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Speaker 4: Oh hey, so it's your partner who insisted on buying
Speaker 4: respirators during COVID, who isn't clothing at all. They're just
Speaker 4: glad that we have them when we need them. Ali
Speaker 4: Ward here with a rather smoky encore. It's a mega
Speaker 4: episode because the time has never been right to explain
Speaker 4: what is happening over North America? Is it the apocalypse? Maybe?
Speaker 4: Stay tuned. So we have a really good episode about
Speaker 4: scallops in the Pike coming for you that we have
Speaker 4: been working so hard. You're gonna have to wait a
Speaker 4: coup more days for it. But with the current situation,
Speaker 4: we thought we'd bring back these super hot fire ecology
Speaker 4: episodes to your attention. If you're like, what's going on
Speaker 4: over there? Let me tell you a quick rundown. What
Speaker 4: is happening currently on the continent of North America. So
Speaker 4: the Canadian Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said, as of
Speaker 4: Wednesday this week, four hundred and fourteen wildfires we're burning
Speaker 4: in Canada, with two hundred and thirty nine of them
Speaker 4: out of control. As of today Wednesday, Tune seventh, Toronto
Speaker 4: has the third worst air quality in the world and
Speaker 4: New York City has the second worst. Dealing with the
Speaker 4: same smoke from all these Canadian fires, Delhi, India, I
Speaker 4: regret to inform you that you are the winner of
Speaker 4: this terrible contest. But right now, North America isn't just
Speaker 4: sporting bizarre hellish landscapes with smoky orange glowing skies that
Speaker 4: you may have been seeing posted all over social media.
Speaker 4: It's also a real health hazard, especially after a three
Speaker 4: years of a pandemic that involves respiratory infections. So if
Speaker 4: you are being affected by the smoke at all, pay
Speaker 4: attention to your local authorities for upstate health alerts, as
Speaker 4: have been issued from New York to the Carolinas and
Speaker 4: as far west as Minnesota, according to The New York Times,
Speaker 4: where health officials are recommending that residents with health risks
Speaker 4: stay indoors and keep the windows closed. The CDC has
Speaker 4: a bunch of recommendations about dealing with the smoke, which
Speaker 4: will link in the show notes for this episode. But
Speaker 4: in case you can't stay indoors hopefully with an air
Speaker 4: filter running, we thought we'd highlight what the CDC has
Speaker 4: to say about masks. Quote, don't rely on dustus masks
Speaker 4: for protection. Paper comfort or dust masks commonly found in
Speaker 4: hardware stores trap large particles such as sawdust. But these
Speaker 4: masks will not protect you or your lungs from smoke.
Speaker 4: So an N ninety five mask properly worn will offer
Speaker 4: some protection, So bust out those N ninety five's if
Speaker 4: you are somewhere with smoke right now. Also, speaking of health,
Speaker 4: another reason why I'm running this mega episode is I've
Speaker 4: been dealing with some health stuff and I will talk
Speaker 4: about it in this mega secret at the end of
Speaker 4: this mega episode. If you care, if you make it
Speaker 4: all the way there, but take care of yourselves and
Speaker 4: please enjoy this mega encore double feature of fire ecology
Speaker 4: and indigenous fire ecology. Hem oh hey, it's the pair
Speaker 4: of sunglasses that you leave in the car. It's scratched.
Speaker 4: It's not your favorite, but it's better than nothing. In
Speaker 4: a pinch, Ali ward back with a piping hot episode
Speaker 4: of ologies. It's top of mind for a lot of
Speaker 4: us out here up here in the Northern Hemisphere, especially
Speaker 4: towards the west of the continent. Wildfires, fire ecology, blazing infernos,
Speaker 4: apocalyptic nightmares, this ologist so special. Got his bachelor's in zoology,
Speaker 4: a master's in wildlife ecology, and a PhD in Wildlife
Speaker 4: ecology Statistics, all from the University of Wisconsin and Madison.
Speaker 4: He is currently a Wildlife and Terrestrial Ecosystems research ecologist.
Speaker 4: Such a mouthful. He's a research scientist at the US
Speaker 4: Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, also an adjunct professor at
Speaker 4: the University of New Mexico. He has been published on
Speaker 4: papers about fire refuges for wildlife where they hide out megafires,
Speaker 4: habitat loss. He's also just casually the editor at the
Speaker 4: Association of Fire Ecology, so I have been following him
Speaker 4: online for a while. I reached out to casually ask
Speaker 4: him about pyrology versus fire ecology, and before I knew it,
Speaker 4: I was begging him to talk to me. So we
Speaker 4: hopped onto chat while fires were raging in the West
Speaker 4: this week and I was in a muggy Florida hotel
Speaker 4: room for work and it smelled like a turtle tank.
Speaker 4: But before we dive into the conversation, I want to
Speaker 4: thank everyone at patreon dot com slash ologies. It costs
Speaker 4: a dollar a month to join, and then you can
Speaker 4: submit questions to Theologists. Thank you to everyone listening and
Speaker 4: making us the number one podcast in the science category
Speaker 4: on Spotify, and thank you for leaving reviews on Apple
Speaker 4: Podcasts to get us seen by other people. I truly
Speaker 4: read them all because I desperately want to make a
Speaker 4: show that does not suck, and to prove it, I'm
Speaker 4: going to read you a still glowing coal of assessment
Speaker 4: from Bert Lancaster, who wrote Ologies is your cynicism antidote.
Speaker 4: I simultaneously feel beautifully tiny and so expansive that I
Speaker 4: could burst after listening. Sometimes I just have to stand
Speaker 4: there and laugh to myself for a while. Sometimes I cry.
Speaker 4: Emotions are weird. Love you dad, word, Bert Lancaster, get
Speaker 4: a hanky because your internet dad right here loves you
Speaker 4: right back. Okay, everyone who left to review, I read it.
Speaker 4: I love you also. Okay, all right, let's fine. Fire
Speaker 4: off some questions, Yeah, okay, open your ears for info
Speaker 4: on what fire is, how hot it burns, fire trends,
Speaker 4: tinder boxes, lots and lots of forest fire, flim flam,
Speaker 4: tolerant wombats, Angelina Joe Lee, movies, cunning pine cones, thick bark,
Speaker 4: tragic Koala's indigenous fire stewardship and more with researcher, scientists
Speaker 4: of the woods, desert dweller, awl cuddler, forest service employee,
Speaker 4: optimist and fire ecologist doctor Gavin Jones.
Speaker 5: Yes, Gavin Jones, and my pronouns are.
Speaker 6: He him, got it?
Speaker 4: And you are currently in New Mexico.
Speaker 5: That's right in the great city of Albuquerque.
Speaker 4: Do you guys have trees there?
Speaker 5: You know we do? Yes, Okay, it's pretty much desert
Speaker 5: out here, so when the trees grow, they don't grow
Speaker 5: very tall.
Speaker 4: And now tell me how a fire ecologist from Wisconsin
Speaker 4: and Florida and now New Mexico. Yes, how did your
Speaker 4: life path lead to fire ecology?
Speaker 5: Oh my goodness, it was really an accident. I do
Speaker 5: consider myself a fire ecologist, but I was really trained,
Speaker 5: and I did my graduate work and all my studies
Speaker 5: in wildlife ecology. And when I was in grad school,
Speaker 5: I was doing some research out in the Sierra Nevada
Speaker 5: and California on the cutest cuddliest creature there is the
Speaker 5: California spot at owl. And yeah, like pretty much anybody
Speaker 5: who spends enough time doing science out in fire prone
Speaker 5: lands like the Sierra Nevada. You eventually become a fire
Speaker 5: ecologist because a fire happens and then you have to
Speaker 5: try to figure out what to do with it. So
Speaker 5: that's exactly what happened. I was doing my master's degree.
Speaker 5: I was at the University of Wisconsin with my supervisor,
Speaker 5: Zach Peery, and we were doing a study out in
Speaker 5: California on spotted owls, trying to figure out what kind
Speaker 5: of forests they used, how they would respond to climate change.
Speaker 5: And just as I was finishing my master's degree, like
Speaker 5: just a month or two before I had defended my degree,
Speaker 5: a big fire burned through our study area.
Speaker 7: Yeh yeah.
Speaker 5: And at the time, to be honest with you, I
Speaker 5: was I was pretty devastated. I was like, man, what
Speaker 5: does this mean for the work that I've been doing?
Speaker 5: Like does this even mean anything anymore? It, you know,
Speaker 5: changed the game a little bit, but it provided an
Speaker 5: incredible opportunity to learn about how these animals, this owl
Speaker 5: that I was studying, responded to fire. It was basically
Speaker 5: a natural experiment. This fire burned through our study area
Speaker 5: in twenty fourteen, and it burned through about half of it.
Speaker 5: And so you know, in ecology, when we're doing these
Speaker 5: field studies, we rarely get the chance to do experiments.
Speaker 5: Like almost everything we do is observational. We go out
Speaker 5: and we see what we see, and we record it
Speaker 5: and we try to make sense of it. We rarely
Speaker 5: get to do experiments like you know other folks get
Speaker 5: to do in the lab who are doing chemistry or
Speaker 5: their molecular things. But this was really a natural experiment
Speaker 5: to see how this species of owl responded to fire.
Speaker 5: And that's what launched me into, i guess, being a
Speaker 5: real sucker for fire and for learning about how it
Speaker 5: works in some of these systems, why it happens, how
Speaker 5: it happens, what its consequences are, and I'm totally hooked.
Speaker 4: Now how many of your owls were later, how many
Speaker 4: of the owls survived that, like what percentage of the
Speaker 4: impacted area half of your study area.
Speaker 5: So some of them didn't make it, some of them dispersed,
Speaker 5: some of them left the fire they were able to
Speaker 5: get out of the way. And then there's large parts
Speaker 5: of the fire that didn't burn so severely, that burned
Speaker 5: at lower severity where basically a lot of the trees
Speaker 5: that the big trees in the canopy, they kind of
Speaker 5: you know, they survived, and some of the understory burned
Speaker 5: a little bit more of what we call quote unquote
Speaker 5: good fire in some of these areas, which I'd love
Speaker 5: to talk more about. But you know, a lot of
Speaker 5: those birds did great and are still persisting in some
Speaker 5: of those areas that experienced lower severity fire, those lower
Speaker 5: severity effects.
Speaker 4: To the forest, but predictably many bit the proverbial dust
Speaker 4: and returned to the earth. As Ash Gavin told me
Speaker 4: that one of his colleagues was surveying the charred land
Speaker 4: and found a little aluminum owl leg band that they
Speaker 4: used for tagging and it in case a little crispy
Speaker 4: owl leg did not go well for that one.
Speaker 6: And how did that wildfire start?
Speaker 5: Well, so that particular wildfire that was a human started fire,
Speaker 5: and it's actually a kind of a sad story. Is
Speaker 5: some guy, I'm trying to remember the details. You should
Speaker 5: look this up ally, but some guy was I think
Speaker 5: taking a video for his ex girlfriend or something and
Speaker 5: like lit some house on fire and then that started
Speaker 5: this gigantic It was like, at the time, one of
Speaker 5: the largest fires that had burned in the state of California.
Speaker 4: Okay, buckle up, here's a story. So this was twenty
Speaker 4: fourteen's King Fire, and it started in Pollock Pines and
Speaker 4: the Sierra Nevadas. And I already knew of this fire
Speaker 4: because my parents lived in Pollock Pines in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 4: and my sisters and I had to plead with them
Speaker 4: to heed the emergency evacuation orders as pyrocumulus clouds billowed
Speaker 4: over their hill. We're like, please get to safety. I'm
Speaker 4: sweat a lot. Don't make me come up there. I can't.
Speaker 4: The roads are closed. So I booked my mom and
Speaker 4: dad a hotel in Reno, out of harm's way. And
Speaker 4: the hotel turned out to have a mirrored ceiling and
Speaker 4: a very thrifty but sensual vibe. They tell me. I
Speaker 4: get the feeling that there were also hourly rates available
Speaker 4: at this hotel. I got them. I didn't read the reviews. Okay,
Speaker 4: it was an emergency anyway. The Kingfire that reduced homes
Speaker 4: to ashes and dashed people's dreams at Flambayed Gavin's Owls.
Speaker 4: It was all started by a guy named Wayne Huntsman,
Speaker 4: who was not a Huntsman but an arsonist, a formerly
Speaker 4: incarcerated firefighter actually, who that sweltering September day had set
Speaker 4: several fires to impress a paramore. He took video for
Speaker 4: her standing between two small, smoldering blazes that were just
Speaker 4: starting to take off. I'm not sure how their relationship
Speaker 4: turned out, but as proof that we're living in a
Speaker 4: simulation the burn area, the burn scar is absolutely shaped
Speaker 4: like a perfect ninety seven thousand acre dick and balls
Speaker 4: all ablaze in one of the state's most infamous literal
Speaker 4: thirst traps. Okay, so how much is our horny, greedy
Speaker 4: species to blame?
Speaker 5: Oh man? And that's another thing, is a lot of
Speaker 5: the ignitions are human ignitions, you know, people accidentally starting fires,
Speaker 5: machinery getting too hot, people driving over dry grass, and
Speaker 5: things like that.
Speaker 4: So Gavin says that eighty to ninety percent of all
Speaker 4: wildfires are human caused ignitions. Half of California's largest fires
Speaker 4: in the last century happened in the past five years.
Speaker 4: By the way, a complex fire means a cluster of
Speaker 4: related fires in one area. But what's the difference between
Speaker 4: a wildfire and a forest fire?
Speaker 5: We talk about wildfires. Typically, when we're talking about wildfires,
Speaker 5: those are unplanned, so fires that we as people don't
Speaker 5: plan so you can kind of juxtapose that with a
Speaker 5: prescribed fire or a cultural fire. So prescribe fire is
Speaker 5: often fire that is purposely set and then managed by
Speaker 5: teams to achieve some type of objective. Maybe they're trying
Speaker 5: to restore some area, restore fire. You know, you probably
Speaker 5: hear a lot about you know, people burning prairies and
Speaker 5: things like that. It's the same thing in forests, they
Speaker 5: go in and do prescribed burns. And then there's also
Speaker 5: a really important component of cultural burning, So indigenous communities
Speaker 5: using wildfire for their purposes, which until you know, about
Speaker 5: one hundred two hundred years ago, made up the overwhelming
Speaker 5: majority of the fire activity that was happening in a
Speaker 5: lot of these areas. For you know, the last ten
Speaker 5: thousand years or so, indigenous peoples have been using fire
Speaker 5: in o really important cultural way, and that has really
Speaker 5: changed in the past couple of centuries with colonization, but
Speaker 5: that is an increasingly important part of the solution to
Speaker 5: sort of this modern wildfire problem.
Speaker 4: And obviously indigenous cultures and just the planet at large
Speaker 4: saw the benefit of prescribed burns. So what good do
Speaker 4: fires do, either in prescribed burns or just in nature.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's such a good question. I mean, fires are
Speaker 5: a critical piece of ecosystems around the world. Every square
Speaker 5: inch of land that has vegetation has some type of
Speaker 5: fire regime, It has some sort of natural fire cycle,
Speaker 5: and fire is kind of a restorative process. There's many
Speaker 5: benefits of fire from we can think about it from
Speaker 5: a human perspective, we can think about it from a
Speaker 5: sort of an ecosystem perspective, you know, from the human perspective.
Speaker 5: You know, fires create more resilient forest when they burn
Speaker 5: the right way. When we have sort of a natural
Speaker 5: kind of lower intensity fire in some systems, like in
Speaker 5: the Sierra Nevada, where I've spent a lot of my time,
Speaker 5: that reinforces healthy water supplies. It reduces erosion.
Speaker 4: Side note, A fire regime sounds like Satan's cabinet members
Speaker 4: farting flames in a hades boardroom, but it's actually just
Speaker 4: a gentle term. A fire regime describes a pattern of fire,
Speaker 4: how frequent, how intense, what kind of fuel of gobbles
Speaker 4: And maybe me just calling it Satan's cabinet members farting
Speaker 4: in hades. Maybe that's part of the root of Europeans
Speaker 4: fear of fire and thus this historical fire suppression by colonists.
Speaker 4: I wondered this, and I begged myself not to google
Speaker 4: it because this aside would be like forty five minutes long.
Speaker 4: But snap, I found a twenty fifteen paper from the
Speaker 4: journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society be title Fire
Speaker 4: in the Mind, Changing Understandings of Fire in Western Civilization,
Speaker 4: in which author Stephen J. Pron writes you ready for
Speaker 4: this quote? The Old Testament is in fact a cauldron
Speaker 4: of stories, rights, and beliefs simmering over a mix of
Speaker 4: religious fires. He goes on to say the heartland of
Speaker 4: European forestry new fire only as a human artifact, not
Speaker 4: a natural process. Most new and colonized lands were burned
Speaker 4: lands naturally, but the agencies found themselves in a continuous firefight,
Speaker 4: so fire became a political as well as practical challenge.
Speaker 4: He continues, the upshot has generally been disastrous. Okay, So
Speaker 4: what does the land miss out on when natural fire
Speaker 4: is suppressed and indigenous populations are fined, imprisoned, or even,
Speaker 4: up until the nineteen thirties in the US shot for
Speaker 4: fire stewardship. Well, from an ecology standpoint, those fires can
Speaker 4: help the water supply by eliminating excess vegetation and thus
Speaker 4: increasing runoff into streams, and by preventing huge fires with
Speaker 4: more frequent smaller ones. Also, erosion doesn't get out of
Speaker 4: control when there are regular fires, like you see with
Speaker 4: post megafire mud slides. Also, the charcoal after a burn
Speaker 4: could trap carbon for millennia, and the recovery of vegetation
Speaker 4: takes more excess carbon from the atmosphere. According to the
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen paper how wildfires trap carbon for centuries to millennia. Okay,
Speaker 4: but wildfires burn at eight hundred degrees celsius. That's fourteen
Speaker 4: seventy two fahrenheit America. So the animals hate natural and
Speaker 4: cultural burns too, right, No animal wants to be trapped
Speaker 4: in a blaze. But I'm just going to stop myself
Speaker 4: from singing about the circle of life in your ears.
Speaker 5: And then from an ecosystem perspective, and from what I
Speaker 5: like to think about a lot is the biodiversity perspective,
Speaker 5: So you know what kinds of animals there are and
Speaker 5: the richness of of animal life and plant life. Fires
Speaker 5: create this template for wildlife and plants to thrive. And
Speaker 5: also this that creates this natural dynamic where you have
Speaker 5: places that burn in one year and then don't burn
Speaker 5: for a while, and places that burn frequently, in places
Speaker 5: that burn at high severity and low severity. You can
Speaker 5: kind of think about it as this patchwork, this mosaic
Speaker 5: of different ages of forests that burned at different times,
Speaker 5: and that creates a really diverse landscape that generates the
Speaker 5: habitat for lots of critters. It can be a really
Speaker 5: regenerative and restorative process to the land, both from a
Speaker 5: ecosystem perspective and also really you know, fire is a
Speaker 5: necessary part of these systems, and so when we can
Speaker 5: put the right kind of fire on the landscape, it
Speaker 5: really benefits us to as people as society.
Speaker 4: So fire mosaic paints a beautiful picture of land in
Speaker 4: different states of recovery and and if you're looking to
Speaker 4: learn more about it, don't google fire mosaic unless you
Speaker 4: want to see a lot of tiling crafts that seem
Speaker 4: to be an homage to burning Man. But look up
Speaker 4: the official term. It's patch mosaic burning. So let's talk
Speaker 4: different flavors of fire, because it does matter.
Speaker 5: So you can think this is a really overly simplistic
Speaker 5: way to think about fire, because fire is a really
Speaker 5: complicated process. But the way that we often sort of
Speaker 5: describe it and think about it within fire ecology world
Speaker 5: is we think about natural low severity fire regimes. You know,
Speaker 5: in a given area, you might expect fires to sort
Speaker 5: of burn a lower severity, not too hot, not too
Speaker 5: all consuming. They burn along in the understory, nice and happy,
Speaker 5: crawl along and burn some logs here, burn some trees there,
Speaker 5: but generally don't destroy or consume the big trees in
Speaker 5: the overstore of the canopy. So that first end of
Speaker 5: the system, that's kind of frequent low severity fires. And
Speaker 5: then on the other end of the whole spectrum you
Speaker 5: can think about infrequent high severity fires or fire regimes rather,
Speaker 5: so these are places in that area is for fires
Speaker 5: when they do burn, to burn pretty big and pretty hot,
Speaker 5: and those are both natural, but they're natural in those
Speaker 5: different places. And so why is it that you have
Speaker 5: some places that naturally burn low severity and generally I'm
Speaker 5: talking about forest fires here and then other places of
Speaker 5: the forests that naturally burn it really high severity and
Speaker 5: really large. We can think about those two ends of
Speaker 5: the spectrum also in terms of what's limiting the system.
Speaker 5: So in these low severity fire systems, those are generally
Speaker 5: systems that are limited by fuel. And so what I
Speaker 5: mean by that is the climate is such that on
Speaker 5: any given year, the conditions are right for fire, Like
Speaker 5: if there's a lightning strike or another ignition, fire is
Speaker 5: going to burn and the fuel is dry, and the
Speaker 5: only thing that's keeping that fire. One of the primary
Speaker 5: things it's controlling that fire and where it burns is
Speaker 5: where the fuel is, where the trees are, where the
Speaker 5: kindling so to speak is. And because those fires those
Speaker 5: places they ignite every year, there's ignitions all the time,
Speaker 5: and the conditions are right for fire, they burn really frequently.
Speaker 5: And so you can think about places where the fires
Speaker 5: burn every couple of years, and when they do burn,
Speaker 5: they kind of clean out or you know, burn in
Speaker 5: that understory, so sort of below the forest canopy. It's
Speaker 5: burning the smaller trees, it's burning some of the medium trees,
Speaker 5: and it's burning some of the big trees. But mostly
Speaker 5: it just every time a fire burns, it burns all
Speaker 5: that fine fuel or a lot of it, right, And
Speaker 5: so that's the primary sort of control on how fire
Speaker 5: burns in some of these dry fuel limited systems.
Speaker 4: So in these areas, the way it's supposed to be
Speaker 4: is that fires don't get mega because blazes are more frequent,
Speaker 4: so burning all of the fallen wood and the understory,
Speaker 4: so an excess of fuel doesn't build up. So that's
Speaker 4: one way that these giant, devastating fires can be avoided.
Speaker 5: And then on the other end of the spectrum, you
Speaker 5: have these climate limited systems, so rather than the system
Speaker 5: being limited by fuel, it's limited by climate. And so
Speaker 5: this is a place like the Pacific Northwest, where it's
Speaker 5: really wet, right, it's generally wet most of the time,
Speaker 5: it's cool. There's maybe quite a few ignitions, but when
Speaker 5: those ignitions occur, the fuel is not really ready to burn.
Speaker 5: It's too wet, and maybe it burns a small fire
Speaker 5: or something like that, but it just kind of extinguishes itself.
Speaker 5: And you think about that system, those kind of areas,
Speaker 5: and when you end up getting those really big, infrequent,
Speaker 5: severe fires that occur there, it's because there's been a
Speaker 5: some sort of climate activity, like a drought that's caused
Speaker 5: all that fuel that hasn't burned in a really long
Speaker 5: time to dry out and then it burns, and when
Speaker 5: it does burn, it burns really big because there's tons
Speaker 5: of fuel available, right, And so those are that's kind
Speaker 5: of the two ends of the spectrum. And you know,
Speaker 5: I was trying to think about this today. How do
Speaker 5: I describe that that like spectrum in a way that's
Speaker 5: not so dry and academic. And I was thinking about, like, Okay,
Speaker 5: like the haircut that I get is like a frequent
Speaker 5: fire system. Okay. You know, I go to Great Clips
Speaker 5: or Sport Clips or whatever just down the street from me,
Speaker 5: and I get my haircut every few weeks, maybe every month.
Speaker 5: It's it kind of maintains the general structure. It never
Speaker 5: kind of goes super long, and I never buzz it
Speaker 5: super short either. I just kind of keep it, you know, tamed,
Speaker 5: so to speak. You know, I go in there frequently.
Speaker 5: I clean out sort of the growth, right that's happened
Speaker 5: in between each cut. And on the other end of
Speaker 5: the spectrum, you could have somebody and I did this
Speaker 5: once when I was in college. I think you're right
Speaker 5: after college, you know, grow out your hair super duper long.
Speaker 5: Like I didn't cut it for I don't remember exactly
Speaker 5: how long it was, but let's say so you grow
Speaker 5: your hair for a year, five years or something. You know,
Speaker 5: you get some pretty floppy, pretty pretty crazy hair, at
Speaker 5: least if you've got hair like me, and then you
Speaker 5: say I'm gonna buzz it, and so then you buzz
Speaker 5: it right off. That's kind of the I don't know,
Speaker 5: you can kind of kind of think about that as
Speaker 5: the two ends of the spectrum. Right, You've got like
Speaker 5: your frequent haircut system, and you've got your infrequent, high
Speaker 5: severity haircut system, where you know, you just let it
Speaker 5: grow and then you cut it all off.
Speaker 4: Okay, So in this analogy, the regular maintenance cuts are
Speaker 4: the low intensity fires, the ones that burn the undergrowth,
Speaker 4: that don't spread too far or that extinguish themselves because
Speaker 4: there's enough moisture to keep things from being stray bone,
Speaker 4: dry powder, keg, kindling. But if those small fires don't happen,
Speaker 4: or if the fire resistant older trees are logged out,
Speaker 4: or if the climate is just super hot, then you
Speaker 4: get a situation that's much more dramatic. I've had got
Speaker 4: and is that like long main to buzz cut.
Speaker 6: Is that what a mega fire is?
Speaker 7: Then?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that term I would say, that's a good
Speaker 5: way to think about it. Yeah, from the long man
Speaker 5: to the buzz cut. The term megafire is a really
Speaker 5: interesting term, and it really doesn't have a great definition.
Speaker 5: A lot of people when they talk about megafires, they're
Speaker 5: thinking about these basically really big fires, just fires that
Speaker 5: are giant in size. But you can have a really
Speaker 5: really large fire that doesn't necessarily create that forest buzz cut, right,
Speaker 5: It doesn't necessarily kill all the trees within its path.
Speaker 5: It may kill some trees in some parts, but not
Speaker 5: throughout the whole fire.
Speaker 4: So a forest mullet maybe, but not the cool kind
Speaker 4: that gen Z has. The warning my cousin will probably
Speaker 4: hit on your wife kind of mullet not ideal.
Speaker 5: You can have really large fires that are not necessarily
Speaker 5: super damaging. You can have smaller fires that are pretty
Speaker 5: severe and intense and destroy a lot of what's there
Speaker 5: in terms of the forests. There isn't really a single
Speaker 5: definition of mega fires. A lot of people like to
Speaker 5: think about them in terms of their impact to society too,
Speaker 5: So it's not just like how big or severe they
Speaker 5: are in terms of how many trees they kill, but
Speaker 5: it's you know, how much that fire influences people, and
Speaker 5: you know how much of the infrastructure it destroys. And
Speaker 5: there's a growing problem within the US, and particularly the
Speaker 5: western US, which right now, as you know, is experiencing
Speaker 5: quite a bit of fire activity. There's a lot more
Speaker 5: people living in that interface, what we call the wildland
Speaker 5: urban interface or the WOUI yeah wooey, So yes.
Speaker 4: The US Forest Service defines the wildland urban interface as quote,
Speaker 4: a group of home and other structures with basic infrastructure
Speaker 4: and services within or adjacent to federal land that is
Speaker 4: an at risk community. Aka all the cute cabins that
Speaker 4: you save on pinorest when you should be working on
Speaker 4: a spreadsheet for your boss because you just want to
Speaker 4: get away for the weekend, but go to someplace that
Speaker 4: still has coffee shops. So more and more folks ditched
Speaker 4: the cities in the pandemic for these type of living
Speaker 4: situations and might be getting their very first tastes of PSPs,
Speaker 4: which are public safety power shutoffs when utility companies straight
Speaker 4: up cut power for a day, maybe a few weeks
Speaker 4: when winds are high in case otherwise live downed wires
Speaker 4: ignite the forest. Realators might not tell you about that
Speaker 4: until after you're done with escrow, So Wowie.
Speaker 5: Indeed, the wildland urban interface is kind of this intermingling
Speaker 5: of people and the forest right where they kind of
Speaker 5: overlap a little bit. And there's a lot more people
Speaker 5: living there now than there was ten twenty years ago,
Speaker 5: and so you can think about fires as generally having
Speaker 5: more of a mega impact on people now because we're
Speaker 5: just more vulnerable in some ways to those fire effects
Speaker 5: when those fires do burn through.
Speaker 4: And now, as we're speaking, the Dixie Fire is the
Speaker 4: one of the largest fires California has ever seen. There's
Speaker 4: the is it the Bootleg fire up in Oregon?
Speaker 7: Ye?
Speaker 5: Up in southern Oregon, that's right.
Speaker 4: So I'm surprised you were able to even talk to
Speaker 4: me right now. Can you tell me a little bit
Speaker 4: about what your job entails. Do you have is the
Speaker 4: busy season all year round because you're analyzing data that
Speaker 4: comes in or do you have to go to the
Speaker 4: field a lot? Are you getting reports from people who
Speaker 4: are closer to each of the fires? Do you have
Speaker 4: to count all the fires all of that?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I am not one of the incredible people
Speaker 5: who are out on the front lines doing this work
Speaker 5: on the fires, right, My work is really more focused
Speaker 5: on after fire burns, what can we learn from it.
Speaker 5: And there are also a ton of people, of course,
Speaker 5: who are out there responding to these fires like the
Speaker 5: Dixie Fire and the Bootleg Fire and many others when
Speaker 5: those are burning, and those are the people who really
Speaker 5: deserve the applause and the praise, right who are out
Speaker 5: there doing this really dangerous work. And I'm relatively speaking,
Speaker 5: I'm a desk jockey compared to those people. So I
Speaker 5: spend a lot of my time here at the computer
Speaker 5: trying to take that data and learn from the fires
Speaker 5: and trying to understand how wildlife respond to those fires.
Speaker 5: That's what I do most of the time. This last year,
Speaker 5: COVID year, has definitely made things even more so away
Speaker 5: from the field. But boy, I love field work. I've
Speaker 5: done quite a bit of it. I love getting out
Speaker 5: into those burned landscapes and trying to figure out what's
Speaker 5: going on.
Speaker 4: What is it like when you are doing field work,
Speaker 4: What kind of samples do you have to collect, and
Speaker 4: what kinds of observations are you making.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so a lot of the work that I've done
Speaker 5: has focused on how this one little critter, that spotted
Speaker 5: owl responds to these burned areas, these fires that have
Speaker 5: come through. And so myself and some of my really
Speaker 5: outstanding colleagues, both back from when I was in grad
Speaker 5: school that I established during my PhD program, some of
Speaker 5: those collaborators back at University of Wisconsin, as well as
Speaker 5: some of my fantastic teammates here at the Rocky Mountain
Speaker 5: Research Station with the US Forest Service, we've done quite
Speaker 5: a bit of work trying to understand how this bird,
Speaker 5: this spotted owl responds to fires. We've gone out and
Speaker 5: spent quite a bit of time in these burned areas,
Speaker 5: capturing owls and putting GPS tags on them to see
Speaker 5: where they move in these burned areas, to see if
Speaker 5: they like them or if they're using them. We literally
Speaker 5: go out into the woods and hood at the alley dear, Really,
Speaker 5: we really do it. You walk into the woods where
Speaker 5: you think there's going to be an owl and you
Speaker 5: just start hooting with your mouth. You just do it,
Speaker 5: and they hoot back because they're like, Hey, who the
Speaker 5: heck is that?
Speaker 8: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4: And then are you able to count them based on
Speaker 4: who hoots?
Speaker 5: Pretty much? Yeah, So we call them callback surveys. So
Speaker 5: we're calling, they call back, and that's how we locate them.
Speaker 5: And oftentimes we're just interested in detecting them. So okay,
Speaker 5: there's an owl here, there's an owl there, sort of
Speaker 5: establishing where they are across the landscape.
Speaker 4: Did I look this up? Of course? And please enjoy
Speaker 4: the absolute maestro of this art see O Pacific Industries
Speaker 4: wildlife biologist Kevin roberts Well.
Speaker 9: I like to do when I'm surveying for spotted owls
Speaker 9: and using my voice is kind of mix them all
Speaker 9: up and do something to the fact of.
Speaker 8: Whoa who who?
Speaker 4: Thank you, Kevin. We beg you to make a ring tone?
Speaker 4: Is it too much to ask? You can only answer
Speaker 4: that in owl hoots? But anyway, that is how you
Speaker 4: do a Jim Carrey level impersonation of spotted owls.
Speaker 5: But a lot of the work I've done is focused
Speaker 5: on capturing those owls once we find them, and putting
Speaker 5: little GPS tags on them and seeing where they go.
Speaker 5: And then we get that, we get that data and
Speaker 5: we see where they went and we try to figure out, Okay,
Speaker 5: how are they interacting with some of those burned areas.
Speaker 5: What can we learn from that about what type of
Speaker 5: fire they like, what kind of forests they like, and
Speaker 5: how we might be able to manage the forests in
Speaker 5: a way that supports them.
Speaker 4: And how is a fire ecology changing with the climate
Speaker 4: with droughts? Why do droughts even happen? Is the water
Speaker 4: that would normally rain here raining somewhere else where?
Speaker 6: Is the water so okay?
Speaker 5: So again, this is something that much smarter people would
Speaker 5: have a much better answer for. But I will say
Speaker 5: that something that is for certain is that we are
Speaker 5: entering into uncharted territory with fire and fire ecology and
Speaker 5: fire behavior. And one of my good colleagues at University
Speaker 5: of California mer said, Leroy Westerling has you know, said
Speaker 5: many many times to me, and I've seen him write
Speaker 5: about this too. You know, there is no more normal
Speaker 5: in terms of fire. There's not even a new normal.
Speaker 5: It's a new abnormal, you know, we because we just
Speaker 5: it's really it's becoming really difficult to predict what's going
Speaker 5: to happen in the future because we don't have a
Speaker 5: reference point anymore. We're sort of just going into uncharted territory.
Speaker 5: And so you know, when it comes to drought and
Speaker 5: climate change and things like that, look those are definitely
Speaker 5: a part of the equation in terms of what's going
Speaker 5: on with wildfire and what's going to happen, and particularly
Speaker 5: climate change and you know how that interacts with forests
Speaker 5: and drives out fuels and things like that. Sometimes it's
Speaker 5: hard to just talk about drought and climate change for
Speaker 5: many reasons because it's hard as like a scientist who's
Speaker 5: interested in conservation, like, what can I do about that?
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, I don't. I don't mean to
Speaker 5: sound like nihilistic, like, oh, we can't do anything about it,
Speaker 5: because we can. We absolutely can. It's never too late
Speaker 5: to make actions on those big problems like climate change, right,
Speaker 5: But you know, I have the the honor to work
Speaker 5: for this agency, the US for a service that is
Speaker 5: in charge of managing a ton of land, and so
Speaker 5: what can we do on the ground to make a
Speaker 5: difference in terms of how these fires burn?
Speaker 10: Right?
Speaker 5: And you know, considering climate change like that plays a role.
Speaker 5: It plays a really role, and so does drought in
Speaker 5: terms of driving some of these wildfire patterns that we've seen.
Speaker 5: But there's also something to be said for how forests
Speaker 5: are managed and how flammable forests are and how we
Speaker 5: can potentially manage them in a way that tries to
Speaker 5: mitigate those worst effects of fire when they do come through.
Speaker 5: So it's really like you are going to hear people say, oh,
Speaker 5: you know, these fires are just because of climate change,
Speaker 5: there's nothing we can do about it. And then you're
Speaker 5: going to hear people say, oh, climate change has nothing
Speaker 5: to do with it. It's we just need to manage forests differently.
Speaker 5: And the reality is it's neither of those. It's kind
Speaker 5: of both, right, It's both climate change and you know,
Speaker 5: the forest and the patterns of fuels across the landscape
Speaker 5: are affecting how fires burn. As a research scientist with
Speaker 5: the Forest Service, I'm thinking about how can I do
Speaker 5: science that informs how we manage for it. And that's
Speaker 5: one of the coolest parts about my job is that
Speaker 5: I work for an agency that has a really strong
Speaker 5: management component, you know, a huge part of the agency
Speaker 5: as people out there doing this work, you know, managing forests,
Speaker 5: coming up with forest plans and management plans and fire plans,
Speaker 5: and I get to do science that helps them figure
Speaker 5: out how to do that, and we work together, you know,
Speaker 5: in a collaborative way to figure that out. And that
Speaker 5: is where I think I like focusing on those solutions, right,
Speaker 5: How can we press the levers and make a difference
Speaker 5: from the ground.
Speaker 4: Is the leading theory on that is just more and
Speaker 4: better prescribed burns, or is it humans stop living in
Speaker 4: the woods for a while, Like what is the best
Speaker 4: tool you have?
Speaker 5: Yes, so that is a great question. And I think
Speaker 5: this is a misconception that if humans just got out
Speaker 5: of the picture, it would all be better.
Speaker 7: Mm hmm.
Speaker 5: You know, I think it's easy to think that way, like, oh,
Speaker 5: we're just the problem and humans suck and we just
Speaker 5: need to get out of the picture and nature will
Speaker 5: do its own thing and blah blah blah. And look,
Speaker 5: you know I understand that perspective. I'm sensitive to it.
Speaker 5: But we have to remember indigenous people's have been burning
Speaker 5: for ten thousand years, and you know, we need more
Speaker 5: fire on the landscape, not less. It's just what kind
Speaker 5: of fire burns. This is kind of crazy to think about,
Speaker 5: but especially given you're looking at these maps. I've got
Speaker 5: the New York Times wildfire tracker open here, I got
Speaker 5: another tracker on my desktop open as well. Like with
Speaker 5: all these big fires burning, you're thinking, like, man, there's
Speaker 5: just got to be so much more fire now than
Speaker 5: there ever was.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's what I would think.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's totally what you'd think, But it's actually not
Speaker 5: the case. There's still less fire in the West, in
Speaker 5: western North America. Then there was many many years ago,
Speaker 5: one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred thousand years ago.
Speaker 6: But they were smaller back then.
Speaker 5: Is that so they just burned differently. I'll bring you
Speaker 5: through a little bit of a time warp. So we
Speaker 5: often in Western science delineate sort of this pre colonial
Speaker 5: era and in the pre European or pre colonial era,
Speaker 5: there was a lot of fire in the West. I mean,
Speaker 5: these are flammable landscapes, and they never really got put out, right,
Speaker 5: All these ignitions would just burn, and vast areas of
Speaker 5: the landscape would burn all the time, depending again on
Speaker 5: what kind of system you're in, right, So these frequent
Speaker 5: fire systems would burn very frequently. You know, every couple
Speaker 5: of years you'd have fires kind of returning to the
Speaker 5: same areas. Then when you know settlers, white settlers colonized
Speaker 5: and pretty much disrupted indigenous burning and began actively suppressing wildfires.
Speaker 5: The amount of fire in the landscape just dropped to
Speaker 5: you know, almost nothing very effective at suppressing fires for
Speaker 5: a long time in the Western US. And basically what's
Speaker 5: happened is only recently have we sort of lost our
Speaker 5: handle on our ability to put out fires. The level
Speaker 5: of activity that we're seeing now is still far less
Speaker 5: than the level of fire activity that used to burn.
Speaker 5: But the difference is that because in many of these forests,
Speaker 5: and particularly in these frequent fire forests or these dry
Speaker 5: forest systems that used to burn really frequently, they haven't
Speaker 5: burned in a century or more, and so when they
Speaker 5: do burn, they burn really hot and really big, and
Speaker 5: that's not a natural kind of fire for this system.
Speaker 5: And also, you know, along with that, we have a
Speaker 5: lot more people again kind of living in those fire
Speaker 5: prone areas, and so we feel the effects a lot
Speaker 5: more as well as the population has increased, and so
Speaker 5: we still have way way less fire activity on the
Speaker 5: landscape that these fires are typically burning in a way
Speaker 5: that is for those forests unnatural and for society really
Speaker 5: not acceptable. Right. The other crazy thing is that we
Speaker 5: actually have in some areas, particularly again these sort of
Speaker 5: historically frequent fire systems, we have a lot more trees
Speaker 5: too than we used to have, oh yeah, which like
Speaker 5: it goes right along with that fire suppression. So we
Speaker 5: put out fires for one hundred years or more, and
Speaker 5: all those little shrubs and saplings that would have burned
Speaker 5: and those regular fires grew up to be big, you know,
Speaker 5: medium sized trees.
Speaker 6: More trees.
Speaker 8: Is that good?
Speaker 4: Well, it's kind of like a garage that we have
Speaker 4: failed to Marie condo for a long time, which I'll
Speaker 4: be honest, is my garage. Got to clear some stuff out.
Speaker 4: I'm talking to myself.
Speaker 5: And so we have actually a lot more trees on
Speaker 5: the landscape now in a place like this Ieerra, Nevada,
Speaker 5: where I've spent a lot of my career doing this
Speaker 5: research than we used to. It's just like the kinds
Speaker 5: of fires are different, the kinds of trees are different.
Speaker 5: We have a lot more smaller trees and medium sized trees,
Speaker 5: and a lot fewer of those really giant old trees,
Speaker 5: which are really kind of an endangered species sort of
Speaker 5: in and of themselves. Because over the past one hundred
Speaker 5: years or so, particularly pre nineteen eighties, there was quite
Speaker 5: a bit of large tree logging going all the way
Speaker 5: back to the early nineteen hundreds and late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: so a lot of those big old trees were removed,
Speaker 5: a lot of those smaller trees grew up with that
Speaker 5: fire suppression, and now we just have a ton of
Speaker 5: smaller trees on the landscape. And that again is kind
Speaker 5: of feeding back into why we have fires that are
Speaker 5: burning differently because these fires are burning through you know,
Speaker 5: these pretty thick, connected, like well connected forests that historically
Speaker 5: just didn't look like that at all.
Speaker 4: So forests look and behave much differently now, and they
Speaker 4: were for tens of thousands of years because of colonial
Speaker 4: human tinkering. Don't you want to know all about indigenous fires,
Speaker 4: stewardship now and cultural burns? So do I? And did
Speaker 4: I hours before this podcast episode on up decide to
Speaker 4: feverishly book an indigenous fire scientist to talk to me
Speaker 4: for next week. I did, so stay tuned. I just
Speaker 4: thought i'd plant that expectation for you. And what about
Speaker 4: the effect of fire on seeds opening and certain plants
Speaker 4: saying like sweet, there was just a fire, now's my
Speaker 4: time to shine like our ash is good for certain
Speaker 4: types of botany.
Speaker 5: So okay, One of my colleagues, Jens Stevens, he's with
Speaker 5: the Forest Service as well. Now he's done some really
Speaker 5: awesome work looking at tree adaptations to fire and fire regimes.
Speaker 5: But one of the most common examples of how trees
Speaker 5: are adapted to fire is, particularly when thinking about seeds,
Speaker 5: is seroteny as E R O T I N. Why so,
Speaker 5: seroteny is this trait that some trees have, not not
Speaker 5: all trees, but some trees have this basically waxy kind
Speaker 5: of resin that encompasses their cones and their seeds, and
Speaker 5: they only open when fires burn because the fire melts
Speaker 5: that wax off of their seeds and the seeds drop
Speaker 5: and then the trees able to regenerate and typically it
Speaker 5: releases in many cases. In some cases that I know of,
Speaker 5: those trees require a really severe fire to release its seed.
Speaker 4: Okay, So serotenus means later or following, and it is
Speaker 4: not to be confused with certolene, which is the generic
Speaker 4: form of zoloft, which I googled wrong. So according to
Speaker 4: Nationalforest dot Org, serotenous cones with full mature seeds can
Speaker 4: just chill out closed up on a pine tree like
Speaker 4: a jackpine or a table mountain pine for years until
Speaker 4: a fire sweeps through and the resin melts and then
Speaker 4: the seed confetti party time happens. So this is also
Speaker 4: side note how indoor fire sprinklers work. They're not reliant
Speaker 4: on smoke, but on heat of over one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty degrees fahrenheit. So there's a little glass capsule in
Speaker 4: fire sprinklers and it's filled with glycerine, and that heats
Speaker 4: up and bursts and opens the sprinkler valve. And apparently
Speaker 4: they open individually wherever it's hottest, not all at once
Speaker 4: like in the movies. I'm looking at you, Lethal Weapon four,
Speaker 4: The Incredibles and Charlie's Angels and Mean Girls and Casino
Speaker 4: Royal and Kindergarten Cop and the Peanuts movie and all
Speaker 4: the other ones. And I'm going to link on my
Speaker 4: website because I found someone with a YouTube channel who
Speaker 4: is very pissed about the sprinkler myth. Anyway, heat seeds disperse,
Speaker 4: it's natural, and.
Speaker 5: So some trees have adapted that that trait, and in
Speaker 5: other cases trees have really thick bark. And this is
Speaker 5: the case for many of the trees and these frequent
Speaker 5: fire systems that experience fires all the time. On a
Speaker 5: five and your cycle or in that range, trees have
Speaker 5: really thick bark because they need to survive that frequent
Speaker 5: heat and disturbance from fire. And so there's really remarkable
Speaker 5: adaptations that plants have to fire. And also increasingly we're
Speaker 5: trying to learn about animal adaptations to fire. Typically we
Speaker 5: think about these in terms of behavioral adaptations. So how
Speaker 5: do animals interact with either fire itself or the post
Speaker 5: fire landscape in a way that tells us a little
Speaker 5: bit about it? Kind of opens the book on their evolution,
Speaker 5: how they evolved.
Speaker 4: So what are the spoty owls like? It turns out
Speaker 4: small patches of high intensity fires, which were more common
Speaker 4: in pre colonial times. Spoty owls are like me at
Speaker 4: a cocktail party, just waiting for a tray of egg
Speaker 4: girls to roll past. Now, in scientific terms, this is
Speaker 4: called a sit and wait predator.
Speaker 5: And the owls like to sit on the edge, on
Speaker 5: that green edge and hunt into that smaller patch of
Speaker 5: open forest where I can see little you know, critters
Speaker 5: run across, and it has a better flight path and
Speaker 5: that sort of thing, while also concealing itself from its predator,
Speaker 5: like the great horned owl. So that's just one example
Speaker 5: that I've been involved in. But we generally expect, you know,
Speaker 5: not only plants to have these adaptations, but also animals
Speaker 5: to potentially have these behavioral adaptations too.
Speaker 7: M h.
Speaker 6: That's so interesting.
Speaker 4: Also, I didn't realize that owls had drama between them.
Speaker 4: He would think they'd be like, I'm an l you're
Speaker 4: an owl. Let's make this happen, you know.
Speaker 5: No, it's it's so true. There is totally drama. And
Speaker 5: one of my mentors and colleagues's name is Rocky Gutierrez.
Speaker 5: He's done some work looking at owl communities and trying
Speaker 5: to figure out like how owls can coexist in space.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of drama out there in the in the.
Speaker 11: Hour so much.
Speaker 4: Speaking of drama, have you seen the acclaimed dramatic film
Speaker 4: Those Who Wished Me Dead starring Angelinisholei, who as a
Speaker 4: person who lives in a fire tower.
Speaker 5: No, I have not.
Speaker 4: If you like fires and people being miscast, you will
Speaker 4: love Those Who Wish Me Dead.
Speaker 5: That's that's my main genre of movie that I like,
Speaker 5: wonderful miscasting. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 4: If you like to watch a movie in the entire
Speaker 4: time picture someone else playing the lead role, you will
Speaker 4: love those who Wish Me Dead? She is absolutely gorgeous.
Speaker 4: She's a stunner. I love her acting. I don't know
Speaker 4: why they cast her this movie. It seemed so weird.
Speaker 5: Why they put you in a fire tower?
Speaker 6: Well I'm just lucky, I guess.
Speaker 4: Anyway, Those who Wish Me Dead just so much, so
Speaker 4: much forest fire and a lot of just breathing through
Speaker 4: smoke that seems like it should be thicker.
Speaker 6: But you can just you can smell this movie.
Speaker 4: Listen. There are a lot of actors that are suited
Speaker 4: for certain types of cinematic environments. Okay, Oh, but if
Speaker 4: you watch it, Medina Sanghor is so good in it
Speaker 4: that I just looked up her name and then I
Speaker 4: followed her on Instagram. So some beautiful creature are more
Speaker 4: well suited to some roles and environments. That's all.
Speaker 6: What about the term pyro diversity? Is that a really Oh?
Speaker 5: Ali, I'm so glad you asked that question. I am
Speaker 5: street smart and book smart. Yes, so pyrodiversity is something
Speaker 5: that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about
Speaker 5: in recent years. It's kind of a fun buzzword, you know,
Speaker 5: like pyro diversity, Like what does that even mean? Someone
Speaker 5: made that up, and it's probably because well, somebody did
Speaker 5: make it up. It basically is another way to think
Speaker 5: about this fire mosaic that we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 5: The term pyrodiversity sort of emerged alongside this idea that
Speaker 5: pyro diversity gives rise to biodiversity. So basically that the
Speaker 5: more different kinds of fire that we have on the landscape,
Speaker 5: the more different kinds of severities, the different fire ages. Basically,
Speaker 5: the greater mixture of different types of fire characteristics that
Speaker 5: are in a landscape is going to lead to greater biodiversity,
Speaker 5: which means more species basically, so you have more kinds
Speaker 5: of wildlife, more kinds of plants, et cetera, more kinds
Speaker 5: of bees, more kinds of bats, more kinds of birds,
Speaker 5: et cetera, because you have all sorts of different kinds
Speaker 5: of habitat for them that's been produced by fire.
Speaker 6: Ah Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, So it's it's an important idea because it
Speaker 5: it really kind of underlies this important role of fire
Speaker 5: in these cases with you know, the Dixie Fire and
Speaker 5: the Bootleg fire, these fires that are really like destructive
Speaker 5: to human infrastructure and also you know, to people's lives.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is really serious stuff that is sad
Speaker 5: and it's hard to watch. But on the other side
Speaker 5: of the coin, we do need fire on the landscape,
Speaker 5: right We just we need a different kind of fire.
Speaker 5: We don't want to see more, you know, of the
Speaker 5: destructive fires that are out there. We want to see
Speaker 5: good fire. And what I mean by good fire is
Speaker 5: really kind of like this pyro diversity idea, where we
Speaker 5: have a really nice mixture of fire that kind of restores,
Speaker 5: It cleans out the understory in some places, it kills
Speaker 5: some trees, It disrupts the system a little bit. You know,
Speaker 5: some disruption is good, and you create that really sort
Speaker 5: of wide ranging variety of habitats for different critters to live,
Speaker 5: and that also supports all sorts of other great things
Speaker 5: like water quantity and quality. It reduces a runoff, It
Speaker 5: reinforces the resilience of ecosystems and forests. So like, fire
Speaker 5: is so good, and it's like, we want that good
Speaker 5: kind of fire. It's really such a restorative thing. And
Speaker 5: it's just pyro diversity kind of encompasses this idea of
Speaker 5: like that beautiful mosaic on the landscape that is always changing.
Speaker 5: It's not just static. It's always changing, always being renewed.
Speaker 5: That's the idea of pyrodiversity.
Speaker 4: Huh can I blaze through a lightning round?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 6: Part in the pun, even though I'm not sorry, okay.
Speaker 4: And before your questions. We donate to a cause each episode,
Speaker 4: and as a forest Service employee, Gavin can't directly endorse
Speaker 4: anything in particular, so it was my pick this week
Speaker 4: and a donation will be going to the Common Good
Speaker 4: Community Foundation. They have established a matching fund to assist
Speaker 4: all local communities impacted by the Dixie Fire, and all
Speaker 4: donations will be distributed to Plumous County agencies involved in
Speaker 4: directly assisting communities and individuals most affected by the fire.
Speaker 4: More info is up at common Goood Plumas dot org
Speaker 4: and that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
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Speaker 4: Okay, let's tend to your smoldering curiosities. Great question from
Speaker 4: Nicole d g Marie Charlotte Falcacard, Meghan McLean, Daniel Kim,
Speaker 4: Liz Gross, Eden, Sunshine, Talia Dunyak. Nicole Kleiman also asked,
Speaker 4: in Nicole's words, what happens to wildlife when there's a fire?
Speaker 4: Daniel Kim wants to know are there any animals that
Speaker 4: have adapted to survive forest fires? And Nicole asks do
Speaker 4: they all leave? Or are some able to hide or
Speaker 4: survive in a sneaky way?
Speaker 5: Oh that's so great. That's a great question. So I
Speaker 5: don't know if I can do a super quick answer
Speaker 5: to this because too excited about it. But yeah, so
Speaker 5: how do wildlife respond to wildfire? So here's the thing.
Speaker 5: It really depends and that's like the greatest you know,
Speaker 5: scientific smoke and mirrors. Like, hey, it depends, but it
Speaker 5: really does. Some species like fire, some don't, And it
Speaker 5: also depends on what kind of fire it is, you know,
Speaker 5: if it's really severe or mild. So, for example, there's
Speaker 5: one species that some of my awesome colleagues have worked on.
Speaker 5: It's called the black backed woodpecker. Many people think of
Speaker 5: it as a poster child of severely burned forest because
Speaker 5: it really needs these patches of totally killed trees. It
Speaker 5: depends on the insects that live in those recently killed trees.
Speaker 5: It needs those severely burned forests. Several years after those
Speaker 5: those fires burn and those trees are killed, it's no
Speaker 5: longer good habitat, Like it's really kind of this short
Speaker 5: term thing. They flock to these really severely burned places,
Speaker 5: they totally thrive, and then they are out of there
Speaker 5: and onto the next fire. So some critters love that,
Speaker 5: others not so much so. The spotted out all the
Speaker 5: species that I spent a lot of time studying, it
Speaker 5: is really kind of more of an old forest obligate.
Speaker 5: It doesn't love that severely burned stuff quite as much.
Speaker 5: So basically there are winners and losers, that's the answer.
Speaker 12: Is.
Speaker 5: It's never simple. It's never as simple as you make it.
Speaker 5: It's not just so all animals are going to die
Speaker 5: or leave when a fire burns. No, some of them
Speaker 5: are going to do great and some of them are not.
Speaker 5: That's like part of the beauty of studying this stuff
Speaker 5: is like trying to figure out why why do some
Speaker 5: animals love and some don't? The world is so complex
Speaker 5: and amazing it's like really fun to try to figure
Speaker 5: that out.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: And then in terms of where animals go, some animals
Speaker 5: can escape fires, you know, fly out of the way,
Speaker 5: run out of the way. I always think of like
Speaker 5: Bamby movie Bad, Like all the animals are like parading
Speaker 5: out of the forest. I don't want to ruin Bambi
Speaker 5: for anybody's but you know, some animals can be a
Speaker 5: fire even you know, flying critters cannot always fly away
Speaker 5: from fast moving fires. Some animals will burrow under the
Speaker 5: ground and wait for the fire to pass and then
Speaker 5: go back out, which is totally crazy. You should, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's it's nuts.
Speaker 4: Oooh okay, burrowing critters hiding from fires? My heart burst
Speaker 4: into flames. So which animals burrow?
Speaker 8: All?
Speaker 4: Right? Some Australian possums hide out in tree hollows, snakes
Speaker 4: high tail it down a burrow, but wombats also hit
Speaker 4: the basement during bush fires. And there were a bunch
Speaker 4: of internet rumors going around last year that they invite
Speaker 4: and usher other critters in. These rumors spread like wildfire,
Speaker 4: but they are flim flam. They actually just tolerate other
Speaker 4: animals hiding out in their wombat doomsday bunkers. But same
Speaker 4: with gopher tortoises in the US. And to hear all
Speaker 4: about that, you can amble slowly over to the Testudentology
Speaker 4: episode with wonderful tortoise scientists Amanda Hips. Now what about
Speaker 4: rebel birds.
Speaker 5: There are other creatures. There's fire hawks and they're down
Speaker 5: in Australia and they will actually like pick up burning
Speaker 5: branches and drop them to burn other parts of their
Speaker 5: habitat so that they can catch their prey.
Speaker 4: I have heard of these and it sounds so devious.
Speaker 4: But they even will get together and wait for rodents
Speaker 4: to run out.
Speaker 5: That's wild. That's just wild. Yeah, there's winners and losers,
Speaker 5: Like there's such a variety of animals that respond in
Speaker 5: different ways to fire, and that's just the coolest thing.
Speaker 5: And that's that's one of the reasons why pyro diversity,
Speaker 5: going back to pyrodiversity is thought to promote biodiversity because
Speaker 5: the more kind of variety of fire you have, the
Speaker 5: more different kinds of animals that are going to benefit
Speaker 5: from that variety. Right. So, you know, if you have
Speaker 5: sort of your forest that was killed by trees next
Speaker 5: to a forest that is totally green and old and
Speaker 5: you know, decaying almost, we have this big mosaic of
Speaker 5: different kinds of forests that burn at different times. That's
Speaker 5: going to support all kinds of different critters. So it's
Speaker 5: a cool thing.
Speaker 4: Now, that's a good thing. And several people, Rebecca wine Settle,
Speaker 4: India Land, Nicole Kleinman, Jesse Hurlbert want to know, can
Speaker 4: I really prevent forest fires? Rebecca asks, or is this
Speaker 4: just another example of a giant corporation trying to foist
Speaker 4: responsibility on to individuals. Nicole wants to know what smoking
Speaker 4: the bear more helpful or harmful to forests?
Speaker 6: What do you think about smoking the bear? Okay liberty
Speaker 6: to say.
Speaker 5: I think smoky the bear is super cute. I will
Speaker 5: say that we absolutely can prevent forest fires, not all
Speaker 5: of them, and we not necessarily should prevent all of
Speaker 5: them over think about prescribed fires, right, Like, we do
Speaker 5: want to put some fire in the landscape. But as
Speaker 5: I mentioned before, a giant majority, like eighty seven percent,
Speaker 5: between eighty ninety percent, humans cause eighty seven percent of
Speaker 5: all wildfire occurrences annually within the western US. Like, that's crazy,
Speaker 5: that's a big number. Yeah, and a lot of those
Speaker 5: you can go look this up. There's this a couple
Speaker 5: studies out there that have shown, you know, these gigantic
Speaker 5: spikes of fire activity on the fourth of July every year.
Speaker 7: Oh, Like, we.
Speaker 5: Absolutely play a role in ignitions. A very small percentage
Speaker 5: of all of the ignitions result in those really big,
Speaker 5: big fires. Of course, many of the fires that ignite
Speaker 5: don't burn everything up, but we absolutely as people can
Speaker 5: be careful about how we burn. I think that Smoky
Speaker 5: the bear is just misunderstood, Okay, you know, like because
Speaker 5: it's true. You know, we we as people, like, we
Speaker 5: absolutely do start fires. We start unintended, unplanned fires that
Speaker 5: sometimes result in really devastating circumstances. There's sort of this
Speaker 5: perception that all fire is bad among some people. And
Speaker 5: maybe I don't know, I don't know if smoking the
Speaker 5: bears associated with that or not. But you know, all
Speaker 5: fire is not bad, Like fire is so important, and
Speaker 5: the reason why some fire is really bad right now
Speaker 5: and particularly is because we haven't had the kind of
Speaker 5: fire on the landscape that is natural in a lot
Speaker 5: of these systems.
Speaker 4: So a lot of patrons looking at you, Michael Davis,
Speaker 4: Peter Ashley, herbel Sebastian Pepino. First time question asker is
Speaker 4: Karla Jerez and Ada Smith, Schandra Mason, Bennett Gerber. They
Speaker 4: all essentially asked.
Speaker 6: What do we do it?
Speaker 4: Should firefighting teams approach it more strategically, like let it
Speaker 4: burn twenty five miles over here, but let's stop it here,
Speaker 4: or at this point, like what do we even do?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So that is such a difficult and vexing question
Speaker 5: that much smarter people than me are like thinking really
Speaker 5: really hard about. So I don't want to make any
Speaker 5: like really poorly informed statements about how firefighters should be
Speaker 5: doing their job, because they're doing an incredible job. But
Speaker 5: I'll say generally, there's there's many times when fires are
Speaker 5: burning and there's a decision made to let the fire
Speaker 5: burn on its own for a little while when it
Speaker 5: is deemed to be safe. Right, So especially in areas
Speaker 5: where there's not as many people and you know, like
Speaker 5: kind of more wilderness type areas, because fires can do
Speaker 5: some of that work for us, to restore the natural
Speaker 5: structure of a system. So fires can be really restorative,
Speaker 5: especially in those cases when we think it's going to
Speaker 5: burn in a quote unquote healthy way or a natural
Speaker 5: way and there aren't people who are in danger. So
Speaker 5: that's kind of the idea of those managed wildfires. Just
Speaker 5: you know, when wildfires burning, we're kind of trying to
Speaker 5: manage them as opposed to to just put them out
Speaker 5: or suppress them.
Speaker 4: And from smoky the bear, let's move on to goats.
Speaker 4: Ashley Nton and Leanne Schuster literally both started their questions goats,
Speaker 4: both of them please tell us about how goats are
Speaker 4: used to help produce fire risk in areas with excess vegetation,
Speaker 4: And Ashley says, I mean a few hours and they
Speaker 4: chewed down most of the pasture.
Speaker 6: Can goats save us? Man?
Speaker 5: I wish goats could just save us. That would be
Speaker 5: so great. Just hand it all over to them. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm sure they've they've got it figured out. No, but
Speaker 5: I actually don't know about goats being used in wildfire management.
Speaker 5: That could just be my naivity, so I'll pump that one.
Speaker 6: Okay, all right?
Speaker 4: Goats. I tried to rent some for my hillside about
Speaker 4: two years ago, and it was a minimum, sadly of
Speaker 4: five acres and I just moved in and it was
Speaker 4: too soon to ask my neighbors if they wanted to
Speaker 4: go in on a goat hert with me. I didn't
Speaker 4: want to come on so strong. But there are businesses
Speaker 4: like goatsarus dot com that'll rent them out. I thought
Speaker 4: this was a pretty common practice, hiring goats to eat
Speaker 4: your overgrown grass, because when I was in high school
Speaker 4: in northern California, a lot of neighbors did that. And
Speaker 4: then I read the faq on goats rs dot com
Speaker 4: and what this business started in the tiny town I
Speaker 4: went to high school in around the time I was
Speaker 4: in high school. Holy literal smokes. As far as coincidences go,
Speaker 4: it's the greatest of all time. Okay, So this next
Speaker 4: smokey query was asked by plenty of folks, including patrons
Speaker 4: Hannah Aussi, Alana wood firefighter supporter, Lousey Martinez, Charlie Cacamo.
Speaker 4: First time question asker, Ashley Martinez, Nina eve Zeininger asthmetic
Speaker 4: Ada Smith, Joseph and Katie Coast.
Speaker 6: Let's see.
Speaker 4: Dylan McGuire says, I live in eastern Washington where smoke
Speaker 4: has become the fifth season. When will we have the
Speaker 4: giant forest rakes mentioned by Donald Trump?
Speaker 6: And they spent a.
Speaker 3: Lot of time on breaking and cleaning and doing things.
Speaker 6: And do we need to rake the forest?
Speaker 5: So you know this this is I think again, this
Speaker 5: is this is just a misunderstanding. So going back to smoke,
Speaker 5: this is a real problem. Right. We don't like being
Speaker 5: exposed to smoke. You remember, I'm sure I don't know Ali,
Speaker 5: if this happened where you were. I think this was
Speaker 5: up in the in the Bay Area. Yeah, last year
Speaker 5: you probably remember seeing all of our social media those
Speaker 5: pictures of you know, San Francisco being just like Orange
Speaker 5: is like some blade runner or something. The problem with
Speaker 5: smoke is that you know it's going to be there,
Speaker 5: It's going to happen. If we're living in a in
Speaker 5: a system that has fire, and that where we need
Speaker 5: to have fire, we're going to also have smoke. That's
Speaker 5: that's just a part of a part of it, right,
Speaker 5: Where there's fire, there's smoke. The real important question is
Speaker 5: how do we want our smoke? You know, And and
Speaker 5: that's that's how some people are trying to think about
Speaker 5: this problem of smoke, because it is a real serious
Speaker 5: public health problem, right with these sort of unplanned big
Speaker 5: quote unquote mega fires that happen all of a sudden,
Speaker 5: get a ton of smoke we didn't know it was coming.
Speaker 5: It disrupts our lives and puts us at risk. And
Speaker 5: there's a lot of smoke right that happens. Just this
Speaker 5: past week or two, I saw people on Twitter, you know,
Speaker 5: out on the East coast saying that they had, you know,
Speaker 5: they were getting some smoke from some of the wildfires
Speaker 5: in the West. That kind of unpredictable nature is I
Speaker 5: think for many people not desirable, Okay, And so the
Speaker 5: idea is if we can use more prescribed and planned fires,
Speaker 5: and more cultural and indigenous fires where we know when
Speaker 5: the smoke is coming, it's a lower amount. It's like,
Speaker 5: you know, less smoke in general is come in our
Speaker 5: way at any given time, but maybe a little more often.
Speaker 5: You know, those are kind of the two options, right
Speaker 5: We can either sort of have our smoke in big
Speaker 5: pulses when we don't know it's coming, or we can
Speaker 5: try to make it a little more predictable.
Speaker 4: It seems like the whares and the why are important here.
Speaker 5: That's exactly right for sure.
Speaker 4: Yes, what about Maria Shuavleva wants to know underground wildfires?
Speaker 4: I understand how they start, but how do they keep going?
Speaker 4: How is there enough oxygen for some to last for years?
Speaker 4: How deep do they go? Jeremiah Miller says, what's the
Speaker 4: strangest place there's been a wildfire?
Speaker 6: They're underground?
Speaker 5: Some Yeah, some fires do burn underground. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 5: Who So. One of the interesting kind of related phenomenon
Speaker 5: that I've witnessed is sometimes in these areas that have
Speaker 5: recently burned, you come across a gigantic hole in the ground,
Speaker 5: like just a giant hole. There's no tree, there's trees
Speaker 5: around you, and then there's just a gigantic hole in
Speaker 5: the ground. Okay, when I started doing this work in
Speaker 5: these post fire landscapes, I was like, what in the
Speaker 5: heck is going on here? And I started asking around,
Speaker 5: and these are basically trees that have burned and kept
Speaker 5: burning and smoldering and smoldering and the smoldering fire continued
Speaker 5: down through their root system underground, throughout the whole root system,
Speaker 5: and maybe they'll they'll even pop up somewhere else, like
Speaker 5: you know, a little ways away where the root kind
Speaker 5: of pops back up onto the ground. And basically these
Speaker 5: are like gigantic casts for trees, right like where the
Speaker 5: tree and its roots used to be. So fires can
Speaker 5: absolutely burn, you know, in a subterranean way. I've seen
Speaker 5: some of these sort of root holes following fire, which
Speaker 5: is just kind of wild to see.
Speaker 4: It is wild to see, and I know because I
Speaker 4: just watched a ton of videos of smoldering, flickering root systems.
Speaker 4: They can burn for weeks, months, maybe even through a
Speaker 4: whole season, and the fire will just pop up somewhere else. Also,
Speaker 4: somewhere in Pennsylvania, there is an abandoned Centralia coal mine
Speaker 4: that's been on fire since nineteen sixty two X. Let's
Speaker 4: say there was enough fuel to just keep it burning
Speaker 4: for two hundred and fifty years. No one knows what
Speaker 4: to do. They just all left town except for five
Speaker 4: people who still live there. They're like, we're not going anywhere,
Speaker 4: Like that's cool, But yes, fires, underground flames flames, breathing, heaving.
Speaker 6: Oh man, I didn't even know that was possible.
Speaker 4: I would not have thought that that is bananas ough.
Speaker 4: Some of y'all patrons, Lizzy mar bushfire asker, Brandy Harbaugh,
Speaker 4: first time question asker, longtime lurker, Adriana Alfaro, and want
Speaker 4: to know what can we expect the normal amount of
Speaker 4: wildfires to be? Is there a normal? They all want
Speaker 4: to know numerically, how much worse are big wildfires gonna get?
Speaker 4: Give us numbers. We need numbers.
Speaker 5: So you know, if you look at how fires have
Speaker 5: changed in the last thirty forty years, we have seen
Speaker 5: a lot more fire activity now than we did ten, fifteen,
Speaker 5: twenty years ago, forty years ago. So one of my
Speaker 5: colleagues I just mentioned a moment ago, is named Sean
Speaker 5: Parks with US for a service and one of his colleagues,
Speaker 5: they put out a study recently showing that between nineteen
Speaker 5: eighty five and twenty seventeen there was an eight fold
Speaker 5: increase in area that burned at high severity on an
Speaker 5: annual basis in the western US. Eight So there is
Speaker 5: certainly a lot more large fires now, and there's also
Speaker 5: when those those fires are burning more severely now than
Speaker 5: they did thirty five or so years ago, thirty five
Speaker 5: forty years ago. But that's like the sort of small
Speaker 5: scale context. But then if you zoom back out and
Speaker 5: look at sort of the whole context of the last
Speaker 5: several thousand years, we are seeing less fire now than
Speaker 5: we did way back when it's a different kind of
Speaker 5: fire that's burning, right, that's not necessarily natural in some
Speaker 5: of these systems. And then also we are we are
Speaker 5: experiencing more of the effects of fire than we ever
Speaker 5: have as humans, and the negative effects because we're living
Speaker 5: in these fire prone areas where for a long time,
Speaker 5: it was you know, somewhat safe to live, right because
Speaker 5: fires weren't burning that much for the last hundred years
Speaker 5: in a lot of these areas because you're pretty good
Speaker 5: at putting them out. But now that those fires are
Speaker 5: burning more severely and more intensely and we're living there
Speaker 5: and we have the news to cover it all the time, yeah,
Speaker 5: we certainly are hearing about it more, right, and it
Speaker 5: is having a serious impact on people, as you know,
Speaker 5: you know, there's all sorts of really tragic stories of
Speaker 5: these fires burning through towns. In one of those towns
Speaker 5: just you know, the Dixie Fire I believe, burned through Greenville, California,
Speaker 5: in the last day or two. And that's an incredibly
Speaker 5: tragic thing to have happened. And right like we are,
Speaker 5: we are living in a world that's really different.
Speaker 4: Now, right, I know, it's kind of like top of
Speaker 4: mind for everyone. I feel like when you say, oh,
Speaker 4: I live in California, people ask you, like, is your
Speaker 4: sitting on fire?
Speaker 6: And you're like, I don't know, let me check Twitter.
Speaker 5: I just texted one of my friends who lives in
Speaker 5: California be like, are you guys, where are you? Are
Speaker 5: you okay? Are you burning?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So yeah, literally, b BITPB like this just in. According
Speaker 4: to an NPR report that dropped about an hour ago,
Speaker 4: the US Four Service just announced that wildfires will be
Speaker 4: aggressively extinguished this summer and all the preventative controlled burns
Speaker 4: are suspended. Apparently fire season is predicted to be so
Speaker 4: bad they can't spare any of the thousands of firefighters
Speaker 4: on the ground to go do prescribed burns. Kind of
Speaker 4: like not being able to go to bed because you
Speaker 4: have a paper due, but then you can't finish the
Speaker 4: paper because you're too tired. Something's got to change. Tune
Speaker 4: in next week for more on that. Now, on the
Speaker 4: topic of heavy hearts amid blazing wildfires, is there anything
Speaker 4: that is the most difficult thing about being a fire ecologist.
Speaker 4: I mean, I already the idea of like a charred
Speaker 4: owl leg is going to hurt my heart until the
Speaker 4: day I die.
Speaker 6: But anything that is just really frustrating or difficult for you, hm.
Speaker 5: I would say that one of the frustrating things is
Speaker 5: just how difficult this problem is. It's it's just such
Speaker 5: a big problem, and sometimes it's hard to sort of
Speaker 5: feel like we can get out of it. I'm I
Speaker 5: like to call myself a reckless optimist. I don't think,
Speaker 5: you know, for me, like the glass is not half full,
Speaker 5: it's like, oh my god, it's almost overflowing. It's like,
Speaker 5: you know, we can do this, you guys, like we
Speaker 5: can totally do this. This is such a difficult problem.
Speaker 5: It seems like we're facing the same problems every year.
Speaker 5: But I think that there there is a light at
Speaker 5: the end of the tunnel, and that light has to
Speaker 5: do with getting more of that good fire on the landscape,
Speaker 5: and that's something that I know is a priority for
Speaker 5: the agency. I work for the US four Service and
Speaker 5: trying to restore the resiliency of these forests. And I think,
Speaker 5: like what I the sort of nugget of goodness that
Speaker 5: I try to take is that we, as you know,
Speaker 5: at least on my side, the science side of this agency,
Speaker 5: we have this incredible opportunity to learn about this, you know,
Speaker 5: about fires, why they burn, how they burn, what their
Speaker 5: consequences are, and what we can do about it. And
Speaker 5: we get to work with the managers and the people
Speaker 5: who are again out doing that stuff on the ground.
Speaker 5: We've got our hands on some of the levers. We
Speaker 5: can make a positive impact, and we can make a
Speaker 5: change in you know, how these fires are burning, even
Speaker 5: as we're thinking about you know, these bigger problems like
Speaker 5: climate change. We can put our fingers on the on
Speaker 5: the lever a little bit, and so there's a huge
Speaker 5: opportunity in the coming decades to make a big difference
Speaker 5: in sort of the next century of fire.
Speaker 4: Yeah, how do you think an average joe like myself
Speaker 4: sitting around biting my nails at the news, what can
Speaker 4: we do?
Speaker 13: You know?
Speaker 5: I would say, follow Smokey the Bear's advice, So we'll
Speaker 5: put him on the pedestal for a minute and say
Speaker 5: just you know, watch out for yourself and make sure
Speaker 5: that you are not contributing to any of the problems
Speaker 5: with you know, these unplanned ignitions and fires. That's one
Speaker 5: thing you can do. So you know, maybe try to
Speaker 5: avoid you know, explosive gender reveal parties. Uh, you know
Speaker 5: that's good. Probably not do that. You know, don't be
Speaker 5: throwing your cigarettes out, and don't drive your car anything
Speaker 5: on dry grass and things like that. You know, like
Speaker 5: there's there's little little things like that you can do.
Speaker 5: But this is a big problem and it takes both
Speaker 5: sort of individuals to make sure they're you know, not
Speaker 5: starting these these unplanned fires, but also these big sort
Speaker 5: of institutional actions and management to fight this problem. So
Speaker 5: it's you know, I would say, don't don't bite your
Speaker 5: nails down to the to the bone. Just make sure
Speaker 5: you're not the one who's starting that fire.
Speaker 4: Okay, good to know. Don't start any fires. Don't try
Speaker 4: to impress any ex girlfriends.
Speaker 5: Yes, don't buy starting are going to be impressed.
Speaker 6: Not going to be impressed.
Speaker 4: The gender reveal party couple who started a fire last
Speaker 4: year in November were charged with manslaughter for a firefighter's death,
Speaker 4: and that lovelorn arsonist of the twenty fourteen kingfire sentenced
Speaker 4: twenty years in prison and ordered to somehow pay sixty
Speaker 4: million dollars to victims of the crime. So imagine what
Speaker 4: you could do with sixty million dollars and twenty years
Speaker 4: of your life. Yeah, I think twice before doing any
Speaker 4: hornt up fire tumfoolery.
Speaker 5: Just get it. Just get them a cupcake or something with.
Speaker 6: Get them a cupcake. Do that, don't be on the news.
Speaker 4: What about your favorite thing about fire ecology, Like, is
Speaker 4: it putting puzzles together?
Speaker 6: Is it being out in the field.
Speaker 5: I would say my favorite part about being a fire
Speaker 5: ecologist is similar to my favorite part about being a scientist,
Speaker 5: which is just that we it's the world is infinitely
Speaker 5: more complex than we think it is, and I learn
Speaker 5: new things every day about what's going on with these
Speaker 5: and how animals are responding. My preconceptions are always just
Speaker 5: kind of blown out of the water whenever I start
Speaker 5: digging into this stuff. So it's just such a wonderfully
Speaker 5: rich world out there, and fire is such a critical
Speaker 5: part of that whole system, and so being able to
Speaker 5: step into that complexity and try and just use my
Speaker 5: little you know, pick to chip away at one corner
Speaker 5: of that you know, vast unknown in the world of
Speaker 5: fire ecology is just the greatest honor and pleasure. I've
Speaker 5: got three little kids, and you know, I when I
Speaker 5: sit down on my computer and start clacking away every day,
Speaker 5: I'm partly thinking, like, what can I do to make
Speaker 5: this world better than I, you know, than when I
Speaker 5: came into it. And you know, sometimes it may seem
Speaker 5: that my little corner of the world is insignificant, but yeah,
Speaker 5: I like to think that that me and all my
Speaker 5: wonderful colleagues within my agency and outside of it as well,
Speaker 5: work in this area. We're all pulling in the same direction.
Speaker 5: We're trying to, you know, make this world a better
Speaker 5: place as well, and get that good fire back on
Speaker 5: the landscape and try and yeah, change the game a
Speaker 5: little bit.
Speaker 6: I love it.
Speaker 4: I appreciate it so much. I'm glad that you are
Speaker 4: not currently in the middle.
Speaker 6: Of a fire.
Speaker 4: Me too, And thank you for talking to me during
Speaker 4: obviously a very very busy time for firefolks.
Speaker 5: It's been my pleasure, absolutely.
Speaker 12: So.
Speaker 4: Yes, fire off your birding questions to the coolest nerds.
Speaker 4: Out there. That is what we do, and stay tuned
Speaker 4: for a special follow up episode next week. Cross your fingers.
Speaker 4: I can make it happen anyway. Learn more about doctor
Speaker 4: Gavin Jones by following him on Twitter at Ecology of Gavin.
Speaker 4: We are on there also at Ologies and I'm on
Speaker 4: there Ali Ward with one l same handles on Instagram.
Speaker 4: Come be our friends. Feel free to support the show
Speaker 4: for a dollar a month if you'll like it at
Speaker 4: patreon dot com. Slash Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch
Speaker 4: dot com. Thank you Shannon Felts and Bonnie Dutch of
Speaker 4: the podcast You Are That for managing merch. Thank you
Speaker 4: Aaron Talbert for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank
Speaker 4: you to Emily White of the Wordery for making the transcripts.
Speaker 4: Caleb Patton bleeps them and those are all available for
Speaker 4: free at the link in the show notes. Every other
Speaker 4: Thursday we also release new Smologies. They are edited down, short, clean,
Speaker 4: classroom friendly versions of your favorite episodes. Thank you to
Speaker 4: Zeke Rodriguez Thomas of mind Jam Media for editing those big.
Speaker 4: Thanks to Kelly Dwyer for website design. If you need
Speaker 4: a website, She's your gal. Link in the show notes
Speaker 4: to her Thanks Noel Dilworth and Susan Hale for keeping
Speaker 4: the schedules running and for social media Quizzz and Merch
Speaker 4: Monday posts. Thank you to Main Squeeze and Hottest Hell
Speaker 4: editor Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media for putting it all
Speaker 4: together and of course longtime editing help Stephen Ray Morris
Speaker 4: of the podcast The per Cast and See Jurassic Right.
Speaker 4: Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. He's in
Speaker 4: a band called Islands. They have a new album out Alamania.
Speaker 4: And if you listen to the end, you know I
Speaker 4: tell you a secret. And this week's secret is sometimes
Speaker 4: if I need a brain break, I'll go on Craigslist
Speaker 4: and I'll just click the free section to see what
Speaker 4: people are given away, so you could see things that
Speaker 4: people just put up there are free, and I just
Speaker 4: sometimes like to look and see what people are getting
Speaker 4: rid of, and then I try to figure out, like
Speaker 4: what a life story is for that, Like why is
Speaker 4: this person giving away like a ballerina statue? What's up
Speaker 4: with this wheelbarrow? Let's look at a couple right now?
Speaker 4: You want to Okay, okay, let's see what's up there? Oh,
Speaker 4: there's two guinea pigs, and it just says need gone. Damn,
Speaker 4: that is the meanest way to give a guinea pig. No,
Speaker 4: I just want to get these guinea pigs. I have
Speaker 4: ten guinea pigs needed for pickup. I can no longer
Speaker 4: take care of them, and we'll have to release them
Speaker 4: if I cannot find anyone to pick them up. Yikes,
Speaker 4: if anyone needs guinea pigs in LA, I don't mean
Speaker 4: to make that so sad. Vintage artists portfolio case. Did
Speaker 4: they quit being an artist? I don't know. I hope not. Oh,
Speaker 4: here's a six foot pine ladder. I don't need one,
Speaker 4: but it's fun to look a lot of free pianos
Speaker 4: on here. Again, I don't want or need these things,
Speaker 4: but sometimes it's just nice to wonder how that person
Speaker 4: get the piano in the first place, and why don't
Speaker 4: they play it anymore? Anyway, I love when people I
Speaker 4: love when people spare things from landfills and other people
Speaker 4: get things for free. What can I say? Ooh, tap shoes, okay, brybye, pacodermatology, bombiology, cryptozoology, lithology,
Speaker 4: new technology, meteorology, matology, ethnology, zeiology, ethology. So how could
Speaker 4: we have avoided all of that. You're asking, please enjoy
Speaker 4: Indigenous virocology. Oh it's so good, Pass it on. Oh hey,
Speaker 4: it's that incense that reminds your freshman year so much
Speaker 4: that you can only smell it sometimes because you don't
Speaker 4: want the nostalgia to fade. Ali Ward back with a
Speaker 4: follow up as promised episode of Ologies that serves as
Speaker 4: a companion piece to last week's fire Ecology episode. So
Speaker 4: perhaps listen to that one first, come here from more context,
Speaker 4: or don't. Ultimately, none of my beeswax. Okay, so just
Speaker 4: a little behind the scenes on this one's format. Format
Speaker 4: is a little different than what you're used to. I
Speaker 4: spoke with this ologist while she was up in the
Speaker 4: wilderness of Canada on vacation, and the internet was spotty.
Speaker 4: So the first ten minutes or so, it's not the
Speaker 4: finest quality audio we've ever had on Ologies, but we
Speaker 4: did our best, and then she sent some standalone recordings
Speaker 4: answering more questions, and then after the break we're featuring
Speaker 4: excerpts from her own indigenous fire ecology podcast, Good Fire
Speaker 4: with Matt Christoff. Making this a real community effort and
Speaker 4: a fire mosaic episode. Indeed, So this ologist got her
Speaker 4: master's and PhD and hazard management and fire science and
Speaker 4: works as a fire social scientist for the Canadian Forest Service.
Speaker 4: She is a meytea woman from Treaty six Territory on
Speaker 4: land now known as Canada, and has authored papers such
Speaker 4: as social science Research on Indigenous wildfire management in the
Speaker 4: twenty first century and future research needs. So she is
Speaker 4: well schooled on this. And then I saw she has
Speaker 4: a podcast called Good Fire, recorded with Matt Christoff, who
Speaker 4: also hosts the Your Forest podcast. So this ologist was
Speaker 4: on vacation. I desperately wanted to chat with her the
Speaker 4: one week she was trying to relax, but she luckily
Speaker 4: was very up to take a little break and chat
Speaker 4: amid spotty internet and some techtifs. Huge thanks to Matt
Speaker 4: for getting us in touch and for lending us excerpts
Speaker 4: from Your Forest and Good Fire to a future. Also
Speaker 4: thank you to everyone at Patreon dot com slash Ologies
Speaker 4: for making the show possible. This episode was informed by
Speaker 4: the questions you left about indigenous fire stewardship. And thanks
Speaker 4: to everyone who rates and reviews a podcasts It matters
Speaker 4: more than you will ever know, and I read them
Speaker 4: all so I can prove it with a fresh shout
Speaker 4: out for one left this week, such as Sarah ib
Speaker 4: who wrote, I started listening to this podcast and got
Speaker 4: to the gynecological episode and decided to make my first
Speaker 4: obgyn appointment after turns out I have endometrial cancer. I
Speaker 4: had a hysterectomy and I'm currently doing radiation therapy. Thank you,
Speaker 4: Dad Ford for this informative podcast. Sarah, what what sending
Speaker 4: you the biggest, biggest hugs and the best vibes for
Speaker 4: a speedy defeat of that, and thank you for getting
Speaker 4: checked out. Okay, onward to the episode. Etymology is simple.
Speaker 4: Indigenous means native fire has a root meaning fire and
Speaker 4: ecology the study of where we live. So we'll be
Speaker 4: covering cultural burns, drip torches, forest debris, healthy trees, the
Speaker 4: legality of indigenous fire stewardship, fighting fires with strategy, napping
Speaker 4: on the fire line, evacuations and more with Fire Scientist
Speaker 4: Advocate podcast host Canadian Forest Service employee, scholar and Indigenous
Speaker 4: fire ecologist doctor Amy Christiansen.
Speaker 9: Yeah, no problem at all.
Speaker 8: It's great too to have so much.
Speaker 9: Attention on this topic as well.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's wonderful wonderful to have you. So, now, are
Speaker 4: you at the top of a mountain right now trying
Speaker 4: to get cell service?
Speaker 9: No, I'm actually at my parents' cabin, but they do
Speaker 9: not have great internet. But does it sound okay?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it sounds great so far.
Speaker 9: Literally, they're at like the very north end of a
Speaker 9: lake called Shoeshwap Lake, and currently we're actually surrounded by
Speaker 9: three fires as well.
Speaker 6: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4: And is that an area that you're pretty familiar with?
Speaker 4: Has your family been there for a long time?
Speaker 9: Yeah, my parents have this cabin that we've had in
Speaker 9: our family I think for about thirty years now.
Speaker 4: Have you seen a change at all in how the
Speaker 4: summers go in terms of say, being surrounded by fire.
Speaker 9: So the area that we're in is actually kind of
Speaker 9: a rainforest area. We always kind of jokingly refer to
Speaker 9: it as that, and we used to get so much
Speaker 9: rain out here in the summer. In probably the last
Speaker 9: ten years, we've noticed it's been getting warmer in this
Speaker 9: area and we've been getting less rain and even the
Speaker 9: cedars are really starting to not look as healthy. And
Speaker 9: then the last probably five years, we've had more summers
Speaker 9: of smoke. So it's really been yeah, I've really noticed
Speaker 9: the change just even in my lifetime.
Speaker 4: And how long have you been studying fire? How long
Speaker 4: had you been a fire scientist.
Speaker 9: I grew up in northern Alberta. There's always kind of
Speaker 9: fires around my family, although we didn't kind of have
Speaker 9: the connection. We were disconnected from cultural burning practices, but
Speaker 9: my family was kind of always, you know, a bit
Speaker 9: involved than fire, and my husband's a wildland firefighter, and yeah,
Speaker 9: just growing up it seemed like kind of a normal
Speaker 9: thing in the north. And when I moved down south
Speaker 9: to an urban center, that was when I really realized,
Speaker 9: you know, that other people didn't have that, or you know,
Speaker 9: we weren't so used to that. I guess I started
Speaker 9: actually as a geologist, but I always loved hazards, but
Speaker 9: more volcanic hazards and things that I was interested in.
Speaker 9: So I did two years actually in New Zealand, where
Speaker 9: I did my masters on volcanic hazard management. But you know,
Speaker 9: I always kind of feel like bound to the forest
Speaker 9: in Alberta. So I ended up kind of coming back.
Speaker 9: And I even said to my PhD supervisor, like, you know,
Speaker 9: I'll study anything but fire. You know, I don't want
Speaker 9: to have fire in my life because I just you know,
Speaker 9: it was around it all the time and wanted something different.
Speaker 9: But yeah, kind of slowly got pulled back into the field.
Speaker 9: And yeah, I've been at the Canadian Forest Service now
Speaker 9: for about ten years.
Speaker 5: Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, what is your what is your work like?
Speaker 4: And have you grown to appreciate it it all? Are
Speaker 4: you still like fire? Here we are again, you and
Speaker 4: me fire?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 9: No, I think yeah, it's kind of one of those
Speaker 9: things you have to realize that maybe you're just like
Speaker 9: I don't know, I don't want to say destined to be,
Speaker 9: but you know, I think that living in the North,
Speaker 9: it's just you know, I think that you have that
Speaker 9: experience with fire and seeing it around you. And that's
Speaker 9: one thing I always find interesting is when I meet,
Speaker 9: you know, other fire scientists who aren't, you know, from
Speaker 9: areas that experience fire, and I think sometimes it's may
Speaker 9: be hard for them to relate, especially when we're talking
Speaker 9: about fire risk and kind of how people act during
Speaker 9: a fire event.
Speaker 4: So one of doctor Christensen's areas of research and work
Speaker 4: is studying evacuations. So when to leave your home with
Speaker 4: just a few possessions and your life for what might
Speaker 4: be the last time. And it's something that she says
Speaker 4: fire scientists who haven't grown up around fire and had
Speaker 4: to themselves evacuate might not understand. And if you listened
Speaker 4: to last week's episode, I mentioned that my parents lived
Speaker 4: in the remote Sierra Nevadas for years and coercing them
Speaker 4: to evacuate during the King Fire was not easy, even
Speaker 4: with the promise of a night or two at the
Speaker 4: fantasy end with a mirrored ceiling.
Speaker 9: When I first started on at the Canadian for Service,
Speaker 9: there was like no interest really in indigenous fire management
Speaker 9: or cultural burning practices or indigenous firefighters. So I would
Speaker 9: say it was like a very lonely kind of first
Speaker 9: five or six years. And so most of my colleagues
Speaker 9: are actually international folks, so mainly folks from actually California
Speaker 9: and Australia who are in this field as well. But
Speaker 9: I think like pretty much since we've started having the
Speaker 9: big fire events in Canada, that's really what's forced people
Speaker 9: to kind of look at maybe a different way of
Speaker 9: looking at fire on the landscape. My interest in fire
Speaker 9: is also tied to like my own family's histories, so
Speaker 9: my family's Mayti. So we're from northern Alberta, the Cardinal
Speaker 9: and Labcan families, and we kind of had like a
Speaker 9: weird kind of disconnection from culture, which in most mate
Speaker 9: families in Canada actually experience during colonization, and so it's
Speaker 9: basically we weren't allowed to practice any of our traditions
Speaker 9: and other things. It's interesting to me because it almost
Speaker 9: parallels fire in a way. So when settler's you know,
Speaker 9: first came to Canada, one of the first things that
Speaker 9: they brought with them was actually fire suppression. And as
Speaker 9: they moved kind of west across Canada, they basically just
Speaker 9: put into place fire suppression policies wherever they went. And
Speaker 9: the big reason for that was, you know that they
Speaker 9: saw the forest as this wilderness is this kind of
Speaker 9: natural place. But really now we know, like and lots
Speaker 9: of scientific studies now are pointing out that that wasn't natural,
Speaker 9: Like many of those areas were actually stewarded by indigenous
Speaker 9: people to look that way. Actually, the first fire suppression
Speaker 9: campaign was in sixteen ten in Newfoundland in Canada, where
Speaker 9: that was like kind of the first you know, enactment
Speaker 9: of you know, thou shelt not light fires on the landscape.
Speaker 4: Amy says that she's from northern Alberta and there were
Speaker 4: only two fire rangers for the entire province.
Speaker 9: So even though they had like a fire suppression policy,
Speaker 9: you know, those guys couldn't be everywhere obviously, so there
Speaker 9: was still a lot of cultural burning that went on.
Speaker 9: So I would say that in where I'm from, it
Speaker 9: really only kind of stopped or halted around the sixties
Speaker 9: or the seventies where fire really stopped being allowed on
Speaker 9: the landscape in the north. And what we've seen with that,
Speaker 9: you know, is just a massive increase in fuel loading
Speaker 9: and also kind of these like monoculture forests where there
Speaker 9: are the stands are you know, all one species, like
Speaker 9: all similar age, and they're really vulnerable to pest. There's
Speaker 9: other disturbances like fire, and so we're getting these massive,
Speaker 9: big fire events that have come through. And so for
Speaker 9: indigenous people, you know, like my family and others, they
Speaker 9: my family were actually buffalo hunters and they used fire
Speaker 9: in the buffalo hunt, but also afterwards to improve the
Speaker 9: habitat for buffalo and other things that to help them
Speaker 9: in their hunting. When the settlers started coming across and
Speaker 9: saying like no you can't do this, like you don't
Speaker 9: know as much as us, Like, you know, it really
Speaker 9: devalued Indigenous people and their knowledge. And then when you
Speaker 9: add into that, you know, we had residential schools in
Speaker 9: Canada where Indigenous people you know, were sent there and
Speaker 9: basically told you know that you know, it said they
Speaker 9: were savages, that their way of knowing their family, of
Speaker 9: knowing the earth wasn't proper, and you know that they
Speaker 9: had to learn this new way that was much better.
Speaker 9: So we like my colleague fives A Mulla, he was
Speaker 9: telling me that they called that like a cultural severance activity,
Speaker 9: where basically you're just told that, you know, suddenly you know,
Speaker 9: you cannot practice your culture anymore. And so the impacts
Speaker 9: of that are just massive on people, not only on like,
Speaker 9: you know, their ability to use fire, but also just
Speaker 9: on who they are as a person, their pride and
Speaker 9: their family and other things. And so I too, like
Speaker 9: even now, I still have a lot of anger about that,
Speaker 9: and you know how I wasn't able to learn from
Speaker 9: my elders about landscape, stewardship and other things because of that,
Speaker 9: you know, like kind of dominant Western worldview.
Speaker 4: Do you know or has there been research into how
Speaker 4: much of that knowledge is lost.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so, actually Henry and Lewis, who is a researcher,
Speaker 9: He actually started in California but then was at the
Speaker 9: University of Alberta.
Speaker 4: Doctor Henry T. Lewis aka Hank was an anthropology professor
Speaker 4: at the University of Alberta and was one of the
Speaker 4: first researchers to really document indigenous fire stewardship and its
Speaker 4: role in shaping the landscape. And he wrote the paper
Speaker 4: A Time for Burning. It was published in nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: two and a PDF to it is linked on my site.
Speaker 4: It's typewritten on a typewriter. It's wild and it details
Speaker 4: all of the different biomes and how indigenous cultures shaped
Speaker 4: them with fire and if you're like no reading, need visuals.
Speaker 4: He also made a sixteen millimeters documentary titled The Fires Spring.
Speaker 3: All of this was managed by people who had developed
Speaker 3: a complex technology of fire to assure a continued successful
Speaker 3: adjustment to the Northern Royal Forest.
Speaker 4: Somehow this ended up on YouTube.
Speaker 9: Hank God he went up and worked with the woodland
Speaker 9: kreen Denny people in northern Alberta. So actually kind of
Speaker 9: where my family's from as well, and what he was
Speaker 9: saying was in the nineteen seventies when he did his
Speaker 9: work that he thought that between ninety and ninety five
Speaker 9: percent of that knowledge had been lost. So I mean
Speaker 9: that was now, like it's hard to believe it almost
Speaker 9: fifty years ago, right when that was happening. So for me,
Speaker 9: like I often hear people say in meetings like you know,
Speaker 9: oh well, indigenous knowledge is inapplicable to today and cultural
Speaker 9: burning practices because you know, now we have climate change,
Speaker 9: like now there's more values on the landscape in terms
Speaker 9: of thinking about structures and other things. But I always
Speaker 9: argue against that because for me, like it's not about
Speaker 9: like indigenous people, like we're alive today, we're part of society,
Speaker 9: like we see all these things, like indigenous people are
Speaker 9: on the front lines of climate change, Like of course
Speaker 9: we don't. That's occurring. And you know, indigenous knowledge, the
Speaker 9: most beautiful thing about it is how adaptable it is
Speaker 9: to the local environment. So like, for like, because you
Speaker 9: know you're living in that environment, you're dependent on it.
Speaker 4: Okay, So Amy's internet cut out again, so we tried
Speaker 4: a new way of recording just via the phone and
Speaker 4: her laptop, and it sounds much better, which is great
Speaker 4: so clear. In fact, you may even be able to
Speaker 4: discern the pitter pattern of children's footsteps on the cabin
Speaker 4: stairs as her family vacationed around her.
Speaker 7: Hi, maybe this will work.
Speaker 12: I can hear you great at home. It's funny because
Speaker 12: I have a pretty good setup with a podcasting microphone, headphones,
Speaker 12: And of course I'm like, oh, it's this week when
Speaker 12: I'm gone, but no worries.
Speaker 4: But where were we? Yes, that indigenous fire knowledge is
Speaker 4: starting to get more attention as climate change worsens and
Speaker 4: larger fires erupt And as a fire scientist, what is
Speaker 4: her workday?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 12: Sure, yeah, So with my job with the CFS, I
Speaker 12: most fire research scientists, I say, kind of do the
Speaker 12: same thing. So we have our research projects that we
Speaker 12: run or that we're a part of. So a lot
Speaker 12: of my day is actually kind of meeting about research
Speaker 12: and other things that are going on. So really similar
Speaker 12: to like you know, an academic researcher from a university.
Speaker 12: But then as well, we also kind of have the
Speaker 12: policy or the government side, So I said, on a
Speaker 12: lot of like national or international committees or working groups
Speaker 12: you know, looking at fire and trying to direct policy
Speaker 12: we just recently in Canada finished the Blueprint for Wildland
Speaker 12: Fire Science for twenty nineteen to twenty twenty nine, so
Speaker 12: looking at, you know, topics that we should really be
Speaker 12: spending money basically in time doing research on. And one
Speaker 12: of those the themes from that was actually on indigenous fires.
Speaker 12: So we also have an evacuation database actually with the
Speaker 12: Canadian for Service, where we've tracked wildfire evacuations in Canada
Speaker 12: since nineteen eighty. So during this summer, like that's one
Speaker 12: thing is that we have like lots of our staff
Speaker 12: working on that doing data entry into it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 12: a big job this summer. Like in twenty twenty, I
Speaker 12: think we only had twenty different evacuations in Canada, but
Speaker 12: this year I think we're already at one hundred and
Speaker 12: twenty five different evacuation events. So it's a huge job.
Speaker 4: So this Blueprint for a Wildland Fire Science in Canada
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen to twenty twenty nine outlines, in its own words,
Speaker 4: a business case to increase investment in wildland fire science.
Speaker 4: And it is fifty seven pages of really great strategies
Speaker 4: covering themes like understanding fire in a changing world, recognizing
Speaker 4: Indigenous knowledge and enhancing knowledge exchange mechanisms to improve the
Speaker 4: ways in which wildland fire science and technology are shared, understood,
Speaker 4: and implemented. So Amy's team had been working on that,
Speaker 4: and for the curious, I will link to the full
Speaker 4: pdf on my website. Now, as far as the increasing evacuations,
Speaker 4: that issue gets more personal as this episode unfolds, even
Speaker 4: more personal than my parents in an hourly motel in Rynow,
Speaker 4: and this is something I think a lot of people
Speaker 4: have trouble wrapping their brain around. And maybe there is
Speaker 4: no good answer. But is it climate change? Is it
Speaker 4: human ignition and carelessness? Is it not letting the forest
Speaker 4: burn as it naturally would? How do you scientists come
Speaker 4: up with plans to tackle this issue? If it's kind
Speaker 4: of like a trifle problem.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I agree with you.
Speaker 12: It's just such a complex issue. I mean, there's also
Speaker 12: the fact that people are just building more in you know,
Speaker 12: areas that are of higher risk to fire. You know,
Speaker 12: as communities get larger and kind of expand out into
Speaker 12: what you know, some people call the wildline urban interface,
Speaker 12: it's really increasing fire risks.
Speaker 7: I think that that's the hard thing too.
Speaker 12: Is that there's no like magic bullet solution, right, like
Speaker 12: even with cultural burning, like you know, I'm such a
Speaker 12: strong proponent of getting that back on the ground, but
Speaker 12: that doesn't at all tackle you know, how vulnerable some
Speaker 12: homes and other things are to fire at the moment.
Speaker 4: Climate change, she said, is also a pretty big frickin deal.
Speaker 12: But the one thing you know that I think locally,
Speaker 12: like you know, in our towns and stuff, that we
Speaker 12: can control is the fuels that are available to burn.
Speaker 12: And so that's why, you know, I think that cultural
Speaker 12: burning or landscape level fuel management as well as the
Speaker 12: community wildfire mitigation is so important to do in combination.
Speaker 12: And lately too, I've been seeing I don't know if
Speaker 12: you are seeing in the States as much, but in
Speaker 12: Canada there's a bit of a movement to just kind
Speaker 12: of you know, fireproof communities or you know, keep homes
Speaker 12: or you know, structures safe from fire. But to me,
Speaker 12: that's really missing the point of like the landscape around
Speaker 12: your home. Like for me, I don't want to be living,
Speaker 12: you know, if my home is standing in like the
Speaker 12: middle of you know, a black and landscaping. In Canada,
Speaker 12: it can take a long time for the forest to
Speaker 12: regenerate sometimes, you know, twenty thirty forty years and even
Speaker 12: then they're finding up north in the boreal forest that
Speaker 12: burns or just so hot that they're basically kind of
Speaker 12: killing the soil and any vegetation around. So, yeah, it's
Speaker 12: quite a complex issue. But I think when I think
Speaker 12: as an indigenous person, I look at the forest, I
Speaker 12: don't just see it as trees or timber values or
Speaker 12: other things. You see it as like part of who
Speaker 12: you are, right like your relations So you want to
Speaker 12: be able to, you know, steward and protect that area
Speaker 12: as much as you do you know, your own home
Speaker 12: or structure.
Speaker 4: And can you describe a little bit about prescribed fires
Speaker 4: and indigenous fire stewardship versus cultural burns. I think a
Speaker 4: lot of people maybe want to lump them in together,
Speaker 4: but can you describe a little bit about how they
Speaker 4: work or what they are.
Speaker 12: Yeah, so there's a bit of a danger of that
Speaker 12: this whole thing now where we're seeing prescribed fire and
Speaker 12: just kind of throwing cultural burning into that. So prescribe
Speaker 12: fire is you know, generally what agencies do, so where
Speaker 12: they're setting fire on the landscape, but in many cases
Speaker 12: they're setting you know, high severity fires.
Speaker 5: It's burning really fast.
Speaker 12: And they want to burn a lot of land in
Speaker 12: a little bit of time. So we see like lots
Speaker 12: of aerial ignition of fires.
Speaker 7: We see them using you.
Speaker 12: Know, basically like helicopter ignition, and in Canada, like lots
Speaker 12: of times people put that together as you know, being
Speaker 12: a crown fire being these big, bad, kind of out
Speaker 12: of control fires that are burning up you know, mountain sides.
Speaker 12: That's generally the media that we see in Canada about
Speaker 12: prescribed fire, but it really differs from cultural burning because
Speaker 12: cultural burning is more about achieving a cultural objective around
Speaker 12: the forest around where you live. So you don't really
Speaker 12: want to have these big, large, standard placing fires that
Speaker 12: go through and and can kill everything in a prescribed
Speaker 12: fire event. That sometimes is what happens in Canada. Yeah,
Speaker 12: so for culture fire too, the thing is that most
Speaker 12: fires are actually pretty low intensity. In Australia they call
Speaker 12: them like slow burns or cool burns, and they generally
Speaker 12: move through the understory and they're done it certain times
Speaker 12: of year where the potential fire behavior is very low risks.
Speaker 12: So you know where you're not getting, you know, potential
Speaker 12: of crown fire. There's lots of natural fuel breaks around
Speaker 12: the fire in Canada that's usually snow still on the ground.
Speaker 12: For Indigenous people, cultural burning too, is like a family
Speaker 12: a community activity, So like when I'm doing burns and things.
Speaker 7: Like, I take my daughters. My mom was on the
Speaker 7: last one that we did.
Speaker 4: There's a great photo that's run in a few news
Speaker 4: articles about Amy's work, and she's standing in a golden
Speaker 4: grassy field. It's hazy with smoke as a cultural burn
Speaker 4: grass fire she's overseeing lurches behind her, and there's a
Speaker 4: husky wolfy dog sitting to her right staring off. And
Speaker 4: Amy's wearing black leggings and a red flannel shirt and
Speaker 4: is pregnant with would be her second daughter. So the
Speaker 4: mood is very calm, unlike what most people's experience of
Speaker 4: land on fire might be.
Speaker 12: Lots of times, you know, we don't wear personal protective equipment,
Speaker 12: you know, like the kind of gnomes that you usually
Speaker 12: see firefighters wearing, because usually the fires are honestly just
Speaker 12: so slow and most people find them I think a
Speaker 12: bit boring too, because it can take a really long
Speaker 12: time to burn a really small piece of land, and
Speaker 12: so for agencies it doesn't really work well, right because
Speaker 12: that for them means more staffing, dollars and other things.
Speaker 7: To achieve, like you know, a smaller area burned.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when it comes to how much fuel is in
Speaker 4: some of the forests, now that would be too much
Speaker 4: for say a prescribed burn maybe to tackle I'm reading
Speaker 4: like there's so much you know, dead timber and fallen
Speaker 4: timber because we've suppressed fire for so long, Like where
Speaker 4: does fire management even begin? And to kind of tackle
Speaker 4: that issue.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's it is a big issue, and I think
Speaker 12: people often get overwhelmed, Like I just hear you know
Speaker 12: all the time.
Speaker 7: Oh, it's so complex.
Speaker 12: There's so many things and so many people's competing values.
Speaker 12: But I think that we often lose the focus on
Speaker 12: like local communities. So in Canada, our first nations have reserves,
Speaker 12: and so if you go on to a reserve, many times,
Speaker 12: like when you speak to the elders and other people,
Speaker 12: like they know what needs to be done in their area,
Speaker 12: Like they know if certain areas are too fuel loaded,
Speaker 12: and you know, they want to go in there and
Speaker 12: kind of mechanically treat the forest, so you know, by
Speaker 12: using machines and labor to go in and do thinning
Speaker 12: and other things before they can burn to kind of
Speaker 12: keep the fuel load low in those areas. So I
Speaker 12: think for me that's that the biggest thing is that
Speaker 12: we really need to go back to kind of these
Speaker 12: local solutions to fire and that's really kind of what
Speaker 12: our research is showing that, you know, local people want
Speaker 12: to be involved. So you know, I talk mostly about
Speaker 12: indigenous peoples, but you know, ranchers, farmers, other people who
Speaker 12: you know use the landscape for their livelihood, they also
Speaker 12: you know, really want to have a healthy forest and
Speaker 12: environment around them, and they know the areas too, and
Speaker 12: even forestry companies. Like the one nice thing about cultural
Speaker 12: burning is that because we're doing kind of these low
Speaker 12: understory burns, like we don't want to burn the nice, big,
Speaker 12: healthy trees, right because those are so important for cultural
Speaker 12: activities and for other other like our relations other animals.
Speaker 12: It's actually really nicely works together because you kind of
Speaker 12: can get cultural burns going through and really removing some
Speaker 12: of that dead fall and promoting those healthy big tree
Speaker 12: growth that like the timber companies love.
Speaker 4: And obviously this is something that is a family issue
Speaker 4: for you two, having you know, being married to someone
Speaker 4: who is a firefighter. Point did you decide to spread
Speaker 4: the word about good fire. And the term good fire
Speaker 4: too is something that I'm I kind of just learned too.
Speaker 4: Can you talk a little bit about what good fire is?
Speaker 8: Sure?
Speaker 12: So if good fire I think comes just from the
Speaker 12: idea that you know, it's very obvious that we can
Speaker 12: have good fires on the landscape. You know that fire
Speaker 12: is something that is helpful to the environment and to people.
Speaker 12: And so I think Indigenous people lots of times see
Speaker 12: fire almost in a dichotomy, so kind of you know,
Speaker 12: these bad fires and then the good fire that we
Speaker 12: can use as a tools. But before colonization, indigenous people
Speaker 12: would use fire on the landscape in good ways. But
Speaker 12: then also we did have lightning fires obviously back then, right,
Speaker 12: but they would come across the landscape and kind of
Speaker 12: enter into this mosaic landscape that these indigenous burns and
Speaker 12: other lightning cause fires like, and so as they would
Speaker 12: enter them, then the fire behavior would change. So as
Speaker 12: you know, it entered a meadow, the fire intensity might decrease,
Speaker 12: and then it would go back into the forest and
Speaker 12: maybe increase, and then it would hit like a deciduous
Speaker 12: stand of trees and go down again. And so this
Speaker 12: mosaic or patchwork on the landscape was actually really helpful
Speaker 12: for fire to kind of decrease the intensity of these
Speaker 12: fire events. But what we're seeing right now is because
Speaker 12: we've been suppressing those fire events, there's just so much
Speaker 12: fuel in the forest that we're seeing these bad fires.
Speaker 12: So even like I'm thinking like the Dixie Fire in
Speaker 12: California right now, or we have like multiple fires in
Speaker 12: Canada at the moment too that are bad fires. Like
Speaker 12: lots of times, you know, we look at and say, oh,
Speaker 12: fire's natural, there's good ecologic benefits. But for me, there's
Speaker 12: nothing good about these current fires happening right now.
Speaker 4: So at this point, our FaceTime call cut out because
Speaker 4: of spotty internet, so Amy recorded a clip answering a
Speaker 4: few more questions because she is the best and knew
Speaker 4: that we only had a few days until this went up,
Speaker 4: and she's once again the best.
Speaker 12: I also just wanted to mention the importance of indigenous
Speaker 12: people in fire in Canada but also in other countries.
Speaker 12: You know, we often think about indigenous people in fire
Speaker 12: management as something that happened in the past, but we
Speaker 12: have a lot of amazing indigenous firefighters in Canada, Indigenous
Speaker 12: fire managers and other people who are really, you know,
Speaker 12: on the front lines trying to bring back good fire
Speaker 12: and indigenous fire stewardship and really out there every summer
Speaker 12: kind of protecting our communities from these bad fires, and
Speaker 12: especially in Canada, lots of times there we don't give
Speaker 12: enough attention, I think to those indigenous firefighters. Lots of
Speaker 12: times they're kept kind of from progressing in their careers
Speaker 12: because they might not have the appropriate Western education levels,
Speaker 12: you know, a degree or a diploma or something, but
Speaker 12: they have you know, might have twenty thirty forty years
Speaker 12: experience of being on the fire and so knowledgeable and incredible.
Speaker 12: And I think, you know, a lots of times we
Speaker 12: need to look at where Western science as well got
Speaker 12: some of its ideas. Like I've spoken to many elders
Speaker 12: who've told me about drip torches and how they would
Speaker 12: use tree limbs and sap to create their own drip torches.
Speaker 12: That's what their ancestors did and how they would spread
Speaker 12: fire across the landscape was in doing that. So now
Speaker 12: you know, it's a metal canister with fuel in it,
Speaker 12: but it's kind of the same idea that indigenous people's
Speaker 12: had about how to use fire. Properly on the land,
Speaker 12: and just this incredible knowledge base and people in the communities,
Speaker 12: you know, had roles. In Canada, some nations actually had
Speaker 12: families that were fire keepers. There were many people who
Speaker 12: knew about fire and had knowledge about fire activity.
Speaker 4: After the break, you'll hear a clip from Good Fire
Speaker 4: podcast hosts Amy Christensen and Matt Christoff talking about Indigenous
Speaker 4: firefighters experience on the fire line, And I admit I
Speaker 4: found this discussion hilarious. But before that, remember Henry T.
Speaker 4: Lewis Hank the anthropologist who wrote A Time for Burning
Speaker 4: and made that Fires of Spring film, So the retro
Speaker 4: sixteen millimeter film aesthetics are far from the coolest thing
Speaker 4: about his fireworks.
Speaker 12: One of the coolest things I think from Henry Lewis's
Speaker 12: work was when he was speaking to woodland crean Dana
Speaker 12: elders about how they would use fire to melt the
Speaker 12: frost in the ground. And I've seen actually a few
Speaker 12: kind of Western science studies lately on that, but that's
Speaker 12: actually an older technique that the communities would use. So
Speaker 12: you'd get kind of all the dry grass on top
Speaker 12: of a meadow or something, and they would go and
Speaker 12: burn that in the really early spring, because that's the
Speaker 12: most important thing about indigenous burning, is the time to burn,
Speaker 12: when it's safe to do a good fire, and they
Speaker 12: would that would then turn that level that grass into
Speaker 12: you know, black, and so the black would absorb the
Speaker 12: heat of the sun and then start to melt the
Speaker 12: frost out of the ground in the early spring, and
Speaker 12: that would give you much like earlier green shoots and
Speaker 12: green grass coming up that then moves deer other things
Speaker 12: could come in and eat in that area, so it
Speaker 12: would make your hunting or other things a lot easier
Speaker 12: to do. So yeah, I think that that's those are
Speaker 12: things you know that and there's probably so much more
Speaker 12: out there that we don't even know that communities use
Speaker 12: and how they would use fire in a good way.
Speaker 12: And I mean if people are interested as well. You
Speaker 12: know Frank like I think, is probably one of the
Speaker 12: first kind of fire ecologists who also is an indigenous man,
Speaker 12: who you know, saw very early the importance of indigenous
Speaker 12: fire knowledge and bringing it and he's written some really
Speaker 12: great publications that I think for people who are eye opening,
Speaker 12: you know, about how we can use fire in a
Speaker 12: good way on the landscape.
Speaker 4: And to hear an earload of other incredible Indigenous voices
Speaker 4: in fire ecology. You want to subscribe to Goodfire. It's
Speaker 4: a podcast series by Amy and Matt, and we are
Speaker 4: featuring audio from a discussion as they launched Goodfire in
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen. They were gracious enough to let us steal
Speaker 4: some clips to round out the conversation amid our tech
Speaker 4: issues this week, and as it turned out, Amy and
Speaker 4: I had further trouble connecting because those three fires that
Speaker 4: she mentioned around her family cabin got bigger and they
Speaker 4: were forced to evacuate from their vacation. So yes, her
Speaker 4: work is timely and personal, and she literally wrote the
Speaker 4: book on this, a volume titled First Nations Wildfire Evacuations,
Speaker 4: a Guide for Communities and External Agencies, alongside Tara McGee
Speaker 4: and First Nations Wildfire Evacuation Partnership. So I'm going to
Speaker 4: link to that in the show notes as well. Now
Speaker 4: in her name, we're donating this week to a cause
Speaker 4: of her choosing, and she asked her to go to
Speaker 4: Indigenous Residential School Survivors that's IRSSS dot CAA. For over
Speaker 4: twenty years they've assisted First Nation peoples in British Columbia
Speaker 4: to recognize and be holistically empowered from the primary and
Speaker 4: generational effect of the residential schools by supporting research, education, awareness,
Speaker 4: establishing partnerships and advocating for justice and healing and the
Speaker 4: society SS survivors with counseling, court support, information, referrals, workshops
Speaker 4: and more. And you can find out more at IRSSS
Speaker 4: dot Ca. There's a link in the show notes. And
Speaker 4: in Canada, consider participating in Orange Shirt Day on September thirtieth.
Speaker 4: It's also known as National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Okay,
Speaker 4: so that donation was made possible by some sponsors of
Speaker 4: the show.
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Speaker 4: And so many of you patrons asked about indigenous fire management, namely,
Speaker 4: and I'll list you all off at once, very quickly,
Speaker 4: Cameron Brown, Doug potential future fire ourcologist, Ronan Jackie Crisper Who,
Speaker 4: Kimberly Hoffman, Ellen Skelton, Thomas and Wyndham, Brianna Freeman, Justin Roberts,
Speaker 4: Anthony Willis, Donnell O'Neill, and Alexandra Getul. And because our
Speaker 4: time chatting was cut short again, we're so honored and
Speaker 4: lucky to feature relevant clips from a conversation with The
Speaker 4: Good Fire podcast host Amy Christensen and her co host
Speaker 4: Matt Christoph. Okay, here Amy is talking to Matt about
Speaker 4: fears of fire.
Speaker 12: Even in our indigenous communities, Like lots of people are
Speaker 12: now worried about fire and scared of fire. And I
Speaker 12: think so for me when I come across people like
Speaker 12: you know that kind of have that tendency to think
Speaker 12: of fire as bad, I always say, you know, well,
Speaker 12: there's good fire and that's kind of you know the
Speaker 12: name of from the podcast, So you know, when we're
Speaker 12: doing these kind of good fires, it's basically it's not
Speaker 12: a wildfire.
Speaker 7: It's totally different.
Speaker 12: Most Indigenous people want to bring back burning right and
Speaker 12: bring back that cultural practice to their landscape because most elders,
Speaker 12: when they look at the forest, the first thing that
Speaker 12: they say is that it's unhealthy and that it needs
Speaker 12: cleaning up. When I first started working a bunch of elders,
Speaker 12: I'd always hear this cleaning up phrase, cleaning up, And
Speaker 12: you know, it took a while till I realize that,
Speaker 12: you know, that meant fire that they wanted, because you know,
Speaker 12: you don't normally think of that. You think like I'll
Speaker 12: go out with a rake or something like Donald Trump
Speaker 12: thinks that we're doing. But you know, it was actually,
Speaker 12: you know, that they wanted to use fire to kind
Speaker 12: of clean up all that dead litter on the forest
Speaker 12: for so they just want to do that again in
Speaker 12: their territory. But I think they also realize that because
Speaker 12: of the fire suppression that we've had over the last
Speaker 12: you know, fifty to three hundred years depending where you
Speaker 12: are in Canada, Yeah, that it's not that easy just
Speaker 12: to bring back our burning practices right, because we burned
Speaker 12: on intervals, so depending on where you were. You know,
Speaker 12: if you were burning a meadow, you might burn the
Speaker 12: meadow every three years. If you're burning like you know,
Speaker 12: an old growth forest down, you might burn every twenty years.
Speaker 12: Like you know, it just depended on what you were
Speaker 12: burning or what objective you are trying to achieve. So
Speaker 12: you know, we and now we've excluded fire. So I mean,
Speaker 12: the litter and the build up of fuel is crazy.
Speaker 12: So I think, like now, most of the elders I
Speaker 12: talked to, if they say, like if we went and
Speaker 12: tried to do this now, like we would basically burn
Speaker 12: down the forest because we'd be trying to start a
Speaker 12: low intensity burn, but there's just too much fuel on
Speaker 12: the floor, so it would immediately like escalate.
Speaker 4: So how do indigenous fire scientists and wildlands firefighters approach
Speaker 4: these really different schools of thought? Any explains to that.
Speaker 12: We call it like two eyed seeing, So that's kind
Speaker 12: of the new concept that's come up. So that's like,
Speaker 12: you know, where as indigenous people or even as non indigenous,
Speaker 12: like you know, you're looking at the world through one eye,
Speaker 12: through your western perspective, right, because we're all trained in
Speaker 12: that you know, like there's not there's very few people
Speaker 12: that you know are and raised in the bush and
Speaker 12: have that kind of only subsistence lifestyle. But then out
Speaker 12: of the other eye, you know, you can see with
Speaker 12: your indigenous eye, right, so you can see, you know,
Speaker 12: how you know where things could be better. And I
Speaker 12: think for me that's where fire management comes in because
Speaker 12: you know, I'm trained from the Western perspective, but I
Speaker 12: think you know, from like culture then like you know,
Speaker 12: there's things that Indigenous people do or know better. And
Speaker 12: you know, for me, part of my job is you know,
Speaker 12: advocating for that and trying so you know, it's not
Speaker 12: saying like drop all Western science around fire, right, we
Speaker 12: need that, we need that too, But then indigenous people
Speaker 12: and our cultures also no ways you know for making
Speaker 12: the forest healthy. So to me, if you bring those
Speaker 12: two together, it makes like you know what I mean,
Speaker 12: it's then you have like an incredible knowledge base that
Speaker 12: you're coming from, right.
Speaker 4: Ah, the firefighter stories I promised you.
Speaker 12: One example is like talking to firefighters. So there's this
Speaker 12: one guy who is a non like a non indigenous firefighter.
Speaker 12: So it's kind of funny up on the you know,
Speaker 12: the fire crew is there lots of that. There's like
Speaker 12: thirty or forty year indigenous firefighters that have been on
Speaker 12: the fire line a long time, and they say, you know,
Speaker 12: these new kids, like university grats come up and start
Speaker 12: telling them what to do. So this one guy was
Speaker 12: actually telling me that he, you know, he started out
Speaker 12: of university as kind of a fire boss and went
Speaker 12: up on the one line and he had these native crews,
Speaker 12: and he said he was that he thought they were
Speaker 12: the laziest people in the world because he's like, they
Speaker 12: would get up in the morning and work a little bit,
Speaker 12: but then he's like, then they nap all day and
Speaker 12: then like in the in the bush, you know, yeah,
Speaker 12: and then he's like, but then you know, they would
Speaker 12: get up and kind of work all night. And then
Speaker 12: he's like and then I started like really looking and
Speaker 12: watching what they were doing.
Speaker 7: And he said that.
Speaker 12: Then one of the guys came up and told him, like,
Speaker 12: we fight the fire when it's the weakest, because we
Speaker 12: see fire as a living being, and why would you
Speaker 12: fight something at the height of its day, you know,
Speaker 12: like at two pm on a really sunny, hot day
Speaker 12: with high winds, right, like, why would you do anything?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 12: Like the fire can just jump or yeah, you know,
Speaker 12: but if you know, fight it in the morning when
Speaker 12: it's the weakest, or in the evening or overnight is.
Speaker 14: High and the temperature is low, and so the activities.
Speaker 12: Yeah, decrease. Yeah, and everyone, well I should say generally
Speaker 12: now with climate change, who knows, but generally fire activity
Speaker 12: decreases at night.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 12: So Sony's but that these guys have got that not
Speaker 12: from textbooks, but from years of being out and watching fires,
Speaker 12: so I think. And so he was saying, like to me,
Speaker 12: like this non indigenous kid that that it was just
Speaker 12: amazing to see that because he didn't learn any of
Speaker 12: that in school. And so for him, he said he'd
Speaker 12: learned more that summer working with the native crews about
Speaker 12: fire than going to school. Basically not to say, you know,
Speaker 12: don't stay in school, kids, but like because that's important too,
Speaker 12: but you know, there's other ways and other things to
Speaker 12: learn as well about about fire. Lots of the indigenous
Speaker 12: fire guys they'd always tell me. One of the funniest
Speaker 12: things is like the when the fire season first starts
Speaker 12: in like in Cree, the word for white boy or
Speaker 12: whatever mooniew. So they say, like, oh, it's so funny.
Speaker 12: Ande like the mooney I'll come on the fire because
Speaker 12: he's like, they're all just doing selfies with the fire
Speaker 12: in the background, and he's like and we're all like,
Speaker 12: you know, actually working and he's like and you look
Speaker 12: and all the moonya are just lined up way away
Speaker 12: from the fire take itself. And then it was funny
Speaker 12: because then I started seeing on Facebook.
Speaker 14: Like lots of people well on Instagram.
Speaker 12: Yeah, but I think that that's like just maybe a
Speaker 12: bit of and it's kind of more of like because
Speaker 12: for Indigenous people, it's more of a lifestyle, right, so
Speaker 12: they're they've been doing that. That's so it's it's a
Speaker 12: great career for indigenous people because they can go out
Speaker 12: in the summer, make money, be on the land, and
Speaker 12: then in the winter they can go and like run
Speaker 12: their chaplines or hunt, be with their families and like
Speaker 12: kind of participate in their their culture. So I think
Speaker 12: that that's why it's become like kind of a nice
Speaker 12: life style for certain people.
Speaker 14: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker 4: So how do agencies and nations work together? How can
Speaker 4: ecologists and fire keepers spark those collaborations.
Speaker 12: People always say, oh, you need to gauge with the
Speaker 12: Indigenous communities and and well, like to me, that's a
Speaker 12: nice concept. I know that lots of non Indigenous people
Speaker 12: or companies get frustrated because you know, they go to
Speaker 12: these communities and try to engage and nobody turns up
Speaker 12: or you know, they can't get a hold of anybody,
Speaker 12: nobody returns their calls. And so I think for me,
Speaker 12: like the thing to remember with that is, you know,
Speaker 12: for people to remember that like first nations are under
Speaker 12: the Indian Act, right, so basically all their resource and
Speaker 12: you know, how their capital for how they're run all
Speaker 12: basically is decided in Ottawa almost you know, and how
Speaker 12: much money comes down to them. So most of the times,
Speaker 12: you know, even though the communities have high capacity, you know,
Speaker 12: for forestry or other things, it's often very underfunded because
Speaker 12: of what comes down the stream from Ottawa.
Speaker 4: Ottawa is an eastern Canada in Ontario. And did you
Speaker 4: know that Ottawa is the capital of Canada. I didn't
Speaker 4: until right now. So if you feel the same, it's okay.
Speaker 12: Basically there's not enough money, right so they you know
Speaker 12: might not have a forestry cordate, or they might not
Speaker 12: have a lands person or you know, or the chief
Speaker 12: might be like that. You know, the chief has to
Speaker 12: manage housing, healthcare, like you know, everything like you get so,
Speaker 12: I know, people get frustrated. But at the same time,
Speaker 12: I think, you know, there's it needs to be a
Speaker 12: bit of patience and understanding there that lots of the
Speaker 12: nations are trying as much as they can, and some
Speaker 12: are great. Like there's some nations you know that have
Speaker 12: really gone into forestry there, you know, the community forests
Speaker 12: in BC. I think that those are a really great
Speaker 12: example of things that are working well. Or I know
Speaker 12: there's been partnerships like between different like forest industries and
Speaker 12: indigenous nations too. Most forestry people don't go into forestry
Speaker 12: because they want to you know, kill all the trees
Speaker 12: and everything, right, They go into because they love being
Speaker 12: in the forest, right, so they want to sustain that.
Speaker 12: Most indigenous people love being in the forest, right, So
Speaker 12: right there you have a match of you know, so
Speaker 12: then it almost goes to well, then, you know, if
Speaker 12: these are our shared values, how then can we you know,
Speaker 12: move forward together. But I think think one of the
Speaker 12: problems is that there's a real lack of trust because
Speaker 12: there's been a lot of people that have taken advantage
Speaker 12: of indigenous communities, so you know, come in and said
Speaker 12: good things, said all the right things, and then you know,
Speaker 12: ended up taking money and you know, not involving the nation,
Speaker 12: and so it takes it can take a while. I
Speaker 12: think like a helpful thing too, as employing indigenous people.
Speaker 12: So you know, when you make or want to work
Speaker 12: in a certain nation or with them, you know, to
Speaker 12: employ people from that band and give them, you know,
Speaker 12: a sustainable you know career. And there's lots of indigenous
Speaker 12: people that actually have forest tech diplomas and other.
Speaker 4: Things, yep, that that can do that.
Speaker 12: So I think, you know, and I know it's not
Speaker 12: easy either. I don't want people to think like, oh yeah,
Speaker 12: you just sit at a table and decide your values
Speaker 12: and then everything goes away.
Speaker 4: Amy explains that over the many years, promises have been
Speaker 4: made and broken, and outside collaboration has seemed to come
Speaker 4: with a price tag.
Speaker 12: You know, I think you need to recognize, you know,
Speaker 12: if you want to do this kind of work that
Speaker 12: there has to be some kind of benefit for the
Speaker 12: community as a whole as well, whether that's you know,
Speaker 12: monetarily or you know, supporting like a recreational forest or
Speaker 12: you know something. Yeah, to kind of come to that,
Speaker 12: I don't like, there's not I think an easy answer
Speaker 12: for you know, like just do this one step and
Speaker 12: you know, indigenous people will love to work with you.
Speaker 12: But for me, I think that forestry really has an
Speaker 12: advantage over say like the oil and gas industry because
Speaker 12: I think that there's many more shared values or like
Speaker 12: I think the worldview of an indigenous person in a
Speaker 12: forestry is much more similar. So yeah, I think that
Speaker 12: that's kind of exciting almost, and you know, something kind
Speaker 12: of a future. And I've seen like a bunch of
Speaker 12: nations now you know, are opening their own little sawmills
Speaker 12: and other things, and to me, that's like exciting. So
Speaker 12: because it has to do with the housing crises we have,
Speaker 12: right so they want to be able to you know,
Speaker 12: harvest their own wood to build their own homes, which
Speaker 12: I mean, why we aren't doing that, I have no idea,
Speaker 12: you know, instead of shipping in the wood and timber
Speaker 12: and stuff. So I think, yeah, there's Unfortunately there's not
Speaker 12: like a really easy answer. But I would say, like
Speaker 12: the biggest thing is, you know, to be genuine and
Speaker 12: patient and then understand that history. You know that the
Speaker 12: situation that you're coming into because lots of people get like,
Speaker 12: a I don't want to say white savior because that
Speaker 12: sounds really bad, but you know it's kind of like, oh,
Speaker 12: I'm going to go to the community and help them,
Speaker 12: or you know, like yeah, and I think the problem
Speaker 12: is that there's a revolving door of these you know,
Speaker 12: white saviors or people that you know are coming to
Speaker 12: save them. And like even like if you go to
Speaker 12: a First Nation conference, like there's just kind of business
Speaker 12: people all over the place trying to sell the chiefs
Speaker 12: on different ideas and different different things. So yeah, it's
Speaker 12: almost kind of being becoming trusted in the community and
Speaker 12: then also working long term. And that's something that you know,
Speaker 12: are especially in government, like we don't really support because
Speaker 12: you know, everyone kind of wants to climb the ladder
Speaker 12: in government, whereas you know, the most trusted people are
Speaker 12: generally the ones from the community who've been in the
Speaker 12: community the longest. Yeah, and that's generally who like an
Speaker 12: Indigenous person would trust.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 12: So yeah, it's almost like doing these relationships long term too.
Speaker 12: And I think there's some great examples out there of
Speaker 12: things that are going really well.
Speaker 4: So yes, trust and incentives really matter, as does plain
Speaker 4: old money.
Speaker 12: And I would say lots of that does come from
Speaker 12: like that funding issue. You know that sometimes they just
Speaker 12: don't have enough money. And then also other times, you know,
Speaker 12: we're dealing with lots of issues that have been brought
Speaker 12: on by colonization, right, So like if you're dealing with
Speaker 12: a suicide crisis in your community, you're not really going
Speaker 12: to care about forestry, right, And so I hear people
Speaker 12: say that too, like to me sometimes about you know,
Speaker 12: when I talk about how we're stewards of the environment,
Speaker 12: they'll say to me, like, have you ever been on
Speaker 12: a reserve and looked at like you know, there's garbage everywhere,
Speaker 12: and you know, and people don't care about their houses,
Speaker 12: and like that's hardly an environmental steward. And to me,
Speaker 12: that's colonization, right, Like that's where where we've gone and
Speaker 12: where we've been pushed.
Speaker 4: So reminder that cultural burning practices were criminalized, but now
Speaker 4: they're becoming of interest to Western scientists. And Amy says
Speaker 4: that returning to that fired stewardship could be really healing
Speaker 4: for forests, for people who love the forest, and for
Speaker 4: the people who have been kept from doing it for
Speaker 4: so long.
Speaker 12: Moving forward, it's kind of like re like regaining our
Speaker 12: culture back. And so that's like where to relate it
Speaker 12: to burning. That's we're burning in those things because burning
Speaker 12: for us is a cultural practice, right, And so I
Speaker 12: think by getting fire back on the landscape, by kind
Speaker 12: of making our forests healthier, you know, than that promotes
Speaker 12: a healthier community. So you know, instead of kids sitting inside,
Speaker 12: you know, they're out on the land and like what
Speaker 12: kid doesn't like fire, right, So they're out with their
Speaker 12: elder like burning, and and it is those neat things
Speaker 12: like even just showing kids like how smart their ancestors were.
Speaker 12: Like the one elder that I was talking to was
Speaker 12: telling me about how drip torches actually came from First
Speaker 12: Nations people, which I didn't know, but I think, like that,
Speaker 12: to me, that's neat because you take kids out there
Speaker 12: and you show them like, well, you know, drip torches
Speaker 12: came from your you know, and and and even like
Speaker 12: kids had jobs on fires, right, So oh man, I
Speaker 12: actually heard this fantastic well that also made me cry
Speaker 12: the other day from this guy in Australia and he
Speaker 12: was saying for them, burning is such a family affair.
Speaker 12: And actually that's what I hear too from all of
Speaker 12: our that people I've talked to here, is that you know,
Speaker 12: it wouldn't just be the men that would go out
Speaker 12: and burn. It's the entire family and the kids. Like
Speaker 12: one thing they would do is pick up like pine
Speaker 12: cones and you know, light them on fire and then
Speaker 12: from the fire and then.
Speaker 4: Throw them right.
Speaker 12: It's like awesome for kids. And I know, like there's
Speaker 12: fire managers probably listening to this saying, oh my goodness,
Speaker 12: they're going to burn down the Please do not do this.
Speaker 14: If you are just a kid listening, I don't want
Speaker 14: to start throwing flaming balls of fire. Don't do that.
Speaker 12: Yeah, but this was obviously under the direction of elders,
Speaker 12: and you know also burning at like a very low
Speaker 12: risk times, right, Like this was not in the very yes,
Speaker 12: but so you know, it's to give the kids a
Speaker 12: job on the fire. And the one guy from Australia
Speaker 12: was saying that for his mob that for them it
Speaker 12: was bringing children's laughter back to the forest because the
Speaker 12: trees hadn't heard the children laugh in a long time
Speaker 12: and they felt that that was needed for the trees
Speaker 12: to be healthy too. And I mean that kind of
Speaker 12: relates like obviously children's laughter does not you know, directly
Speaker 12: affect the tree, but it's more that like if people
Speaker 12: are out on the land stewarding it, right, then that
Speaker 12: promotes health for the health of the trees.
Speaker 4: So anyways, to me, that.
Speaker 12: Was such a beautiful like quote because I think too often,
Speaker 12: you know, we kind of remove that or remove kind
Speaker 12: of the community.
Speaker 4: Patron n Nikki DeMarco asked, is there any way we
Speaker 4: could go back to indigenous sewardship to help with this
Speaker 4: problem or does the red tape make it not feasible?
Speaker 4: So moving forward, what are the legalities of it?
Speaker 12: So on our like the reserves were technically allowed to burn,
Speaker 12: right because that's the you know the band, Well it's
Speaker 12: federal jurisdiction, but you know, the band kind of has
Speaker 12: a bit of control over it, so you know that
Speaker 12: you don't need provincial permission to do that. So, you know,
Speaker 12: lots of agents fire management agencies say, you know, oh,
Speaker 12: we're so supportive of indigenous people and we want to
Speaker 12: help that, you know, you know, support their practices, you know,
Speaker 12: until we say, you know, we want to burn something.
Speaker 12: And so you know what I've seen even you know,
Speaker 12: in BC is where I'm doing a lot of work
Speaker 12: right now, because the nations there are so passionate about burning.
Speaker 12: But you know, they they're going into these meetings and
Speaker 12: it's you know, like a really complicated process to get
Speaker 12: prescribed burning on the ground, and it's very Western base,
Speaker 12: you know, you have to know like fuel types that
Speaker 12: are out there. Yeah, it's like a crazy twelve step process.
Speaker 12: And most of the communities look at that and just say,
Speaker 12: you know, we'll screw this, we're burning ourselves, you know.
Speaker 12: And then even when they want to burn, like I've
Speaker 12: heard of lots, you know where somebody sees smoke and
Speaker 12: then you know, calls the you know, calls the emergency number,
Speaker 12: and then you know, a helicopter will just come and
Speaker 12: put out their little fires that they're burning right without
Speaker 12: you know, coming and dropping down and maybe talking to
Speaker 12: the people or seeing what's going on. So there's a
Speaker 12: bit of a disconnect, and I can see it from
Speaker 12: both sides, right because especially in BC, like the fires
Speaker 12: has been so crazy that I think, you know, the
Speaker 12: BC Fire Manager or Wildfire Service there, you know, obviously
Speaker 12: doesn't want out of control fires, but the nations there
Speaker 12: want to burn. And so what I'm seeing right now
Speaker 12: is because they they're just like smashing heads basically, like
Speaker 12: they're supportive until we want to burn. And because of
Speaker 12: that smashing of heads, is that now the nations are
Speaker 12: saying like, well, screw you, this is our territory. We're
Speaker 12: doing what we want, you know, and then like it
Speaker 12: becomes like this real conflict situation and we're trying to
Speaker 12: work with like the agency and you know, maybe even
Speaker 12: introduce some sort of like cultural burn protocol or procedure
Speaker 12: you know that's more indigenous based, that same thing, like
Speaker 12: you're kind of getting permission, you know, you're notifying the
Speaker 12: correct authorities, but it's not as crazy. Is this like
Speaker 12: existing process?
Speaker 14: Well, I think that's and we've just again it's another
Speaker 14: thing we've discussed a bit on the on the other
Speaker 14: episodes we did that, yeah, the Good Fire podcast. But
Speaker 14: talking about that, that's another big barrier to indigenous burning
Speaker 14: or cultural burning however you want to call it. Is
Speaker 14: the like the Western barriers on that because like you're right,
Speaker 14: we don't want out of control of fires. So the
Speaker 14: Western like the Western government, we want to make sure
Speaker 14: that like any fire that is started is not going
Speaker 14: to become a problem for anything outside of the reserve
Speaker 14: or whatever, right, but also at the same time recognizing that,
Speaker 14: like you Nick, you were saying, Indigenous people have been
Speaker 14: working with fire for thousands of years and understand the relationship.
Speaker 14: So how do you make sure that government feels comfortable
Speaker 14: with this going on? But also ensuring that because it's
Speaker 14: entirely possible. Also like this is something that somebody who's
Speaker 14: playing Devil's advocate would say, right, is just saying that, like, well,
Speaker 14: how do we ensure that they know what they're doing,
Speaker 14: because it could be somebody who just because they're Indigenous
Speaker 14: doesn't mean they know what's going on, right, they have
Speaker 14: to have that knowledge passed down and collected somehow.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and you know, I've heard that all the time, like, oh,
Speaker 12: if we allow this, the Indians are going to be
Speaker 12: lighting fires everywhere, Like yeah.
Speaker 14: Exactly right.
Speaker 12: And then that kind of fear yeah.
Speaker 14: Right, So there's that fear of will they take advantage
Speaker 14: of this and just do it for fun or whatever?
Speaker 14: And that exists, So we have to address that fear.
Speaker 14: So how do we There's going to have to be
Speaker 14: a collaboration somehow to be like, Okay, we acknowledge that
Speaker 14: like these four people somehow, Unfortunately, that's the way it's
Speaker 14: going to happen. I think it's probably going to have
Speaker 14: to go that these four people in this band have
Speaker 14: the knowledge and they have to be like I don't know,
Speaker 14: And this is super westernized for me to think, right, like,
Speaker 14: these people have the knowledge and understanding of how to
Speaker 14: do this, so if they're in charge, we're not going
Speaker 14: to worry about it. But I also feel like indigenous
Speaker 14: communities having to talk to the overlord, the government of
Speaker 14: all what they're doing on their own land is counter
Speaker 14: is exactly the opposite of what you're trying to accomplish here.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and so that's like so you know, like there's
Speaker 12: fireboss training, right or no burn boss training, So there's
Speaker 12: like different levels of that you can go through. Same thing.
Speaker 12: It's very Western like I know that now, like there's
Speaker 12: Bob Gray and other guys who train on that who
Speaker 12: are starting to incorporate a bit of Indigenous knowledge or
Speaker 12: you know the importance of Indigenous knowledge and burning, but same,
Speaker 12: it's very like kind of Western. You know, this is
Speaker 12: how we light a prescribe fire.
Speaker 10: And that's all we know.
Speaker 14: That's the only culture I know, right, So it's where
Speaker 14: my perspective is going to come from.
Speaker 12: Yeah. So we were doing brainstorms on the fire keepers
Speaker 12: and we're like, you know, well they do a certification
Speaker 12: course to get that, So maybe what we need to
Speaker 12: do then is have a cultural burning certification course, right,
Speaker 12: so that you know, people would go through and then
Speaker 12: once they get that, then you know they can go
Speaker 12: and and light fires or whatever. But then then we
Speaker 12: had a lot of fire keepers that were saying like, no,
Speaker 12: that is basically just us trying to fit into a
Speaker 12: Western system, right, And they were saying, like the one
Speaker 12: guy actually at the fire keeper's conference, I just went
Speaker 12: to the government people were talking, and he stood up
Speaker 12: and he just said, you know, I find this really difficult.
Speaker 12: Well because they were talking about, you know, like all
Speaker 12: the procedures you need to go through to get approval.
Speaker 12: He stood up and he just said, you know, for me,
Speaker 12: this is my families and like my nation's inherent right
Speaker 12: to steward the land, this is my responsibility. This is
Speaker 12: why I was put on this earth, you know. So
Speaker 12: for me then to have to go and ask you
Speaker 12: for permission to do what is my responsibility and my
Speaker 12: right that doesn't make any sense. And then he was saying, like,
Speaker 12: you know, one hundred years ago, you guys were telling
Speaker 12: us we couldn't burn because we were destroying the forest,
Speaker 12: and now you're saying, Tess, oh, only we can burn
Speaker 12: because you know, because now the forest is destroyed. And
Speaker 12: he's like, you're the ones, you know who's practices because
Speaker 12: you wouldn't listen to us, you know, have led to this.
Speaker 12: If you would have listened to my ancestors, you know,
Speaker 12: then we wouldn't be in this predicament we're in now,
Speaker 12: So like, let us kind of take it over. So
Speaker 12: I think it's one of those like I don't hate.
Speaker 12: I don't really like that term like wicked issue, you know,
Speaker 12: where it's like super complex, but it is kind of
Speaker 12: like that in a way, because you like you're worried
Speaker 12: the forest isn't healthy right now. I don't personally want
Speaker 12: to say to somebody like, yeah, go out and burn
Speaker 12: and then have you know, a massive crown fire start.
Speaker 12: But I think the thing is with indigenous fire practice
Speaker 12: is that it's you know, you're burning at very specific times,
Speaker 12: so you know it's like early spring before the snow
Speaker 12: is left. In Canada, it's late fall, just like the
Speaker 12: day or two before the first snow fall, right, you're
Speaker 12: not burning like obviously in the summer. So like I
Speaker 12: would think that that, you know, obviously still should be
Speaker 12: criminalized to some extent. You know that you need to
Speaker 12: find people or whatever that are just going because that
Speaker 12: is very high risk.
Speaker 7: And so like what our.
Speaker 12: Like elders and ancestors say from like the different nations
Speaker 12: that I've talked to, is that you know, our burning
Speaker 12: that we do is so low risk. That's why we
Speaker 12: don't need protective equipment. That's why we don't need a
Speaker 12: burn plan, because if we're doing it right, you know,
Speaker 12: there's there's literally very low or zero risk. Well, I
Speaker 12: think they would say zero risk to what they're doing,
Speaker 12: you know, to starting an out of control fire is
Speaker 12: somebody getting hurt.
Speaker 14: It's amazing how complicated the situation is to try and
Speaker 14: navigate this, but I think, yeah, the only way forward
Speaker 14: is to come together and have his discussions right on this.
Speaker 14: It seems like a cop out to say that because
Speaker 14: it's just like like we need to discuss it, but
Speaker 14: unfortunately that's the truth.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Well, and on the Good Fire podcast, I think
Speaker 12: like that's what's interesting is because with the range of
Speaker 12: people that we talked to on there, like you know,
Speaker 12: you go from somebody who thinks, you know, like it's
Speaker 12: their right to burn and they're not working with any agency,
Speaker 12: and then to like other people who you know, are employed,
Speaker 12: like mean kind of buy an agency. Yeah, like Frank Lake,
Speaker 12: you know, he works for US Forest Service and he's
Speaker 12: used his you know, work within this kind of western
Speaker 12: government structure to bring more fire back to his territory.
Speaker 12: So yeah, it's just it's really interesting to see kind
Speaker 12: of all the different perspectives.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So that conversation was from the Your Forest podcast, which
Speaker 4: is hosted by Matt Christoff, who also co hosts Good
Speaker 4: Fire with a Me. And of course there's a whole
Speaker 4: Good Fire episode with Frank Lake, and there's so many
Speaker 4: other great voices in indigenous fire ecology. So I'm going
Speaker 4: to link that episode in the podcast in general on
Speaker 4: my website, and I will also put up a link
Speaker 4: to the wonderful forty seven page book called Blazing the Trail,
Speaker 4: celebrating Indigenous fire stewardship. So many resources, so much learning.
Speaker 4: Now to wrap up, though, let's talk about some pains
Speaker 4: in some assets so the most vexing thing about Amy's job, I'd.
Speaker 12: Have to say my least favorite thing about my job
Speaker 12: is the bureaucracy, which I think that most people who
Speaker 12: work in a government agency can relate to.
Speaker 7: It's sometimes really frustrating when.
Speaker 12: You know, you know something needs to be done or
Speaker 12: what a solution could be, but then you kind of
Speaker 12: get held up in all sorts of bureaucratic processes.
Speaker 7: So I mean that's my least favorite.
Speaker 12: Unfortunately, it takes up a lot of time that we
Speaker 12: could be, you know, devoting to other things.
Speaker 7: So that's frustrating for sure.
Speaker 4: In the stand out best aspect, the most brightly glowing coal.
Speaker 7: But I think my most.
Speaker 12: Favorite thing about my job is that I'm able to
Speaker 12: work with communities and knowledge keepers from across Canada and
Speaker 12: then internationally sometimes as well. And I really realize that that's,
Speaker 12: you know, a position of privilege that I have and
Speaker 12: that I'm in to be able to do that, and
Speaker 12: it comes like with a lot of responsibility that often
Speaker 12: you know, keeps me awake at night, but for me,
Speaker 12: when I'm able to bring fire keepers or other people
Speaker 12: to events or other things and just see their pride
Speaker 12: and finally, being recognized in their knowledge being known, and
Speaker 12: sometimes like I've been referring to that as kind of like,
Speaker 12: you know, we had this big severance event with fire,
Speaker 12: but now what we're almost seeing is this reunion with
Speaker 12: fire where Indigenous people are coming back to it. And so,
Speaker 12: you know, we have the land back movement for Indigenous people,
Speaker 12: and often I think, you know, we need a fireback
Speaker 12: movement as well, where Indigenous people, you know, impact again
Speaker 12: to make those decisions on the land. And what I'm
Speaker 12: seeing right now in Canada especially is that there is
Speaker 12: a movement where people want to be involved in fire
Speaker 12: management decisions that are happening in their territories.
Speaker 7: And so I think that's really exciting.
Speaker 4: So ask smart people exciting questions because sometimes the situation
Speaker 4: is impossibly complex and they can help break it down
Speaker 4: for you, like a focus on a fallen lock. And
Speaker 4: so for more on this topic, you can get yourself
Speaker 4: some good fire podcasts Into your Ears. It's hosted by
Speaker 4: Amy and by Matt Christoff and it's linked in the
Speaker 4: show notes. Matt's podcast again is Your Forest Podcast. Thank
Speaker 4: you so much to him for letting us use so
Speaker 4: much of his interview with Amy. You can follow Amy
Speaker 4: at Christiansen Amy on Twitter. There are more links in
Speaker 4: the show notes and up at my website, Aliward dot com,
Speaker 4: slash Ologies, slash good Fire. You can follow us at
Speaker 4: Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali Ward with
Speaker 4: one l New full length adult friendly episode codes continue
Speaker 4: to come out on Tuesday, and we're moving smolodies releases
Speaker 4: to the weekend I think Sundays or Mondays, so look
Speaker 4: for a new kid friendly episode next week. Also, I'm
Speaker 4: sorry that my neighbor's dog's barking. I can't really do
Speaker 4: anything about it. We gotta get this episode up. I'm
Speaker 4: So Sweaty. Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank
Speaker 4: you to sisters Shannon fellas Us and Body Dutch for
Speaker 4: managing merch. They host a podcast called You Are That,
Speaker 4: a comedy podcast. Thank you to longtime friend Aaron Talbert
Speaker 4: we met when we were four, for admitting the Ologies
Speaker 4: podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Emily White of the
Speaker 4: Wordery Professional Transcription Company for making transcripts for Ologies. They're
Speaker 4: available for free on my website. Thank you Caleb Patten
Speaker 4: for bleeping episodes. Thank you Noel Dilworth for all the
Speaker 4: scheduling and Susan Hale, both of you for helping with
Speaker 4: social media quizes and such as always giant thank you
Speaker 4: to Resident editor by resident, I mean we live in
Speaker 4: the same bed, shared sleeper, who helped me stitch all
Speaker 4: these audio clips together. And also of course to Steph
Speaker 4: Maray Morris for all the editing help for working on
Speaker 4: somologies now too. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music.
Speaker 4: And if you listen to the end, you know I
Speaker 4: tell you secret. This week's secret. It's pretty juicy. It's
Speaker 4: actually not. It's that I prefer dry pulpy oranges. I
Speaker 4: don't want a juicy orange. I want the pulp to
Speaker 4: hold all the juice. I don't want to need juice
Speaker 4: on my hands. I want to dry pulpy orange. I
Speaker 4: don't know if it's a certain kind of orange or
Speaker 4: if I have to just let them stand on the
Speaker 4: counter longer. But if you are a pulpologist and you
Speaker 4: know this, holler let me know. Because every time I
Speaker 4: open an orange, I'm rolling the dice. I'm like, come on,
Speaker 4: give me a dry one. Is it gross? I don't know,
Speaker 4: I don't care anyway.
Speaker 13: Byebye, Packidermatology Homology Crypto zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, althology, nathology, ceiology.
Speaker 4: Elenology, And now that you've stuck around to two episodes,
Speaker 4: I feel like you deserve to be burdened with a
Speaker 4: double mega secret, which is afreshy. This is no Encore secret.
Speaker 4: It's June seventh, twenty twenty three. I thanks for dealing
Speaker 4: with a couple of encores recently. Your dad words, not
Speaker 4: feeling great. I'm doing okay. Nothing is nothing is like
Speaker 4: scary or anything. But I have switched an antidepressant that
Speaker 4: I was on because I'm now medicated for ADHD, which
Speaker 4: is helping. But if anyone out there, there's a couple
Speaker 4: of you probably have gotten off of effects for or
Speaker 4: back on it. It's a toughie. Don't google it unless
Speaker 4: you want to be sad for anyone who's gone off it.
Speaker 4: Uh and not solely tapered anyway. I've been feeling just
Speaker 4: just terrible, and then it that coincided with my endocrinologists
Speaker 4: being out of the office for most of the summer
Speaker 4: and not having the hormones that I require to survive
Speaker 4: because I went through a varia failure at an early age.
Speaker 4: So I'm a mess, just a goddamn mess. But your
Speaker 4: girl is doing her best. I've cried so much today
Speaker 4: for no real reason. But thanks for sticking it out.
Speaker 4: Thanks for dealing with encores. Every once in a while
Speaker 4: I'll get someone who goes, why are you putting up
Speaker 4: an encore? And I'm like, because I can barely function,
Speaker 4: And that's just how it goes when you put out
Speaker 4: fifty to sixty five hour long episodes a year. So
Speaker 4: thanks for dealing with it. Thanks for rolling with it.
Speaker 4: This is a vulnerable secret. I appreciate you listening and caring.
Speaker 4: Hopefully I will be on the mend soon. If you
Speaker 4: have dealt with anything like this, please know that you're
Speaker 4: not alone. Okay. Please enjoy the fresh air if you
Speaker 4: have any, and please enjoy indoor filtered air if you don't. Okay,
Speaker 4: scallops next week, fresh episode, byebye.
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