It's the Forest Management, Stupid

The devastating forest fires in Jasper, Alberta have show the country what it already knows - that the government will gladly use its pet causes as a front for not doing anything about forest management and fire prevention:

Parks Canada’s insistence that thousands of hectares of dead forest be allowed to regenerate naturally turned Jasper National Park into kindling.

Bill Byrne, a former Alberta deputy minister, frequently butted heads with federal officials over their refusal to thin out dead forests in the national parks. He wrote in the Edmonton Journal on Friday that Parks Canada’s rigidity ensured “the parks were becoming tinder boxes which would not only destroy the federal parks but, once started and out of control, would spread into adjacent Alberta forests.”

According to Byrne, a highly decorated archaeologist, the provincial warnings to Parks Canada go back at least 25 years when the mountain pine beetle began killing trees in Jasper, Banff and Waterton National Parks.

The Alberta government permits selective logging of dead trees from provincial forests. It allows limited firebreaks in advance, conducts prescribed burns and allows “natural fires to run their course if lives or private property were not at risk,” Byrne explained.

That’s far from the eco-extremist approach by Parks Canada. For instance, no selective logging was permitted inside the parks to thin out the hundreds of thousands of trees lost to beetles. Instead, they stood bare of needles and red for up to two decades, getting drier by the year like giant matchsticks.

When wildfire finally came, kilometre after kilometre of the beautiful national park turned into a tsunami of flame that surged over a large part of Jasper townsite in a matter of hours.

But the concerns weren’t just from Alberta.

As long ago as 2016, Parks Canada’s own chief conservation officer suggested it might be wise to engage in a little “active management,” i.e. selective logging. Nothing was done.

In 2017, the town’s popular, longtime mayor, Richard Ireland, pleaded with Parks Canada that all the deadwood had become a “major fire hazard.” He worried even then that the “increased fuel load” could, if ignited, make Jasper “the next Fort McMurray.”

The “green” cultists in charge at Parks Canada wouldn’t hear it. It was around this time the federal agency decided to step up its efforts to convince campers and sightseers to take better care extinguishing their fires and putting out their cigarettes.

In 2018, the House of Commons natural resources committee recommended immediate and significant intervention at Jasper. And two longtime professional foresters, Emile Begin and Ken Hodges, did a thorough examination of the problem and predicted a “mega fire” was inevitable unless an active intervention occurred. “Houses and livelihoods are at a very high risk of being destroyed.”

Their predictions have come true, unfortunately.

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The federal government is pushing back against suggestions that it waited too long to act to combat the raging wildfire that made its way to Jasper’s historic resort town in Alberta late Wednesday.

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Is that so?

And do fires consume? Dry wood?:

Dead trees ravaged by the mountain pine beetle in Jasper National Park may have been a factor to the devastating blaze that destroyed hundreds of homes, say forest scientists, but ultimately they were not as pivotal as the high winds, hot temperatures and overall dry conditions.