FE5.4 - On Fire: Under Water (Part 4) - Future Ecologies

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Introduction Voiceover (00:04):
You're listening to Season Five of
Future Ecologies.

Adam Huggins (00:10):
I don't usually do this, but I have to know if
you're willing to tell me. Howdid you meet?

Ron Ignace (00:18):
She got cursed to be here.

Marianne Ignace (00:19):
Yep.

Cursed?

Ron Ignace (00:21):
Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh.

I'm originally from Northwestern Germany from
a, if you want, a sort ofminority in Europe. So my
ancestors right down to myparents spoke Plautdietsch as we
call it, or Plattdütsch. It'scloser to Dutch than to standard
German. So that's where I wasborn and raised and then as a

(00:47):
young adult, traveled to HaidaGwaii and lived there for a
number of years. When in 1982,my mother was visiting and I had
a toddler, my daughter, Jessica,and we were driving to the
interior. I'd never been east ofHope. So we traveled for hours

(01:11):
through the sagebrush,bunchgrass ponderosa pine, if
even there were some. Andfinally, it was when we were
right at the mouth of like thehighway here – by the mouth of
Deadman Creek. We turned to eachother, and I said "What a
godforsaken area is thisanyway?"

(01:35):
We've said ever since that'swhen I cursed myself for the
rest of my days, and of course,I you know, I came to Secwépemc
territory just a bit after that.

Ron Ignace (01:49):
I was raised and lived in this valley here. I was
adopted by my great grandmother,Sulyen. I was fortunate Shuswap
great grandmothers have theright to look amongst all their
grandchildren and adopt one andraise it as their own. And I say
that I won the lottery ticket.And as a result, I got some

(02:13):
understanding of our languageand our ways in our knowledge,
traditional knowledge. And Imean, I remember my great
grandmother's Sulyen would haveher her old saddle horse and her
birch bark baskets, and we wouldjump on the horse — me riding in
the back — and we'd be ridingall these hills picking the
Saskatoonberries off ofhorseback.

(02:35):
But one of the things that mygreat grandmother, she told me
before she left this place, shesaid, "I want you to go out into
the world and study it. Once youdo that, then you come home and
help your people." And I triedto not live up to the
admonishments, but to forgetabout them and do my own thing.

(02:58):
But nonetheless, I ran away fromthe Kamloops Indian Residential
School with an incomplete gradeeight, went traveling around
working here on ranches andfarms and things of this nature.
But I went back to universityand got my master's degree from
there.

My sort of mentor, supervisor of my
postdoc, was Ron's thesissupervisor.

Right!

So one time he mentioned, "oh, yeah, you gotta
meet this guy. He wrote a reallygood master's thesis, you should
read it. Maybe look him up oneday." You know, since those
days, we've co-authored manytimes and working together with
Dr. Nancy Turner from UVic tookus to begin studying the wider

(03:47):
context in which plants andanimals interact with humans and
vice versa, but also how ourecologies are rapidly changing
through fragmentation anddestruction of our lands, our
homelands. And in more recentdecades, the impacts of drought,

(04:08):
climate change, floods, and ofcourse fires.

Newsreel Montage (04:12):
Look at this dashcam video you're seeing
here. One family trying to fleea wildfire engulfing parts of
Canada. The flames and smoke...The smoke from the wildfire
western Canada. We are facingthe large wildfire ever recorded
in EU history... Devestatingwildfires are ravaging part of
the Big Island and the island ofMaui... An astonishing milestone
this week. Monday and Tuesday,the hottest days ever recorded

(04:36):
on Earth... Severe weather yetagain, from an atmospheric river
that has dumped rain in thecentral part of the state
tonight, causing massiveflooding... For the third time
in a week an atmospheric riveris drenching Southwestern BC,
where flooding and landslideshave already disrupted the lives
of 1000s of people.

Ron Ignace (04:52):
Fire and water were heads and tails of the same coin
really. Because if you don'trespect and honor fire, it will
cause you great harm and danger,likewise with water. Water can
be equally as destructive. Soit's how you respect and honor
the land and we have what youknow, like our word

(05:16):
[Secwepemctsin]. If you don'thonor the land, the land will
turn on you. And you experiencegreat grief and sorrow through
floods and fires. And basically,that's what's happening with us
today.

Mendel Skulski (05:40):
Welcome back, my name is Mendel.

And I'm Adam.

And to cap off another record season of floods
and wildfires. We're dippingback into the hottest topic in
the more than human world. Andit's a perennial favorite of
ours on this show.

This is the next installment in our long running
series on fire. We're callingthis one under water.

We've spoken about fire at length three times
before this, but don't worry ifyou're just joining us for this
one.

Introduction Voiceover (06:14):
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and
asserted territories of theMusqueam, Squamish, and
Tsleil-Waututh, this is FutureEcologies – exploring the shape
of our world through ecology,design, and sound.

So, Adam, another year, another record
shattering fire season, and aseemingly endless list of
disasters close to home, andaround the world.

Mhm

Plus unprecedented heat waves, with
scientists reporting, thehottest day ever recorded.

Three straight days in a row in July.

And then beyond fire, we've witnessed
catastrophic floods rippingthrough communities on
practically every continent.

And of course, in my home state of California,
which was literally underwaterfor most of the winter.

Yeah. So we're all living out the climate
crisis right now, together indifferent ways. How are you
feeling about it?

To be honest, I'm feeling pretty angry about it
right now. I just traveled tothe Rockies and back. And
everywhere that I went, therewere fires burning, could see
them from the road. We could seethem progress over time, as we,
you know, went out and then cameback. And my community has been
fine so far. But I can't say thesame for some of my friends.

Yeah.

Honestly, I feel like we're living in the world
that we were warned aboutdecades ago. And watching our
neighbors get burned and floodedout of their homes.

Yeah...

It just seems like it's gonna get worse. And, you
know, usually when there's adisaster, we grieve, we recover.
The mayor makes some statementsin the local newspaper about
rebuilding, and we move on. So Iguess the question that we have

(08:37):
to ask ourselves under thesecircumstances is, what does
recovery look like when thedisaster just never ends? When
it just keeps going? What doesrecovery mean, when the crisis
that we're experiencing ischronic?

Well, to start to answer that question, I think
we have to rewind the clock alittle bit. We're gonna go back
to 2021 in my home province ofBritish Columbia. Where during
the summer, anotherunprecedented heatwave or heat
dome, which is a word we now allknow, but at the time had never

(09:17):
heard before.

Yeah.

That heat dome hit the Northwest.

That was the summer that the town of Lytton,
in the interior of BC,experienced the highest
temperatures ever recorded inCanada.

Coincidentally for three straight days in a row
in July.

Yeah. And then was razed to the ground the next day
in a massive wildfire. One ofhundreds that would burn
throughout the province thatsummer.

Then later that Fall, an atmospheric river!

Which is another term that most of us learned for
the first time in 2021.

Yeah. That resulted in massive floods
across the Northwest and in BCthey were so bad that they
literally severed majorhighways, cutting Vancouver off
from the rest of the country fora time.

And both Mendel and I were living through all of
this and trying to make sense ofit as well. So we turned to
someone that we knew might havesome answers.

Lori Daniels (10:11):
Yes, my name is Dr. Lori Daniels. I'm a
professor of forest ecology atthe University of British
Columbia in the faculty offorestry. And I do research on
wildfire science and management.

Longtime listeners will recognize Lori
from the previous installment inthis series. So there we were,
in the spring of 2022, stillreeling from the disastrous
floods of that previous Autumn,and thinking back to the fires
from that Summer. And so weasked Lori to help us understand
the connection between fires,landslides, and floods.

So there's a really amazing well documented
relationship between fire andhydrology and the types of
landslides and slope failuresthat we observed in November.
Normally, under normalcircumstances, when we get a lot
of rain onto the steep slopes ofmountainous environments, the
forest kind of acts like asponge that absorbs a lot of

(11:10):
that moisture into the organicmaterial on the forest floor,
which can hold a lot of water.The water slowly trickles down
into the soil...

But when a wildfire sweeps through and
removes all of that organicmaterial, it dramatically
reduces the landscape's abilityto intercept, absorb and retain
that precipitation.

The heat of the fire also takes all of the
material in the vegetation thatburns.

Vegetation, which around here would mainly be the
needles of coniferous trees.

Those needles have waxy coatings on them – that are
adaptations that make themsurvive well in this
environment.

And all of those oils and fats and waxy coatings,
in the heat of the fire, not allof it burns away,

It merges together, it sinks down into the
soil, and then it re-solidifieskind of like wax paper.

Creating an impermeable, hydrophobic layer
across the burned forest floor.

So, imagine dropping water onto wax paper.
It forms beads, instead ofsoaking down into the paper. The
soils did the same thing.Hydrophobic soils caused by the
intensity of the fire meant thatthe water that came down onto
those surfaces now sat andpooled instead of infiltrating
down into the ground. Andeventually, on our steep

(12:29):
mountain slopes, it begins toflow overland, carrying with it
the ash and the debris that wasleft after the fire.

And during the megafires of 2021, and as we're
seeing again in 2023, entirewatersheds were burned. Add all
of this up together...

And so now we have this intense rainfall onto these
ecosystems on these mountainslopes that are highly altered.
And we've created a situationwhere we have excessive rain, we
have excessive runoff, and thenyou get this huge erosion power,
the amount of power in thoserivers as the water collects in
the headwater streams, and movesdown slope, gaining volumes of

(13:09):
water, amounts of debris, andgaining energy as it flows down
slope. We saw those catastrophiceffects.

So case closed, you get massive wildfires. And
you can pretty much expect thereto be massive floods afterwards.

It's all interconnected. It's a classic
disturbance cascade, you know,that started in June and
culminated in November and willhave lasting impacts... for
years if not decades in BritishColumbia.

But then, when we were wrapping up the
interview, Lori planted a littleseed.

I'm gonna do a little sales pitch here. Sarah
Dixon oil is one of the PhDstudents that I co supervise.

She told us Sarah was working with an
organisation called theSecwepemcúl'ecw Restoration and
Stewardship Society.

And they have just released a big report on the
Elephant Hill Fire

Detailing and the recovery efforts jointly led
by this Secwepemc First Nationsand the province of BC.

It's like a 200 page report – could probably be
the topic for an entire podcast.I think you guys would do a
fantastic job with it.

Which just goes to show how susceptible we are
to flattery!

Well, we actually didn't follow up on this tip
immediately. I mean, she reallydid have me until she said the
words 200 page report.

Yeah, well, you're only human.

But fast forward another year, another round of
global climate disasters. Andyou'll never guess who gets in
touch.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle.

And she's now a postdoctoral research fellow
with the faculty of forestry atthe University of British
Columbia and still working inpartnership with the
Secwepemcúl'ecw Restoration andStewardship Society. She invited
me to visit her and thecommunities that she works with
up in the interior, to see howthe post-fire, post-flood
recovery was shaping up. Thatlittle seed that Lori had

(15:08):
planted was finally getting somelight. So I took her up on it.
Earlier this summer, before thelatest disasters in Maui,
Kelowna, and Yellowknife, amongothers, I made the drive through
the Fraser Valley from thecoastal rainforest up into the
coast ranges, east of Hope.

Which is a town by the way, not just an
expression.

And winding my way through the scenic Fraser
Canyon, which was stillundergoing repairs from the 2021
flooding, by the way.

Mhm

I went past the former village of Lytton, which
still doesn't have anystructures two years later. And
that's where I forked off of theFraser River and headed up the
Thompson. Pretty quickly the dryDouglas fir forests of the
interior gave way to sagebrushbunchgrass and ponderosa pine –
really some of the driestcountry I've seen anywhere in

(16:00):
the province. And as I campedout right beside the Thompson
River in the evening light, withthese massive freight trains on
both sides of the river,rattling my tent about every
hour or so, I finally crackedopen that 241 page report that
Laurie told us about.

... you, you waited until the night before
your interviews to read thereport?

In my defense, Sarah had only sent it to me a
few days before.

Okay...

And I actually burned right through it.

Oh my god.

Anyway, the report raised lots of questions and
made me really excited to seeSara the next morning, so got up
early rolled down to the villageof Cache Creek, surrounded by
dry hills and irrigated fieldsof hay and alfalfa. But what
immediately caught my attention,Mendel was the flood damage all
through the center of town.Everywhere I looked, there were

(16:53):
sandbags, huge piles of rubble,washed out roads and busted
culverts. It was so strikingthat when I finally met Sarah, I
forgot to ask her to introduceherself. I just took her
straight over to Cache Creek.

You're talking about the creek that the whole
town is named after.

Exactly. And when it isn't flooding. It's actually
not that much to look at.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle (17:14):
Yeah, I've driven over that creek so many
times and barely even glance tothat. It's amazing. It can do
that much damage.

How much damage are we talking about here?

I mean, this used to be a bridge. This
used to be a road into town.

We were standing at what used to be a road and is
now essentially just a bunch ofriprap with Cache Creek running
through it. The asphalt hascollapsed in on either side, and
the culverts are buried inrubble. I actually tried to
drive over this, because GoogleMaps routed me that way.

Oh no...

And this damage is much more recent than just 2021.

Yeah, this entire town was flooded out
maybe a month ago.

Cache Creek has been flooding regularly for the
past several years. And this isa direct consequence of climate
driven extreme weather eventsrepeatedly hammering a burned
landscape.

We saw that with the atmospheric river in
2021 that fires and floods oftengo hand in hand. It's just crazy
seeing these roads you've drivenso many times, suddenly, you
know, completely under rubble,or these, you know, rivers and
creek lines just spilling outover the banks. We're staying at
the RV park just up the road.And it's right on the river. And
you can see just off to theedge. They've done a lot of

(18:25):
work. But there's just stillcars tipped on their side and
RVs kind of everywhere. And thecreek just completely
overflowed.

Wow. So you didn't even have to get out of
town to see the damage.

No, not at all. But eventually, I hop into
Sarah's car and she took me fora ride up this steep grassy
slope above the town through anactive landfill, actually.

Take a drive up the lovely dump road,
as it's called, to give youaccess and a bit of a viewpoint
down over the fire.

And pretty soon we start to see some trees. But
they've seen better days.

I look around we're in this incredibly
dry, you know almost desertecosystem. It's sagebrush. It's
a bunch grasses, you look up onthe hills that used to be forest
and now it's really just burntsticks.

So we make our way up through those burnt sticks.
And then we step out of the carand into the footprint of the
2017 Elephant Hill Fire – sixyears, almost the day from when
it ignited. We're actuallysquinting a bit through the
smoky haze from another wildfirefarther north — par for the
course in a summer like this.And Sarah points across the

(19:35):
valley to a cleft in a dryhillside.

See there's kind of a deep gully running up
the flat back of that hill?Right above that house down...

Yes, that's what I'm looking at too
The base of the hill looks alittle bit like the rear end of
a large animal

Or the tail perhaps! And then you go up and
it's the elephant's back. Thenit's kind of hot through this
haze, but you can almost seelike a big elephant ear and then
a trunk. So this big hill hereis Elephant Hill.

I see... Elephant hill looks like an
elephant.

Yes, it does.

And that's where the fire started down near
Ashcroft on a really hot, dry,windy day.

Wait, isn't Ashcroft where?

Yeah, the fire ignited just a few kilometers
from the Ashcroft Indian Bandand burned right through the
reserve.

Which we heard about from Chief Maureen
Chapman, back in part three ofthis series.

Yeah. Yeah, it was an awful day.

Just the heat and the wind on that day,
just pushed that fire up overthe provincial park, up over
Elephant Hill, down to CacheCreek. And then it jumped the

After burning around the village of Cache
highway and was off.
Creek, the fire found its wayinto the forest and plateaus of
BC's interior, consuming almost200,000 hectares, and releasing
about 38 million tons ofgreenhouse gas. It happened so
quickly that people who are outon the road just doing errands
that day, got trapped on thewrong side of the fire, and had

(21:04):
to camp out until they could getaround again. So Sarah and I
were basically staring at theepicenter of one of the largest
megafires of 2017 — a fireseason that put the term
megafire into our collectivevocabulary. And now here it was
six years later.

We're walking in what used to be an
Interior Douglas Fir forest, andnow really is quite a weedy
grassland with the remnants ofthose trees. So we have these
really tall, completelyblackened trees. A lot of them
have been falling down, comingdown over the last few years.
I'm sure we're actually stillseeing some mortality from the

(21:42):
fires. You know, you look aroundhere and I can't see a single
green tree anywhere.

And not only are there no green trees, I couldn't
see any tree regeneration. Likeat all. You've got to remember
this was a Douglas Fir forest.And it's been...

Six whole years.

You know, it was burnt right down to
mineral soil. There were thesebig treacherous holes that you
had to be careful of when firehad just burnt out the roots
under the soil. And completelyright down, consuming all
organic matter. So we're notseeing a lot of natural tree
regeneration in these forestshere at all, particularly in
these really dry sites here.

Eventually, we do bump into a few Ponderosa Pine
seedlings, but they've beenplanted as part of the recovery
efforts. Otherwise, it's sort ofa mix of weeds.

Such... such as?

Knap weeds, annual grasses, typical stuff.

Right.

And then there are these really cool patches of
naturally regenerating nativebunchgrass and wildflowers and
some shrubs too

Pretty!

It's actually pretty patchy. We see some
Mariposa lilies, lots of Yarrow,Roses, some Saskatoonberry,
Arrowleaf Balsamroot...

This is Arrowleaf Balsamroot. It looks
like it's been grazed,

Uh... grazed by what?

Most likely cows.

There... there are cows... on the fire
footprint?

Everywhere we went,

Yes, I mean, this is all so-called
crown range tenure. So they didrescind some of those licenses
after Elephant Hill. Essentiallymeaning that they worked with
the range holders, the ranchersto take cows off this landscape
because it was so impacted.

So this pasture was mostly ungrazed for the
first three or so years afterthe fire.

You can see cows back out all over this
landscape, you can see it'squite weedy, particularly up
these roads.

But why were the cows put back on? Wouldn't that
really affect the regeneration?

Sure. I mean, it's a trade off for what is
basically an economic imperativein the region. Actually, range
recovery was one of the three socalled "great goals" of the
immediate post fire recoveryprocess. And range recovery
basically meant rebuilding rangefences.

So when the fences are gone, you know, they
had cattle roaming out into thehighway, cattle congregating
around water sources, maybeover-grazing some areas. So they
had to really quickly rebuild alot of those fences. But you can
see here, I mean, these havejust been super heavily grazed,
all these bunch grasses arereally grazed down. And then you

(24:23):
see Kentucky Bluegrass, which isa Poa species. It's an
introduced species. It's notactually from Kentucky. Although
it is the floral emblem, Ithink. But it's really tolerant
to heavy grazing. And so it'sjust naturalized throughout
these landscapes.

And the Bluegrass seemed to be doing just fine.
Whereas most of the nativeshrubs that I was seeing were
being heavily browsed by cattle.And we were walking through a
landscape that completely absentany shrub or tree cover was
actively eroding with these biggullies forming wherever water
collects.

You know what is the impact of cows when
you've got no vegetation cover?When you got incredible erosion?
When you're concerned aboutinvasive species spread across
these fire guards? I reallydon't think that's a lot of
understanding.

Wait... what's a fire guard?

It's basically a fire break.

Okay, yeah.

They were constructed to contain the fire.

They're about 600 kilometers of fire
guards, so essentially roads,put in across this landscape.
And actually you talk to a lotof community members who say,
you know, we saw fire guardsbeen put in or access roads
being punched in in areas wherethere was already access, or
where there were natural firebreaks. You know, we didn't need
600 kilometers of disturbanceacross this already quite
impacted landscape.

Right, I guess some of those fire guards are
critical for stopping the firefrom traveling further. But not
all of those breaks end up beingactually necessary. And once
you've ripped out all thevegetation and the organic
material, that's a prettyserious impact on the landscape.

Exactly. And so the second great goal of the
recovery process wasrehabilitating all of those fire
guards, basically, ripping them,seeding them, planting them. But
still...

It's not like it's back to how it was
before.

This is especially the case in areas that burned
with high heat and highseverity. But that isn't the
only story for this landscape.

No?

No. So we hopped into the car and went a bit
further up hill. Sarah wanted toshow me some of the areas that
burned less severely, wherethere were still species of
cultural significance to thisSecwépemc People.

Whose territory this is.

Yes, along with the Nlakaʼpamux. So she walks me
up to this area where there's afence and a cattle guard across
the road. And the differencefrom one side of the fence to
the other is just crystal clear.

Yeah, you can see on one side, it's pretty
heavily grazed, the other side,we've got really tall Fireweed,
we've got Balsamroots go alittle bit further up in there
we've got these beautifulpatches of Chocolate Lily.

So we walk over to this field of native wildflowers
and grasses – still surrounded,of course, by the remains of
burnt trees.

Of course.

And it's full of chocolate lilies!

You must have been in heaven.

I mean, they were all mostly gone to seed at this
point. But yeah, I could picturewhat they had been like when
they were flowering.

You know, it's actually really nice to get you
talking plants on the showagain.

I know... it's been so long.

So we set up a number of plots, in the
fire, outside the fire, at thesedifferent elevations, and
specifically targeted areas thathad high abundance of these
culturally important plants.

And they're studying these plots to try to
understand how differentseverities of fire at different
elevations impact theregeneration of native plant
communities.

Mmm... so, what are they learning?

Well, nothing's published yet. But the
preliminary results are that inareas where the fire burned with
low to moderate severity,there's been a really strong
regeneration of native plants,and especially those culturally
significant ones.

That's encouraging.

Definitely. On the other hand, though, areas that
burned with high severity hadmuch poor regeneration overall.
Less culturally significantplants, for sure, and more
introduced weeds.

Right. And since these mega fires are burning, so
much of the landscape at higherand higher severities...

It means lots of areas with poor regeneration.
And then you have to layer onall of the other variables. Some
of those are differences inelevation, microclimate,
moisture, or soils, but so muchof it is variation resulting
from human impacts.

So we're thinking not just about fire,
but how fire was interactingwith these other disturbances
that are kind of layered,historically, and still now onto
this landscape.

Right, like roads and fire guards and
livestock.

And forestry. But it turns out that fire severity
is still a key variable.

There's not just one kind of monolithic
fire, there's so many differenttypes of fires. So we need to be
thinking about when is the fireburning? How intensely is it
burning? How much is itconsuming that vegetation? You
know, what season is it burningin? And what ecosystem is it
burning in? And what are thespecific adaptations of plants
or animals in that area to fire?So if we look around at an

(29:27):
ecosystem like this, that wouldhave been a relatively open very
dry Douglas Fir forest. Youknow, historically, this is
characterized by more frequentlow severity fires, maybe, you
know, sporadic more highintensity fires. But
predominantly, this was a kindof low to mixed severity
fire-adapted ecosystem. So thesekinds of fairly frequent really

(29:50):
large and intense fires, thatare killing all of the trees
like this, are probably notcharacteristic are typical of
what this ecosystem is adaptedto.

My major takeaway from that experience is that the
areas that burn at the highestintensities just aren't
recovering that well.

We found across all these forest types
across Elephant Hill, we'reseeing fairly limited short term
recovery, we're seeing lowspecies richness, low species
diversity. But in contrast, inareas burned at kind of low to
even moderate severity, weactually saw a really high
abundance of species of culturalsignificance. So species,

(30:26):
perhaps, that were managed withfire, or are still managed with
fire in some areas. So evencompared to areas that aren't
burnt at all, we're actuallyseeing higher diversity and more
cultural species in those areasthat had maybe some of that cool
ground fire coming through. Sothat really speaks to the
potential for restoring some ofthese areas by putting the right
fire back in the right place atthe right time.

So what else can we learn from the Elephant Hill
fire?

Well, for starters, enough to fill a 241
page report. Did I mention?

Duh. Yeah.

241 pages?

Yes.

Sarah was telling me about the process of writing
the report, in the car on theway down. It actually started as
a way to follow up on the 2018Abbott Chapman report.

Which we discussed in the previous
installment of this series.

So I'd been doing all these interviews as
part of my PhD with communitymembers, Secwépemc community
members, governmentrepresentatives about their
experiences during the 2017 fireseason, and particularly about
the joint recovery — the workbetween governments, between
First Nations and the province,on how to actually recover that
fire landscape.

What fascinated me the most was that she wrote that
report during the 2021wildfires, which struck just as
the region was still recoveringfrom the Elephant Hill fire.

I hadn't lived through evacuations, and I
hadn't lived through a fireseason like that. I think 2021
really changed things for a lotof people, but changed things
for me and how I kind of see theimportance of this work. And I
can really understand why it'sso important for so many of the
communities I work with to havetheir stories heard.

Of course, we taped this interview before so
many people would live throughthe same trauma in 2023.

Right... it's a really grim kind of deja vu.

But back in 2021, as she was trapped in her house,
locked down not by COVID, but byash falling from the sky, Sarah
felt a bit helpless. Shecouldn't contribute to the
firefighting on the frontlines,or help coordinating
evacuations. But what she coulddo was write, and share the
stories that had been sharedwith her.

Yeah, something we can relate to.

And the question at the heart of those stories
is, I think, the same questionabout recovery that you and I
have been asking.

What happens after the smoke clears?

Everyone in the city goes "We have clear
skies, amazing. We can enjoy therest of summer." But for
everyone who's actually out hereliving in these landscapes that
have burned, that's really whenthe challenges begin. You know,
what do we do after the fire?The media attention is gone, on
the whole. But how do we beginto, not just rebuild homes or

(33:18):
get back into our communities,but what do we do with this
burnt landscape?

And while I can't really summarize the whole
report here, what I can do istake you a little bit farther up
the Thompson River toSkeetchestn — where some of the
key voices in the report areleading the recovery and
restoration efforts in theirterritory. And in 2021, when
Sarah was writing that report,they were being evacuated for

(33:44):
the second time in four years.
After the break.

Hey. This is the spot where most shows would play
ads. But ads don't supportFuture Ecologies. It's people
like you who do.
Maybe you care about independentmedia and editorial freedom. Or
maybe you just want nerds likeus to keep telling stories and

(34:14):
making art. Or more importantly,making a space to have these
deep discussions on the complexeco-social issues that are
relevant to all of us today. Nomatter the reason, every single
supporter makes a realdifference in our ability to
make this show. You keep thelights on. You help us bring on

(34:38):
guests producers, and you makesure contributing artists and
musicians get fairlycompensated.
For just $1 a month, you'll geta whole extra podcast feed —
where you can be the first tohear our latest episodes, plus
an assortment of bonus content —and hangout with the whole
community in our Discord server.If you can chip in a little

(34:59):
more. we'll send you stickers,embroidered patches, and if you
want, even set up a call to saythanks, personally. Signing up
is simple. Head tofutureecologies.net/join click
the big purple button, andchoose whatever amount works for
you.
That's futureecologies.net/join

(35:24):
Okay, thanks. And back to theshow.

I'm Adam.

Mendel.

This is Future Ecologies.

The fourth installment in our On Fire
series, which is ofindeterminate length, kind of
like our increasinglyunpredictable fire seasons.

And at this point, in this particular episode, I'm
heading from the 2017 ElephantHill fire footprint over to the
2021 Sparks Lake fire footprint,near Skeetchestn Indian Band.
And Sarah Dickson-Hoyle hasbrought me here to meet Sam
Draney, from Skeetchestn NaturalResources. And the minute we

(36:07):
roll up to the offices, Sampacks us into her truck, and I
also forgot to ask Sam tointroduce herself.

That's strikee two!

In my defense, she had literally the cutest puppy
ever curled up in her backseat.

Sam Draney (36:20):
She's got so many dog breeds in her, I just call
her a designer rez mutt.

All right, all right. That gets a pass. By the
way, did you tape all of yourinterviews in moving vehicles?

It was just that kind of day. Sorry, Mendel.
Anyway, the first thing that Samdoes is to give me a bit of a
lay of the land.

Sam Draney (36:43):
So we have the Tremont fire over here. Sparks
Lake fire here. And then theremainder of Elephant Hill to
the North of us. So when you'resitting in my house, you can
actually see all three burnszones. We kind of have just one
side of us left that isn't burntyet.

Three burns?

Yeah, Skeetchestn is pretty much surrounded.
Elephant Hill was basically thelargest fire in the south of the
province in 2017. And thenSparks Lake actually was the
largest fire in the province in2021, with the Tremont fire not
far behind. And there'sSkeetchestn Indian Band right in
the middle. But once Sam got usoriented, we could do what I was

(37:26):
actually there for which waschatting plants.

Hah! You two must have been peas in a pod.

I was having a great time. Sam told me about
all of these medicinal plantsthat could be found on the
territory.

Sam Draney (37:38):
I harvested Arnica from the Tremont fire last year.
So I did a salve with thatArnica, and I had an older
Arnica salve. And I actually gotto try them out against each
other on people. And the Arnicasalve that I got the fire, you
could feel instantly. The momentyou put it on, there was just
like this huge release in yourmuscles.

It was immediately clear that she's very
knowledgeable and passionateabout plant medicines.

Sam Draney (38:05):
So we have 165 plants that we can prove are
significant to the community.

And you might notice that she said "prove"
there, because part of Sam's jobis surveying whole landscapes
for these culturally significantspecies and features to
documents Secwépemc use, both inthe past and in the present. And
if that isn't cool enough, shealso gets to occasionally stop
that work and start harvesting.

Sam Draney (38:34):
If I identify something harvestable there, I'm
allowed to keep my crew thereand harvest for the community.
And that's always the way atleast I think and the way I
taught my crew to think is we'renot harvesting for ourselves.
We're harvesting for ourcommunity and we're providing to
as many of the community membersas possible. If it's something

(38:56):
they can touch, hold and feel orif it's information. So they go
out and practice that with theirown family.

And she shared with me that it isn't just the
plant medicines that are comingback stronger after the fires.
But also species that weretotally unfamiliar.

Sam Draney (39:13):
After Elephant Hill. There was plants I'd never seen
before... just being out and Ifelt like I'd covered a lot of
land, I knew all the plants andall of a sudden it was like...
golden corydalis, I think itwas, came back and none of us
knew what it was. We sat therefor a lunch break and there was

(39:33):
a bet going on – who could IDthe planet first? I don't
remember who won the bet. Idon't think it was me, 'cause I
think I was the one that boughtthe six pack.

I'm sure I would have lost that bet too. What's
golden corydalis?

It's a pretty little wild flower that likes
disturbance. So it often showsup for the first year or two
after a big fire. And Sam alsostarted to see way more Tiger
Lily and even Soapberry which isan important traditional
medicine.

Sam Draney (40:04):
But I just can't get over the taste. It is not
something I can get used of.I've used it to do cleanses. But
you aren't going to catch medrinking it every day like my
kyé7e. No, it tastes like soap.

I actually really like the taste of
Soapberry...

You and Sam's kyé7e! And Sam told me it wasn't
just plants that were returning.

Sam Draney (40:31):
Everyone's noticed a huge increase in wolf in our
territory, which puts a hugepressure on moose and deer and
other wildlife

Wolves? From the fires?

Yeah, fire makes landscapes much easier for
predators to traverse and huntin.

I guess I'd never really thought about it.

And Mendel, there were also of course, the
mushrooms.

Sam Draney (40:57):
Of course, the mushroom rush after the fires,
like none of us have ever beenexposed to that, really. So that
was really interesting to getout and get to harvest those.
Because like to us that wassomething completely new. We're
like "what is this gross thing?That looks weird coming out of

(41:18):
the ground?"

Yeah, she's, uh, she's gotta be talking about
morels, right?

Yeah, you got it.

Yeah, looks gross. tastes great. Just don't
eat them raw.

Duly noted.

Yeah. Okay, so how did the regeneration at
Sparks Lake compare to ElephantHill?

Other than being somewhat fresher? I mean, Sam's
dealing with a lot of what wesaw over at Elephant Hill, and
down in Cache Creek.

Sam Draney (41:47):
My backyard is the creek. So right down in my back
door, and the creek is within100 metres of my house. Since
the wildfires, I have had toinsure the house because of
flooding. I've lived here for 32years straight. This is the
highest water I've seen. Thingswere more predictable before the

(42:09):
fires. Now rainstorm happens,we're all on high alert. Is
there going to be a mudslide?Road washing out? Are we going
to flood? You just... you don'tknow. Like, I lost a large chunk
of land on my side of the creek.And it happened in a day. So
we're losing huge amounts ofland, just having like huge

(42:32):
amounts of erosion happening onour water bodies.

So flooding and erosion

And other impacts too. Like, cows.

Sam Draney (42:44):
I would like them held off the fires a bit longer.
I've nothing against cows, Ilove them. But I think they
spread weeds. I think theydamage the super fragile plant
community that's coming back.They over graze. The fences are

(43:05):
burnt down, so we have minimalways to control where they're
at. Our water is all exposed.Cows made wallows in water,
causing more erosion. Cowsoveruse trails again, causing
erosion. But I don't see a wayfor us to keep the cattle off.

Right... more of the same.

Yep. And linear features like roads,

Sam Draney (43:33):
The amount of roads we have in our territory is a
big issue.

And fire guards.

Sam Draney (43:39):
I think most of them have been rehabbed now. That
happens pretty fast after thefire. They'll go and rip up the
guards see can't drive down themagain.

But even just putting in the fire guards had
unintended consequences.

Sam Draney (43:56):
The one thing that really got to us is right here
is our community potato patch –uh, Indian Potato... Spring
Beauty.

What's an Indian Potato?

It's kind of a nutty tuber from a wildflower
that you might know as springbeauty.

Ah. I don't... but thank you.

I was just giving you the benefit of the doubt
there.

Yeah.

Anyway, Sam and her team had set up test plots
to study how different variablesand treatments impact the growth
and yields of those Indianpotatoes.

Hey cool!

But the province accidentally built a fire garden
right over one of the communitypotato patches.

Huh... less cool.

It sounded to me as though while relations had
definitely been improvingbetween Skeetchestn and the
other various institutions ofcolonial government since the
Elephant Hill fire, there werestill lots of sore points and a
pretty big power imbalance. Forexample, there was enormous
pressure in the immediateaftermath of the fires to

(44:57):
salvage the remainingharvestable timber as quickly as
possible.
You remember the three greatgoals of the recovery effort
that I mentioned?

Yep, there was range recovery, like building
fences to keep the cattlecontained.... Fire Guard
rehabilitation, and... did weeven get to number three?

No, I was I was saving it. Goal number three was
salvage logging.

Sam Draney (45:25):
We had to go from wildfires to "Now we got to log
it." And for me, that was a lotto handle because I just had to
watch my childhood burn down. Inthe last five years, I got to
watch basically all my childhoodpicking spots with my kyé7e go

(45:45):
up in flames.

So after all of that, logging what little was
left was a pretty tough pill toswallow.

Sam Draney (45:53):
There's still some sore spots, but I guess it's
just part of the machine, youhave to get out and harvest this
while it's still harvestable andit doesn't just fall to the
ground. Oh, the roses are reallygood up here too. Wow

I was also really distracted by the roses.

Plant people... Let's stay on track. Salvage
logging?

Is pretty controversial. Even up there, in
the interior, with a variety ofarguments for and against – from
the economical to theecological, on both sides
actually. When you considerrural livelihoods, the potential
for beetle outbreaks, the riskof deadfall injury, it's not a
clear cut decision.

Ughh.

Except when it ends up being a clear cut
decision. Luckily, Sam was ableto give some input into the
process, offering someguidelines so that at least some
of the potential damage could bemitigated.

Sam Draney (46:53):
So we created guidelines for the companies to
follow in their logging. And oneof those was you can only log
black timber. The one thing Iused against logging red timber,
although might be dead and notcoming back, is that the plant
community underneath was comingback in the first year in the

(47:16):
form of morels – that's wherethey wanted to grow – or, you
know, other plants we've seenlittle Soapberry bushes coming
back. Some lilies, a lot offireweed, of course.

Black timber is like, completely burned up?

Yep, those are the matchsticks

Okay, so, red timber is only like partly
combusted?

It's mostly still dead. But there are red needles
on the trees, and the bark oftenisn't completely blackened. It's
a real balancing act betweeninterests.

It sounds like it. And I think this might be
the moment to point out thatLori, and a bunch of other folks
that we talked to, wanted tomake sure that we mentioned that
it's not just fires and roadsand cows that have contributed
to the flooding.

Right.

It's also industrial forestry, perhaps
primarily industrial forestry.

There is no doubt that harvesting and industrial
forestry across the landscape isalso contributing to make these
landscapes less resilient to theimpacts of atmospheric rivers
and the types of flooding thatwe experienced.

In 2021, even in areas that hadn't just burned,
there were still massive floods.And we can say that those were
exacerbated by forestry.Practically speaking, clear cuts
aren't really that differentfrom intense burns, and BC is in
a league of its own when itcomes to clear cut logging.

Our industrial forest management has been
designed for many decades now totry to sustain timber yield on
the timber har– We call it thetimber harvesting land base. You
know, we are trying to sustaintimber yield and optimize the
economic benefits from that partof British Columbia, that we
have designated or delegated tobe for production of timber.

And this is all accelerated over the previous
decades of a different kind ofsalvage harvesting, that was
following the climate-drivenmountain pine beetle outbreaks.
The logic of salvagingbeetle-killed stands is pretty
similar to the logic forsalvaging those burned stands.

And in doing so we've really simplified our
forests. We have simplified agestructures. We've simplified the
biological legacies that areleft behind after a clear cut
harvesting versus naturaldisturbances. We have focused on
fast growing species likeLodgepole Pine in the interior

(49:43):
of British Columbia. We'vecreated monocultures.

Lori says a big part of this is the widespread
practice of replanting only thesaleable species and suppressing
everything else, including theindustry's ongoing use of
glyphosate

Otherwise known as Roundup.

Yeah, herbicide – sprayed or brushed onto those
fire resistant but lesscommercially valuable trees

Like, Aspen and Birch.

Yeah, it's an unfortunate practice. We're
still kind of entrenched in thisperspective that broadleaf
trees, you know, that their onlycontribution to an ecosystem is
to compete with conifers thatare the timber producers, and
that they need to be eradicatedso that we can optimize the
growth of the conifers.

It's a feedback loop. Simplified forests are
more susceptible to fires andpest outbreaks, which then
creates an imperative to salvagethose stands, leading to more
damage and more simplifiedforests.

Those monocultural, coniferous stands
certainly contributed to thesize, and the spread, and the
intensity of all three of thefires that we've been
discussing. But that's anotherarea where Skeetchestn is
asserting itself, because thebig replanting effort is still
ongoing.

Sam Draney (51:05):
So under that we asked for a mixed tree stand to
be replanted, so like don't justplant all Pine. That happened a
lot in the past. So we asked forlike a mix of Pine, Spruce,
Douglas Fir, and even deciduous– we've asked for near water and
less of the coniferous to beplanted right up to the water.
So the deciduous are given achance. And if there was a

(51:28):
natural patch of deciduouscoming back there are spacing
away from that to give it achance to grow.

They've also been pushing for a more selective
harvest,

Sam Draney (51:37):
We do ask for that. This would still be Douglas fir.
So I'd asked for 50% of thestand to be left up or, you
know, some upright structures.So there is still protection for
animals, shelter, and woodydebris will fall, adding back to
the earth. But, you know,economics and safety usually

(52:03):
wins. Those are two words I hatebecause they're always the top
two reasons for anything tohappen, usually.

I happen to dislike the words economics and
safety for this same reason.

... that could sound bad taken out of context.
But uh, maybe you mean thateconomics and safety aren't bad
words. but the problem is thatthey take exclusive priority
over community and ecologicalhealth.

Yeah, what you said.

But it's interesting that Sam is using
the word ask here, ask who?

Well, at a basic level, the Skeetchestn reserve
is surrounded by mostly burntout Crown Land that is part of
both range and timber tenuresystems. And while all of that
land is the Secwépemc territory,it's still the BC government and
the business interests callingthe shots at the end of the day.

(53:04):
So Skeetchestn is still in theposition of having to ask.

Sam Draney (53:08):
That's where I feel like that's our power. We don't
come in demanding. although itmight come off that way. It's a
strong ask, a strong suggestion,a strong "you should probably do
this". But you know, we stillget thrown back kind of science
and stuff like that, or theyhave to do it this way. Because

(53:30):
it's been done that way.

Whether it's economics or safety, science or
tradition, they can all justsound like justifications
sometimes for the status quo.

Right.

As far as I can tell. While there is a general
consensus on an overallimprovement in working
relationships in the region,since the mega fires, it's still
hit and miss at an individuallevel. And a lot depends on
personal relationships andtrust. Because the colonial
structures and power imbalancesare still very real.

Sam Draney (54:04):
I won't lie I do not have relationships with BC
Wildfire. I had a pretty hard gowith them on mainly Tremont.
Sparks Lake, they were veryrespectable. We went across the
river to Tremont – completelydifferent story. I ended my
working relationship with themthere. I've yet to really

(54:25):
rebuild that with them.

And even at Elephant Hill, things got off to
a pretty bad start.

Sam Draney (54:32):
We weren't invited on to elephant hill at the start
of it. We just went out and wewere doing our own territorial
patrol. We were doing our ownreporting system on the fire
because we didn't feel like wewere getting the right
information and up to dateinformation from BC Wildfire.

And that is how Sam Draney became a fire
watcher.

What is a fire watcher?

Well, starting out, actually, she says she was
a fire bug.

Sam Draney (55:03):
We've always been fire bugs in Skeetchestn. A lot
of it when I was younger wasmore just getting to sit back
and watch the older people doit. But then I eventually grew
up and I got my own burn rake.And that's all we usually use.
It's just a steel rake and scoopup some weeds, dry weeds with

(55:24):
that light it on fire, and youkind of just walk along and
start stuff on fire in a plannedway. And I hear that from a lot
of people that like burning wassomething that we've always done
from young age, and it wasn'tsomething scary where you... of
course you have to be safe, butyou know, that the kids were
still involved.

Unsurprisingly, these fire bug activities can be
another area of friction withthe province, especially on
lands beyond the boundaries ofthe reserve.

Sam Draney (55:55):
And that's the thing that I think holds a lot of us
back and holds back the culturalburning, is that we have to jump
through all of these hoops. Anda lot of us, you know, we don't
know how to fill out thegovernment forms or do burn
plans. But we understand fire,and we understand its connection

(56:16):
into the circle. And withoutthat we're starting to lose our
culture.

She was talking about controlled burns, right?

Cultural burns. Yeah. And we're gonna come back
to that. But it was ElephantHill that made her a fire
watcher.

Sam Draney (56:35):
I've always said I'm not a firefighter. I'm a fire
watcher. It's not in me to putout a wildfire. I have a really
strong spiritual connection toit. And I believe that it's out
there cleaning up everythingwe've messed up. Oh, there's the
Arnica down here. Wow that'sreally good. Beautiful. Still

(56:55):
harvestable. That's really greatstuff to harvest. It's better
looking than the stuff I got.

You plant people, you're hopeless. Okay,
so again, what is a firewatcher?

Well, I think it's a great example of a concept
that was introduced to me by Ronand Marianne Ignace, called
"Walking on Two Legs".

Okay, your answers just keep raising more
questions. Who are Ron andMarianne?

Remember the couple with the academic
meet-cute from the verybeginning of the episode?

Oh, the one who was cursed.

Yep, that's Marianne. She and Ron are at the
heart of a cultural andecological revitalization that's
happening at Skeetchestn, andelsewhere as well. It involves
the fire bugs and the firewatchers, and learning how to
walk on two legs together.
We're going to dig deeper intoall of that, next time – in part

(57:56):
five of our series On Fire.

This episode of Future Ecologies was produced
and hosted by Adam Huggins andme, Mendel Skulski. With the
voices of Lori Daniels, SarahDickson-Hoyle, and Sam Draney,
plus Marianne and Ron Ignace.And with music by Thumbug,
Any-Angled Light, and SunfishMoon Light.

(59:06):
We want to send a big thank youto Lux Meteora for the cover
artwork, and to Daniel Piercefor speaking with us on
background. You can find links,citations and a transcript for
this episode, plus photos fromAdams road trip to Cache Creek
and Skeetchestn, all atfutureecologies.net

(59:28):
And, as always, this independentad-free podcast was made
possible with the support of ouramazing community on Patreon. To
get early episode releases,bonus behind the scenes content,
and access to our Discordserver, join us at
patreon.com/futureecologies.

(59:48):
'til next time thanks forlistening and stay safe

All Episodes

FE5.4 - On Fire: Under Water (Part 4)

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

The Nikki Glaser Podcast

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}FE5.4 - On Fire: Under Water (Part 4)