Forests in and around the Adirondack Park see between 175 and 250 fires a year but they tend to be small and quelled relatively quickly.
The same can’t be said about the forests of Canada where more than 190 wildfires in Ontario this month alone have burned more than 735,000 hectares of land.
Canadian wildfires are something we are acutely aware of here in New York thanks to a ubiquitous smoky haze in the summer months usually accompanied by dire air quality warnings.
Why doesn’t New York see the kind of fires that Canada does?
According to John Sheehan, director of communications for the Adirondack Council, there are multiple reasons, including rules against clear cutting.
“Clear cutting has really made wildfires more likely and made them bigger in the Canadian forest,” Sheehan said. “We’re seeing a lot of landscape-wide clear cutting that areas of very large forest are being essentially leveled and eliminated from the landscape leaving very small trees to grow back.”
On commercial forest land in the Adirondacks, you can’t cut more than 25 acres without an Adirondack Park Agency permit.
“We tend to be more selective in the way we cut our forests, and we also have a forest preserve that is never cut. That has helped because a buffer between the commercial forests helps,” Sheehan said.
While fire is needed to regenerate the boreal forests of Canada, the region’s lack of stewardship has made those forests even hungrier for fire than the ones that naturally would occur.
New York did see the kind of fires that Canada now faces back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We can thank the “Forever Wild” clause in the state’s constitution and the creation of the Adirondack Park for our healthy forest lands, Sheehan says.
“Those two actions helped to set aside land that would remain forever wild and create the kind of conditions that would make fire very unlikely to become a catastrophe in the Adirondacks,” he said.