Collaborator: Piper Bernbaum
Research Assistants: Ann-Catherine Lemond, CIMS (Carleton Immersive Media Studio)
Photography: Luis Panchi Galvan
Because of its large land mass and northern latitude, parts of Canada are undergoing global warming at twice the rate of the global average. Wildfires are common occurrences across Canada, but the summer 2023 fires were amplified radically in scale and scope, making international news as migrating smoke degraded air quality in New York City and beyond.
This project uses a single event—the 2023 Quebec wildfires in Lebel-sur-Quévillon, Quebec—as a methodological pilot project for visualising impacts of climate change in Canada across scales. Lebel-sur-Quévillon is a small community in Quebec’s boreal forest at the conjunction of six major burn sites of the 2023 June forest fires.
We recorded the traces of the fire in the Lebel-Sur-Quévillon WUI (wildland urban interface) in three ways. First, we modelled fire to illustrate characteristics of fire spread as a function of fuel source, topography, and weather/wind patterns. Second, we analysed available maps and satellite imagery across national, regional, and local scales to identify hotspots for fieldwork. Finally,we documented three sites of significance in LSQ: a firebreak, a post-fire logging site, and a hydro station at the fire front. Together these models, mappings and photographs form an ‘evidence assemblage’ of the fire, its impacts, and its resulting traces on the ground.