The B.C. government needs to rethink how it manages the province’s forests and adapt its approach to fires, including prioritizing the use of prescribed burning, to reduce the severity of ever-worsening wildfires, says a forestry scientist. “Our old policy was always to put out every fire, thinking fire was only bad, that all it did was damage,” said Lori Daniels, a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forest & Conservation Sciences. “So for many decades, we were very successful at detecting and suppressing all fires, and that had an impact on the forests that make them more susceptible to fire today.” Daniels told The Epoch Times that wildfires are an important part of how forests and ecosystems function, and in the past, low-intensity surface fires in remote areas would be allowed to burn, removing fuel without “killing the big trees” while at the same time stimulating …