Blame Canada?: smoke and mirrors

To the Editor:

I was embarrassed to read the letter of Representative Tom Tiffany and others to the Canadian Ambassador to the United States, scolding Canada for allowing wildfire smoke to enter our country. Tiffany and company claim that Canada has failed to use good forest management and firefighting technology.

Context — Nearly 40 percent of Canada is forested. That’s over 980 million acres of forest — 9 percent of the world’s forestland. For comparison, that’s about 28 times the size of the state of Wisconsin. 

Currently there are over 600 wildfires burning in Canada. Wildfires in Canada have consumed about 16 million acres of forest so far this year.

It’s interesting to imagine what kind of management Tiffany and friends think might be brought to bear against the fire risk. More logging, or the cutting of fire lanes perhaps? 

Logging is already a huge industry in Canada, with clear cuts extending hundreds of miles north of the border, yet only a small fraction of Canada has been logged. The logistics (workforce, markets for wood) of logging off a substantial part of Canada’s 980 million acre forest make the idea of doing so ludicrous.

For Canada to even develop a grid of fire lanes with each grid square being ten miles by ten miles in size, would require developing and maintaining over 450 thousand miles of fire lanes. That would be enough fire lanes to circle the planet over 18 times. This is not to suggest that such a grid would stop the fires, but to show the impossible magnitude of the task.

It’s even more interesting to wonder about the technology that Tiffany and company must imagine being available to put out 600 fires which are consuming millions of acres of forest. I sure don’t know what that technology would be. If such magic technology is available, why hasn’t it been used to put out the fire in our country near the Grand Canyon, which is less than 1 percent of the size of the Canadian fires?

It’s hard to imagine that the letter was really anything more than a political stunt designed to make Tiffany and the others look like they were getting tough with our neighbor and ally to the north. From that point of view, the letter fell dismally flat. No thinking person believes that Canada could stop these fires. If they could, why wouldn’t they?

Forest fires have been part of the landscape of the Canadian forests for as long as those forests have existed. What’s changed is the size and number of those fires. For example, the Canadian wildfires of 2023 set the record for amount of forest burned, more than doubling the previous record.

Every credible scientist attributes the increase in wildfires to global warming. Thinking people know that man-made global warming is real, and a severe threat. I’m as tired of the smoke as anyone, but real problems demand real answers. Political stunts add nothing to either the discourse, or the solution. 

Tom Wiensch

Rhinelander