GLST 300 Ecological Justice (Eric Kurtz)

For two months in the spring of 2016, the world watched as wildfire ravaged the Canadian town of Fort McMurray. Firefighters named the fire "the Beast." It acted like a mythical animal, alive with destructive energy, and they hoped never to see anything like it again. Yet it's not a stretch to imagine we will all soon live in a world in which fires like the Beast are commonplace. A glance at international headlines shows a remarkable increase in higher temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands- a trifecta for igniting wildfires like we've rarely seen before. This change is particularly noticeable in the northern forests of the United States and Canada. These forests require fire to maintain healthy ecosystems, but as the human population grows, and as changes in climate, animal and insect species, and disease cause further destabilization, wildfires have turned into a potentially uncontrollable threat to human lives and livelihoods.

Wildland fire is an important, pervasive, and a sometimes-destructive ecological process in many forest ecosystems across the globe. In some cases, wildland fire maintains and reinforces forest dynamics. This is common, for example, in forests with thick-barked species that are adapted to frequent, low-severity fires or in forests where species’ regenerative traits (e.g., serotiny, resprouting) allow them to endure regimes of recurrent high-severity fire. However, wildland fire can also act as a catalyst that changes the successional trajectory of forest ecosystems, particularly if the factors responsible for historical fire regimes (e.g., frequency, severity, or season) have been substantially altered and exceed species’ adaptive capacity.