The Arctic Aflame: Intensifying Arctic Wildfires Present a Sobering Reminder that Climate Change Remains a Grave and Gathering Threat to the Arctic
A haunting image of the village of Enterprise, Northwest Territories, after its near-total destruction by wildfire in August 2023. Photo: Jeffery J. Nichols
As a former resident of Yellowknife (where I lived in the mid-1990s while executive director of the Native Communications Society), I found myself transfixed 24/7 last summer to the ominous news as unprecedented wildfires engulfed the entire region. This worst fire season ever culminated in the mass evacuation of 22,000 Yellowknifers starting 16 August – by military airlift, chartered civilian evacuation flights, and a seemingly endless convoy of vehicles heading down the long, singular road south to Alberta. As an apocalyptic wall of fire and ash took aim at the capital city, a successful Herculean effort to save the city from the encircling flames through fire suppression efforts was heroically waged. While Yellowknife was mercifully spared destruction from last summer’s wildfires, the small village of Enterprise, NWT was less lucky, and was destroyed in its entirety.
As NWT Fire Information Officer Jessica Davey-Quantick described in the October 5th edition of Maclean’s, “By the end of September 2023, the N.W.T. had recorded 303 fires, burning over four million hectares. That’s about the size of Denmark, and well beyond the record set in 2014, colloquially known as the Summer of Smoke, when 3.4 million hectares burned.”1) She noted the season started “hot” in May “when over 4,000 people were forced to evacuate” in “the first of 14 evacuation orders over the course of the summer;” in late July, the territorial government “had imposed the largest fire ban in its history, covering the entirety of the North Slave and South Slave regions;” and by August, there were “over 200 fires burning throughout the territory. Winds gusting up to 60 km/h, unseasonable temperatures in the high 20s and drought conditions combined to send multiple fires hurtling toward communities in the South Slave, devouring everything in their paths in a matter of hours.”2)
Dene National Chief Gerald Antoine described last year as an “unprecedented year for wildfires in the NWT with almost 70 percent of the population being evacuated” from over a dozen NWT communities, including: Behchoko, Fort Smith, Salt River First Nation, Smith Landing First Nation, Jean Marie River, West Point First Nation, Hay River, K’atl’odeeche First Nation, Enterprise, Ndilǫ, Dettah, Yellowknife and Kakisa.3) Chief Antoine pointed out that “some people were away from their home community and unsettled in unfamiliar surroundings for over a month. The community of Enterprise was almost completely destroyed and West Point First Nation, the town of Hay River, and K’atl’odeeche reserve were evacuated twice.”4)
Even after the fire season’s pressing danger was safely past, 91 of those 303 fires continued to burn as winter approached, unseasonably late and an ominous harbinger of things to come. As NASA reported, “[a]s of late October 2023, Canada’s remarkable fire season was finally slowing down. Dozens of fires were still out of control on October 24, but winter weather is expected to suppress most of them. However, even winter may not be enough in some cases. Previous research shows that overwintering ‘zombie’ fires in this region have increasingly begun to smolder underground throughout the winter and remerge in the spring as temperatures rise.”5) While it is still too soon to know if such zombie fires will re-erupt at winter’s end, since November the NWT Live Fire Map has shown a welcome absence of active fires in the territory.
Coming to a Boil
As Marlene Payva Almonte described in The Arctic Institute’s May 2, 2023 article, “Vulnerability in the Arctic in the Context of Climate Change and Uncertainty,” the “Arctic region and communities living there are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, which threatens the survival of several species and puts at risk a range of human rights of its inhabitants.”6) This was abundantly clear last summer as this unprecedented wave of wildfires bore down upon multiple isolated NWT communities. To gain insight into both the causes and implications of last summer’s unprecedented NWT wildfires and first-ever evacuation of the NWT’s capital city, I spoke with two veteran Arctic journalists and climate change experts: former Inuvik Drum editor (and long-time editor with the Drum’s parent company, Yellowknife-based Northern News Services Limited), James Hrynyshyn; and former Edmonton Journal Arctic correspondent and prolific author on Arctic climate change, Ed Struzik. Both have been covering Arctic climate change for nearly four decades now. I first met Hrynyshyn when he was the editor of The Inuvik Drum newspaper in 1991 — at the time, I was editing Tussayaksat, the biweekly newspaper of the Inuvik-based Inuvialuit Communications Society. Hrynyshyn first published on climate change in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Collecting Net in July 1987. Struzik, now a prolific book author, also began as a newspaper journalist with an enduring interest in Arctic climate change; among his most prescient and haunting articles was his seminal “The End of Arctic” in Equinox magazine in November/December 1992, an article I still assign to my students for its prescience.7)
In an email interview, Struzik — whose recent books include the two timely tomes, Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future in 20178) and Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire in 2022 9) — described 2023 as “the most intense fire season ever” for the NWT, adding, “Two-thirds of the Northwest Territories population was forced to evacuate for several weeks. The threat was territory wide. A research camp I was planning to visit on the coast of the Beaufort Sea was forced to evacuate because the smoke was so thick and unhealthy. It may be hard to believe, but many fires were still burning in mid-October when there is usually snow on the ground.”10)
While “more than four million hectares of boreal forest burned in the NWT in 2023,” Struzik points out that“fires burned more than 18 million hectares of Russian forest in 2021, setting a record since the country began monitoring forest fires using satellites in 2001. If the Yukon and Alaska had burned big this year, the Russian record might have been surpassed.” Indeed, while unprecedented for the NWT, Struzik recalls that “the Arctic and sub-Arctic has burned big in the past.” As far back as 2004, “a record number of fires burned in the Yukon and Alaska. One complex of fires consumed over 1.7 million acres – almost the size of Vancouver Island. I remember it well because my wife and I ended up canceling plans for a wilderness canoe trip down the Wind River in the Yukon. Not only because the Alaska Highway was being closed periodically, but because all the bush planes had been seconded to deal with the fires. There was no way we would have been able to get to the headwaters of that mountain river.” Then, Struzik adds, “we got a good sense of what was coming three years later when a fire burned more than 1,000 square kilometers of tundra on Alaska’s North Slope. Tundra is almost always too wet and cold to be ignited by lightning or a campfire. Permafrost can be up to 300 feet deep. There is no evidence of a fire as big as this burning the tundra in the last 10,000 years.”
And since then, Struzik points out, things have only continued to intensify: “Alaska burned big again in 2015. It began with a slow moving thunderstorm that shot out 62,000 lighting strikes in five days, triggering 286 fires. On June 20, there were 8,000 strikes in Alaska and several hundred more in the Yukon. No one had ever seen anything like it. Ironically, one fire overran part of the Alyeska pipeline.” Then, just last summer Struzik was “visiting a climate change research station in the Dehcho region of the Northwest Territories. In an historic move, Laurier University handed ownership over to the indigenous community. In late October, when there is almost always snow on the ground, a wildfire burned through it.”
Mass Evacuations: Surrounded by Wildfire, a Capital City Empties
In an email interview, James Hrynyshyn — who resided in Yellowknife in the middle 1990s when he was an editor at Northern News Services Limited (NNSL), the parent company of The Inuvik Drum and publisher of NewsNorth and The Yellowknifer (among other titles), and later published the Class M11) blog on climate change and the environment — shared his reflections on this summer’s mass evacuations in the NWT in an email interview: “Like most former Ykers, I was surprised by the need for an evacuation. We’ve all been through aggressive fire seasons — I was raised in Dryden, Ontario, which suffered through a forest fire season in 1974 that was so bad it was featured in the world’s first IMAX movie (North of Superior) — and I remember camping one summer in the NWT when the smoke was sufficient to keep the mosquitos at bay enough to allow sleeping outside without a tent. But evacuating the whole city was certainly not expected by anyone, and even among those who study wildfires from a climatologist’s point of view, I doubt such an eventuality was on their radar.”12)
While off many of our collective radars, Hrynyshyn presciently anticipated many of the dramatic consequences of a warming Arctic in the early 1990s, and recalls that wildfire risk has long been predicted by climate change scientists and policy experts and that the “increasing risk of wildfires has been incorporated into future climate change scenarios for decades now,” and “several” of Al Gore’s famed 2007 climate change PowerPoint slides “were devoted to fire threats.” Fortunately, as Hrynyshyn observed, the “destructive potential” of this year’s fire threatening Yellowknife “was mitigated by the extraordinary suppression efforts that involved three 10-kilometer-long fire breaks that were bulldozed through the forests around the city. If those hadn’t held, it is likely the destruction would have been enormous. In a way, I think that the success of those efforts is quite reassuring: if we can save a city as remote as Yellowknife, maybe we can save other communities, too.”
On the other hand, Hrynyshyn reflects, “If the fires had breached the firebreaks around Yellowknife and the city had burned to the ground, I can’t see an economic case to rebuild. Sorry, but there isn’t a good argument to be made for having 20,000 people living there. Not with the diamond mines winding down. And do the other 20,000 residents of the NWT really need a big(ish) city to administer their federal subsidies and health care? Doubt it. I don’t think people understand how close Yellowknife came to being permanently abandoned. So, while the pressure to maintain a presence in Las Vegas will be strong (if ultimately futile), I doubt we can make the same case for urban life in the Arctic. I hate to think of the politics involved in depopulating the entire territory — and the Indigenous People who rely on some urban presence pose a very real political problem — but just how much can we afford to pay for the privilege?”
Hrynyshyn notes that “it’s always been energetically expensive to live in the NWT, but it’s going to increase even more.” Indeed, Hrynyshyn adds, “The truth is, settlements in the North haven’t grown considerably over the past century, at least not relative to the rest of the continent. Canada’s population has doubled in the past 50 years to almost 40 million people. The NWT, however, has only grown at half that rate, and today is still only in the 40,000 range, and almost all of the increase has come in one city.” That’s why, he adds, ”I don’t think encroachment is nearly as important a factor as it is further south, and certainly not as important a factor as the changes in climate parameters.” Moreover, increasing wildfires are “only one manifestation of anthropogenic climate change that is being felt in the Arctic. For example: what are chum salmon doing off the northern coast of Alaska?” Hrynyshyn recalls that when he “started paying close attention as a journalist to climate change in the early 1990s, most predictions called for the Arctic to warm at twice the rate of the global average. That turned out to be an underestimate by a factor of at least two.”
Nature Strikes Back
I asked both Hrynyshyn and Struzik if humanity is at war with nature, with nature now fighting back. Struzik observed that “the force and advantage is with nature. You can’t heat up the pot, as we are doing in the south, and not expect things to boil over.” Hrynyshyn observed, “I don’t like to think of nature as ‘fighting back’ as that implies intent. But nature does seek an equilibrium. If we push too hard on some settings, it will try to adapt by fiddling with the settings in other elements of the global ecosystem. And some of those new settings will be hostile to civilization. For places like the Arctic, as well as many low-lying coastal regions like the US East Coast, and water-scarce deserts like Arizona and Nevada, that means it will become increasingly expensive to live. In Arizona and Nevada, I expect Scottsdale and Las Vegas to be untenable within 20 years. It will be just too expensive to haul water to the cities (if there is any water available, that is). In Florida, it will be too expensive to build sea walls against rising sea levels. And in the Arctic, it will be too expensive to rebuild after the inevitable fires that burn down more communities like Enterprise. The difference between Miami and Yellowknife, however, is that there are lot more people in the former.”
I asked Hrynyshyn if the 2023 NWT wildfires present us with a timely (and dramatic) reminder of what security truly means in the Arctic, and if it’s less about tank formations crossing borders, more about upheavals to the natural balance itself? Hrynyshyn replied thoughtfully that he has “long thought that the threat from natural upheaval is far greater than any military threat. There’s simply no good reason to physically invade the Arctic when there are much more important fronts to worry about. The trick is to make governments understand that melting permafrost and ice caps pose enormous threats to the entire human race by releasing CO2 and methane and decreasing the albedo of the planet and accelerating ocean warming even further. For many of those far from the Arctic, these are abstractions. For those in the Arctic they are all too real — climate change is here and now. Unfortunately, Northerners have no power, and I don’t think those that do are prepared to do much about it yet.” If there is an upside, it’s only that awareness of the profound dangers of Arctic climate change has grown dramatically since Hrynyshyn’s arrival to the NWT at the dawn of the 1990s. “Given how much attention real journalists are (finally) devoting to the issue (WaPo has 30 full-time climate journalists now!), I don’t think I need to continue egging them on, which was the point of Class M. So I have switched to hyperlocal podcasting.”13)
I asked Struzik if the mutual challenge of wildfires presents the entire Arctic with a compelling reason to reach across the re-emerging East-West divide, and resume pan-Arctic cooperation with the Russias on at least this particular challenge given its gravity and enormity. He replied, “I wish it were so. But based on everything I’ve seen and heard from scientists so far, pan-Arctic cooperation is unlikely so long as Putin is in power.” Struzik recalled how, “Following the catastrophic 2010 fire season, the German government offered money and expertise to help restore the hydrological regimes that keep Russia’s peaty bogs, fens, and marshes wet and their carbon sequestered. But on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, German institutes — including the Succow Foundation — withdrew their support. Just weeks afterward, a Russian bomb in Ukraine likely triggered a wildfire in the forest around the Chernobyl nuclear site, a focus of another rewetting project.” Struzik cautions that this “cessation of scientific collaboration comes at a precarious moment for the Arctic: Environmental risks associated with sea ice loss, pollution, and shipping are increasing; Russia and other Arctic states are proposing new boundary lines along the continental shelf that would expand their claims over the Arctic Ocean seabed; and peatlands have been continuing to burn after a year of record-setting wildfires in northern Russia, adding substantially to the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. (Russia is the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.) In addition, China is ramping up its economic interests in the Arctic.” Struzik’s takeaway: “The Arctic has long been a model for optimism and international cooperation. A lot needs to be done to keep it that way.”
Moreover, as Struzik explains, “What happens in the Arctic matters to the rest of the world. There are many examples to drive this point home. One of the most impactful is the jet stream, which manufactures weather and moves weather from west to east. The strength of the jet stream is dependent on the difference in temperature between the Arctic and mid-latitudes. The larger the difference, the stronger the jet stream. As the temperature difference wanes in this warming world, the jet stream weakens. That’s why we see heat domes building in places like British Columbia which has been hard hit by wildfires since 2017. The jet stream is not strong enough to move it and allow wet Pacific moisture to move in.”
The Beginning of a New Normal That’s Anything But
Hrynyshyn predicts that “we can expect lots more disruption in the future, obviously. I don’t see this year’s fire as the culmination, but the beginning of a new normal, in which those who have settled the North have to spend a lot of scarce resources just maintaining a livable environment.” He further notes that the NWT “hasn’t engaged in forest management practices as forestry isn’t a significant industry, so you can’t blame the fires on build-up of forest floor detritus, like you can in California. It’s simply that the summers are longer and hotter and winters are shorter.” And this is having profound impacts on the entirety of the circumpolar world: “Certainly the permafrost is melting around the world. Any literature search of climate change at the ecosystem level will show dramatic changes in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, northern Scandinavia, and Russia. Meanwhile, glaciologists are worried about Antarctic ice cover, which may be about to experience a sudden and catastrophic decline. And just about everything will be affected.”
Struzik concurs, noting “many people refer to this new wildfire paradigm as the ‘new normal’.” But as he notes above, this rising tide of Arctic infernos is not altogether new, dating back two decades to the start of the 21st century. Moreover, “there is nothing normal about what is happening. Almost each year since the turn of the century has brought something new and unexpected, as I point out in my book Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire. Unless we come to grips with this new reality, nothing will be normal.” According to Struzik, “the rising number of fires in the Arctic and sub-Arctic is pure and simple, a symptom of a warming world. Very few fires are ignited by humans as they are in the south. Several things contribute to the severity. One-degree increase in temperature equals 12 per cent more lightning. More heat means more tundra and wetlands drying out and being primed for ignition. Wetlands are also important because they can slow or stop a fire.”
So what can we do to fight this gathering threat to the Arctic? Struzik believes that “communities in the North can do a lot to mitigate the threat of wildfire. They can thin the forests around town and create fire breaks that reduce the chance of fires moving into populated areas. Controlled burning is also a way of reducing the amount of fuel on the ground. Better building codes are also necessary. The traditional log cabin will not fare well in a fire. That said, most communities do not have the necessary resources to do this. They need help.” He recalls how “Indigenous people in the south used controlled burning as a way of leveling brush so that grass would grow and attract bison and other animals. They also did it to nurture the growth of root vegetables and berries. This was very good land management until we made them stop doing it.”
In an October 12, 2023 press release, Dene National Chief Gerald Antoine called for a “full independent public inquiry into the management and response to the 2023 wildfires in the NWT,” as an inquiry that is both public and independent “encourages everyone in our communities to talk about it.”14) Chief Antoine added: “We must discuss lessons learned and how to prepare for next spring and into the future. The climate catastrophe will continue, and uncertainty will be the norm,” and that “[s]ome of the fires will burn underground all winter and will resurface in the spring.”15) He emphasized that “above all, we must incorporate Dene knowledge into our emergency response to wildfires. Our People have been here since the beginning of time and have always relied on our own understanding of the land and the environment around us to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Clearly, emergency management and response in the NWT must incorporate the expertise of the Dene,” and “Dene authority and governance must be recognized and included in all response plans going forward.”16)
As reported by NNSL Media on February 16, 2024, Chief Antoine continues to believe a “full inquiry into the wildfire catastrophe requires all participants to discuss what happened and how we can prepare to better safeguard our people and ensure clear chains of command that prioritize the wellness and safety of our peoples. This evacuation was likened to forcible removal by former governments with thousands of our people displaced with no clear communication or resources to ensure their safety and wellness in some cases.”17) NNSL reports both the NWT Departments of Environment and Climate Change (ECC) and Municipal and Community Affairs (MACA) “have already launched reviews — what the GNWT is calling ‘after-action assessments’ — into the decision-making surrounding last year’s catastrophe,” and whether the GNWT will hold a public inquiry is presently being considered by the NWT Legislative Assembly, with the issue expected to come to debate as early as February 22nd.18)
As we look ahead to future conflagrations, now may be the time to once again embrace the wisdom of traditional Indigenous knowledge. There is much worthy of emulation in traditional land stewardship, from the increased sustainability of seasonal nomadicity with its light human footprint on the fragile northern ecosystem to the carbon neutrality of subsistence-hunting and fishing societies with their low carbon output, minimal deforestation, and eco-friendly economies. But with urban regional centers of governance a reality of contemporary Arctic society, until a city like Yellowknife falls to an unstoppable wall of fire, it is unlikely that we will see a managed retreat from the Arctic on par with what we are seeing in low-lying coastal communities now being consumed by sea level rises and salt-water intrusions. Until then, the best we can do is to take a proactive approach to this grave and gathering threat to Arctic communities, and learn from last summer’s conflagrations how we may best develop the necessary precautions from preventive firebreaks to well-practiced evacuation drills along well-stocked escape routes, to ensure the chaos and fear that gripped much of the NWT last summer will never again take us by surprise — taking Ben Franklin’s famed 1735 dictum to heart, that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” — or even more.19)
The magnitude of climate change’s impact on the Arctic has been underestimated before, but in the wake of last summer’s wildfires and historic evacuation of Yellowknife, we must never again let our guard down. With comparable wildfires in recent years in Alaska and Siberia, this is a threat that is faced by the entirety of the circumpolar Arctic. While a new Cold War may be brewing, with NATO’s Nordic expansion moving us closer to a re-bifurcated Arctic for the first time in a generation, there has been a chilling deep freeze in Arctic collaboration. This has included a dramatic collapse of Arctic science diplomacy between the West and Russia, eroding the common foundation of shared knowledge that had, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, united Arctic states and Indigenous peoples around the whole of the Arctic, east or west. While the wildfire threat is primarily a threat to the Arctic’s environments, ecosystems, and communities, affecting human security first and foremost, it is a threat that faces the whole of the Arctic, regardless of alliance or degree of authoritarianism. This universality suggests that even as re-emergent blocs face off once again across the Arctic, there are still common threats to our shared Arctic existence that demand a collective and united response, whether it is in our efforts to slow or stop climate change, and mitigate its impacts, or to respond to the crises that arise in its wake. Last summer’s NWT wildfires are thus a sobering reminder that climate change remains a clear and present danger to the Arctic and its peoples, and a grave and gathering threat that we cannot safely ignore.
Since 2018, Barry Scott Zellen, Ph.D., has been a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut (UConn); he was a 2020 Fulbright Scholar at the Polar Law Centre at the University of Akureyri, and lived in Canada’s Northwest Territories in the 1990s where he managed several Indigenous language media centers funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage’s Northern Native Broadcast Access Program (NNBAP).
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