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Wildsight’s Youth Climate Corpshass been working all over the Kootenays this past summer. The Kimberley/Cranbrook crew is currently working in the Kimberley Nature Park. They are focused on fire mitigation work. They will be on site for the remaining few weeks of their contract.
“The Youth Climate Corps is working in an area that has already had some treatment by contractors,” said Kent Goodwin, Kimberley city councillor and member of the Kimberley Nature Park Society. “But there’s been a bunch of blowdown, and there are trees lying on the ground in greater numbers than our fire ecologist (Bob Gray) is comfortable with so close to town.”Historically, low and moderate intensity fires would have passed over the landscape in an irregular fashion. Consuming debris, young trees, and in some cases entire areas of forest, with the result being a mosaic of forest cover types. But fire suppression has been the go-to response for so long now that we have many homogenous and overstocked forest landscapes that are less resistant to fire and pose significant wildfire risk, particularly when adjacent to communities. Research on the mountain pine beetle also points to wildfire suppression as a primary cause of the beetle’s destructive spread. What many see as a ‘normal-looking’ forest is a tinderbox ready to burst from the slightest ember.
“We want to break up the continuity of fuel, so that if a fire were to start somewhere, it would have a difficult time travelling along the ground and a near impossible time getting into the canopy,” said Tim Chapman, YCC Kimberley/Cranbrook coordinator.
“This is not what a forest should look like,” added crew member Kaite Martin. “When it looks like this, if a fire were to come, it could destroy the entire forest, instead of just clearing it up. Because of human impact, because we’ve prevented the natural way of things, we now have to go in and do some sort of restoration; we have to clean up the forest, especially near our towns.”
Dave Hale, Kimberley Nature Park Society director, explains that while this is a relatively small project compared to some of the extensive ones underway elsewhere, it all adds up to helping protect this valuable local space, and the community alongside it, from wildfire threats.
“It’s cool that youth are doing that work, and that Wildsight is involved,” says Dave. “It’s small, but influential.” The City of Kimberley also wrote a letter of support for the project.
Wildsight’s Youth Climate Corps provides meaningful employment and training opportunities for young adults, with tangible climate action projects as our main focus. This year’s Kimberley/Cranbrook crew undertook projects on food security, ecosystem restoration, water quality, community education, and several wildfire mitigation efforts.
The Kimberley Wildfire Resilience Demonstration Project is made possible with support from Columbia Basin Trust and the Province of BC, along with other supporters of Wildsight’s Youth Climate Corps Program.