I absolutely do want to point out that a lot of the dialogue in our communities has been about prescribed fire and traditional use of fire from our communities as a forest management strategy, I suppose you could say. The traditional knowledge and use of fire over the years would have left the forest in a different environment than the intensively managed forest plantation monoculture that we've created through forest management. It has created that strong environment, as climate change did, to allow the pests to multiply with such an abundance in the host species that it needed.
That conclusion has definitely been talked about. It's very interesting to learn how our traditional knowledge would guide and advise our forest management going forward. That's exactly the kind of work we want to be able to do with our knowledge keepers, and in collaboration with the province and others, about how we do forest management going forward. That's where we want to get to the table to offer that.
It was quite devastating to watch the mountain pine beetle erupt as it did and do the damage that it did. You know, when we start mapping out.... As the chief forester was saying, we were kind of praying for those cold winters to come back to take care of that problem. It wasn't something we could get ahead of, I don't think, at that stage.
Now, with regard to the learning and the decision on how to go forward, really what came out of our communities was the health and safety of our members. We have a distinctly higher risk of fire hazard, being in communities that are much more rural than rural British Columbia towns out on the edge—