Lirondelle, Prentice & Parrott-Landry

UBC Okanagan undergrads get hands-on with wildfires, monitoring and Indigenous land stewardship practices. What started as fieldwork for UBC Okanagan students Ainsley Lirondelle, Jed Prentice and Olivier Parrott-Landry soon became a crash course in fire science, place-based knowledge and unexpected friendship. …Under the guidance of UBC Okanagan wildfire scientist Dr. Mathieu Bourbonnais, the research opened their eyes to a central truth about the Okanagan: what appears to be wilderness is often anything but. …They learned how fire exclusion policies have led to tightly-packed stands of similar-age trees that burn hotter and faster than historic landscapes ever did. “I’ve had so many conversations where I explain that fire is a forest management issue, not just a weather problem,” says Lirondelle. “People are always surprised. They think fire is this external force. It’s not. It’s the result of how we’ve managed the land.”