Each year, British Columbia’s (BC) wildfire seasons force us to reckon with two stories about fire that are simultaneously true. With drought conditions persisting in the West, we know that this year’s fires will be damaging and even deadly. BC is still reeling from the record-breaking 2023 season, and fires have been burning out of control in the North since early spring. Three years after the Lytton fire on June 30, 2021, the community is still feeling its impacts. The harms are also indirect: new science shows that 50,000 people died prematurely due to wildfire smoke exposure over the last decade in California.
A second story is also true. We know that we need more fire to produce healthy, bio-diverse ecosystems. Failing to burn debris risks creating explosive accumulations of fuels on the land that pose direct risks to communities and creates even larger, more dangerous wildfires. Fire is both dangerous and necessary — a deadly hazard we somehow must (re)learn to live with. In BC, First Nations are leading the way in reimagining a relationship with fire through prescribed and cultural burning projects aimed at putting fire back on the land to promote the growth of desirable species while mitigating risk in proximity to communities.1
In 2023, I worked with Petroglyph Studios to create Living with Smoke: Lessons from the Chinchaga Fire. Living with Smoke began as my way of grappling with these two stories of fire. The comic follows a massive smoke plume that rose up from Dane-zaa land in the Peace River district of BC and spread around the whole northern hemisphere in the fall of 1950.
From my office in southern Norway, I traced smoke from the Chinchaga plume (and other plumes that rose from northern forests in the 20th century) from Canada to Scotland, Germany, Sweden, Russia, and Alaska. Over time, ash from big fires has settled in layers in arctic ice and lakebed mud. Scientists use cores taken from these materials to identify significant fire years. The Chinchaga fire appears in these records as a dark layer between sheets of ice and sediment. Using the dates of known smoke events from scientific studies, I searched archives, historic newspapers, and journals for human accounts of transient smoke to better understand how smoke was observed and interpreted by people who lived under its haze at different times and in different places.
As people around the world breathed in Chinchaga smoke and watched it colour the sky, they told different stories about its origins and meanings. Those stories were based on their experiences and understandings about the world. The archival record shows that, although the meanings we ascribe to them change, experiences like living under a hazy red sun, tasting ash on our tongues, and thinking about distant burning forests are a regular part of our human experience.
Story-telling is how we make sense of our world, particularly when that world becomes disorienting. Fires like Chinchaga have become more frequent since 1950. In the last decade, satellites have traced wildfire smoke across the Atlantic almost every year, meaning that more people than ever are breathing smoke from Canadian fires. In 2024, we are already telling stories about the coming fire season as we attempt to make sense of a fire prone environment that seems to hold many contradictions. When we do, we might consider how our experiences are historically constituted. The way we think about red suns and hazy skies is a product of our expectations about our environment and a relationship with fire that has been built over time.
Drawing on historical experience can allow us to imagine a better future with fire — one where many cool burns connect us to disturbance cycles, clearing debris and making room for new growth. When we can tell stories about fire that embrace its inherent contradictions, we might be better equipped to mitigate its harms.
Living with Smoke is part of “Wildsmoke,” a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Action funded by the European Commission and held at the University of Stavanger between 2021 and 2023.
Notes
1. For a recent example, see the Boothroyd Indian Band’s Cultural Burn Project.
Latest posts by Mica Jorgenson (see all)
- Living with Smoke: A Comic for the Fire Season - June 25, 2024
- A Year of NiCHE – Looking Back at 2023 - November 6, 2023
- Drones in Environmental Humanities Research - April 28, 2023
- Wild Smoke: Forest Fires and Air Pollution in BC since 1950 - March 1, 2023
- Fire Stories: Encountering Wildfire in the Archives and on the Land - August 26, 2022
- Call for Contributors – Fire Stories - May 5, 2022
- Online Event: “Smoke Seasons: Living with Wildfire since 1900” with Mica Jorgenson - March 31, 2022
- Smoke Seasons – Tracing Transient Smoke Across Northern Borders - May 13, 2021
- Rhizomes: An Interview with Mica Jorgenson - December 15, 2020
- Fire Break? Environmental History and the 2019 Wildfire Season - October 23, 2019