Forest Fires in Eastern Canada

If somebody tries to tell you that the Canadian wildfires are caused by climate change – like this essay at the NY Times – refer them to these, sent to me by a friend who is researching the ecological history of Labrador. This is only a sample of the material he has accumulated. Those forests burned all the time even during the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age.

In 1661, the Jesuits Gabriel Druillettes and Claude Dablon traveled by canoe up the Saguenay as far as  Lac Nicabau and reported: 

Nothing beautiful, nothing attractive is to be seen here —the soil being dry, barren, and sandy, and the mountains covered only with rocks, or with little stunted trees. . . . The air here is almost always brown with smoke, caused by the burning of the surrounding woods, which, catching fire all at once within a circuit of fifteen and twenty leagues, have sent us their ashes from more than ten leagues' distance. For this reason, we have but rarely enjoyed the beauty of a cloudless Sun, it having always appeared to us veiled by those clouds of smoke —and sometimes to such a degree that the most Perfect Solar eclipses do not render air, earth, and herbage more gloomy and somber. These fires —which are very common here for a month or two in the Summer, and as a result of which we have seen many forests wholly composed of charred wood —keep the atmosphere so very warm, and make it so stifling, that it is difficult to live in it.

Jesuit Father François de Crépieul went up the Saguenay in the winter of 1673-4. In the first week of December, he was camped near Lake St. John: 

About this time there was a very noticeable earthquake near us. I had still further opportunity, during our journey, to observe the extraordinary ravages of the terrible earthquake that took place some years ago in these wild regions. There may also be seen the recent traces which cruel fires have left in these vast forests. The Savages say that they have spread over more than two hundred leagues.

And here is an 1842 description of the landscape inland from Hamilton Inlet: 

… in looking down from the brow of some more elevated hill, an interminable succession of naked hills and lakes is seen, giving an indescribable aspect of desolation to the country, which is greatly heightened by the effects of the fires that have ravaged the whole country. Indeed, there can be but little doubt, that at one time nearly, if not the whole, of the interior of Labrador was covered with wood, which has since been destroyed by fire; in almost every direction, the naked stumps of trees are seen, rising out of the moss that now covers the country. Hundreds of miles of the country are now nothing but a barren waste of naked rock from this cause, which in the recollection of some of the old hunters were covered with wood formerly.

Very dark days, because of smoke from distant fires, were reported from New England in 1706, 1716, 1732, 1780 (when May 19 was called Black Friday or The Dark Day), 1785, 1814, 1819, 1836, 1881 and 1894. The number of such days declined in the 20th century, most likely because intensive logging thinned out the forests, so in a sense the return of Dark Days shows that the forests are returning to something more like their natural cycle.

Certain landscapes just burn on a regular basis, and the only way to prevent really big fires is to encourage lots of little ones.