Firefighters on the front line of the climate emergency

By Denise Christie - Morning Star, November 19, 2021

From flooding to forest blazes, firefighters all over Britain are already engaged with the practical battle against the climate crisis – but our services are not yet fully prepared for the enormous implications of the emergency, writes DENISE CHRISTIE of the Fire Brigades Union.

COP26 is an opportunity for our movement to demonstrate our solidarity with working people and their communities around the world and to organise together to create the just and green world we want and need, to allow us to live safely and fairly.

We must also be fully active in the campaign that Cop26 must be a focus to organise against the climate emergency in solidarity with all working people.

The climate crisis is a crisis of social justice, with those who have done least to cause the crisis and who are least able to address it facing the worst effects.

What’s it got to do with firefighters and the FBU?

Firefighters are on the front line of tackling the climate emergency. Climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires, such as grassland and forest fires and floods, including from surface water, rivers and the sea.

It will also affect the supply and availability of water and may give rise to more extreme weather events.

These hazards will have implications for the working conditions of firefighters. The climate emergency will require significant changes to appliances, to the equipment available to firefighters, and to training.

We will also need greater awareness of firefighters’ health implications, greater pumping capability and water use and increased capacity within our operational fire control rooms.

The fire and rescue service needs the staff, resources and equipment to tackle the impact of this climate emergency. There is no logic to job cuts and shutting fire stations and control rooms when these risks are likely to increase in the years ahead.

Firefighters tackling climate change

The FBU has been proactive in raising the impact that the climate emergency will have on fire and rescue services (FRSs).

We have raised it directly with FRSs and with politicians as far back as 2016 when I organised and chaired an FBU fringe meeting at the Scottish Green Party conference titled “Climate Change — Key Issues for the Fire and Rescue Service.”

The point has been well made that firefighters are the primary emergency responders to severe climate events that affect communities and that the FBU is committed to political and industrial campaigning on the climate emergency.

The union campaigns within the fire and rescue service and works with others in our movement to tackle one of the most fundamental questions of our age.

Meanwhile, on the ground, firefighters all over Britain are engaged with the practical battle against the climate crisis. For example, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service received 350 flooding-related calls over just one week with around 1,000 people eventually being evacuated.

The increase in these types of calls can also be very challenging for firefighters working within the operational fire control rooms as they handle each flooding-related call over and above the other emergency calls they receive.

Flooding can also delay the response of the fire and rescue service attending emergency incidents due to the severe impact it has on roads and travel.

Firefighters have a “can-do” attitude and instinctively want to help people. It can become incredibly frustrating when the infrastructure all over the country is not capable of meeting the demands of the climate emergency which in turn can delay a firefighter’s response to emergency incidents.

While it is right that we are proud of our work here and at incidents like it, they should also serve as very real reminders that climate change is here, and is affecting our lives and our work today.

Protect firefighter jobs

Our fire and rescue services are not yet fully prepared for the enormous implications of the climate emergency. Over the last decade, we have seen a loss of over 11,000 front-line firefighter jobs in the UK.

We’ve seen the closure of operational fire control rooms and fire stations and fire budgets slashed by Westminster. There is no logic to these cuts when climate risks are likely to increase in the years ahead.

The FBU will continue to be front and centre in our campaigns to reverse these attacks on our profession.

We will be front and centre at Cop26 supporting the many campaigns and ask those who are able to, to join us on Saturday November 6 for the Global Day of Action in Glasgow.

We will have the FBU fire appliance on the march from Kelvingrove to Glasgow Green and will be involved in other Global Day of Action demonstrations across cities around the UK.

We will also be launching our FBU film at a special Cop26 event on Monday November 8 1.30pm-3pm at the Websters Theatre, 416 Great Western Road, Glasgow.

Speakers include FBU general secretary Matt Wrack and myself, plus contributions from front-line firefighters tackling the climate emergency on the ground and in operational fire control rooms.

If we demand climate justice then we must demand social justice too. You cannot have one without the other and that message will be delivered loud and clear during Cop26.

Denise Christie is FBU regional secretary in Scotland.

All of this and more was elucidated in a remarkably non-partisan speech in the provincial legislature by Prince George-Mackenzie Liberal MLA Mike Morris just days before the government made its potential deferral announcement.

“We are, quite simply, out of harvestable trees, unless we don’t care about habitat for wildlife, salmon and genuine biodiversity management,” Morris said before beginning to catalogue the shocking inventory of losses. Morris’s words take on even more meaning when one considers the riding he represents. The community of Mackenzie — which owes its very existence to the forest industry — is on the path to ghost town status, the forest industry equivalent of Newfoundland’s deserted cod-fishing outports.

The town that once had two pulp mills, a handful of sawmills, a remanufacturing mill and a wood chipping plant is down to just two mills. Meanwhile, the Mackenzie region’s remaining “harvestable trees” continue to fall and be trucked away to feed mills starved for logs in Prince George and Quesnel. Only the willfully blind fail to see that this may soon mean zero mills in Mackenzie, and no jobs for local loggers, many of whom are First Nation members.

Where have successive governments been — where, for that matter, has the Council of Forest Industries been — as the list of endangered species rose sharply, along with the numbers of the unemployed, and First Nations communities lost the moose, salmon and other species that defined them? Nowhere.

There’s one reason and one reason only that explains why we are “out of harvestable trees.” Most of them have been cut down.

In June, Premier John Horgan and Forests Minister Katrine Conroy released a document outlining what the government “intended” to do to set a new course for forestry in the province. Significantly, the announcement came as protesters were being arrested in droves in the premier’s own riding for blocking logging roads leading into old-growth forests in the Fairy Creek area on southern Vancouver Island. Those arrests now exceed 1,000 as the blockades continue and police enforce an injunction obtained in BC Supreme Court.

When the document was released, the premier and forests minister said that they intended to increase old-growth forest protection after negotiation with First Nations on whose ancestral lands such protections would occur, and to enact policies that ensure that the industry adds more value to each tree logged — something that government after government has “intended” to do but never got around to.

Developments in Morris’s riding also underscore the farce that is value-added in B.C.’s forest industry today. In an idled sawmill in Mackenzie where 200 workers were once employed by Canadian Forest Products, banks of computer processors will soon be in place to “harvest” not wood, but the crypto-currency Bitcoin. Another idled Canfor mill in Canal Flats in southeast B.C. is now fully converted from processing harvested trees to harvesting data to make Bitcoin.

Somehow, we don’t think this is what the premier had in mind when he talked about the need to shift the forest industry onto a new value-focused footing.

The people in Mackenzie have seen it all: a shocking loss of biological diversity, a shocking loss of mill jobs, gutted rural communities, and an appalling lack of leadership by successive provincial governments, which chose to turn over vast swaths of forestland to companies like Canfor in exchange for promises to build and maintain mills in specific communities.

But that social contract was shredded long ago by the Liberals under Gordon Campbell. And the Liberal and NDP governments that followed did nothing to reverse course.

The “logging rights” that the government turned over gave corporations a lock on lands at the expense and in contempt of the rights and traditional practices of First Nations. Those nations had managed the forests quite well for thousands of years before B.C. became a province in 1871 and the provincial government gained powers to manage natural resources on so-called “Crown” land.

Adding insult to injury, the publicly owned forest resources that governments turned over to the companies cannot be taken back without compensating the companies for the loss of “their” rights.

What we need now is a frank acknowledgement of the reality we now face in B.C., and concrete action to address it. The day of reckoning is at hand. We are nearly out of harvestable trees. The potential deferrals will not significantly alter this reality.

Here are four things the provincial government could do.

First, make it very clear that First Nations will be promptly and properly compensated for newly conserved old-growth forests on their traditional lands. To compensate logging companies for losing logging rights and not compensate First Nations whose lands have been stripped of most of their trees and who are now being asked to conserve some of what’s left is the height of injustice.

Second, rural First Nation communities and their non-Indigenous neighbours should be given the authority to manage significant areas of forest in their regions. The provincial government should immediately negotiate with First Nations to turn over at least half of all logging revenues (known as stumpage, the fee a logging company pays to the provincial government for each tree cut down) to those communities to assist them in the management work they do.

Government has demonstrated that it is unwilling or unable to manage forests for broad societal benefit. It’s time to promote local management of forests and tap into the knowledge of local residents, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.

Third, immediately take back a significant portion of logging rights currently held by logging companies and turn those rights over to First Nations. This would provide much-needed leverage for First Nations and their non-Indigenous neighbours to attract investment capital and to negotiate with businesses that might come forward with proposals that could generate local jobs in watershed restoration, forestry, fisheries and tourism enterprises, to name but a few.

Fourth, the government needs to walk the walk and end the talk about value-added. For decades, we have been told that cutting fewer trees and extracting more value from each tree cut down is the way to generate both new and more secure jobs in the forest sector and to allow for increased conservation.

The government should signal that it is serious about this by immediately announcing that it will award areas of forestland directly to value-added manufacturers that come forward with solid proposals that have the support of local communities. And, wherever possible, those awards should be in second-growth forests, not old growth.

Every day that the provincial government allows the industry to maintain its present destructive course brings us one day closer to an even more brutal day of reckoning. We either keep our collective foot on the logging truck accelerator or we decelerate and begin to chart a new course.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.