At 7 p.m. on July 22, an American couple returning from a holiday in Alaska was driving south on the Icefields Parkway, on their way from Jasper to Lake Louise. It was raining, they later reported, and very windy. They were 27 kilometres south of Jasper when they saw a flash of lightning ahead that appeared to strike the ground. A few minutes later, they saw to their left that the forest was ablaze and that the strong wind appeared to be feeding it. They immediately reported it.
At 8 p.m., Parks Canada issued an evacuation alert for the entire national park, including the Jasper townsite. At 10 p.m. that evacuation alert became an evacuation order. Firefighters soon found themselves facing the conditions fire experts call “crossover,” the point at which a wildfire can become a firestorm. Firefighters soon confronted a 500 Celsius sky-high tsunami of fire and dangerously toxic smoke driven by winds of up to 125 kilometres an hour moving five kilometres an hour coming right at them. It was as if hell had come to Earth. Soon after, a third of the town burned down. Miraculously, no lives were lost during the evacuation. The coordinated response of the Jasper National Park field unit and the Municipality of Jasper can only be described as heroic.
Could the same thing happen to Canmore or Banff? Absolutely. We are every bit as vulnerable here as Jasper was. All we have to do is look up to see why. We live at the bottom of a stone cauldron filled nearly to the rim with firewood. Seen through the eyes of fire, this entire valley, including the town, is nothing but fuel.
One might well ask how we got ourselves into this situation. The fires that continue to burn in Jasper are an answer to that question. Following the Enlightenment, educated European elites dismissed the Indigenous use of fire as primitive nonsense. Europeans brought these prejudices with them when they colonized North America.
While the attitude that we had to fear fire gave the forestry profession an enemy to fight as well as markers for success, the result was that there were too few “good fires” and the number of “bad fires” increased over time. The result was fuel build-up and with that build-up, the most destructive fires in history.
So, what are we dealing with here that is so alarming? Because of the extent of warming in its north and its continental extent, Canada is already warming at twice the global average. Presently, it appears there is nothing whatsoever to prevent Canada from reaching 3 C, or more, of warming by later this century. The problem is that even with the degree of warming we have already experienced, places and things burn now that didn’t burn before.
As John Vaillant concluded in Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, “This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place – a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past three million years.”
So, what do we do?
First, we need to fight apathy and be on guard against feelings of helplessness and despair. We avoid despair by remaining focused on what brings us joy in our lives, but also have to accept responsibility.
Rather than despairing about the climate threat, we need to put anxiety to work for us and for the future of our community. We do that by persistently pressing politically for adequate funding for under-resourced municipal and provincial regional fire protection measures including a greater number of initial attack crews, more prescribed burns, Indigenous cultural burning and the establishment of concentric fire breaks surrounding the town as proposed by former Banff fire ecologist Cliff White.
The third lesson we learn from Jasper is that it is up to home and business owners to meaningfully FireSmart their properties if they want to protect them in the event of a major wildland-urban interface fire. In that regard, at the community level, Jasper is both an example, and a lesson.
A broader fourth lesson is the global climate solidarity cavalry is not coming to save us. Because there isn’t one. We have to save ourselves. This, however, should not be seen as the end of the world. There is enormous power in realizing the power of community – for it is at the local level – the level at which all of us live and work – that we have the most power to effect change and to act most effectively in service of where and how we live and who we love, now and in the future.
The final lesson Jasper teaches us is more difficult. We need to get to the root of the growing fire problem which means the unlimited social licence granted to fossil-fuel producers must be revoked.
It is now up to us to do what we can, where we can, with what we have and what we know, while at the same time aiming to create the conditions in which we may discover the most enduring qualities in ourselves, in others and in our community. In this regard, Jasper is again not only a lesson but an example. We simply cannot fail. This can and must be our finest hour.
Bob Sandford is Senior Government Relations Liaison for Global Climate Emergency Response at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. He lives in Canmore.