Firefighters often have mere minutes to prevent a fire from metastasizing into a wildfire that is impossible to extinguish.
In August, a fire near Summerland, B.C., came to span an area of 50 square kilometres in just a few hours, forcing more than 20,000 people in and around the community to evacuate.
Award-winning photojournalist Jesse Winter was on the front lines of that fire. And for years, Winter has been at the scene of others, documenting a side of Canada’s wildfire crisis that few people see up close.
Winter spoke with Alexandra Keeler about what he is seeing on the ground, and why Canada must rethink its relationship with fire.
AK: When a new fire is reported, how important are those first minutes and hours?
JW: They can be critical.
Depending on the prevailing conditions — the amount of fuel in the forest, the relative dryness of those fuels, things like that — sometimes you have maybe half-an-hour to an hour to get control of a fire while it’s still possible to actually extinguish it.
Once it grows beyond about a hectare, it’s considered to have escaped initial attack. At this point, it’s essentially not considered possible to really extinguish it — you’re only trying to contain it.
AK: You’ve used Jasper as a case study for what happens when we suppress wildfires and ban Indigenous cultural burning. What did you see there?
JW: Jasper is a park where they effectively completely excluded wildfire from the Athabasca Valley for about 100 years. So when that fire exploded in 2024, not only were fire crews dealing with the impact of climate change, it was also happening in a forest that was unnaturally loaded with fuel to burn.
If you look at pictures of Jasper from the founding of the park [in 1907], you’d be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a golf course: lots of meadows, clumps or spans of trees, wetlands — a very mixed, mosaic landscape with a lot more deciduous trees, aspens and so on.
Right before that fire burned it was just wall‑to‑wall conifers. That wouldn’t have naturally existed had parks managers and colonizers allowed Indigenous cultural burning to take place and allowed natural lightning‑caused fires to run their course.
I’m not saying Jasper would have completely avoided a bad outcome — climate change still sets the underlying tone of how dry and hot things are. But it would have been a less devastating fire.
One of the things that Australia does really, really well is their Indigenous cultural burning programs — allowing Indigenous communities themselves to do hazard reduction burns — and also finding ways to incorporate that into their broader fire mitigation work. It’s really effective.
Canada passed laws banning that kind of practice.
AK: Experts in Portugal talk about wildfire prevention strategies such as mosaic landscapes. Is Canada moving in that direction?
JW: We can’t prevent wildfires. But we can change how they burn and how they impact communities, with things like these mosaic landscape initiatives. We’re starting to get lip service towards it now, but I don’t yet see a serious concerted effort at the provincial or federal level to make that a policy.
There are a lot of fire ecology experts who are quite frustrated. These kinds of interventions have been talked about for a long time.
We still manage our forests largely based on timber value, where the goal is to maximize merchantable timber. A lot of folks are now talking about the need to change the goals of forest management towards wildfire resiliency.
AK: From what you’ve seen, what’s actually working to protect communities?
JW: In the Catalina neighbourhood, just south of West Kelowna, a fire started in the community this summer under exactly the kind of conditions in which flames can spread aggressively and overwhelm suppression very, very easily.
But they didn’t lose a single structure because that whole community had built their own FireSmart committees [groups that coordinate activities to protect communities from wildfires].
Homeowners prioritized making sure their properties were fire-smarted. The fire chief said all of that work is what allowed his firefighters to go into that community and confront the fire head-on in a way that would have been really unsafe if all that fuel mitigation hadn’t been done.
This stuff works. It can dramatically change how fire impacts a community.
AK: Why aren’t these measures happening at scale?
JW: There’s no legislative requirement to do any of this. It’s voluntary adoption. In order to be really effective, there’s got to be broad adoption, which is really, really hard to do when you’re just hoping for voluntary efforts.
AK: If you could name one to three realistic changes Canada should make in the next decade, what would they be?
JW: A recent Senate committee report is recommending better hazard mapping — so public maps that show how at-risk an area is.
In the U.S., you can search your neighbourhood by name and it’ll show you exactly how at-risk that area is. That changes home-buying behaviour and helps daylight the need for things like home hardening.
What we need to do as a country is better understand the scale of the hazards where we live and pursue things like mechanical thinning, prescribed fire and FireSmarting.
Instead of thinking, ‘How do we put this wildfire out?,’ we basically have to start thinking, ‘How do we keep our homes from burning down in the wildfire?’
Because the wildfires are going to come. They’re going to keep happening. And this idea that we can just put them out is no longer reasonable.
