By: Olivia Sherman, News Writer
For Yolanda Clatworthy, wildfires are no longer a matter of if they will happen, but when. This grim perspective can lead to proactive wildfire prevention, lessening the size, severity, and impact of mega-wildfires. Clatworthy is the project manager for the Wildfire Mitigation Initiative, which aims to proactively prevent mega-wildfires across BC. Working under SFU’s Centre for Dialogue, Clatworthy plans to stop these wildfires through dialogue and active prevention.
Clatworthy explained in an interview with The Peak that the Centre for Dialogue helps to “use dialogue as a means to address some of society’s most pressing challenges,” which includes environmental challenges. “Our role, as it’s being developed and as it’s emerging, is as kind of a convening role, where we bring folks together in dialogue to say what our common priorities are.”
As the program manager for Wildfire Mitigation Initiative, Clatworthy looks at “how dialogue can advance solutions” through the promotion of understanding and learning, uplifting voices of marginalized and impacted communities, and increasing the resilience of both forests and human communities. Wildfire mitigation follows a myriad of strategies, many of which are centered around proactivity and prevention, “rather than looking at response and recoveries or suppression, which are also important,” Clatworthy said. “This is just a different piece of the puzzle.
“There is a lot of work and resources and policies and legislation around wildfire suppression,” Clatworthy said, before adding that while suppression is important, “mitigation has been sort of the lost little cousin.”
Clatworthy recognized that fire suppression isn’t as simple as it seems, and that a “perfect storm” of conditions have exacerbated BC’s wildfire crisis. Some of these reasons include climate change, the densification of BC forests, the value of timber sales, and the criminalization of Indigenous stewardship over the land and ritual burning practices. Merely enacting fire suppression is not as simple as it seems, as there are many causes contributing to why wildfires happen that must be acted on first.
Some fires are beneficial for the environment, and some ecosystems are dependent on regular, naturally-regulated wildfires, Clatworthy explained. Some of these prevention practices include “fuel removing,” which is the removal or thinning of underbrush, some of the main fuels for massive wildfires. Many Indigenous communities across Canada practiced ritual, controlled burning for thousands of years, which was made illegal by the Canadian government with the Brush Fire Act of 1874.
“We need these proactive measures in order to lessen the impact,” she said. These measures include “moving in a livable region to urban planning, [and] mass timber,” among others. Clatworthy stressed the importance of this mitigation, while recognizing that “no one wants to hear how we can do things better while things are burning around them.”
