Extreme Wildfires in the Land without Limits: Communities of Unsettled Futures in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, Canada

The summer of 2017 marked the beginning of a series of disastrous wildfire seasons on Canada’s West Coast. In the Cariboo region, it exacerbated the daunting emergency preparedness challenges faced by small unincorporated communities; without an elected body, a fire department, and largely left to their own response means. This was the situation of numerous residents, many of whom ranchers and farmers, around the town of Williams Lake. During this summer, they lived through one of the largest evacuations in British Columbia’s history. Many scholars underline how legacies of settler colonial state, regional, and local wildfire preparedness schemes are largely insufficient to address the scale and scope of wildfire hazards. The overly reactive, rather than preemptive, logic of emergency response and of wildfire preparedness produces challenging situations largely downloaded on individuals’ responsibility. In a province where most of the landscape is severely prone to disastrous wildfires, and yet scarcely inhabited, little research evaluates how unincorporated localities showcase distinct forms of wildfire preparedness. To bridge this gap, I ask: how does the current wildfire preparedness regime affect rural inhabitants?

I focus on the Cariboo region and the city of Williams Lake in the context of the megafires of 2017, 2018, and 2021. Based on a mixed-methods approach, I investigate 100 wildfire-related policies from Williams Lake, the Regional, and Provincial governments, and 92 semi-directed interviews with planners and inhabitants. In this, I show how wildfire preparedness involves an uneven struggle over the production of disaster-proof futures. I argue that wildfire preparedness under present socio-institutional conditions involves a process of environmental endangering and a systematic under-preparedness of rural areas. Through recent disastrous forest fires, I debate how Cariboo region residents responded and their relevance for research on climate injustice more broadly.