Premier Danielle Smith sobbed as she tried to describe Jasper’s beauty and the devastation of that magical mountain town.
The surprise wasn’t so much that she choked up — who wouldn’t? — but how long her struggle to speak went on.
A premier who talked her way into office was virtually wordless for minutes. Her ministers and others at the news conference began to look uneasy and even concerned for her.
Some say this was all an act. That’s ridiculous.
What I saw was not political acting but the pain of a leader who knows she’s utterly powerless.
The Jasper fire raged at that moment, unstoppable. The leader of a $70-billion government with beefed up firefighting could not do anything to defeat this monster.
As one federal official said, there are “no tools in the tool box” to stop a blaze with flames rising 100 metres above the burning treetops.
The hellfire of it is, this is no longer a rare event. The same thing happened (but worse) in Fort McMurray in 2016, Waterton Lakes National Park in 2017, Slave Lake 2011.
The public snapped to attention because the fires did the unthinkable by ravaging towns, cities and managed areas where we imagine ourselves to be safe from natural disasters.
Today, Banff National Park, the townsite, and even Canmore are also at extreme risk, according to Cliff White, a retired environmental scientist with the park.
He told Postmedia’s Bill Kaufmann that vast “circles of protection” must be carved out of the forest around vulnerable centres.
White feels the work will take decades and it may already be too late to save Banff from its inevitable fate.
Calgarians shouldn’t feel complacent. The province also says the risk is extreme in the forest area west of the city.
Fire will always start with today’s extreme heat waves. But it’s not good enough to just cite the obvious factor, climate change, and look to policies such as taxes for the answers.
This is in many ways a practical problem. Wildfires become monsters when they encounter old and failing trees, pine needles, the skeletons of trees killed by pine beetles.
Provincial and federal governments need to urgently expand controlled burns and create large firebreaks.
They have done a terrible job at this, making passes at controlled burning without doing nearly enough.
Indigenous people have known how to manage woodlands for thousands of years. They sculpted the forests to make their communities safe and create space for wildlife and vegetation to thrive.
Today, many watch with contempt as the forests are neglected until they become firebombs.
“This attitude that the world works best when people aren’t part of it is very wrong,” says an Edmonton activist.
“That’s basically the attitude of environmentalism today. They don’t respect traditional environmentalism, which was looking after the land and ensuring that there was diversity of plants and diversity of animal life.”
With proper forest care there would still be fires, he said, “but the buildup of fuel to create such a crazy fire would never have happened.”
A Calgary friend says: “We should turn over the management of forests to Indigenous people and pay them to do it.”
Not a bad idea, that. But governments have always done pretty much the opposite.
Indigenous people were evicted from Jasper Park when it was formed in 1907. Whole communities and families left, taking with them their animals, children and centuries of knowledge.
Photos of the forest from that time show younger, less vulnerable trees, the result of generations of First Nations management.
But as Parks Canada now says, “Indigenous peoples were considered incompatible with nature and so couldn’t live in, hunt or harvest within park boundaries.”
Unfortunately, official regret for this appalling history doesn’t extend to adopting Indigenous techniques that actually work.
And so, the monsters are born.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald
X: @DonBraid