Tumpline
Smoke on the Water
“TOLD YOU WE DIDN’T NEED THE STOVE.” PHOTO: HAP WILSON
Quetico management plan WELCOMES FOREST FIRES
ROBIN REILLY pays no heed to Smokey the Bear. As superintendent of Queti- co Provincial Park in northwestern Ontario, he cheers when parts of the park go up in flames. Last summer, despite the fact that
4,000 hectares of wildfires made por- tions of Quetico’s famous network of canoe routes off-limits to paddlers, not one water bomber entered the park’s airspace. “Fire is consistent with our goal of
protecting the park’s natural process- es,” says Reilly. He maintains that a “let it burn” policy is not only far cheaper than suppressing forest fires, it’s better for the ecological health of the park Historical data indicates that an
average of 2,500 hectares (or 0.5 per cent) of the park ought to burn annu-
ally, says Reilly. So last year’s burn was a bit above the hoped-for average, but the management plan doesn’t enforce an upper limit on the amount of for- est that’s allowed to burn each year. Te only thing that will bring a fire crew into Quetico, says Reilly, are con- ditions like prolonged dry, hot weath- er and strong winds which threaten to push a fire into surrounding areas outside of the park. Several national parks in Canada
allow forest fires to burn or carry out prescribed burns as a matter of policy, but Quetico is the only provincial park in Ontario that explicitly welcomes forest fires in its management plan. Reilly argues that fire is a normal
part of the forest cycle and that regu- lar, uncontrolled fires increase soil nu-
trients, control forest pests and create a diverse forest consisting of trees of different ages and species. Tis cre- ates a variety of wildlife habitat. And taking the long view, a series
of scattered, smaller fires reduce the likelihood of larger, catastrophic fires, says Reilly. Contrast Quetico’s 2006 fire stats
with those of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, its sister park in Minnesota which tries to con- trol wildfire, and it looks like Reilly is right. About 16,000 hectares of forest burned in the Boundary Wa- ters last summer, including the mas- sive 13,000-hectare Cavity Lake fire, which cost $10 million and took more than 400 firefighters nearly a month to contain. — Conor Mihell
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