Watch: how we’re grappling with B.C’s new wildfire reality

“I’ve been all over the territories looking for food and medicine. … Those [cultural] burns that we had this spring were one of the most productive places that I’ve seen all year.”

That was just one of the hopeful reflections Darlene Vegh, a fire stewardship leader with the Gitanyow Lax’yip Guardians, shared during a very special Narwhal webinar this week.

At a time of worsening wildfires, northwest B.C. reporter Matt Simmons convened a crew of inspiring experts to ask: how can we use the power of fire to heal relationships with the land — and each other?

After joining Vegh to witness one of those cultural burns in Gitanyow earlier this year, Matt wrote about the potential for fire to heal the landscape. At this week’s event, we learned the actual — and extraordinary — results.

“I’ve driven past that section a few times this summer, and it’s just bursting with life,” Matt shared. “You can see the vibrancy of the undergrowth; it’s like a whole different colour of green. It’s like a new colour spectrum, and it looks incredibly beautiful.”

Reflecting back, Vegh estimated the productivity of the land tripled after the burn. The renewal of the land brought back animals, too. Wildlife cameras recorded five species of ungulates — in an area where deer had not been seen for decades, Vegh said.

Kira Hoffman, a fire ecologist who helped lead those spring burns, witnessed it, too. “Some of the plants that we visited this spring, after our burn, we didn’t even recognize; they were so huge and juicy and tasty,” she said. “You could see and feel the land kind of waking up again. You could feel the land being really excited about being burned, I guess. And everyone was just laughing and giggling that day, because there was just so much hope — that you could see — that it was really working.”

Bringing cultural burns back to the landscape and preparing B.C. communities for bigger, hotter wildfires are part of the same story. It’s going to take renegotiating our relationship with fire, building trust, leaning on local expertise — and getting comfortable with failure.

For Kiah Allen, the cultural and prescribed fire knowledge and research lead with BC Wildfire Service, the progress over the last decade is exciting — and there’s a role for everyone to play. “More people [are] interested in learning about fire and wanting to come out and be involved on the ground,” she said on the panel.

Vegh, who has spent 30 years on the effort to bring fire back to Gitanyow, sees a tipping point coming. “My one big, huge excitement is that we can bring an ancestral fire management tool back into existence and heal the land,” she said. “That’s my excitement. It’s my passion. It’s my joy.”

This event was part of In the Line of Fire, a series made possible with support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our work.