{"id":148952,"date":"2026-07-30T00:30:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T00:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/148952\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T00:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T00:30:10","slug":"why-the-adirondacks-dont-burn-like-canadas-forests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/148952\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Adirondacks don\u2019t burn like Canada\u2019s forests"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The same can\u2019t 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.<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Why doesn\u2019t New York see the kind of fires that Canada does?<\/p>\n

According to John Sheehan, director of communications for the Adirondack Council, there are multiple reasons, including rules against clear cutting.<\/p>\n

\u201cClear cutting has really made wildfires more likely and made them bigger in the Canadian forest,\u201d Sheehan said. \u201cWe\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On commercial forest land in the Adirondacks, you can\u2019t cut more than 25 acres without an Adirondack Park Agency permit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d Sheehan said.<\/p>\n

While fire is needed to regenerate the boreal forests of Canada, the region\u2019s lack of stewardship has made those forests even hungrier for fire than the ones that naturally would occur.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s constitution and the creation of the Adirondack Park for our healthy forest lands, Sheehan says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThose 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forests in and around the Adirondack Park see between 175 and 250 fires a year but they tend…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148953,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[48213,48212,45917,45997,17,48211,48210,4752,116,45999,113,48209,516,4754],"class_list":["post-148952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-albany-capital-region","tag-app-capital-tonight","tag-app-local-state-politics","tag-app-ny-state-of-politics","tag-canada","tag-capital-tonight","tag-capital-tonight-interviews","tag-new-york-state","tag-news","tag-ny-state-of-politics","tag-politics","tag-susan-arbetter","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}