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Transcript

Wild Spaces And Outdoor Life · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Riley: Hey, welcome back. Today we've got a prescribed burn planned near Deer Park Mountain outside Castlegar — up to 450 hectares, smoke over Castlegar this week — and the question nobody's answering: who actually decided that acreage, and did Sinixt or Tŝilhqot'in voices have any real say? Plus goats fighting wildfire fuel at Kanaka Bar. Coming right up.
• 0:35
  Riley: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities — I'm Riley. It's Friday, September 18th, 2026. Speaking to you from the traditional territories of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations here in the Cariboo region. Today's theme is Wild Spaces & Outdoor Life.
• 0:58
  Casey: And I'm Casey. We're talking backcountry, wildfire, and who actually gets a say in how these landscapes get managed and burned. Quick weather check — overcast and around 8 degrees out at Horsefly Lake this morning, high of 22 today, no rain in the forecast. Across the region: 100 Mile House sitting around 10 with clear skies, Williams Lake around 9 and overcast, Quesnel around 8 and clear, Tatla Lake around 8 and clear as well.
• 1:24
  Riley: Good day to be outside, smoke permitting. Let's get into what's happening.
• 1:29
  Casey: Six stories close to home today, a real cluster on the theme after that, and a few worth a quick mention before the Spotlight. Starting local — 100 Mile House RCMP have laid charges after a road rage incident on Grosset Road near Bridge Lake.
• 1:45
  Riley: Richard Mowat, 35, is facing one count each of assault with a weapon and uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm, plus dangerous driving and two counts of possession of a prohibited firearm. RCMP say it started as an argument over animals on Sunday, one man drove off, then came back with a vehicle.
• 2:04
  Casey: He's due back in court on the 25th.
• 2:07
  Riley: In Quesnel, the Women's Resource Centre held its annual Take Back the Night event last night.
• 2:14
  Casey: Counselor Brittany Marsh spoke ahead of the event about why the Centre runs it every year — a walk and rally meant to draw attention to gender-based violence and reclaim public space after dark.
• 2:26
  Riley: Small and recurring events like that don't get less important because they're familiar.
• 2:31
  Casey: Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA Lorne Doerkson published a column this week arguing the province's natural resource sector is struggling under current NDP policy.
• 2:41
  Riley: That's an opinion piece from a sitting MLA, not an independent report — his framing, not a finding.
• 2:48
  Casey: Provincewide, B.C. Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay has rolled out a revamped shadow cabinet after nine of her MLAs left caucus in under three weeks.
• 2:57
  Riley: Nine departures that fast is a lot of turnover for any party to absorb at once.
• 3:03
  Casey: Findlay's now assigning critic roles to cover the gaps left behind. We'll see whether the new lineup holds through the fall session.
• 3:11
  Riley: Back home — the Apple Pie Society recognized the Cariboo Memorial Hospital Auxiliary this week for its volunteer contributions.
• 3:19
  Casey: Decades of fundraising and hospital support that mostly happens without anyone outside the building noticing.
• 3:26
  Riley: And in Kelowna, Team Leavitt took the win at the annual Haul for Hope truck-pull competition, with video posted by the Tribune.
• 3:34
  Casey: New figures reported this week put outdoor recreation's contribution to B.C.'s economy at six billion dollars a year.
• 3:42
  Riley: The Vancouver Sun frames that as putting the sector in the same league as oil and gas extraction, tourism, and film production combined.
• 3:51
  Casey: For a region built on trails, lakes, and backcountry access, that's the argument for treating outdoor infrastructure as economic infrastructure, not a nice-to-have.
• 4:01
  Riley: Six billion sounds impressive until you ask how much of it actually lands in the towns doing the hosting, versus the outfitters and booking platforms taking a cut off the top. The article doesn't say.
• 4:15
  Casey: No breakdown in the piece, no. We'll come back to some of the underlying tension there in a minute.
• 4:21
  Riley: Earlier this week, the Nlaka'pamux community of Kanaka Bar started deploying a herd of goats to clear brush and reduce wildfire fuel load around the community.
• 4:32
  Casey: Goats work through undergrowth and ladder fuels without machinery, without diesel, without hiring a contractor crew. It's a low-tech fireproofing method and it's entirely community-led.
• 4:43
  Riley: It's also slow and doesn't scale the way a grant committee likes to see results scale. That cuts against how most wildfire funding gets structured — favoring the expensive, fast, one-time fix over the patient, ongoing one.
• 4:58
  Casey: Also earlier this week, a new federal report concluded that the effects of climate change on Canada are now largely irreversible, with average temperatures expected to climb at least three and a half degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
• 5:12
  Riley: That's not a projection to plan around anymore. That's the baseline the government is now planning against.
• 5:19
  Casey: Tied to that, a piece in Mother Jones on this year's El Niño describes die-offs and flooding already underway in the Pacific, with the article's sourcing pointing to supercharged storms and drought still ahead.
• 5:32
  Riley: We'll dig into that properly in a few minutes — it connects directly to the burn planned outside Castlegar.
• 5:40
  Casey: Popular Mechanics reported this week that wildfire smoke across North America is becoming a bigger health threat every summer, with the piece citing warming temperatures and longer fire seasons as the drivers.
• 5:52
  Riley: Every August in the Cariboo tastes like that already. No argument from this end of the table.
• 5:59
  Casey: Earlier this week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to eliminate federal limits on climate pollution from power plants, reversing a rule that's been on the books for years.
• 6:09
  Riley: Power generation is the second-largest source of planet-warming emissions in the country. A rollback there has weather consequences that don't stop at a border.
• 6:20
  Casey: Earlier this week, Vox reported that food packaging chemicals are drawing more regulatory scrutiny than the food inside the packaging, with the piece noting regulators still don't have a full inventory of what's in the plastics and coatings involved.
• 6:35
  Riley: Slower-burning story, the kind that eventually turns into a policy fight nobody saw coming three years out.
• 6:42
  Casey: And Scientific American noted earlier this week that the ozone hole is healing, but extreme weather events are slowing that recovery.
• 6:50
  Riley: Good news with an asterisk.
• 6:53
  Casey: Last one before the Spotlight — WIRED explained why great white sharks seem to be showing up in bigger numbers along the coast of Maine. Turns out it's a conservation success, not an invasion. Seal populations recovered under protection, and the sharks followed the food source north.
• 7:09
  Riley: Nice to close that run on something that isn't a warning label for once.
• 7:14
  Casey: That's the ground for today. Let's get to the Spotlight.
• 7:18
  Riley: Today's Spotlight goes to the Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society, running environmental education across the region since 1996 — Water Wise, Waste Wise, Skates for All, and school field programs that get kids out onto real ground instead of just talking about it in a classroom. It's also National Day of the Hunter today, and ethical hunting has always been part of the Cariboo's conservation story — knowing the land, respecting seasons and limits, taking only what's needed and using what's taken. The Society's programs connect that heritage directly to how young people in the region come to understand responsible land use going forward. Find them at conservationsociety.ca.
• 8:02
  Casey: Twenty-nine years of continuous school programming is a track record most nonprofits never reach, in this region or anywhere else.
• 8:10
  Riley: Which is a decent bridge into where we're headed next — who actually gets a say in what happens on this land.
• 8:18
  Riley: BC Wildfire Service has a prescribed burn planned near Deer Park Mountain outside Castlegar. Up to 450 hectares, within a kilometre of Deer Park itself, timing dependent on weather, possibly starting this week and running in stages over the next month.
• 8:33
  Casey: Standard risk-reduction language. Reduce fuel load, reduce future fire severity. Standard is the word carrying weight in that release.
• 8:41
  Riley: What's wrong with standard?
• 8:43
  Casey: Nothing's wrong with the goal. What's unexamined is who decided this particular 450 hectares was worth the smoke, the cost, and the risk of igniting fire on purpose — and who wasn't in the room when that decision got made.
• 8:56
  Riley: That's the actual question today. Not whether fire belongs on this land — everyone from BC Wildfire Service to Kanaka Bar agrees it does. It's who's holding the drip torch, and who's watching the smoke column from town with no say in the plan.
• 9:10
  Casey: Right. And the framing coming out of the ministry is that this is settled science. Burn now, prevent megafire later. It isn't settled.
• 9:17
  Casey: A 2024 study in the peer-reviewed literature found that under certain conditions, prescribed fires actually raised the probability of a subsequent wildfire event rather than lowering it. A 2025 paper in the journal People and Nature makes a related point — prescribed burning can work, but only in specific contexts, and agencies routinely stretch that evidence past where it actually holds.
• 9:41
  Riley: The AGU Advances research on Western U.S. burns says something close to that too. There's still no reliable way to weigh the smoke and near-term risk of doing a burn against the wildfire severity it might prevent five or ten years down the line.
• 9:56
  Casey: So BC Wildfire Service is running a province-wide program on the strength of evidence its own research community says isn't fully worked out yet.
• 10:04
  Riley: Or it's running a program because doing nothing has its own track record, and it's worse. Waiting around for airtight science while fuel loads keep building isn't a neutral choice. It's a choice with its own consequences, they're just deferred a few years.
• 10:20
  Casey: Deferred risk versus imposed risk. The Deer Park burn puts smoke over Renata, Edgewood, and Castlegar this week. Guaranteed. The wildfire it's supposedly preventing is hypothetical.
• 10:31
  Riley: A wildfire tearing through unmanaged interior forest isn't hypothetical in this province. We just came off a summer where Summerland evacuated for twenty-five straight days.
• 10:41
  Casey: That's not what I'm contesting. What I'm contesting is whether this specific 450 hectares, picked through this specific ministry process, is actually the right 450 hectares. And whether the people who've been burning this exact landscape for longer than the province has existed had any real say in choosing it.
• 11:00
  Riley: That's where it gets uncomfortable. There's a live argument right now, including a National Post opinion piece, framing provincial prescribed burning as a colonial adaptation of Indigenous cultural burning — copying the technique without transferring any of the authority that goes with it.
• 11:17
  Casey: Kanaka Bar's goat program is sitting right there as the counter-example. Nlaka'pamux-led, low-tech, no waiting on a ministry burn window that depends on the right humidity, the right wind, the right staffing all lining up in the same week in September. Roughly eighty goats worked about twelve hectares this summer, a quarter-hectare a day.
• 11:37
  Riley: Goats work for fuel reduction around a community's immediate footprint. They don't scale to 450 hectares of interior conifer forest. That's a different tool for a different scale of problem, not a substitute.
• 11:51
  Casey: Assuming the goats don't unionize over the workload. But scale isn't the only variable that matters here. Who authorizes the tool is the variable that keeps showing up no matter the scale. Kanaka Bar decided for itself, on its own land, on its own timeline. Deer Park Mountain got decided by a ministry, for a landscape that predates that ministry by longer than anyone in Victoria wants to sit with.
• 12:13
  Riley: BC Wildfire Service does have consultation built into its burn planning protocols with Nations. That's part of the current process, and it's a real improvement over having no coordination at all.
• 12:26
  Casey: Consultation and control aren't the same category of thing. One is being asked your opinion on a plan someone else wrote. The other is deciding whether the plan happens at all.
• 12:35
  Casey: Cultural burning under Indigenous authority runs on its own protocols — timing tied to specific plant cycles, wildlife movement, ceremonial calendar, not just a weather window that happens to open in a given month. A provincial burn schedule built around staff availability and a dry-season forecast isn't the same practice with a different name on the door.
• 12:56
  Riley: The process matters as much as the outcome here. A good result produced by a broken process is still evidence of a broken process. The open question with Deer Park specifically is whether the burn plan reflects actual Sinixt or Tŝilhqot'in input, or whether it checked a consultation box and moved on.
• 13:14
  Casey: The BC Wildfire Service release doesn't say either way. That's the tell. When a Nation has actually shaped a burn plan, the announcement usually says so, because it's the more interesting story to tell.
• 13:26
  Riley: Or it's just terse agency copy that skips its planning inputs across the board, including the fire science behind the acreage number. Absence of detail in a press release isn't proof of absence of consultation.
• 13:39
  Casey: I can't prove a negative from three paragraphs of ministry copy. But the pattern across this province holds — when Nations lead a burn, that leadership becomes the headline. Silence in the release usually means it wasn't the headline, because it wasn't the story.
• 13:55
  Riley: Zoom out for a second, because the reason any of this matters beyond one mountain near Castlegar is the El Niño piece. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has flagged a greater-than-ninety-percent chance of a very strong event in an upcoming season, and it's not a one-off — it's part of a pattern that keeps recurring and keeps intensifying.
• 14:16
  Casey: Doom loop is a punchy headline. Is the underlying data actually there, or is that framing doing the selling?
• 14:22
  Riley: The intensification and the recurrence are both in NOAA's own tracking — these oscillations are swinging harder and more often than the historical baseline. Whether "doom loop" is the right label for that is a separate question from whether the trend itself is real.
• 14:38
  Casey: My actual problem with pairing that trend with a 450-hectare burn near Castlegar is this: one is a hemispheric climate driver reshaping drought and storm patterns across an entire continent. The other is a single ministry project scheduled around a weather window in mid-September. Framing the second as a response to the first oversells what a burn like this can possibly accomplish.
• 15:00
  Riley: Nobody's claiming one burn solves a hemispheric problem. It's a local mitigation action taken inside a worsening climate context. Those are two different claims, and collapsing them into one is how a person talks themselves out of doing anything local at all.
• 15:16
  Casey: I'm not arguing for doing nothing. I'm arguing that calling a single burn "proactive climate resilience" borrows credibility from a crisis it can't touch, while the harder structural question — who actually has standing to make land-management calls as fire seasons stretch longer every year — goes unanswered again.
• 15:33
  Riley: Then land the structural question somewhere concrete. What would you actually want changed about how a Deer Park-style burn gets planned?
• 15:41
  Casey: Co-decision authority, not consultation. A Nation with a documented interest in a burn area gets a seat at the table that can say no to the plan as written, not just comment on a draft that's already finished.
• 15:54
  Riley: That's a real governance change, and it doesn't require new money. It's a rule the province could write into its own burn-planning policy tomorrow. Utilities are already dealing with something structurally similar, for what it's worth.
• 16:08
  Riley: Wildfire Today published an interactive map this week tracking state-by-state utility wildfire laws in the U.S. After PG&E's bankruptcy over California fire liability, several states are now forcing utilities to actually harden infrastructure, not just pay damages after the fact.
• 16:26
  Casey: Some of those same states are also building self-insurance funds for utilities. Nevada and Utah are looking at it, and Hawaii's regulator may revisit one after Lahaina. That shifts financial risk back onto ratepayers and fire victims instead of forcing the utility to spend on prevention up front.
• 16:43
  Riley: So the liability threat is what's actually driving infrastructure hardening in the first place, and a self-insurance fund undercuts that pressure the moment it exists.
• 16:54
  Casey: That's financial engineering standing in for the harder, more expensive work of pole replacement and vegetation clearance. Same move, structurally, as a burn announcement that skips who was consulted. Solve the visible, fundable part. Leave the governance question sitting on the shelf.
• 17:11
  Riley: Here in the Cariboo, that same governance question is live right now with the B.C. Rail Corridor. The Rail Corridor Alliance has been pressing for a formal role in decisions over that land, and it's the identical ask underneath — a seat before the plan is final, not a comment period after.
• 17:29
  Casey: Named organization, real ongoing dispute, current fight. That's a better test case than hoping some ministry writes a warmer press release next time around.
• 17:38
  Riley: So here's a concrete thing to check next spring — whether the Cariboo Regional District, or any Nation with territory touching a planned burn in this region, pushes for a formal seat in that planning process before next fire season starts. Not after the smoke clears.
• 17:55
  Casey: That's the actual test. If it doesn't happen before spring, this is consultation theatre again, wearing reconciliation's clothes.
• 18:02
  Riley: I'll take that as the marker to check back against — not agreement that it fails, just agreement on what would prove it worked. If you know whether Sinixt or Tŝilhqot'in voices actually shaped the Deer Park plan, write in — feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
• 18:18
  Casey: Good enough. We'll know by next spring, assuming nobody in Victoria decides a press release counts as evidence. Try not to breathe too deep out there this weekend.
• 18:27
  Riley: Stay out of the smoke where you can. See you Monday.