were still fire issues that we were being warned about, as you know, but they weren't reaching emergency level.
00:15:42.860 The reports since 2015 are showing emergency level forest conditions.
00:15:47.100 We're showing a tinder kick.
00:15:49.440 It has nothing to do with climate change.
00:15:51.360 There are hot days in July.
00:15:53.020 There always have been hot days in July.
00:15:55.080 In the middle of the last ice age, when there were glaciers all the way up to Jasper Townsite, there were still hot days in July.
00:16:01.420 Right?
00:16:01.560 So this is nothing whatsoever to do with climate change.
00:16:05.240 This is entirely a forest management question.
00:16:07.980 You've worked with people in Parks Canada.
00:16:10.300 You know how they operate.
00:16:12.360 Do you think that this is going to be a wake-up call for them?
00:16:15.260 Do you think that something like this is actually going to trigger them and perhaps the political leaders, people who run Environment and Climate Change Canada, to actually say, okay, we have to change our forest policy completely to prevent this?
00:16:27.360 Do you think that's actually going to happen?
00:16:29.780 No, it's not.
00:16:31.120 They've had plenty of wake-up calls already.
00:16:32.820 As I said, they had the Kootenai Fire.
00:16:34.360 They had the Waterton Fire.
00:16:35.440 We've seen the big fire down in Yellowstone.
00:16:37.040 We've seen the big fire in Glacier National Park, Montana.
00:16:39.100 They've been a bit more logging around the perimeter of Banff.
00:16:46.180 But at the end of the day, it's the forest fire managers that need to be calling the shots and not the political level.
00:16:53.240 And I can't imagine Environment Canada suddenly saying, oh, we need to change our forest management policy and send loggers into the park to the areas that aren't burnt.
00:17:06.840 It's us is going to happen.
00:17:09.200 There's not going to be any wake-up call.
00:17:11.180 We do need superintendents who are the people that are supposed to be the interface between the park staff and the political level.
00:17:23.620 They need to step up.
00:17:25.460 They need to step up loudly.
00:17:27.120 That is their job.
00:17:28.140 They get their own big mansion inside the park and earn their couple hundred thousand dollars a year for a good reason.
00:17:33.780 And that needs to be taken.
00:17:36.840 Which just seems like we could be in a position of losing more pieces of history and incredible places in this country.
00:17:44.020 It's really horrible.
00:17:46.820 Absolutely.
00:17:47.220 The one positive silver lining and one thing I appreciate about this interview is I think the Jasper fire creates an opportunity to tear down preconceptions and political pressures around forest management in much of the interior of Northwest North America.
00:18:00.820 That's including most of BC and Alberta, and I'm not including the coast, the British Columbians who are listening.
00:18:07.140 I am not including the coast.
00:18:08.360 It is a different ecosystem.
00:18:09.640 You are in a rain forest.
00:18:11.420 The rest of the West is not in a rain forest.
00:18:14.340 Understand that.
00:18:15.500 It's a different.
00:18:16.440 It's a fire based ecosystem in the interior.
00:18:19.240 The coast is different.
00:18:20.180 Vancouverites, please understand that.
00:18:24.780 And we can prevent future megafires.
00:18:28.920 Here's the thing.
00:18:29.720 If we do proper forest management, we hypercharge, A, wildlife populations.
00:18:35.420 Wildlife don't like spruce bark.
00:18:37.360 Wildlife like foliage.
00:18:39.780 You have less mature forest cover.
00:18:42.680 You increase the wildlife populations.
00:18:44.140 Number two, you can hypercharge the forest industry.
00:18:48.240 Yes, more forestry done right increases your wildlife population while decreasing your fire risk.
00:18:56.980 Imagine that.
00:18:58.220 We could be exporting wood around the world, probably double, triple or quadruple what we do now with more wildlife, less fire risk, and better to the ecosystem, and reducing carbon,
00:19:13.200 and reducing carbon, because we're taking the trees, instead of burning them, putting the carbon back to the atmosphere, we're taking the wood,
00:19:18.780 returning it to buildings and furniture, and shipping it around the world.
00:19:22.160 And it gets sequestered permanently that way.
00:19:25.640 It's a win, win, win.
00:19:28.580 Wow.
00:19:29.620 Is there a country that does forest management the right way that you've seen that is really good at preventing wildfires?
00:19:37.860 Because we've heard reports that the Americans are changing their policies.
00:19:41.680 We've also heard reports that the Australians are having to change some policies.
00:19:46.260 But have you seen countries that do this the right way?
00:19:52.140 Each ecosystem is different.
00:19:54.380 I mean, the Australians have a fire-based ecosystem in most of their country.
00:19:59.500 And obviously, the interior U.S. West is a fairly similar model.
00:20:06.520 I have been outside the forestry sector.
00:20:08.420 I'm, you know, I'm a town and regional planner.
00:20:12.900 So my understanding is of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and understanding their ecosystem,
00:20:18.040 because I had to develop policy for there.
00:20:20.800 But each ecosystem is different.
00:20:23.220 This one is a fire-based ecosystem.
00:20:26.960 It has been for 10,000 or 20,000 years.
00:20:28.860 We need to change our approach to it, because that's where we are now.
00:20:33.080 And these attitudes about never cut down the trees, because killing trees is murder, does not belong at any time, in my opinion.
00:20:41.140 But it certainly does not belong here.
00:20:43.660 And it's coming from very populated areas on the coast, in large part California, you know, Vancouver.
00:20:50.000 But also, I think it might have some European roots.
00:20:53.180 If you look at the fire forests of the Alps and the Carpathians and the Scottish Highlands,
00:20:59.880 there's not many forests left in the Scottish Highlands.
00:21:01.680 But anyway, those are not fire-based ecosystem.
00:21:06.480 If you have broad-scale fire, something has gone seriously wrong.
00:21:11.940 Trees do need to be extracted carefully, one at a time.
00:21:15.020 But this is a much different approach, and the approach does apply down at least as far as Colorado.
00:21:22.260 But I can't talk about the more recent developments.
00:21:25.340 Sure, of course.
00:21:26.900 Is there any other information that you think is required to be shared with the audience here,
00:21:32.620 and people who want to learn more about how this whole thing even happened in the first place?
00:21:37.900 If you need to be convinced, pick a random spot on the side of a highway in Banff or somewhere,
00:21:49.500 and just park your car and just walk in a straight line.
00:21:55.140 Once you pass the fire cutback zone, you will enter the raw forest,
00:22:00.040 and you will see for yourself massive amounts of dead branches and trees,
00:22:06.680 very little understory foliage, almost nothing for there will be no squirrels.
00:22:11.200 You'll see very little sign of other wildlife in this forest.
00:22:15.420 You don't have to go very far.
00:22:16.260 You can go 500 meters, 600 meters into the forest, and you'll see it for yourselves.
00:22:20.820 You don't need to be an expert.
00:22:21.860 And you'll think, on a hot, dry day with strong winds, I can light a match on a twig,
00:22:29.420 or there can be one lightning bolt, or I can be whatever, an arsonist or whatever.
00:22:34.480 One match, and this is going to go very quickly.
00:22:37.240 And then you step back and you look at the sheer scale of the forest that you're looking at.
00:22:41.400 And you'll understand the apprehension that folks like me see.
00:22:44.560 And if you're a lover of the outdoors like myself, and you get your renewal from hiking or fishing or hunting or whatever you do,
00:22:53.100 and you look at the forest, you'll feel a sense of great outrage that we need to fix the situation,
00:23:00.460 get it back to pre-contact type of management pretty quickly.
00:23:06.320 Incredible.
00:23:07.360 Well, Peter, we really appreciate your time and sharing your insight with us.
00:23:10.720 It's a very important story, and one that I fear is going to be repeated, as you have predicted as well on this show,
00:23:19.080 that's going to be repeated across some of the most beautiful places in the world,
00:23:22.180 which all happen to be in our great country.
00:23:24.700 So, Peter, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.
00:23:28.000 My pleasure.
00:23:28.440 Thanks very much, Harrison.
00:23:29.100 Thank you.