Canada needs to use the Indigenous practice of prescribed burning for wildfire prevention, experts say

• Indigenous communities have used prescribed burning for centuries to maintain forest health.
• The intentional, controlled burning eliminates dangerous fuel that could cause disastrous wildfires.
• Canada has been slow to work with Indigenous communities to eliminate barriers to the practice, one expert said.

As smokes continues to drift south of the Canadian border into the US over the holiday weekend, experts are warning that Canada does not have enough resources or strategies in place to prevent these disasters in the future.

As a result, ecologists are calling on the Canadian government to eliminate barriers to the practice of prescribed burning, a key cultural and environmental practice that Indigenous people have used for thousands of years to maintain forest health and prevent wildfires.

"We don't do anywhere near enough prescribed burning," Canadian fire ecologist Robert Gray told CNN. 

The practice involves the intentional, controlled burning of large wooded areas to eliminate fuel — such as certain grasses — that could allow future wildfires to burn uncontrollably. While Indigenous communities have used prescribed burning for thousands of years, legal barriers from the Canadian government have placed restrictions on who can burn what land, the Globe and Mail reported.

For instance, British Columbia banned cultural burns in 1874, making it the first Canadian province to do so. Now, Gray says it has fallen behind other countries — like the US and Australia — in lifting these restrictions and implementing government cooperation with Indigenous communities to pursue prescribed burning, according to the Globe and Mail.

"Right now we're burning about 10,000 hectares a year," Gray told CNN. "The state of New Jersey burns more than we do here at BC."

In April, the ʔaq'am First Nation — a member community of the Ktunaxa Nation in southeastern British Columbia — worked alongside Canadian officials to undertake a successful two-day, 1,200 hectare prescribed burn, the Globe and Mail reported. In the days that followed, witnesses told the Globe and Mail that elk and deer displaced by overgrown forests had returned, the first sign of a successful burn.

"We're going to get a lot more big, ugly fires unless we do more prescribed burns," Gray, who attended the April burn, told the Globe and Mail.