Forest fires are a big problem – the smell of woodsmoke is overwhelming at the moment. I’ve had enough of others speaking for me. But I’m not keen on introducing myself. I’m a Pinus strobus, a northern white pine, which means I don’t lose my leaves during the colder months of the year. Where I live, there are two types of folks: those who call themselves ‘Anishinaabe’ and see me as animate and those who belong to another group which don’t recognise that I’m a living entity. To this second group, I’m a tree, so I’m a resource to use.
But I’m old, and I’ve started to talk more and talk more loudly to anyone who will listen. My home is getting hotter, and the air is terrible. I am worried and, well. My friends are worried as we smell woodsmoke all of the time. We wonder whether people noticed. I had heard that folk in Montreal, thousands of miles away from the burning trees in Western Canada, can smell the death of burning trees. We communicate through our roots… and we hear things….
A few years ago, the smoke from forest fires spread from the regions to the west of me, reducing air quality throughout the United States and Canada, to Mexico to the south, and across the Atlantic to Europe. Why? The fires in Canada covered an area six times greater than the average year, producing nearly a decade’s worth of blaze emissions: 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – that’s a quarter of total global emissions! So, that’s nearly as much greenhouse gas emissions in one season. This sum is greater than what is expected over a decade of fires in normal circumstances.
So in terms of trees, that’s more than five hundred fires burning for nearly a month. The haze was an orange-brown in colour and spread across eastern Canada, the Midwest and Northeast regions of the US, to the South. In terms of area burned, 16.5 million hectares of land have been destroyed by 6,132 blazes. It devastated the lives of everyone, not just people. Everyone’s homes were gone.
Where am I? You can find me at the top of a granite cliff on the shore of a freshwater lake, called by folk, the Lake of the Woods, in Northwestern Ontario. It’s a large lake in central North America. My roots grow in the crevasses of a large outcrop of granite bedrock. The vegetation here is a mixture of the vegetation of the Boreal Forest and the Great Lakes, St Lawrence Seaway. So, there’s a mixture of trees from different ecosystems: fir, spruce, pine, larch, birch and poplar.
When I use the word ‘we’, I mean me and my white pine friends and relatives. We’re described as ‘standing tall’ and ‘graceful’ with long, soft needles with straight, sometimes bent, trunks with a ‘pyramid-shaped crown’ at their top. We dominate the forest canopy of the Boreal Forest as we’re usually the tallest trees, towering over the other plants. We often live the longest, so a white pine tree is often also the oldest in a group of trees. I’m not sure how old I am, but I know that we can live over 100 years. But as we’re the tallest, we tend to attract lightning strikes and are always physically affected by the wind and ice storms. So, the long and the short of it is white pine trees often don’t live for 100 years. I’m now at an age where most of my friends who are white pines have died due to tornadoes, as they were badly broken by strong winds, burned, or just died because of old age.
These days in the forest, our main topic of conversation is dominated by forest fires, hotter temperatures and shifting weather patterns. As a rule of thumb, wildfires in the forest have ecological benefits, as small, low-intensity fires help rejuvenate the forest. Some of the people who live near us use what’s called burns, as they know that clearing land of larger trees, removing these trees, means that smaller, younger plants can grow instead. The ‘burn’ removes the layer of decay and the duff in a controlled manner, on the forest floor, so the healthy parts of the forest ecosystem can thrive. The heat releases the nutrients from the burned material, dead plants and animals, returning more quickly into the soil than if they slowly decayed over time. The fire removed the dead or decaying plants that grow on the forest floor, which often prevented organisms within the soil from accessing nutrients or blocked animals on the land from accessing the soil. The dead organic matter chokes newer or smaller plants trying to settle and expand in the forest. So, in this way, fire can increase the soil’s fertility. Some plant and animal populations need forest fires to grow, thrive, survive and reproduce. So, the forest fires come periodically to clear out dead organic material.
I’ve noticed that the Jackpines burn quickly in the forest fires, but they return quickly, once a forest fire has passed through. The heat of the fire causes the cones of the pine trees to open up and enable sprouts, new growth to exist. Jackpine, Pinus banksiana, is, I’ve discovered, used for lumber and the pulp and paper industries run by people. There aren’t many red pines, Pinus resinosa, growing near me, but I know that they’re part of the Boreal Forest’s mosaic of plant, faunal and insect life. There are lots of White Birch trees, Betula papyrifera, which are deciduous. They lose their leaves twice a year, causing trees which are coniferous, like me, to be more obvious in the forest as we still have our green needles. Some of the people who live in the Boreal Forest call the White Birches ‘weeds’ because they’re one of the first species to grow back after a forest fire. These trees are little plants, while the Jackpine trees are still growing, emerging from pine cones and trying to catch up. The bark of the White Birch is white and flat – it peels off in thin layers.
I’m concerned about life in general and the future of my home, the forest. My friends, the trees, and I think many folk don’t place any value on us. We may be described as ‘striking’, but many people may not remember when they look at us, that we also have, for folk, an economic value. We’re either there on the land as part of the scenery, or we are an economic resource, meaning that we can be turned into toilet paper, wooden planks, firewood or some other item which has an economic value for folk. Some trees have nuts and fruits which are gathered by folk for food, such as apples, acorns, plums and cherries. I have found out that white pines are often in paintings created by a group of people called artists called “The Group of Seven”, where I and many other white pine trees live. I am assuming that the label ‘Group of Seven’ means a group of seven people. I’ve noticed over time that many people take photographs of us on the grounds that we’re often in physically striking parts of the landscape. I’ve arrived at this conclusion after decades of watching people pointing little boxes at us and listening to people talking, while they sleep in the forest, beside the trees – what they call ‘camping in the ‘bush’ beside me and my friends. So, trees are useful to people in several ways, and I know that many of my friends have been chopped down in the prime of their lives, probably to be used by people.
I’m elderly, so I’m speaking out. I’m bent and crooked as the strong winds affected my shape as I grew up as I grew on the edge of a high cliff, on the water’s edge of a freshwater lake. Below me, at the base of the cliff face, there’s a lake, and I often watch folk passing by oval-shaped containers floating on the surface of the water, in what’s called ‘boats’. I have noticed people spend time sitting in boats taking more of my friends, the fish, removing them from their homes, from below the water’s edge. They remove them after sitting for hours in these metal boats, on curved metal hooks, usually during the warmer summer months. During the winter, the water is frozen solid; it’s ice. I have heard that these people call this activity of removing my friends, the fish as “fishing”. The Jackpines are the trees that predominantly complain about this habit of removing fish. Jackpines like complaining, and honestly, there are many more of them in the forest, but as I’ve said to them, we, the trees, can’t do much about this human trait.
What’s more concerning is that climate change is affecting our lives, our environment. We’ve noticed that the temperatures are rising, the winters are so long, as we know from our antecedents – we have oral histories and long memories. We know about forest fires in the Boreal Forest where we live. As I said, we know that while wildfires are destructive, they often have natural causes such as lightning, or accidents caused by people who forget about campfires which they’ve started or what’s called arson. So, I know that my ‘home’ is prone to forest fires, but the climate crisis makes the situation for potential forest fires worse. Years ago, when I was younger, when the cool weather arrived, bringing the rain or snow, the fires were extinguished. I know about it from oral memories of previous generations of white pines about a large forest fire called the Baudette Fire, or the Spooner-Baudette Fire, which burned 300,000 to 360,000 acres in Minnesota on October 7, 1910. Minnesota is the area of forest, to the south of where I live. These big fires out in Western Canada are enormous, and they’re not a form of natural rejuvenation. These fires are different – they’re bigger, last longer, more severe and dangerous. We, the plants, can tell the climate has changed – it’s warmer… there are longer periods of drought and extreme heat. Drilling for fossil fuels causes a 20% increase in fire-prone weather. So, I’m forced to ask myself, why do folks want to make wildfires more severe and dangerous so they threaten the loss of life and ecosystems? Why can’t people realise that these big fires are connected with their activities? Lots of questions which will remain unanswered, but I have to ask them.
My friends ask me, as I’m one of the eldest, what about the fires in Brazil, in the Amazon River, which fell to its lowest since 1902. What can I say? Nothing other than the fires aren’t always to regenerate the forest. Will such fires stop? No, because we’re nobodies, nothing we say or think matters, as we don’t matter.
