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“If you could imagine fire as a creature or a force, how would you describe it?” asked filmmakers Nova Ami and Velcrow Ripper while filming their documentary Incandescence. Fire is like a pig, someone answered, because it eats everything in sight; fire is like a grizzly bear, another responded, running to stay alive.
These unconventional characterizations of fire weren’t the only thing that surprised Ami and Ripper while shooting their film. While fire is often described as a force of unrelenting destruction, they learned fire can also breathe life into the forest if treated with respect.
Methods for responding to and preventing wildfires are evolving along with attitudes toward it.
“They're starting to realize that constantly putting out fires is not always the best approach,” Ripper said.
The idea to create a documentary about wildfire came to Ami and Ripper in late 2018 after wildfires in Williams Lake. B.C. sent smoke all the way to Vancouver. While these wildfires were a big deal at the time, they just foreshadowed more extreme fires that followed, like the Quebec blazes that compromised air quality in New York City, the 2021 fire that destroyed Lytton and the fire last summer that decimated Jasper National Park in Alberta.
“Every season was becoming the most intense fire season,” Ami said.
Ripper says these massive fires are not healthy for an ecosystem. Megafires are “not normal,” or part of the natural cycle, he said. They’re created by climate change caused by burning fossil fuels which trigger global warming. Our forests are now breeding grounds for megafires which are more pervasive and extreme than 50 years ago.
Megafires have burned through vast swaths of Canadian forests since Ami and Ripper conceived the film in 2018. As a response to these fires, Indigenous preventive practices of cultural burning and prescribed fires have started to become more mainstream — and this is one topic in the film.
Before settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous communities used cultural burning as a tool to maintain the land. This type of burning is a low-intensity fire to clear out the underbrush that serves as fuel for a forest fire. Cultural burning was banned and criminalized for many years by the Canadian government, giving this kindling a lot of time to build up.
While this is not the primary reason behind megafires, reinstating cultural burning can be an important tool for prevention and managing underbrush accumulation.
Otherwise, “when fires do come through, there's all this fuel, and we have these megafires,” Ripper said.
But in careful doses, fires can aid ecosystem health; there are trees and medicinal plants that will only grow in the presence of fire.
The filmmakers were on the scene of the rebuilding of communities in the Okanagan after the wildfire. They captured how communities come together to survive and rebuild afterward, Ripper said.
“There's the period before the wildfires where it's life as normal, and there's the pending threat, and then there's the actual time during the acute emergency where people are coming together,” Ripper said.
The filmmakers were moved by the tremendous amount of mutual aid and support where communities collaborated to help other people, animals and the ecosystem. For example, animal rescue services rushed to help evacuate farm animals and pets ahead of the McDougall Creek wildfire fire. Afterward, they came back to feed animals that survived.
Ami hopes the documentary will show how communities are affected after the fire goes out.
“We hear about the fire, and then we don't hear about the people afterwards,” she said. “Hopefully people will feel a connection with communities that have been impacted and how their lives change.”
A big takeaway is that community is one of the most important forces of resilience to wildfires, Ripper said.
“What we discovered in making this film was the strength of community and how we need to celebrate our community. We need to build our community, and we need to know who our neighbours are and get to know them and look out for the most vulnerable,” he said. “That's how we're going to get through these crises — together, not hiding out in our bunkers, but actually coming together and strengthening our communities.”
Comments
do you know what the difference is between coal ash and wood ash?
one is death to life, while the other is the building blocks of all life on the planet.
coal is full of toxic elements never meant to be dug up and burnt as man digs up trillions of tons a year to use for power plants and refining. coal ash is a huge problem, like nuclear waste there is no safe place to put it. coal and the burning of coal is ACID, death to life, causing acidification of the oceans and acid rain, which causes rainwater to be toxic and stops the absorption of nutrients. self-evident in the colour of much of the world's vegetation turning from a deep dark "forest green" to a light lime, sometimes brownish colour, evidence of the plants being starved of nutrients.
wood ash is the opposite, its full of non toxic nutrients that are ALKALINE, both are the building blocks of every living thing on this planet. Forest fires spread these alkaline nutrients over the forests and lands, which is why forest fires areas are so lush and abundant the next year.
Forest fires are also the way in which Mother Nature can repair itself, the biggest benefit is its Alkaline ash which can work to reverse the acids from fossil fuels. Forest fires should NOT be extinguished but rather let to burn so long as they are not near residential or commercial structures. Unfortunately, when forest fires burn in places where there were mines, like Yellowknife, where there are thousands of tons of Arsenic, it can be very dangerous.
The earth has a system of fail-safes, systems of reset within itself, so when things like man-made problems of constant extraction of tons of fossil fuels offsetting the balance of PH in the natural world, Mother Earth's fail-safe kicks in and huge fires are set off all over the world.
If only man would STOP the insanity of digging up trillions of tons of oil coal and lng every year, things like forest fires can repair the damage man has done. Self-evident during Covid when most of the world's factories and processing plants where shut down we saw the earth bounce back, I saw plants flourish.
understand the is a HUGE difference between complete combustion, [full combustion from beging to end< the burning of wood consists of natural laws of physics in which wood transforms from a solid, then to a liquid, then to a vapour, then to plasma] and incomplete combustion, which is the stoping of the natural cycles of combustion.
anyone who's fiddled with a carburetor understands the importance of air/fuel ratio, to rich and you get black smoke, which is unburnt fuel,
anyone whos tried to light a campfire in the winter understands that cold wood will not burn, it takes several attempts untill the wood warms up enough in order for the combustion takes place.
and heres the difference between right and wrong.. mother nature and man.. here in BC the government and corporations slash burn wet cold green wood in the fall winter and spring, filling the whole entire province with thick blue super toxic smoke. often so thick the air is blue and sometimes you can even taste the tar in the air.
Blue smoke is a compound, is unburnt wood that has been stopped right when the wood is transforming into a liquid, anyone who's had a woodstove and sees black tar dripping from the pipes or chimney can see this first hand.
I'm a high school dropout, but one of the important things I have ingrained in my head is grade nine science teacher explaining the difference between a compound and an element. he explained that no matter what you do to it, send it through the fires of hell, that an element can not be broken down, like gold or silver that goes through a house fire.
compounds on the other hand are a combination of elements, often toxic elements, and acidic elements.
notice how forest fire smoke is gray for the most part. while smoke from slash burning or a woodstove that doesn't have enough air or is using wet or cold wood is BLUE. Also the fact that carbon from unburnt wood is one of the cleanest forms of carbon and beneficial carbon in existence.. again, self-evident in how wood carbon is used for air and water filters around the world.
and the carbon from oil coal and LNG is the most toxic acidic carbon that has eaten away the biosphere, [it wasn't wood burning that caused the hole in the ozone, no that only happened in last 100 years with trillions of tons of fossil fuels and minerals like sulfur being injected into mother nature. nor did the billions of animals or millions of farmers destroy the world as being implied by every so called "educated" idiot from universities who''ve never worked a day in their lives in any of the trades, its all based on theories and graphs, but how can anyone no matter how smart they are come to the proper conclusion without including all the factors and facts of an issue.
Blue smoke is indeed a compound, while gray smoke is made up of elements, things like phosphorus and micronutrients, non toxic and building of blocks of every living creature.
ever hear the saying "we are merely sacks of dirt? or "plants are really farming us, waiting for us to die so they can absorb our nutrients" ?
so yes, forest fires are a benefit and should be allowed to run their natural course, but of course man via government and corporations like to think they are above nature's laws, making their own laws as if they were god, though the condition of the environment on the brink of complete collapse is self-evident of their crimes against all living things and mother earth.
As for the natives, they've lost any and all knowledge of what was once done, we often hear natives of today boast they know better, and governments are giving them authority to slash burn wet green wood in the cold rainy seasons of fall and spring and during winter.
the fact of the matter traditional forest fires natives did hundreds of years ago was when the world was healthy and lush green, a few forest were lit once in a blue moon during mid fall so they would not burn with the intensity they do today and they would be naturally extinguished from rain in late fall or snow in early winter. also fall and winter conditions were much cooler earlier and more intense than they are today.
how do I know so much being a high school drop out you be asking yourself; well I grew up on a farm in the 70's, then I became a automotive machinist rebuilding engines, a mechanic and gearhead, [ once I saw the sludge mud from inside worn out engines, most of it washed down the drains or thrown in landfills, the oil leaks and rest of the toxins i changed who I thought I was and what the world really is] then later I got involved with growing world-famous BC bud, in which to do so we growers became self taught botanist, learning every detail of what a healthy plant is supposed to look like, and what was ailing the plants, PH was one of the biggest factors, and now for last 20 years as a woodstove installer and chimney sweep, over the years I've seen first hand the difference between complete combustion and incomplete combustion. also todays wood stoves have advanced with secondary air injection to facilitate 100% complete combustion, with ZERO smoke when used properly.
one thing in common with all these things is the smallest details makes the biggest difference.
https://rumble.com/v4pb34l-the-destruction-of-the-world.html