Bruce Hyer on the los of Wabakimi Lodge to Fire

It's just absolutely astonishing that these fires get so big now and they move so fast.

Lawrence, do you know why they are huge now and more of them? There are two reasons.

One has been all over the media and it's climate change.

Is there really anybody out there besides Donald Trump that believes that climate change isn't real? So we know that's a big cause.

But the other cause is the forest industry for 60 years has insisted that the taxpayers and MNR put out every little fire whenever possible.

Well, smoking's a bit of a lie.

We cannot prevent forest fires, but we sure can postpone them.

So to maximize the forest inventory for the forest industry, you and I have been paying to put out all the little fires in good use, and what's happened is the fuel load has built up, And normally in nature, there are lots of little and medium sized fires that act as fire breaks and diversify the forest in age classes and species.

And now we've postponed for decades.

And then this year, climate change, unusually hot dry year, high winds and boom.

So, um, MNR has to show responsibility because they haven't been listening to the science, they've been listening to the forest companies.

Now, why did the forest companies do this? Well, the bigger the pie, the bigger the slice they can take every year.

So by pretending that every tree, every acre, far away, small trees, inoperable, is really in their inventory, they can over-harvest or harvest more and sooner, and they're just about done.

But they've been pretending that 40% of their inventory is there for the future, and it's not.

They're not taking into account anything that's destroyed in the renewal of forest fires.

And from what I understand, the boreal forest is genetically designed to only reproduce and recover after forest fires.

Like, isn't that the case? It

is, but that's the case when there are small and medium-sized fires, oftentimes that don't crown.

They burn the underbrush, but not that hot.

They bounce right back.

The indigenous people used to deliberately set those kinds of fires to increase wildlife and for their ends, but they manage the fires quite well.

But now we have hot fires that are bigger and they're so big they take all the trees and they burn up the dust and the soil.

So this is really bad.

It's a scorched earth kind of situation we're experiencing now.

Is there a pine beetle situation? Do you have pine