Everybody has a Jasper story. In the aftermath of the July wildfire that ripped through Jasper National Park and the Jasper townsite, people from around the world shared theirs.
My own story includes countless summer days camping/hotelling and winter days skiing. In fact, I was in Jasper paddling my feet in Jasper Lake alongside hundreds of others the day before the town was evacuated. We had no inkling of the disaster to come. Officials believed the main fire erupted from lightning strikes the following day, and, in the words of Jasper mayor Richard Ireland, moved with such speed and ferocity it “humbled the humans on the ground” trying to stop the flames.
The only thing that moved as fast was the finger pointing in the days after. The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees said the provincial government had “refused to heed warnings from front-line wildland firefighting staff and bears responsibility for the disaster.” The right-wing sovereigntist group Free Alberta Strategy blamed federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault, saying that “while Ottawa fixates on climate change rhetoric, their neglect of forest fire prevention has left Alberta’s landscapes vulnerable to devastation.”
The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was later determined to be earth’s hottest day on record.
Premier Danielle Smith, ever one to attack the federal government, suggested that jurisdictional barriers impeded the province’s ability to help fight the fire on federal lands. “We can’t just send equipment into federal airspace without coordination,” said Smith, who asked for a unified wildfire command with the federal government.
That’s a great idea. It won’t stop future megafires. It will make fighting them more coordinated. But, according to experts and both the Alberta and federal governments, the Jasper fire was so ferocious and fast, with a wall of flame 100 metres high and generating its own weather system of lightning strikes, no amount of coordination could have stopped it.
Critics blamed Parks Canada for not doing enough over the years to clear out swaths of deadwood created by pine beetles (with the scope of their infestation itself a result of a warming climate). While deadwood creates its own fire hazard, it’s something of a red herring when it comes to the Jasper fire, according to wildfire expert Mike Flannigan with Thompson Rivers University. He pointed out the pine-beetle deadwood had been on the ground for years, and this material “supports intense surface fire but generally doesn’t support crown fires.”
The Jasper fire was a crown fire, where flames race through the treetops and fire-fuelled winds expel burning embers several kilometres ahead, easily crossing fire breaks. It’s the kind of fire that hit Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016. “We can’t stop these fires,” said Flannigan, who has been warning us for years about impending wildfires. But even he was shocked by the immensity of Alberta’s 2023 wildfire season, which saw 2.2 million hectares burn, 10 times the yearly average.
Flannigan said better coordination between various levels of government is key to fighting fires, and that we’ll learn valuable lessons from the Jasper one. But in the end the main culprit is something of a taboo topic for the Alberta government.
“We are seeing more disasters because of climate change,” said Flannigan. “We’re seeing more extreme fires.”
Premier Smith, a loud and proud booster of the fossil fuels that are driving global warming, avoids even acknowledging climate change, preferring to spuriously blame our devastating wildfires on arson, careless humans, El Niño and, generically, Mother Nature.
Another scientific canary in the climate change coal mine is Andreas Hamann, a professor in the University of Alberta’s department of renewable resources, who studies how a warming planet affects forests. He says well-meaning plans such as the federal government’s commitment to plant two billion trees over 10 years to renew devastated forests are “pointless, unless species and planting stock are selected to survive anticipated climate conditions for the next 50–100 years. Otherwise they will get decimated by pests and diseases and go up in flames if climate change is not carefully accounted for.”
The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was coincidentally later determined by NASA to be earth’s hottest on record.
But dealing with climate change is a tough sell politically in Alberta and Canada, and mitigation efforts are an easy target to attack for pro-fossil-fuel ideologues. In fact “climate change” has become a trigger phrase for deniers, who lump it in with what they dismiss as leftist “woke” language and who dismiss scientists as “alarmists.”
Climate change has become another weapon in our culture wars. The victims are countless millions of people around the world devastated by a changing climate. They include the residents of Slave Lake and Fort McMurray and, in the summer of 2024, the people of Jasper.
Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.
____________________________________________
