Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

Fire is the principal mechanism by which the boreal forest purges and regenerates itself, to the point that the cones of several keystone conifer species, including black spruce, will not drop their seeds unless they are heated to temperatures unachievable by sunlight alone. Not only do these blasts of intense heat open the cones, releasing the seeds inside, they also indicate that fire has cleared the ground below and opened the canopy above, thus improving the odds of those seeds’ successful germination. Without fire and its seemingly random but ultimately regular patterns of return, the boreal forest would collapse. There is in this cycle a kind of codependency that, when viewed from the point of view of fire, upends the notion of what a forest is, and whom it serves. As the naturalist and author David Pitt-Brooke wrote of a similar forest farther south, “Fire-spawned stands of lodgepole pine are, in a sense, locked into a fire cycle. They are creations of fire and, in turn, they create conditions hospitable to future fire. You could almost think of it as a symbiosis…a form of farming: fire creates these stands of lodgepole pine so it can eat them later.”