By RICK LAING
As the autumn weather descends upon us, I start to think about forest fires and what can be done over the winter to reduce the risk of wildfire in our 20-acre forest.
The Wilkie Way area was first logged in the late 1960s, about a dozen years before we purchased our land, and we marvel at how it has transformed itself into the thriving Coastal Douglas Fir ecosystem of today.
Over the decades, I have learned a lot and helped a bit, removing hundreds of dead trees under 10 inches in diameter (larger dead fir and cedar become woodpecker wildlife trees) and using them for firewood, biochar or leaving them close to the forest floor to build soil and humus. Letting in the sunlight allows arbutus, broadleaved trees and undergrowth, mosses and wildflowers to flourish, but too much light overheats the forest floor and allows invasives and grasses to move in.
However, the logging disruption 60 years ago was also favourable for the growth of lodgepole pine trees, the most widespread conifer in B.C., and we have dozens that now stand at 80 feet tall and waiting for fire. Unlike firs, pines are a pyrocentric tree. When they experience drought they close their stomata, retain their water and produce terpenoids, a natural flammable substance. Tree scientist, Harriet Rix in her brilliant 2025 book The Genius of Trees – How they Mastered the Elements and Shaped the World describes how trees have shaped fires for millions of years. A quote from ecologist Oliver Rackham, “Trees and other plants are not flammable by misfortune but by adaptation.”
Many people hike the #2 trail on Mount Erskine Nature Reserve, but few would notice that the trees from about the midway point to the peak viewpoint are, I would estimate, 50 to 80 per cent lodgepole pine. That area would have been old-growth fir but was logged after the Second World War and probably burned, which would work to the advantage of the pines, and now with our hotter and dryer summers, has created a preferred habitat for pines instead of the native CDF forest, which was not pyrocentric, up there.
Interestingly, eucalyptus, a pyrocentric tree on steroids, has become the dominant tree of Australia (80 per cent) largely due to Aboriginal peoples clearing the encroaching rainforest and native oaks with fire. Eucalyptus grows fast, burns hard, is poisonous and lowers the water table to kill neighbouring trees, but because of its economic value as fibre, it, along with pine, are the most commonly planted forestry trees worldwide. Controlled burns do work in some forests (the Redwoods) but are ineffective and downright dangerous in many others, particularly in a world with a warming climate.
In our forest, I cut all pine saplings and, with care, drop the mature ones for firewood and hope other people will consider doing the same.