Putting back the NWT's landscape
We just ripped up huge sections of wilderness to defend against wildfires. Meet the woman helping to put things back again.
This is Ollie. Our newsletter, like most of our lives, is gradually returning to some kind of normal routine.
Returning our landscape to some kind of normality will take a lot longer. Who knows if that’s even possible, with the prospect ahead of us that the summer we just had might soon be the norm.
But there are people who swing into action, once fires are successfully repelled and a scarred landscape is left over, to try to bring nature back where they can.
In this newsletter, read a transcript of a conversation between me and Marcia Dewandel, a Parks Canada restoration specialist sent from Jasper National Park to Fort Smith. Marcia’s job is to start helping the dozer guards – huge breaks in the forest created by heavy equipment – to return to some kind of natural state.
Also in this week’s edition, we have our usual round-up of important Cabin Radio journalism from the past seven days, and a selection of things we’ve been reading.
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IN THIS NEWSLETTER:
Our most important stories this week
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What we’re reading
Returning NWT wildfire defences to nature
Stories to catch up on
For days, three Enterprise residents protected homes from fire
Mike Kimble, his wife, Lyne Maisonneuve, and his brother, Adam, returned to Enterprise in the thick of last month’s wildfire to protect the hamlet’s homes together.
“It was around the clock,” said Mike. “You couldn’t sleep because there could be a flare-up here and another fire there.”
The three fought fires alone for the first five days, using a fire truck and equipment they found at the fire hall. Because of their work, a handful of buildings in the hamlet were saved, including the couple’s home.
“You just get up in the morning, and all you see is smoke and trees on fire over here and trees on fire over there – you get to a point where you just don’t want to do it any more,” Maisonneuve said. “You’re in hell, or armageddon as I call it, with no people around.”
NWT minister says removal of downtown planters is ‘appalling’
The NWT's health minister said the removal of planters used as seating by Yellowknife's homeless community "penalizes and further marginalizes" people.
(I’ve seen some suggestion online that the planters’ removal is related to work on the building’s foundations. Neither Canada Post nor the building’s owner said anything of the sort when asked by us.)
Mayor disputes minister’s account of why Yellowknife evacuated
An NWT minister said a lack of staff to help Yellowknifers shelter in place led to an evacuation by road and air. The mayor said that isn't "the whole picture."
From space, a new system will help Canadians fight wildfires
A new system, WildFireSat, is designed to help people battling wildfires make decisions. In the NWT, which uses satellites more than most, it could be key.
Teen charged with assaulting officer in fight after Old Spice theft
A 17-year-old in Yellowknife was charged with robbery, resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, police said, after attempting to steal cologne from a store.
Warming climate reshapes base of Great Slave Lake’s food web
"This is really changing quickly." A fundamental shift at the bottom of Great Slave Lake's food web almost certainly has implications for species at the top.
Yellowknife to host ‘welcome home’ show on Saturday
Yellowknife's Somba K'e Park will host a special welcome-home event on Saturday, the city said, while also launching a weekend-long shop-local campaign.
Amid record drought, miserable NWT summer of smoke continues
This fall's outlook is not great if you want relief from all the smoke across the NWT. One big reason? We're still in the middle of an extraordinary drought.
What wildfires might mean for your NWT water supply
Wildfires are known to affect water in many ways – sometimes making it harder to treat. Here’s why some experts are concerned about the NWT.
What you need to know about November’s NWT election
When is the NWT's election? What are the different ways to vote? How do we get a new premier and cabinet after polling day? Here are some answers.
What’s the deal with Yellowknife’s fire breaks?
Why does Niven's fire break look different? What's happening to all the trees that were cut down? We asked the City of Yellowknife.
Fort Simpson’s bank keeps closing. It’s a big deal.
Fort Simpson's bank, the only one for hundreds of kilometres, keeps closing. That's causing all manner of issues, and leaders say it's time for alternatives.
Integrity commissioner dismisses Thompson complaint about Nokleby
A complaint filed by NWT minister Shane Thompson about MLA Katrina Nokleby was dismissed by the integrity commissioner, though not without criticism of Nokleby.
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What we’re reading
David Wallace-Wells Interviews Kate Marvel
From Ollie: I know, this isn’t the world’s best headline. New York Times climate writer David Wallace-Wells visited Yellowknife this week as he prepares an article on Canada’s wildfires. In this interview from earlier this month, he spoke with climate scientist Dr Kate Marvel and asked some big-picture questions that are deeply relevant to NWT residents right now: just how big a departure is 2023 from the norm? Are these changes speeding up? What kinds of warming scenarios are still likely and have been ruled out, these days? It’s an hour-long podcast, too, so you can listen instead of read. (If you can’t get through the paywall, just go get the Ezra Klein Show episode titled What Have We Learned From a Summer of Climate Reckoning?)
Preparing homes for wildfires is big business that's only getting started
From Chloe, our climate writer: Here's an NPR story that I thought was interesting, particularly since preparing for wildfires no longer seems optional. It's about the growing business around protecting homes from wildfires, which is a bit of a "wild west" in the US right now. The industry is growing as insurers raise their rates due to climate-fuelled disasters, which has homeowners reconsidering their responsibility in managing risks.
India suspends visas for Canadians as row escalates
From Aastha, our communities reporter, who immigrated from India to Canada in the not-too-distant past: I’ve been concerned about the safety of Indian immigrants since the Indian government warned travellers to Canada of “politically condoned” violence this week. India’s visa centres in Canada have suspended services amid a diplomatic row between the two countries about what Justin Trudeau calls “credible allegations” of India’s involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh man who was shot dead in Surrey, BC. I wonder how this will affect immigration. This article reports that 80,000 Canadian tourists visited India in 2021. Last year, 40 percent of the total international students in the country came from India.
Arrests, heated exchanges mark rallies over LGBTQ school policies
From Megan, our host and arts reporter: This article does a really good job of accurately reporting on protests that happened across the country on Wednesday, in which thousands of people showed up to protests against queer rights and children’s rights in Canada. While the rallies only took place throughout one day, it’s important to recognize that the hate that fuelled them exists everyday, and the lives of school aged queer and trans students are directly at risk. 2SLGBTQIA+ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-queer youth, an increased risk due to the mistreatment and stigmatization by society. Parental and community acceptance can drastically reduce these risks. Although no protests happened in the NWT, we as residents must continue to affirm our queer youth that they are valid, loved, and safe in our communities. (You can read my colleague Emily’s coverage of Wednesday’s counter-protest in Yellowknife here.)
Repairing the land we scraped away
What do you do with the huge fire breaks and dozer guards that scar the landscape when wildfires finally leave our communities alone?
Parks Canada has staff whose job is to come in, assess the damage, and figure out how to help nature heal.
Marcia Dewandel is on a two-week assignment to help that work outside Fort Smith. She finishes and heads home this weekend, at which point a colleague will replace her.
She described to me how experts work out “prescriptions” for each patch of damaged land, then set about gradually restoring things to some kind of natural state.
Here’s our conversation, which I have edited only slightly for length and clarity.
Ollie Williams: Are you ordinarily a restoration specialist? Do you travel from dozer guard to dozer guard?
Marcia Dewandel: No – well, I don't travel to do it, but I am a restoration specialist out of Jasper National Park, yes.
What does that involve at Jasper National Park?
We have a team of field techs in the summertime and we focus on non-native veg management in the park and dealing with disturbed sites. When we have any kinds of construction project, we help with the reclamation of those sites to bring those areas back to as close to the pre-disturbed condition. We do a lot of seeding, tree planting and transplanting as well.
How long have you been doing that?
It's been about four and a half years.
Was your heart set on this?
It was, yes. My background is resource management. I've been in the field itself for about 25 years.
I promise this is my last tangential question. When you mention non-native species management, give me an example of that. What might turn up that you'd have to deal with and what would you do?
In a busy place like Jasper, there's a number of different vectors that will bring in invasive species, like highway corridors and train tracks, and then people in general. There are actually plants in Alberta that we are mandated to control – something like a spotted knapweed, we have to pull and remove them from the landscape as best as we can. We have what's called an integrated pest management plan, and we treat species accordingly.
So we take all of those skills and then you rock up outside Fort Smith, where we have just sent bulldozers through acre after acre of scenery. And you've got two weeks to restore it.
I'm so happy that someone is interested in this part. The fire is such a big beast, but reclamation is so important. I'm not the only one on this, there were specialists before me that came up to start the plan. When I arrived for my two-week period here I had a draft plan to follow.
All of those dozer guards, safety zones and helipads have been inventoried throughout the entire fire area. I have that in front of me on maps. I was able to go visit the majority of these sites to get an idea of what kind of landscape they were in, where they were travelling through, was there any water around, what they look like, how much disturbance was there.
Each one of the dozer guards and helipads has what we call a prescription attached to it. That prescription tells us, 'This dozer guard is in this kind of landscape, there seems to be this much disturbance, this is what we need to do to help it along so it can restore itself to somewhat of a natural landscape.' That is our goal.
Residents are coming home to a vastly changed landscape. To what extent do you think about that, when you're doing your job?
If I were driving in here and I was looking out my car window, more than anything right now I would probably see the fire and the effects of the fire. These lines that allowed the fire staff to manage the fire? Many of them are a little farther in, and you wouldn't really see a lot of them unless you took some of these back roads or decided to venture off the highway and such.
It makes me feel good to be able to try to put back some of the disturbances that we've had to make to manage this fire, to put them back to what they were before – or as close to what they were before.
How do you start the process? What do you do in a day to help a dozer guard start to think about being a part of a natural landscape again?
Let's define what a dozer guard is. It's an area that has been cleared, very much like a roadway. It's not necessarily linear. And all the organic matter on top, all of the grasses and the shrubs and any of the soil, has been removed down to what we call mineral soil. Fire doesn't like mineral soil. It can't really take any purchase on mineral soil and the idea is that you will stop a fire once it hits that sort of soil. It's a protective barrier.
When you come across these areas with just mineral soil, the goal is to bring that organic matter back. That's the first thing you want to do. If that mineral soil has been compacted in any way, it has to be loosened up first and decompacted. Most of these guards have been built by machines, so that berm of organic matter that has been left needs to be pulled back. All the organic matter with all those valuable seeds – and some of the shrubbery and what we call coarse, woody debris, which basically will become food for the plants to thrive on – is pulled back onto that mineral soil base. That's step one.
You have to make sure, too, that all of that wood on top is pushed flush with the surface so it decomposes over time. There are smaller prescriptions we can also do that involve seeding. There are native grasses up here and we've purchased native seed so we can spread some of that native seed in the area, to help give that area a bit of a jump-start. And then there's also transplanting: you can take shrubs and small saplings from the area and transplant them in. You can go as far as to do willow staking in wetter areas.
We've even had staff collecting fireweed seeds – we'll take those seeds and we'll spread them on the landscape. Anything that gives the landscape some help to restore.
Do you feel more like a doctor or an architect doing that?
It's a little bit of both. It's very much a science, as well, but it's a lot of exploration and trial-and-error. Every landscape is quite different. It is design, science, understanding, and just trying to work together with the environment you have, understanding how those processes work.
What are the timescales we're talking about here? When should we expect to be able to look at a dozer guard and say, 'Oh look, some nature'?
You know, it's quite amazing. In general, when you do any restoration project, we're talking years before you see something that vaguely resembles the environment prior. But if you travel along the area right now, along some of the roadways where the fire has been close – even in the ditches, you can see that really, really bright green grass that comes up. That's almost immediate.
What happens is – if the fire is not too severe, and it whips through an area – it doesn't burn down deep. So any of these grasses that have what we call rhizomes, and they're not affected underneath, they'll grow right away because all the competition on top is gone. They have more access to the sun and they come up right away. I mean the fire just came through here, literally 10 days ago, and we've got a bed of this wonderful, green, native grass.
Some species come up really quick, others will take some time. And then, of course, you'll see a beautiful fireweed come up. That's another species that does very well after a fire, hence its name.
The whole point of these dozer guards was to stop a fire coming through. Is there an element of your work that tries to restore these in a way that they still serve that purpose for future years?
That comes with the planning. A lot of these guards that have been inventoried, there has to be some discussion around whether or not, given their location on the landscape, they might serve as a guard in the future. Some of them will not, for sure. Others might fit that role. That has yet to be determined. If they do need to remain as a future guard, the prescription attached to that reclamation will be different. We won't be putting, for example, big pieces of coarse, woody debris on top, we'll just have to make it a little more accessible. Every guard has its different classification and prescription.
Will there be someone after you later this month? How far down the line do we go, in terms of handling from person to person, before it's just left to do its own thing?
Yes, there is someone that will come in after me. That I know for sure. And then into the future, there is someone that will oversee that, do some monitoring and follow up to see how successful our reclamation efforts were – and whether or not there's more work that needs to be done.