“The Solution is Aircraft”: Aircraft and the Political Economy of Canadian Forest Fires

Introduction: Fire and the Northern Economy The paradoxes are two, and both are well grounded in Canadian experience. The first is that institutions must reconcile the dynamics of political confederation with the rhythms of the boreal forest. The former builds on measured action, a steady pooling of many competing interests into a collective mean. The latter revels in extremes. Especially when it burns, the boreal forest goes from boom to bust to boom; and while nowhere is wildfire a bureaucratic category, the boreal landscape particularly mocks the norms, means, and statistics of aggregation that allow most agencies to plan. Almost always there is too much or too little, and never do reforms after the last firefight immediately lead to successes in the next. Instead, institutions repeatedly take a drubbing. Aggravating the situation is the British North American Act that led to Confederation in which the provinces were granted control over their lands and natural resources. For 60 years an exception emerged in that the territory acquired from Hudson's Bay Company, notably in the west, along with the Railway Belt and Peace River Bloc in British Columbia (B.C.), remained under the auspices of the Dominion even as provinces evolved and sprawled over those lands. Instead, the Dominion administered the resources; of particular significance was the Dominion Forestry Branch (DFB) within the Department of Interior which oversaw an archipelago of forest reserves, modeled closely on those of the United States. This estate gave the national government an active presence in and considerable leverage over how forestry might be conducted. Then in 1930 the Dominion ceded those lands to the provinces. The Dominion Forestry Branch nearly vanished, spared only because of its research capabilities. Thus, while the dynamics of the boreal environment argued for large entities, the politics of Canadian confederation pushed for smaller ones. That is the first paradox. The second is that the Canadian scene matches the world's most savage fires against its most advanced machines. Here, free-burning flame meets internal combustion. For Canada, however, combining the primitive with the technologically modern is far from unusual. Harold Innis early pointed out the apparent incongruity of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the industrial tip of global capitalism's spear, thrusting through the Canadian wilderness, and later observed the necessity, for a country that was both modern and dispersed, to seize the latest developments in communication and transportation. Donald Worster, less kindly, has pointed out the industrial basis for Canada's exploitation of its natural wealth, likening the country to a technological crack-baby. That Canada should turn to industrial technology to cope with backcountry fires should surprise no one. (1) Fire's hazards and fire's control, in fact, fed one into the other. While mass logging predated steam, it quickened and expanded under steam's lash, such that industrial logging required, as it made possible, industrial fire protection. The locomotive as a source of ignition also morphed into the locomotive as a means of rapid access and pumps; the smokechaser on a velociped was as common as rail section patrols. Automobiles brought access to visitors; converted to forest-fire engines, they carried firefighters to the scene. Telephones and especially wireless shattered the distance that had left remote fires to burn for days. It was the quintessential Canadian conundrum: vast distances, costly labor, expensive capital, bulk commodities. But what forested Canada had in abundance, save along the eastern Rockies, was water. Eastern Canada, notably the Shield, was awash with ponds, bogs, streams, and later reservoirs; the Northwest was laced with rivers and muskegs; the Rockies shed streams; and British Columbia, west of the Cordillera, was a temperate rainforest. If Canada had fire, it also had fire's natural retardant. …

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