In this episode of August After Dark, Matt August sits down with Murray Wilson, a retired professional forester turned filmmaker, whose documentary BC Is Burning is pulling back the curtain on what's actually happening inside our forests.

Murray spent decades on the front lines — from a helitack crew in 1977 to managing BC's forests as a professional forester — and he's watched the system quietly fail.

In 2023 alone, Canada emitted 2.4 billion tons of CO2 from wildfires, making wildfire smoke our single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The smoke in the Okanagan that summer was the equivalent of every person — kids included — smoking 7 to 15 cigarettes a day.

In this conversation, Murray breaks down why decades of reduced forest management, mountain pine beetle outbreaks, and policy gridlock have turned BC's forests into a tinderbox — and why "just letting nature take its course" is actually making things far more dangerous. They dig into the economics (we spend $1.3 billion a year fighting fires but the true cost to our economy is 10-20x that), the carbon release hiding in our forest soils, why Canada stopped prescribed burning, and what BC could learn from California and Finland to actually fix this before it's too late.

This is the conversation nobody in government wants to have — and the one every Canadian needs to hear.

Watch the full documentary and take action: bcisburning.ca
August Group: augustmotorcars.com

Timecodes:

00:00 – INTRO
02:15 – Why he is making this film
05:40 – BC's worst fire year explained
09:20 – The beetle secret in our forests
14:10 – "Leave it alone" is a myth
19:30 – Why burnt wood just rots
24:50 – The carbon bomb underground
31:05 – We stopped doing this on purpose
38:15 – $52 billion spent on the wrong thing
44:30 – What California figured out first
50:45 – His 3-step fix for BC
55:20 – "The bullet's still in the chamber