Amid Manitoba's devastating wildfire season, replanting aims to restore forests, fight climate change

At 5:30 a.m., the first alarm goes off, and Marley Moose wakes up in a tent set up in Manitoba's Interlake.  

Her clothes are dusted in dirt and have a lingering smell, after she spent about 10 hours the day before shovelling to make room for hundreds of seedlings among charred trunks in Devils Lake, a pocket in the Interlake region that's about 300 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. 

Blue-Green Planet Project, a tree-planting company that focuses on sustainability, has been working in partnership with forest services provider Nisokapawino Forestry Management to restore a part of Manitoba's canopy by planting 20 million trees by 2030.

"We're not really doing this for our generation," said Moose, who is from Opaskwayak Cree Nation in northwestern Manitoba and was among 87 tree planters reforesting the area in May. 

"My grandkids will be able to come and see these trees, and they'll be able to run through these forests.…That's going to be their childhood."

Hectares of Crown land in the forest were devastated by a jack pine budworm infestation in 2016. Seedlings were regenerating the forest until an out-of-control wildfire ravaged the area in 2021.

Every spring since then, dozens of people from across Canada have travelled to the forest to plant millions of trees, in hopes of regenerating the ecosystem.

But the devastation the current wildfire season has left in Manitoba has put the need for reforestation projects like this into sharp focus, said Blue-Green Planet Project's Farron Sharp, the reforestation project manager. 

"When you're in a city and protected from a lot of these disasters, it can be really easy to just become apathetic about it," said Sharp.

"Only when it's really close by does it wake you up that this is a crisis."

As of last week, more than 911,000 hectares had burned in wildfires in Manitoba. More wildfires are expected this season amidst above-normal temperatures forecast for the rest of the summer. 

Sharp has been planting since around 2008. While the number of blazes has fluctuated throughout the years, she said it's now almost inevitable that reforestation projects will be cut short because planters are forced out by wildfires — something that didn't happen when she began, she said.

And more reforested areas burn every year, said Sharp.

"At times, it can feel like it's too late," she said. "You're chasing something that's already coming up behind you."