♪ VALERIE: So the boreal forest, first of all, is a forest of cold.

The vegetation grows quite slowly.

It stores twice as much carbon per hectare as any other terrestrial ecosystem, including the tropical forests.

I'm a member of the Innu community of Mashteuiatsh.

But I'm also the executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative.

Because of my connection as an Innu woman, I've always known that I would be doing work to protect and work with nature.

The boreal is very much home to the iconic species of caribou, and it's such a fundamental part of Canadian identity.

I mean, it's on our quarter.

It is what has allowed my people to survive in this landscape for over 10,000 years.

Because the caribou are so sensitive, when they're present, it's a good indication that other species who are a little bit less sensitive will also be present in that area.

They're kind of like canaries in the coal mine or a way of really giving us an alarm about what's coming in these ecosystems.

And so we're definitely looking, as foresters and as people who manage these areas, to find caribou, because it's a good way of telling that the whole system is healthy.

UMA THURMAN: Caribou need old-growth forests.

In this cold environment, the lichens they eat take up to 50 years to grow.

But even the slowest ecosystems need a boost now and then to get the nutrients moving.

VALERIE: Boreal is an ecosystem of fire.

The soils in the boreal are quite poor.

And because that organic matter decomposes so slowly, over time, that soil can break down and become less and less productive over time.

Well, what brings back that productivity, in part, is fires, because what it does is it breaks down that organic matter, and all the nitrogen that is in that matter gets released into the soil.

UMA: Natural fires are usually started by lightning.

Big burns used to happen once a century, giving time for the slow-growing forest to recover.

VALERIE: Fires are becoming more intense, larger and more persistent than the norm.

Canada has had a long forest management history, so we know what is the natural cycle of fires.

And so every once in a while, there's a big fire.

Then there's a lot of little fires.

But what's happening is we're not getting a lot of little fires anymore.

We're just getting big fires.

UMA: More frequent storms and hot, dry weather are causing infernos that are actually damaging soils, impacting the old-growth forest, caribou and also local residents.

I've got a lung disease that was probably exacerbated by the fires last year.

Two weeks after the fire started, that I noticed that I was having shortness of breath.

Peter Durocher lives in Ile-a-la-Crosse in Saskatchewan.

PETER: I feel like I'm grounded when I'm right here.

I don't feel grounded in my house.

Here, I'm grounded.

(BIRD CALLS) It's beautiful.

Forest is healing.

UMA: Peter belongs to the Metis Indigenous community.

The boreal forest has been their home for generations.

PETER: Indigenous people need forest.

I feed my family off the forest and the water, whether it's the rabbit, or the deer, or the moose.

UMA: But under the pressure of climate change, life in the forest is getting harder.

This fire was only about four hectares the first time it was seen.

Four hectares.

And it ended up burning close to a million hectares.

That's a crazy number, eh?

UMA: The initial fire seemed too small and too far from habitation to be a priority for the province.

There was no response to the community's calls for help.

By the time action was taken, the fire was bigger than Chicago.

In all my life, all my 62 years of living on this Earth, I never seen a fire behave like that.

Fire was burning at two, three o'clock in the morning, as hot as it was burning at two, three o'clock in the afternoon.

By the time May 29th came around, the fire was uncontrollable.

UMA: In 2023, the hot, dry spring caused fires to burn so intensely, they destroyed over 70,000 square miles of boreal forest and sent a veil of smoke to New York City and far beyond.

Hundreds of wildfires continue to burn across Canada, many of them out of control.

REPORTER: An ominous orange haze envelops the Statue of Liberty.

Wildfire smoke from Canada has billowed across the border.

As firefighters try to contain the fires, officials in many US cities warn air quality is at code red.

100 million Americans are under air quality alerts.

The potential health threat posed by wildfire smoke spanning as far south as Georgia and Texas.

Normally, where it burned here would have slowed down, but because the fire was so hot, look how high it burned.

Look at my hands.

I mean, this is just from one tree.

You know?

This is only from one tree.

One little...one little tree that's probably only 15 years old.

Now, if you look at a fire of our size here that has... ..10 million trees, you know, how much carbon is actually being released?

If this tree released that much carbon, what happens if a million trees burn like that?

What happens if a billion trees burn like that one year?

There's a problem out there.

Just nobody's listening to us.

♪ UMA: Keeping the infernos in check is essential if we want the boreal forest to help balance the Earth's climate.

PETER: The generations that are coming up behind me, what are they going to see?

Change is going to happen.

The biggest worry I have is how fast the change is coming.

I love my grandkids, all of them, and the forest is up there.

And I want my granddaughter to experience it.

I call her an old soul because she feels what I feel.

And how do you say rabbit in Cree?

- Wapos.

- Wapos, yeah.

- See right there?

Look.

- Yeah.

Yeah, wapos.

We went hunting moose, and she came with me, and we were sitting there, and she says, uh, "Listen."

I said, "What?"

I said, "You hear a moose?"

"No."

She said, "You can hear the forest," you know, which is the wind, right?

So... And I thought it was just a blessing, a blessing for her to feel that, to understand that.

♪ UMA: Indigenous people take care of more than a quarter of all the land on Earth.

But they need support.

In Canada, the government has pledged $800 million to fund that stewardship.

It's a start, but there's an urgency for us to recognize the value of forests.