I cannot believe how the media sees wildland fire as “scarring and devastating” and not renewing and regenerative. So many earth ecosystems are dependent upon fire to flush out excess nutrients, disease, pestilence, and mutation. Without fire, these systems become eutrophic, lifeless, devolve, and significantly decrease in resilience. Symptoms of fire suppression are everywhere within the BWCAW, including excessive organic litter, increasing dominance by native nitrophilic species, declines in biodiversity, and decreasing water quality. By suppressing wildfire to “preserve” the wilderness, we have unintentionally set it up for instantaneous invasive and dominance by nitrophiles, buckthorn, jumping worms, and cyanobacteria. Our fire suppression BMPs will destroy the very “wilderness” we seek to preserve.
Humans have burned these landscapes for thousands of years, barefoot, without air support, and incident command. Sacred fire was used to enhance edible vegetation for the people and the animals they loved. In many northern cultures, it was the grandmothers who held and released sacred fire. Goes to show how broken our relationship is with fire and the land.
Almost every keystone organism within the boreal ecosystem (not forest) is fire dependent. Red pine, moose, wild rice, serviceberry, lake trout, caribou, wolf, deer, vole, gray jay, raven, pollinators, blueberries, all disappear from landscapes without fire. (Some people may question “wild rice” and “lake trout”; however, high water quality associated with this landscape is clearly the outcome of deep fire removing excessive detritus leaching nutrients into the aquatic over 10,000 years); lake trout and wild rice are truly fire dependent, as are we.
I can’t wait to paddle into these renewed lands and contrast the 2026 firescapes with firescapes of past decades; to see the amount of carbon sequestered for millennium, the amount of nitrogen immobilized, the beautiful boreal grasses with strawberries, the released trees in pine-birch groves and aspen parklands, and the nooks and crannies where fire cannot go: a shifting mosaic of successional seres over time and space, maximizing diversity, ecosystem function, resilience, and services. Is it a boreal grassland, or boreal savannah, or boreal forest depends upon when and where we observe. By far the sickest, least resilient, and least diverse sere is the oldest and most decrepit, what we call “forest,” a European term that had nothing to do with tree densities. On the other hand, savanna, e.g. “pine savanna,” is a North American Indigenous term for landscapes with large parklike trees, native grasses, and fire.
The only way we can effectively care (let us refrain from using the term “man”-age) for this land is by decolonizing our minds, accepting we are not in control, cannot control, and should not control nature, but instead work with nature’s rhythms and cycles. Every time we seek to maximize a white colonial value, whether lumber, fish, or “wildnerness,” we end up destroying the very entity we sought to “preserve.”
Let us see fire as sacred, as humans have here before for thousands of years. Let us trust in traditional intuition for landcare, over thousands of generations, isntead of our current “command and control.”