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Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's your cousin three thousand miles away checking
Speaker 2: in to see if your house is on fire, ali Ward,
Speaker 2: Except in this case, I'm the cousin's cousin, and everyone
Speaker 2: is texting me to ask if my house is on fire,
Speaker 2: and it is covered in cinders, and it's raining down ashes,
Speaker 2: and where about a mile or so as the crow
Speaker 2: flies or as the embers drift from the evacuation line
Speaker 2: of the wildfire that's raging in La right now. They're
Speaker 2: eating fire near Pasadena. And this week I've been in
Speaker 2: Las Vega this last few days on a business shrip,
Speaker 2: and I've been like up all night, feverishly refreshing. The
Speaker 2: watch Duty app for updates on the fire spread. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: my husband, Jarrett, your pod mother, has been like packing
Speaker 2: up our passports and our birth certificates and our baby,
Speaker 2: who's a twelve year old dog, and he's been staying
Speaker 2: with friends here and there until the winds died down
Speaker 2: a little bit. But we're back home and most of
Speaker 2: our neighbors on our street have evacuated. The air is
Speaker 2: very heavy with smoke from like a thousand or so
Speaker 2: homes a few miles away that were lost in Altadena.
Speaker 2: I haven't slept much at all the last couple of days,
Speaker 2: and the winds are picking back up tonight, and at
Speaker 2: press time there's zero percite containment on the nearby to
Speaker 2: us eating fire. And then the Pacific Palisades fire is
Speaker 2: barely contained and it's growing, and fires are starting and
Speaker 2: smoldering all over La. I have a nasty smoke headache,
Speaker 2: and so I'm giving you this very relevant encore.
Speaker 3: While I catch my breath.
Speaker 2: How firestart, why they're getting worse, and how indigenous knowledge
Speaker 2: and fire management differs from what we have going on
Speaker 2: right now. And then at the end there's a very
Speaker 2: relevant twenty twenty five secret about something that has made
Speaker 2: me cry several times today, which is very spooky. Okay,
Speaker 2: here we go. The CDC has a bunch of recommendations
Speaker 2: about dealing with the smoke, which will link in the
Speaker 2: show notes for this episode. But in case you can't
Speaker 2: stay indoors hopefully with an aeror filter running, we thought
Speaker 2: we'd highlight what the CDC has to say about masks. Quote,
Speaker 2: don't rely on dust masks for protection. Paper comfort or
Speaker 2: dust masks commonly found in hardware stores trap large particles
Speaker 2: such as sawdust, but these masks will not protect to
Speaker 2: you or your lungs from smoke. So an N ninety
Speaker 2: five mask properly worn will offer some protection, So bust
Speaker 2: out those N ninety fives if you are somewhere with
Speaker 2: smoke right now. Also, speaking of health, another reason why
Speaker 2: I'm running this mega episode is I've been dealing with
Speaker 2: some health stuff and I will talk about it in
Speaker 2: this mega secret at the end of this mega episode.
Speaker 2: If you care, if you make it all the way there,
Speaker 2: but take care of yourselves and please enjoy this mega
Speaker 2: encore double feature of fire ecology and Indigenous fire ecology.
Speaker 2: Hem Oh hey, it's the pair of sunglasses that you
Speaker 2: leave in the car that's scratched. It's not your favorite,
Speaker 2: but it's better than nothing. In a pitch ali ward
Speaker 2: back with a piping hot episode of ologies. It's top
Speaker 2: of mind for a lot of us out here up
Speaker 2: here in the Northern Hemisphere, especially toward the west of
Speaker 2: the continent. Wildfires, fire ecology, blazing infurnos, apocalyptic nightmares. This
Speaker 2: ologist so special got his bachelor's in zoology, a master's
Speaker 2: in wildlife ecology, and a PhD in Wildlife ecology Statistics,
Speaker 2: all from the University of Wisconsin and Madison. He is
Speaker 2: currently a Wildlife and Terrestrial Ecosystems research ecologist. Such a mouthful.
Speaker 2: He's a research scientist at the US Department of Agriculture's
Speaker 2: Forest Service, also an adjunct professor at the University of
Speaker 2: New Mexico. He has been published on papers about fire
Speaker 2: refuges for wildlife, where they hide out, megafires, habitat loss.
Speaker 2: He's also just casually the editor at the Association of
Speaker 2: Fire Ecology, so I've been following him online for a while.
Speaker 2: I reached out to casually ask him about pyrology versus
Speaker 2: fire ecology, and before I knew it, I was begging
Speaker 2: him to talk to me. So we hopped onto chat
Speaker 2: while fires were raging in the West this week and
Speaker 2: I was in a muggy Florida hotel room for work
Speaker 2: and it smelled like a turtle tank. But before we
Speaker 2: dive into the conversation, I want to thank everyone at
Speaker 2: patreon dot com slash Ologies. It costs a dollar a
Speaker 2: month to join and then you can submit questions to theologists.
Speaker 2: Thank you to everyone listening and making us the number
Speaker 2: one podcast in the science category on Spotify, And thank
Speaker 2: you for leaving reviews on Apple Podcasts to get us
Speaker 2: seen by other people. I truly read them all because
Speaker 2: I desperately want to make a show that does not suck,
Speaker 2: and to prove it, I'm going to read you a
Speaker 2: still glowing coal of assessment from Bert Lancaster, who wrote
Speaker 2: Ologies is your cynicism Antidote. I simultaneously feel beautifully tiny
Speaker 2: and so expansive that I could burst after listening. Sometimes
Speaker 2: I just have to stand there and laugh to myself
Speaker 2: for a while. Sometimes I cry. Emotions are weird. Love
Speaker 2: you dad word, Bert Lancaster, get a hanky, because your
Speaker 2: internet dad right here loves you right back. Okay, everyone
Speaker 2: who left to review, I read it I love you also, Okay,
Speaker 2: all right, let's fire off some questions. Yeah, okay, open
Speaker 2: your ears for info on what fire is, how hot
Speaker 2: it burns, fire trends, tinderboxes, lots and lots of forest fire, flimflam,
Speaker 2: tolerant wombats, Angelina Joe Lee, movies, cunning pine cones, thick bark,
Speaker 2: tragic koalas, indigenous fire stewardship, and more with researcher scientists
Speaker 2: of the woods, does dweller, al cuddler, forest service employee,
Speaker 2: optimist and fire ecologist doctor Gavin Jones.
Speaker 4: Yes, Gavin Jones, and my pronouns are he him?
Speaker 5: Got it?
Speaker 3: And you are currently in New Mexico.
Speaker 4: That's right in the great city of Albuquerque.
Speaker 3: Do you guys have trees there?
Speaker 4: You know we do? Yes, Okay, it's pretty much desert
Speaker 4: out here, so when the trees grow, they don't grow
Speaker 4: very tall.
Speaker 2: And now tell me how a fire ecologist from Wisconsin
Speaker 2: and Florida and now New Mexico. Yes, how did your
Speaker 2: life path lead to fire ecology?
Speaker 4: Oh my goodness, it was really an accident. I do
Speaker 4: consider myself a fire ecologist, but I was really trained
Speaker 4: and I did my graduate work and all my studies
Speaker 4: in wildlife ecology, and when I was in grad school,
Speaker 4: I was doing some research out in the Sierra Nevada
Speaker 4: in California on the cutest, cuddliest creature there is, the
Speaker 4: California spotted owl. And yeah, like pretty much anybody who
Speaker 4: spends enough time doing science out in fire prone lands
Speaker 4: like the Sierra Nevada, you eventually become a fire ecologist
Speaker 4: because of fire happens and then you have to try
Speaker 4: to figure out what to do with it. So that's
Speaker 4: exactly what happened. I was doing my master's degree. I
Speaker 4: was at the University of Wisconsin with my supervisor, Zach Peery,
Speaker 4: and we were doing a study out in California on
Speaker 4: spotted owls, trying to figure out forests they used how
Speaker 4: they would respond to climate change. And just as I
Speaker 4: was finishing my master's degree, like just a month or
Speaker 4: two before I had defended my degree, a big fire
Speaker 4: burned through our study area.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And at the time, to be honest with you,
Speaker 4: I was pretty devastated. I was like, Man, what does
Speaker 4: this mean for the work that I've been doing? Like
Speaker 4: does this even mean anything anymore? It, you know, changed
Speaker 4: the game a little bit. But it provided an incredible
Speaker 4: opportunity to learn about how these animals, this owl that
Speaker 4: I was studying, responded to fire. It was basically a
Speaker 4: natural experiment. This fire burned through our study area in
Speaker 4: twenty fourteen, and it burned through about half of it.
Speaker 4: And so, you know, in ecology, when we're doing these
Speaker 4: field studies, we rarely get the chance to do experiments.
Speaker 4: Like almost everything we do is observational. We go out
Speaker 4: and see what we see, and we record it and
Speaker 4: we try to make sense of it. We rarely get
Speaker 4: to do experiments like you know other folks get to
Speaker 4: do in the lab who are doing chemistry or their
Speaker 4: molecular things. But this was really a natural experiment to
Speaker 4: see how this species of owl responded to fire. And
Speaker 4: that's what launched me into, I guess, being a real
Speaker 4: sucker for fire and for learning about how it works
Speaker 4: in some of these systems, why it happens, how it happens,
Speaker 4: what its consequences are. And I'm totally hooked now.
Speaker 2: Ah, how many of your owls were latered?
Speaker 6: How many of the owls survived that?
Speaker 2: Like what percentage of the impacted area half of your
Speaker 2: study area?
Speaker 4: So some of them didn't make it. Some of them dispersed,
Speaker 4: some of them left the fire they were able to
Speaker 4: get out of the way. And then there's large parts
Speaker 4: of the fire that didn't burn so severely that burned
Speaker 4: at lower severity, where basically a lot of the trees
Speaker 4: that the big trees in the canopy, they kind of
Speaker 4: you know, they survived, and some of the understory burned
Speaker 4: a little bit more of a what we call quote
Speaker 4: unquote good fire in some of these areas, which I'd
Speaker 4: love to talk more about, but you know, a lot
Speaker 4: of those birds did great and are still persisting in
Speaker 4: some of those areas that experienced lower severity fire, those
Speaker 4: lower severity effects to the.
Speaker 2: Forest, but predictably many bit the proverbial dust and returned
Speaker 2: to the earth. As Ash Gavin told me that one
Speaker 2: of his colleagues was servying the charred land and found
Speaker 2: a little aluminum owl leg band that they used for tagging,
Speaker 2: and it encased a little crispy owl leg. Did not
Speaker 2: go well for that one. And how did that wildfire start?
Speaker 4: Well, So that particular wildfire that was a human started fire,
Speaker 4: and it's actually a kind of a sad story. Is
Speaker 4: some guy I'm trying to remember the details. You should
Speaker 4: look this up, Alley. But some guy was I think
Speaker 4: taking a video for his ex girlfriend or something and
Speaker 4: like lit some house on fire, and then that started
Speaker 4: this gigant It was like, at the time, one of
Speaker 4: the largest fires that had burned in the state of California.
Speaker 2: Okay, buckle up, here's a story. So this was twenty
Speaker 2: fourteen's King Fire, and it started in Pollock Pines and
Speaker 2: the Sierra Nevadas. And I already knew of this fire
Speaker 2: because my parents lived in Pollock Pines in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: and my sisters and I had to plead with them
Speaker 2: to heed the emergency evacuation orders as pyrocumulus clouds billowed
Speaker 2: over their hill. We're like, please get to safety. I'm
Speaker 2: sweating a lot. Don't make me come up there.
Speaker 6: I can't.
Speaker 7: The roads are closed.
Speaker 2: So I booked my mom and dad a hotel in Reno,
Speaker 2: out of harm's way. And the hotel turned out to
Speaker 2: have a mirrored ceiling and a very thrifty but sensual vibe.
Speaker 2: They tell me. I get the feeling that there were
Speaker 2: also hourly rates available at this hotel.
Speaker 7: I got them.
Speaker 2: I didn't read the reviews Okay, it was an emergency anyway.
Speaker 2: The Kingfire that reduced homes to ask and dashed people's
Speaker 2: dreams at flambayed Gavin's owls. It was all started by
Speaker 2: a guy named Wayne Huntsman, who was not a Huntsman
Speaker 2: but an arsonist, a formerly incarcerated firefighter actually, who that
Speaker 2: sweltering September day had set several fires to impress a paramore.
Speaker 2: He took video for her standing between two small, smoldering
Speaker 2: blazes that were just starting to take off. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure how their relationship turned out, but as proof that
Speaker 2: we're living in a simulation the burn area, the burn
Speaker 2: Scar is absolutely shaped like a perfect ninety seven thousand
Speaker 2: acre dick and balls all ablaze in one of the
Speaker 2: state's most infamous literal thirst traps. Okay, so how much
Speaker 2: is our horny, greedy species to blame?
Speaker 8: Oh man?
Speaker 4: And that's another thing is a lot of the ignitions
Speaker 4: are human ignitions, you know, people accidentally starting fires, machinery
Speaker 4: getting too hot, people driving over dry grass, and things
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 2: So Gavin says that eighty to ninety percent of all
Speaker 2: wildfires are human caused ignitions. Half of California's largest fires
Speaker 2: in the last century, happened in the past five years.
Speaker 2: By the way, a complex fire means a cluster of
Speaker 2: related fires in one area. But what's the difference between
Speaker 2: a wildfire and a forest fire.
Speaker 4: We talk about wildfires. Typically when we're talking about wildfires,
Speaker 4: those are unplanned, so fires that we as people don't plan.
Speaker 4: So you can kind of juxtapose that with a prescribed
Speaker 4: fire or a cultural fire. So prescribed fire is often
Speaker 4: fire that is purposely set and then managed by teams
Speaker 4: to achieve some type of objective. Maybe they're trying to
Speaker 4: restore some area, restore fire. You know, you probably hear
Speaker 4: a lot about, you know, people burning prairies and things
Speaker 4: like that. It's the same thing in forests, they go
Speaker 4: in and do prescribed burns. And then there's also a
Speaker 4: really important component of cultural burning, So indigenous communities using
Speaker 4: wildfire for their purposes, which until you know, about one
Speaker 4: hundred two hundred years ago, made up the overwhelming majority
Speaker 4: of the fire activity that was happening in a lot
Speaker 4: of these areas. For you know, the last ten thousand
Speaker 4: years or so, indigenous peoples have been using fire in
Speaker 4: a really important cultural way, and that has really changed
Speaker 4: in the past couple of centuries with colonization, but that
Speaker 4: is an increasingly important part of the solution to sort
Speaker 4: of this modern wildfire problem.
Speaker 2: And obviously indigenous cultures and just the planet at large
Speaker 2: saw the benefit of prescribed burns. So what good do
Speaker 2: fires do, either in prescribed burns or just in nature.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's such a good question. I mean, fires are
Speaker 4: a critical piece of ecosystems around the world. Every square
Speaker 4: inch of land that has vegetation has some type of
Speaker 4: fire regime, It has some sort of natural fire cycle,
Speaker 4: and fire is kind of a restorative process. There's many
Speaker 4: benefits of fire from we can think about it from
Speaker 4: a human perspective, we can think about it from a
Speaker 4: sort of an ecosystem perspective, you know, from the human perspective.
Speaker 4: You know, fires create more resilient forests when they burn
Speaker 4: the right way. When we have sort of a natural
Speaker 4: kind of lower intensity fire in some systems, like in
Speaker 4: the Sierra Nevada where I've spent a lot of my time,
Speaker 4: that reinforces healthy water supplies, It reduces you know, erosion.
Speaker 2: Side note, a fire regime sounds like Satan's cabinet members
Speaker 2: farting flames in a Haites boardroom. But it's actually just
Speaker 2: a gentle term. A fire regime describes a pattern of fire, frequent,
Speaker 2: how intense, what kind of fuel?
Speaker 3: Of gobbles? And maybe me just.
Speaker 2: Calling it Satan's cabinet members farting in hades. Maybe that's
Speaker 2: part of the root of europeans fear of fire and
Speaker 2: thus this historical fire suppression by colonists. I wondered this,
Speaker 2: and I begged myself not to google it because this
Speaker 2: acide would be like forty five minutes long. But snap,
Speaker 2: I found a twenty fifteen paper from the journal Philosophical
Speaker 2: Transactions of the Royal Society be title Fire in the
Speaker 2: Mind Changing Understandings of Fire in Western Civilization. What, in
Speaker 2: which author Stephen J. Pron writes you ready for this quote.
Speaker 2: The Old Testament is in fact a cauldron of stories, rights,
Speaker 2: and beliefs simmering over a mix of religious fires. He
Speaker 2: goes on to say the heartland of European forestry new
Speaker 2: fire only as a human artifact, not a natural process.
Speaker 2: Most new and colonized lands were burned lands naturally, but
Speaker 2: the agencies found themselves in a can continuous firefight. So
Speaker 2: fire became a political as well as practical challenge, he continues,
Speaker 2: the upshot has generally been disastrous. Okay, so what does
Speaker 2: the land miss out on when natural fire is suppressed
Speaker 2: and indigenous populations are fined, imprisoned, or even up until
Speaker 2: the nineteen thirties in the US shot for fire stewardship. Well,
Speaker 2: from an ecology standpoint, those fires can help the water
Speaker 2: supply by eliminating excess vegetation and thus increasing runoff into streams,
Speaker 2: and by preventing huge fires with more frequent smaller ones. Also,
Speaker 2: erosion doesn't get out of control when there are regular fires,
Speaker 2: like you see with post megafire mud slides. Also, the
Speaker 2: charcoal after a burn could trap carbon for millennia, and
Speaker 2: the recovery of vegetation takes more excess carbon from the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: According to the twenty nineteen paper how wildfires trap carbon
Speaker 2: for centuries to millennia. Okay, but wildfires burn at eight
Speaker 2: hundred degrees celsius. That's fourteen seventy two fahrenheit America. So
Speaker 2: the animals hate natural and cultural burns too, right, No
Speaker 2: animal wants to be trapped in a blaze. But I'm
Speaker 2: just going to stop myself from singing about the circle
Speaker 2: of life in your ears.
Speaker 4: And then from an ecosystem perspective, and from what I
Speaker 4: like to think about a lot is the biodiversity perspective,
Speaker 4: so you know what kinds of animals there are and
Speaker 4: the richness of animal life and plant life. Fires create
Speaker 4: this template for wildlife and plants to thrive. And also
Speaker 4: that creates this natural dynamic where you have places that
Speaker 4: burn in one year and then don't burn for a while,
Speaker 4: and places that burn frequently, in places that burn at
Speaker 4: high severity and low severity. You can kind of think
Speaker 4: about it as this patchwork, this mosaic of different ages
Speaker 4: of foreign that burned at different times, and that creates
Speaker 4: a really diverse landscape that generates the habitat for lots
Speaker 4: of critters. It can be a really regenerative and restorative
Speaker 4: process to the land, both from a ecosystem perspective and
Speaker 4: also really you know, fire is a necessary part of
Speaker 4: these systems, and so when we can put the right
Speaker 4: kind of fire on the landscape, it really benefits us
Speaker 4: to as people and as society.
Speaker 2: So fire mosaic paints a beautiful picture of land in
Speaker 2: different states of recovery. And if you're looking to learn
Speaker 2: more about it. Don't google fire mosaic unless you want
Speaker 2: to see a lot of tiling crafts that seem to
Speaker 2: be an homage to burning man. But look up the
Speaker 2: official term. It's patch mosaic burning. So let's talk different
Speaker 2: flavors of fire, because it does matter.
Speaker 4: So you can think this is a really overly simplistic
Speaker 4: way to think about fire, because fire is a really
Speaker 4: complicated process. But the way that we often sort of
Speaker 4: describe it and think about it within fire ecology world
Speaker 4: is we think about natural low severity fire regimes. You know,
Speaker 4: in a given area, you might expect fires to sort
Speaker 4: of burn a lower severity, not too hot, not too
Speaker 4: all consuming. They burn along in the understory, nice and happy,
Speaker 4: crawl along and burn some logs here, burn some trees there,
Speaker 4: but generally don't destroy or consume the big trees in
Speaker 4: the overstory of the canopy. So that first end of
Speaker 4: the system, that's kind of frequent low severity fires. And
Speaker 4: then on the other end of the whole spectrum you
Speaker 4: can think about infrequent high severity fires or fire regimes rather,
Speaker 4: so these are places in that area is for fires
Speaker 4: when they do burn, to burn pretty big and pretty hot,
Speaker 4: and those are both natural, but they're natural in those
Speaker 4: different places. And so why is it Why is it
Speaker 4: that you have some places that naturally burn low severity
Speaker 4: and generally I'm talking about forest fires here and then
Speaker 4: other places other forests that naturally burn it really high
Speaker 4: severity and really large. We can think about those two
Speaker 4: ends of the spectrum also in terms of what's limiting
Speaker 4: the system. So in these low severity fire systems, those
Speaker 4: are generally systems that are limited by fuel. And so
Speaker 4: what I mean by that is the climate is such
Speaker 4: that on any given year, the conditions are right for fire,
Speaker 4: Like if there's a lightning strike or another ignition, fire
Speaker 4: is going to burn and the fuel is dry, and
Speaker 4: the only thing that's keeping that fire, one of the
Speaker 4: primary things that's controlling that fire and where it burns
Speaker 4: is where the fuel is, where the trees are, where
Speaker 4: the kindling so to speak is. And because those fires,
Speaker 4: those places they ignite every year, there's ignitions all the time,
Speaker 4: and the conditions are right for fire, they burn really frequently.
Speaker 4: You can think about places where the fires burn every
Speaker 4: couple of years, and when they do burn, they kind
Speaker 4: of clean out or you know, burn in that understory.
Speaker 4: So sort of below the forest canopy. It's burning the
Speaker 4: smaller trees, it's burning some of the medium trees, and
Speaker 4: it's burning some of the big trees. But mostly it
Speaker 4: just every time a fire burns, it burns all that
Speaker 4: fine fuel or a lot of it, right, And so
Speaker 4: that's the primary sort of control on how fire burns
Speaker 4: in some of these dry fuel limited systems.
Speaker 2: So in these areas, the way it's supposed to be
Speaker 2: is that fires don't get mega because blazes are more frequent,
Speaker 2: so burning all of the fallen wood and the understory,
Speaker 2: so an excess of fuel doesn't build up. So that's
Speaker 2: one way that these giant, devastating fires can be avoided.
Speaker 4: And then on the other end of the spectrum, you
Speaker 4: have these climate limited systems. So rather than this and
Speaker 4: being limited by fuel, it's limited by climate. And so
Speaker 4: this is a place like the Pacific Northwest, where it's
Speaker 4: really wet, right, it's generally wet most of the time,
Speaker 4: it's cool. There's maybe quite a few ignitions, but when
Speaker 4: those ignitions occur, the fuel is not really ready to burn.
Speaker 4: It's too wet, and maybe it burns a small fire
Speaker 4: or something like that, but it just kind of extinguishes itself.
Speaker 4: And you think about that system, those kind of areas,
Speaker 4: and when you end up getting those really big, infrequent
Speaker 4: severe fires that occur there, it's because there's been a
Speaker 4: some sort of climate activity, like a drought that's caused
Speaker 4: all that fuel that hasn't burned in a really long
Speaker 4: time to dry out and then it burns, and when
Speaker 4: it does burn, it burns really big because there's tons
Speaker 4: of fuel available, right, And so those are that's kind
Speaker 4: of the two ends of the spectrum. And you know,
Speaker 4: I was trying to think about this today. How do
Speaker 4: I describe that that like spectrum in a way that's
Speaker 4: not so dry and academic. And I was thinking about, like, Okay,
Speaker 4: like the haircut that I get is like a frequent
Speaker 4: fire system. Okay. You know, I go to Great Clips
Speaker 4: or Sport Clips or whatever just down the street from me,
Speaker 4: and I get my haircut every few weeks, maybe every month.
Speaker 4: It's it kind of maintains the general structure. It never
Speaker 4: kind of goes super long, and I never buzz it
Speaker 4: super short either. I just kind of keep it, you know, tamed,
Speaker 4: so to speak. You know, I go in there frequently,
Speaker 4: I clean out sort of the growth right, that's happened
Speaker 4: in between each cut. And on the other end of
Speaker 4: the spectrum, you could have somebody and I did this
Speaker 4: once when I was in college. I think you're right
Speaker 4: after college, you know, grow out your hair super duper
Speaker 4: long like I didn't. I didn't cut it for I
Speaker 4: don't remember exactly how long it was. But let's say
Speaker 4: so you grow your hair for a year, five years
Speaker 4: or something, you know, get some pretty floppy, pretty pretty
Speaker 4: crazy hair, at least if you got hair like me,
Speaker 4: and then you say, I'm gonna buzz it, and so
Speaker 4: then you buzz it right off. That's kind of the
Speaker 4: I don't know, you can kind of kind of think
Speaker 4: about that as the two ends of the spectrum. Right,
Speaker 4: You've got like your frequent haircut system, and you've got
Speaker 4: your infrequent, high severity haircut system, where you know, you
Speaker 4: just let it grow and then you cut it all off.
Speaker 2: Okay, So in this analogy, the regular maintenance cuts are
Speaker 2: the low intensity fires, the ones that burn the undergrowth,
Speaker 2: that don't spread too far or that extinguish themselves because
Speaker 2: there's enough moisture to keep things from being straight bone
Speaker 2: dry powder, keg, kindling. But if those small fires don't happen,
Speaker 2: or if the fire resistant older trees are logged out,
Speaker 2: or if the climate is just super hot, then you
Speaker 2: get a situation that's much more dramatic. I've had got
Speaker 2: and is that like long main to buzz cut? Is
Speaker 2: that what a mega fire is? Then?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that term, I would say, that's a good
Speaker 4: way to think about it. Yeah, from the long man
Speaker 4: to the buzz cut. The term megafire is a really
Speaker 4: interesting term, and it really doesn't have a great definition.
Speaker 4: A lot of people when they talk about megafires, they're
Speaker 4: thinking about these basically really big fires, just fires that
Speaker 4: are giant in size. But you can have a really
Speaker 4: really large fire that doesn't necessarily create that forest buzz cut, right,
Speaker 4: It doesn't necessarily kill all the trees within its path.
Speaker 4: It may kill some trees in some parts, but not
Speaker 4: throughout the whole fire.
Speaker 2: So a forest mullet maybe, but not the cool kind
Speaker 2: that gen Z has, the warning my cousin will probably
Speaker 2: hit on your wife kind of mullet. Not ideal.
Speaker 4: You can have really large fires that are not necessarily
Speaker 4: super damaging. You can have smaller fires that are pretty
Speaker 4: severe and intense and destroy a lot of what's there
Speaker 4: in terms of the forests. There isn't really a single
Speaker 4: definition of mega fires. A lot of people like to
Speaker 4: think about them in terms of their impact to society too,
Speaker 4: So it's not just like how big or severe they
Speaker 4: are in terms of how many trees they kill, but
Speaker 4: it's you know how much that fire influences people, and
Speaker 4: you know how much of the infrastructure it destroys. And
Speaker 4: there's a growing problem within the US, and particularly the
Speaker 4: western US, which right now, as you know, is experiencing
Speaker 4: quite a bit of fire activity. There's a lot more
Speaker 4: people living in that interface, what we call the wildland
Speaker 4: urban interface or the wui yeah WOOI.
Speaker 2: So yes. The US Forest Service defines the wildland urban
Speaker 2: interface as quote, a group of home and other structures
Speaker 2: with basic infrastructure and services within or adjacent to federal
Speaker 2: land that is an at risk community. Aka all the
Speaker 2: cute cabins that you save on pinorest when you should
Speaker 2: be working on a spreadsheet for your boss because you
Speaker 2: just want to get away for the weekend, but go
Speaker 2: to someplace that still has coffee shops. So more and
Speaker 2: more folks ditched the cities in the pandemic for these
Speaker 2: type of living situations and might be getting their very
Speaker 2: first tastes of PSPs, which are public safety power shutoffs
Speaker 2: when utility companies straight up cut power for a day,
Speaker 2: maybe a few weeks when winds are high in case
Speaker 2: otherwise live downed wires ignite the forest. Realators might not
Speaker 2: tell you about that until after you're done with escrow.
Speaker 4: So wow, we indeed the wildland are going to interface
Speaker 4: is kind of this intermingling of people and the forest
Speaker 4: right where they kind of overlap a little bit. And
Speaker 4: there's a lot more people living there now than there
Speaker 4: was ten twenty years ago, and so you can think
Speaker 4: about fires is generally having more of a mega impact
Speaker 4: on people now because we're just more vulnerable in some
Speaker 4: ways to those fire effects when those fires do burn through.
Speaker 2: And now as we're speaking, the Dixie Fire is the
Speaker 2: one of the largest fires California has ever seen. There's
Speaker 2: the is it the Bootleg fire up in Oregon?
Speaker 4: Yeah, in southern Oregon, that's right.
Speaker 2: So I'm surprised you were able to even talk to
Speaker 2: me right now. Can you tell me a little bit
Speaker 2: about what your job entails. Do you have? Is the
Speaker 2: busy season all year round? Because you're analyzing data that
Speaker 2: comes in or are you do you have to go
Speaker 2: to the field a lot? Are you getting reports from
Speaker 2: people who are closer to each of the fires? Do
Speaker 2: you have to count all the fires all of that?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, So I am not one of the incredible
Speaker 4: people who are out on the front lines doing this
Speaker 4: work on the fires, right. My work is really more
Speaker 4: focused on after fire burns, what can we learn from it.
Speaker 4: And there are also a ton of people, of course,
Speaker 4: who are out there responding to these fires like the
Speaker 4: Dixie Fire and the Bootleg fire and many others when
Speaker 4: those are burning, and those are the people who really
Speaker 4: deserve the applause and the praise, right who are out
Speaker 4: there doing this really dangerous work. And I'm relatively speaking,
Speaker 4: I'm a desk jockey compared to those people. So I
Speaker 4: spend a lot of my time here at the computer
Speaker 4: trying to take that data and learn from the fires
Speaker 4: and trying to understand how wildlife respond to those fires.
Speaker 4: That's what I do most of the time. This last year,
Speaker 4: COVID year, has definitely made things even more so away
Speaker 4: from the field. But boy, I love field work. I've
Speaker 4: done quite a bit of it. I love getting out
Speaker 4: into those burned landscapes and trying to figure out what's
Speaker 4: going on.
Speaker 2: What is it like when you are doing field work,
Speaker 2: what kind of samples do you have to collect, and
Speaker 2: what kinds of observations are you making.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so a lot of the work that I've done
Speaker 4: has focused on how this one little critter that spotted
Speaker 4: out responds to these burned areas, these fires that have
Speaker 4: come through. And so myself and some of my really
Speaker 4: outstanding colleagues, both back from when I was in grad
Speaker 4: school that I established during my PhD program, those collaborators
Speaker 4: back at University of Wisconsin, as well as some of
Speaker 4: my fantastic teammates here at the Rocky Mountain Research Station
Speaker 4: with the US Forest Service, We've done quite a bit
Speaker 4: of work trying to understand how this bird, this spotted owl,
Speaker 4: responds to fires. We've gone out and spent quite a
Speaker 4: bit of time in these burned areas, capturing owls and
Speaker 4: putting GPS tags on them to see where they move
Speaker 4: in these burned areas, to see if they if they
Speaker 4: like them, or if they're using them. We literally go
Speaker 4: out into the woods and hoot at the alley. Dear, really,
Speaker 4: we really do. It's you walk into the woods where
Speaker 4: you think there's going to be an owl and you
Speaker 4: just start hooting with your mouth. You just do it,
Speaker 4: and they hoot back because they're like, hey, who the
Speaker 4: heck is that?
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: And then are you able to count them based on
Speaker 2: who hoots?
Speaker 4: Pretty much? Yeah, So we call them callback surveys, so
Speaker 4: we're calling the call back and that's how we locate them.
Speaker 4: And oftentimes we're just interested in detecting them. So, okay,
Speaker 4: there's an owl here, there's an owl there, sort of
Speaker 4: establishing where they are across the landscape.
Speaker 2: Did I look this up? Of course, and please enjoy
Speaker 2: the absolute maestro of this art see Ora Pacific Industries
Speaker 2: wildlife biologist Kevin roberts Well.
Speaker 4: I like to do when I'm surveying for spotted owls
Speaker 4: and using my voice is kind of mix them all
Speaker 4: up and do something to the fact.
Speaker 1: Of whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 5: Whoa.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Kevin. We beg you to make a ring tone.
Speaker 2: Is it too much to ask? You can only answer
Speaker 2: that in owl hoots. But anyway, that is how you
Speaker 2: do a Jim Carrey level impersonation of spotted owls.
Speaker 4: But a lot of the work I've done is focus
Speaker 4: on capturing those owls once we find them, and putting
Speaker 4: little GPS tags on them and seeing where they go.
Speaker 4: And then we get that, we get that data and
Speaker 4: we see where they went, and we try to figure out, Okay,
Speaker 4: how are they interacting with some of those burned areas.
Speaker 4: What can we learn from that about what type of
Speaker 4: fire they like, what kind of forests they like, and
Speaker 4: how we might be able to manage the forests in
Speaker 4: a way that supports them.
Speaker 2: And how is fire ecology changing with the climate with droughts?
Speaker 2: Why do droughts even happen? Is the water that would
Speaker 2: normally rain here raining somewhere else?
Speaker 3: So where is the water?
Speaker 5: So?
Speaker 4: Okay, So again this is something that much smarter people
Speaker 4: would have a much better answer for. But I will
Speaker 4: say that something that is for certain is that we
Speaker 4: are entering into uncharted territory with fire and fire ecology
Speaker 4: and fire behavior. And one of my good colleagues at
Speaker 4: University of California, merced Leroy Yesterling, has you know, said
Speaker 4: many many times to me, and I've seen him write
Speaker 4: about this too. You know, there is no more normal
Speaker 4: in terms of fire. There's not even a new normal.
Speaker 4: It's a new abnormal, you know, we because we just
Speaker 4: it's really it's becoming really difficult to predict what's going
Speaker 4: to happen in the future because we don't have a
Speaker 4: reference point anymore. We're sort of just going into uncharted territory.
Speaker 4: And so you know, when it comes to drought and
Speaker 4: climate change and things like that, Look, those are definitely
Speaker 4: a part of the equation in terms of what's going
Speaker 4: on with wildfire and what's going to happen, and particularly
Speaker 4: climate change and you know how that interacts with forests
Speaker 4: and drives out fuels and things like that. Sometimes it's
Speaker 4: hard to just talk about drought and climate change for
Speaker 4: many reasons because it's hard as like a scientist who's
Speaker 4: interested in conservation, like, what can I do about that?
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, I don't I don't mean to
Speaker 4: sound like nihilistic, like, oh, we can't do anything, because
Speaker 4: we can. We absolutely can. It's never too late to
Speaker 4: make actions on those big problems like climate change, right,
Speaker 4: But you know, I have the the honor to work
Speaker 4: for this agency, the US Forest Service, that is in
Speaker 4: charge of managing a ton of land, and so what
Speaker 4: can we do on the ground to make a difference
Speaker 4: in terms of how these fires burn, right, and you know,
Speaker 4: considering climate change like that plays a role, plays a
Speaker 4: really important role, and so does drought in terms of
Speaker 4: driving some of these wildfire patterns that we've seen. But
Speaker 4: there's also something to be said for how forests are
Speaker 4: managed and how flammable forests are, and how we can
Speaker 4: potentially manage them in a way that tries to mitigate
Speaker 4: those worst effects of fire when they do come through.
Speaker 4: So it's really like you are going to hear people say, oh,
Speaker 4: you know, these fires are just because of climate change,
Speaker 4: there's nothing we can do about it. And then you're
Speaker 4: going to hear people say, oh, climate change has nothing
Speaker 4: to do with it. It's we just need to manage forests differently.
Speaker 4: And the reality is it's neither of those. It's it's
Speaker 4: kind of both, right, It's both climate change and you know,
Speaker 4: the forest and the patterns of fuels across the landscape
Speaker 4: are affecting how fires burn. As a research scientist with
Speaker 4: the Forest Service, I'm thinking about how can I do
Speaker 4: science that informs how we manage forests. And that's one
Speaker 4: of the coolest parts about my job is that I
Speaker 4: work for an agency that has a really strong management component,
Speaker 4: you know, a huge part of the agency as people
Speaker 4: out there doing this work, you know, managing forests, coming
Speaker 4: up with forest plans and management plans and fire plans,
Speaker 4: and I get to do science that helps them figure
Speaker 4: out how to do that, and we work together, you know,
Speaker 4: in a collaborative way to figure that out. And that
Speaker 4: is where I think I like focusing on those solutions, right,
Speaker 4: How can we press the levers and make a difference
Speaker 4: from the ground.
Speaker 2: Is the leading theory on that is just more and
Speaker 2: better prescribed burns, or is it humans stop living in
Speaker 2: the woods for a while, Like what is the best
Speaker 2: tool you have?
Speaker 4: Yes, so that is a great question. And I think
Speaker 4: this is a misconception that if humans just got out
Speaker 4: of the picture, it would all be better. You know,
Speaker 4: I think it's easy to think that way, like, oh,
Speaker 4: we're just the problem and humans suck and we just
Speaker 4: need to get out of the picture and nature will
Speaker 4: do its own thing and blah blah blah. And look,
Speaker 4: you know, I understand that perspective. I'm sensitive to it.
Speaker 4: But we have to remember indigenous people's have been burning
Speaker 4: for ten thousand years, and you know, we need more
Speaker 4: fire on the landscape, not less. It's just what kind
Speaker 4: of fire burns. This is kind of crazy to think about,
Speaker 4: but especially given you're looking at these maps. I've got
Speaker 4: the New York Times wildfire tracker open here. I got
Speaker 4: another tracker on my desktop open as well. Like with
Speaker 4: all these big fires burning, you're thinking, like, man, there's
Speaker 4: just got to be so much more fire now than
Speaker 4: there ever was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I would think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's totally what you would think. But it's actually
Speaker 4: not the case. There's still less fire in the West,
Speaker 4: in western North America. Then there was many many years ago,
Speaker 4: one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: But they were smaller back then.
Speaker 3: Is that the thing?
Speaker 4: So they just burned differently. I'll bring you through a
Speaker 4: little a little bit of a time warp. So we
Speaker 4: often in Western science delineate sort of this pre colonial
Speaker 4: era and in the pre European or pre colonial era,
Speaker 4: there was a lot of fire in the West. I mean,
Speaker 4: these are flammable landscapes and they never really got put
Speaker 4: out right. All these ignitions would just burn, and vast
Speaker 4: areas of landscape would burn all the time, depending again
Speaker 4: on what kind of system you're in, right, So, these
Speaker 4: frequent fire systems would burn very frequently, you know, every
Speaker 4: couple of years you'd have fires kind of returning to
Speaker 4: the same areas. Then, when you know, settlers, white settlers
Speaker 4: colonized and pretty much disrupted indigenous burning and began actively
Speaker 4: suppressing wildfires, the amount of fire in the landscape just
Speaker 4: dropped to you know, almost nothing. We were very effective
Speaker 4: at suppressing fires for a long time in the Western US,
Speaker 4: and basically what's happened is only recently have we sort
Speaker 4: of lost our handle on our ability to put out fires.
Speaker 4: The level of activity that we're seeing now is still
Speaker 4: far less than the level of fire activity that used
Speaker 4: to burn. But the difference is that because in many
Speaker 4: of these forests, and particularly in the these frequent fire
Speaker 4: forests or these dry forest systems that used to burn
Speaker 4: really frequently, they haven't burned in a century or more,
Speaker 4: and so when they do burn, they burn really hot
Speaker 4: and really big, and that's not a natural kind of
Speaker 4: fire for this system. And also, you know, along with that,
Speaker 4: we have a lot more people again kind of living
Speaker 4: in those fire prone areas, and so we feel the
Speaker 4: effects a lot more as well. As the population has increased,
Speaker 4: and so we still have way, way less fire activity
Speaker 4: on the landscape. It's just that these fires are typically
Speaker 4: burning in a way that is for those forests unnatural
Speaker 4: and for society really not acceptable. Right. The other crazy
Speaker 4: thing is that we actually have in some areas, particularly
Speaker 4: again these sort of historically frequent fire systems, we have
Speaker 4: a lot more trees too than we used to have.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, which, like it goes right along with that
Speaker 4: fire suppression. So we put out fires for one hundred
Speaker 4: years or more, and all those little shrubs and saplings
Speaker 4: that would have burned and those regular fires grew up
Speaker 4: to be big, you know, medium sized trees.
Speaker 3: More trees, isn't that good? Well, it's kind of like.
Speaker 2: A garage that we have failed to Marie Condo for
Speaker 2: a long time, which I'll be honest, is my garage
Speaker 2: got to clear some stuff out. I'm talking to myself.
Speaker 4: And so we have actually a lot more trees on
Speaker 4: the landscape now in a place like the Sierra Nevada,
Speaker 4: where I've spent a lot of my career doing this
Speaker 4: research than we used to. It's just like the kinds
Speaker 4: of fires are different, the kinds of trees are different.
Speaker 4: We have a lot more smaller trees and medium sized trees,
Speaker 4: and a lot fewer of those really giant old trees,
Speaker 4: which are really kind of an endangered species sort of
Speaker 4: in and of themselves, because over the past one hundred
Speaker 4: years or so, particularly pre nineteen eighties, there was quite
Speaker 4: a bit of large tree logging going all the way
Speaker 4: back to the early nineteen hundreds and late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 4: so a lot of those big old trees were removed,
Speaker 4: a lot of those smaller trees grew up with that
Speaker 4: fire suppression, and now we just have a ton of
Speaker 4: smaller trees on the landscape, and that again is kind
Speaker 4: of feeding back into why we have fires that are
Speaker 4: burning differently, because these fires are burning through, you know,
Speaker 4: these pretty thick, connected, like well connected forests that historically
Speaker 4: just didn't look like that at all.
Speaker 2: So forests look and behave much differently now than they
Speaker 2: were for tens of thousands of years because of colonial
Speaker 2: human tinkering. Don't you want to know all about indigenous fires,
Speaker 2: stewardship now and cultural burns?
Speaker 5: So do I?
Speaker 2: And did I hours before this podcast episode on up
Speaker 2: decide to feverishly book an Indigenous fire scientist to talk
Speaker 2: to me for next week. I did, so stay tuned.
Speaker 2: I just thought i'd plant that expectation for you. And
Speaker 2: what about the effect of fire on seeds opening and
Speaker 2: certain plants saying like sweet, there was just a fire,
Speaker 2: now's my time to shine like our ash is good
Speaker 2: for certain types of botany.
Speaker 4: So okay. One of my colleagues, Jens Stevens, he's with
Speaker 4: the Forest Service as well. Now he's done some really
Speaker 4: awesome work looking at tree adaptations to fire and fire regimes.
Speaker 4: But one of the most common examples of how trees
Speaker 4: are adapted to fire is, particularly when thinking about seeds, is.
Speaker 1: Seroteny as E R O T I n Y.
Speaker 4: So seroteny is this trait that some trees have. Not
Speaker 4: all trees, but some trees have this basically waxy kind
Speaker 4: of resin that encompasses their cones and their seeds, and
Speaker 4: they only open when fires burn because the fire melts
Speaker 4: that wax off of their seeds and the seeds drop
Speaker 4: and then they the trees able to regenerate and typically
Speaker 4: released in many cases. In some cases that I know of,
Speaker 4: those trees require a really severe fire to release its seed.
Speaker 2: Okay, So serotenus means later or following, and it is
Speaker 2: not to be confused with certolene, which is the generic
Speaker 2: form of zoloft, which I googled wrong. So according to
Speaker 2: Nationalforest dot org, serotinous cones with full mature seeds can
Speaker 2: just chill out closed up on a pine tree like
Speaker 2: a jackpine or a table mountain pine for years until
Speaker 2: a fire sweeps through and the resin melts and then
Speaker 2: the seed confetti party time happens. So this is also
Speaker 2: side note. How indoor fire sprinklers work. They're not reliant
Speaker 2: on smoke, but on heat of over one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty degrees fahrenheit. So there's a little glass capsule in
Speaker 2: fire sprinklers and it's filled with glycerine and that heats
Speaker 2: up and bursts and opens the sprinkler valve. And apparently
Speaker 2: they open individually wherever its hottest, not all at once
Speaker 2: like in the movies. I'm looking at you, lethal weapon
Speaker 2: for the Incredibles in Charlie's Angels and Mean Girls and
Speaker 2: Casino Royal and Kindergarten Cop and the Peanuts movie and
Speaker 2: all the other ones. And I'm going to link on
Speaker 2: my website because I found someone with a YouTube channel
Speaker 2: who is very pissed about the sprinkler myth. Anyway, heat
Speaker 2: seeds disperse, it's natural.
Speaker 4: And so some trees have adapted that tree and in
Speaker 4: other cases trees have really thick bark. And this is
Speaker 4: the case for many of the trees and these frequent
Speaker 4: fire systems that experience fires all the time on a
Speaker 4: five to ten year cycle or you know, in that range,
Speaker 4: trees have really thick bark because they need to survive
Speaker 4: that frequent heat and disturbance from fire. And so there's
Speaker 4: really remarkable adaptations that plants have to fire. And also
Speaker 4: increasingly we're trying to learn about animal adaptations to fire.
Speaker 4: Typically we think about these in terms of behavioral adaptations,
Speaker 4: so like, how do animals interact with their fire itself
Speaker 4: or the post fire landscape in a way that tells
Speaker 4: us a little bit about it, kind of opens the
Speaker 4: book on their evolution, how they evolved.
Speaker 2: So what are the spoty owls like? It turns out
Speaker 2: small patches of high intensity fires, which were more common
Speaker 2: in pre colonial times, spotty owls are like me at
Speaker 2: a cocktail party just waiting for a tray of egg
Speaker 2: girls to roll past. Now, in scientific terms. This is
Speaker 2: called a sit and wait predator.
Speaker 4: And the owls like to sit on the edge, on
Speaker 4: that green edge and hunt into that smaller patch of
Speaker 4: open forest where I can see little you know, critters
Speaker 4: run across, and it has a better flight path and
Speaker 4: that sort of thing, while also concealing itself from its predator,
Speaker 4: like the great horned owl. So that's just one example
Speaker 4: that I've been involved in. But we generally expect you
Speaker 4: not only plants to have these adaptations, but also animals
Speaker 4: to potentially have these behavioral adaptations too.
Speaker 2: That's so interesting. Also, I didn't realize that owl had
Speaker 2: drama between them. He would think, you'd be like, I'm
Speaker 2: an owl, You're an owl, Let's make this happen.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 4: No, it's it's so true. There is totally drama. And
Speaker 4: one of my mentors and colleagues's name is Rocky Gucittis.
Speaker 4: He's done some work looking at owl communities and trying
Speaker 4: to figure out like how owls can coexist in space.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of drama out there in the in
Speaker 4: the so much.
Speaker 2: Speaking of drama, have you seen the acclaimed dramatic film
Speaker 2: Those Who Wished Me Dead starring Angelina shole who is
Speaker 2: a person who lives in a fire tower.
Speaker 4: No, I have not.
Speaker 2: Well, if you like fires and people being miscast, you
Speaker 2: will love those who wish me dead.
Speaker 4: That's that's my main genre of movie that I like,
Speaker 4: wonderful miscasting. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2: If you like to watch a movie in the entire
Speaker 2: time picture someone else playing the lead role, you will
Speaker 2: love those who wish me dead. She is absolutely gorgeous.
Speaker 2: She's a stunner. I love her acting. I don't know
Speaker 2: why they cast her this movie. It seems so weird.
Speaker 5: Why they put you in a fire tower.
Speaker 2: Well I'm just lucky, I guess anyway. Those who wish
Speaker 2: me dad just so much, so much forest fire and
Speaker 2: a lot of just breathing through smoke that seems like
Speaker 2: it should be thicker. But you can. You can smell
Speaker 2: this movie. Listen. There are a lot of actors that
Speaker 2: are suited for certain types of cinematic environments. Okay, oh,
Speaker 2: but if you watch it, Medina Sanghor so good in
Speaker 2: it that I just looked up her name and then
Speaker 2: I followed her on Instagram. So some beautiful creatures are
Speaker 2: more well suited to some roles and environments.
Speaker 6: That's all, what about.
Speaker 2: The term pyro diversity?
Speaker 6: Is that a real one?
Speaker 4: Oh Allie, I'm so glad you asked that question. I
Speaker 4: am street smart and book smart. Yes, so, pyro diversity
Speaker 4: is something that I've been spending a lot of time
Speaker 4: thinking about in recent years. It's kind of a fun buzzword,
Speaker 4: you know, like pyro diversity, Like what does that even mean?
Speaker 4: Someone made that up? And it probably because well, somebody
Speaker 4: did make it up. It basically is another way to
Speaker 4: think about this fire mosaic that we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 4: The term pyrodiversity sort of emerged alongside this idea that
Speaker 4: pyro diversity gives rise to biodiversity. So basically that the
Speaker 4: more different kinds of fire that we have on the landscape,
Speaker 4: the more different kinds of severities, the different fire ages. Basically,
Speaker 4: the greater mixture of different types of fire characteristics that
Speaker 4: are in a landscape is going to lead to greater biodiversity,
Speaker 4: which means more species. Basically, so you have more kinds
Speaker 4: of wildlife, more kinds of plants, et cetera, more kinds
Speaker 4: of bees, more kinds of bats, more kinds of birds,
Speaker 4: et cetera, because you have all sorts of different kinds
Speaker 4: of habitat for them that's been produced by fire.
Speaker 2: Ah, Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so's It's an important idea because it really
Speaker 4: kind of underlies this important role of fire in these
Speaker 4: cases with you know, the Dixie Fire and the Bootleg fire,
Speaker 4: these fires that are really like destructive to human infrastructure
Speaker 4: and also you know, to people's lives. I mean, this
Speaker 4: is really serious stuff that is sad and it's hard
Speaker 4: to watch. But on the other side of the coin,
Speaker 4: we do need fire on the landscape, right we just
Speaker 4: we need a different kind of fire. We don't want
Speaker 4: to see more, you know, of the destructive fires that
Speaker 4: are out there. We want to see good fire. And
Speaker 4: what I mean by good fire is really kind of
Speaker 4: like this pyro diversity idea, where we have a really
Speaker 4: nice mixture of fire that kind of restores, It cleans
Speaker 4: out the understory in some places, it kills some trees,
Speaker 4: It disrupts the system a little bit. You know, some
Speaker 4: disruption is good, and you create that really sort of
Speaker 4: wide ranging variety of habitats for different critters to live,
Speaker 4: and that also supports all sorts of other great things
Speaker 4: like water quantity and quality. It reduces a runoff. It
Speaker 4: reinforces the resilience of ecosystems and forests. So like fire
Speaker 4: is so good and it's like we want that good
Speaker 4: kind of fire. It's really such a restorative thing. And
Speaker 4: it's just pyro diversity kind of encompasses this idea of
Speaker 4: like that beautiful mosaic on the landscape that is always changing.
Speaker 4: It's not just static, it's always changing, always being renewed.
Speaker 4: That's the idea of pyrodiversity.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 2: Can I blaze through a lightning round?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 2: Part in the punk even though I'm not sorry, okay,
Speaker 2: And before your questions, we donate to a cause each episode,
Speaker 2: and as a Forest Service employee, Gavin can't directly endorse
Speaker 2: anything in particular, so it was my pick this week
Speaker 2: and a donation will be going to the Common Good
Speaker 2: Community found Nation. They have established a matching fund to
Speaker 2: assist all local communities impacted by the Dixie Fire, and
Speaker 2: all donations will be distributed to Plumous County agencies involved
Speaker 2: in directly assisting communities and individuals most affected by the fire.
Speaker 2: More info is up at common Goood Plumas dot org
Speaker 2: and that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
Speaker 1: Bionant burger, the hardnir, the holla, the hamen a heck
Speaker 1: ah Ersen raslance ladeni, the tain nudovshuhu la hula, shomperodes
Speaker 1: on udos, lance is phaser, Natgan's throw, Tasha tapa siranashka
Speaker 1: av is FuGO more tri h i a punk ie
Speaker 1: is called on tudoros or raslanse if we realti ina hearn.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's tend to your smoldering curiosities. Great question from
Speaker 2: Nicole di g Marie lit Foca Card, Meghan McLean, Daniel Kim,
Speaker 2: Liz Gross, eat in Sunshine, Talia Dunyak. Nicole Kleiman also asked,
Speaker 2: in Nicole's words, what happens to wildlife when there's a fire.
Speaker 2: Daniel Kim wants to know are there any animals that
Speaker 2: have adapted to survive forest fires? And Nicole asks do
Speaker 2: they all leave? Or are some able to hide or
Speaker 2: survive in a sneaky way?
Speaker 4: Oh that's so great. This is a great question. So
Speaker 4: I don't know if I can do a super quick
Speaker 4: answer to this because I'm gonna be too excited about it.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so how do wildlife respond to wildfire? So
Speaker 4: here's the thing. It really depends and that's like the
Speaker 4: greatest you know, scientific smoke and mirrors, Like, hey, it depends,
Speaker 4: but it really does. Some species like fire, some don't.
Speaker 4: And it also depends on what kind of fire it is,
Speaker 4: you know, if it's really severe or mild. So, for example,
Speaker 4: there's one species that some of my awesome colleagues have
Speaker 4: worked on. It's called the black backed woodpecker. Many people
Speaker 4: think of it as a poster child of severely burned
Speaker 4: forest because it really needs these patches of totally killed trees.
Speaker 4: It depends on the insects that live in those recently
Speaker 4: killed trees. It needs those severely burned forests. Several years
Speaker 4: after those those fires burn and those trees are killed,
Speaker 4: it's no longer good habitat, Like it's really kind of
Speaker 4: this short term thing. They flock to these really severely
Speaker 4: burned places, they totally thrive, and then they are out
Speaker 4: of there and onto the next fire. So some critters
Speaker 4: love that, others not so much so. The spotted at all,
Speaker 4: the species that I spent a lot of time studying,
Speaker 4: it is really kind of more of an old forest obligate.
Speaker 4: It doesn't love that severely burned stuff quite as much.
Speaker 4: So basically there are winners and losers. That's the answer is.
Speaker 4: It's never simple. It's never as simple as you make it.
Speaker 4: It's not just all animals are going to die or
Speaker 4: leave when a fire burns. Now, some of them are
Speaker 4: going to do rate and some of them are not.
Speaker 4: That's like part of the beauty of studying this stuff
Speaker 4: is like trying to figure out why why do some
Speaker 4: animals love and some don't? The world is so complex
Speaker 4: and amazing it's like really fun to try to figure
Speaker 4: that out right. And then in terms of where animals go,
Speaker 4: some animals can escape fires, you know, fly out of
Speaker 4: the way, run out of the way. I always think
Speaker 4: of like Bamby, you know, a movie band, Like all
Speaker 4: the animals are like parading out of the forest. I
Speaker 4: don't want to ruin Bamby for anybody, it's uh, but
Speaker 4: you know, some animals can evay fire, even you know,
Speaker 4: flying critters cannot always fly away from fast moving fires.
Speaker 4: Some animals will burrow under the ground and wait for
Speaker 4: the fire to pass and then come back out, which
Speaker 4: is totally crazy. You should yeah, it's it's nuts.
Speaker 2: Woo, Okay. Burrowing critters hiding from fires. My heart burst
Speaker 2: into flames. So which animals burrow?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 2: Some Australian possums hide out in tree hollows. Snakes high
Speaker 2: tail it down a burrow. But wombats also hit the
Speaker 2: basement during bushfires. And there were a bunch of internet
Speaker 2: rumors going around last year that they invite and usher
Speaker 2: other critters in. These rumors spread like wildfire, but they
Speaker 2: are flame flam They actually just tolerate other animals hiding
Speaker 2: out in their wombat doomsday bunkers. But same with gopher
Speaker 2: tortoises in the US. And to hear all about that,
Speaker 2: you can amble slowly over to the Testudonology episode with
Speaker 2: wonderful tortoise scientists Amanda Hips. Now what about rebel birds?
Speaker 4: There are other creatures. There's fire hawks and they are
Speaker 4: down in Australia and they will actually pick up burning
Speaker 4: branches and drop them to burn other parts of their
Speaker 4: habitat so that they can catch their prey.
Speaker 2: I have heard of these and it sounds so devious.
Speaker 2: But they even will get together and wait for rodents
Speaker 2: to run out.
Speaker 4: That's wild, that's just wild. Yeah, there's winners and losers,
Speaker 4: like there's such a variety of animals that respond in
Speaker 4: different ways to fire, and that's just the coolest thing.
Speaker 4: And that's that's one of the reasons why pyro diversity,
Speaker 4: going back to pyrodiversity is thought to promote biodiversity, because
Speaker 4: the more kind of variety of fire you have, the
Speaker 4: more different kinds of animals that are going to benefit
Speaker 4: from that variety. Right. So, you know, if you have
Speaker 4: sort of your forest that was killed by trees next
Speaker 4: to a forest that is totally green and old and
Speaker 4: you know, decaying almost, we have this big mosaic of
Speaker 4: different kinds of forests that burn at different times. That's
Speaker 4: going to support all kinds of different critters. So it's
Speaker 4: it's it's a cool thing. Now, that's a good thing.
Speaker 2: And several people Rebecca wine Settle, India Land, Nicole Kleinman,
Speaker 2: Jesse Hurlbert want to know, can I really prevent forest fires?
Speaker 2: Rebecca asks, or is this just another example of a
Speaker 2: giant corporation trying to foist responsibility on to individuals. Nicole
Speaker 2: wants to know what Smoky the bear more helpful or
Speaker 2: harmful to forests? What do you think about smoky the bear? Okay,
Speaker 2: liberty to say.
Speaker 4: I think Smoky the Bear is super cute. I will
Speaker 4: say that we absolutely can prevent forest fires, not all
Speaker 4: of them, and we not necessarily should prevent all of
Speaker 4: them when we think about prescribed fires, right, like, we
Speaker 4: do want to put some fire in the landscape. But
Speaker 4: as I mentioned before, a giant majority, like eighty seven percent,
Speaker 4: between eighty ninety percent, humans cause eighty seven percent of
Speaker 4: all wildfire occurrences annually within the western US. Like, that's crazy,
Speaker 4: that's a big number. Yeah, and a lot of those
Speaker 4: you can go look this up. There's this a couple
Speaker 4: studies out there that have shown, you know, these gigantic
Speaker 4: spikes of fire activity on the fourth of July every year. Oh, Like,
Speaker 4: we absolutely play a role in ignitions. A very small
Speaker 4: percentage of all of the ignitions result in those really big,
Speaker 4: big fires. Of course, many of the fires that ignite
Speaker 4: don't burn everything up, but we absolutely as people can
Speaker 4: be careful about how we burn. I think that smoking
Speaker 4: the Bear is just misunderstood, okay, you know, like because
Speaker 4: it's true. You know, we as people, like, we absolutely
Speaker 4: do start fires. We start unintended, unplanned fires that sometimes
Speaker 4: result in really devastating circumstances. There's sort of this perception
Speaker 4: that all fire is bad among some people, and maybe
Speaker 4: I don't know, I don't know if smoking the bear
Speaker 4: is associated with that or not, but you know, all
Speaker 4: fire is not bad, Like fire is so important, and
Speaker 4: the reason why some fire is really bad right now
Speaker 4: and particularly is because we haven't had the kind of
Speaker 4: fire on the landscape that is natural in a lot
Speaker 4: of these systems.
Speaker 2: So a lot of patrons looking at you, Michael Davis,
Speaker 2: Peter Ashley, Herbel Sebastian Pepino, first time question askers Karla
Speaker 2: Jerez and Ada Smith, Schandra Mason, Bennett Gerber, They all
Speaker 2: essentially ask what do we do it? Should firefighting teams
Speaker 2: approach it more strategically, like let it burn twenty five
Speaker 2: miles over here, but let's stop it here, or at
Speaker 2: this point, like what do we even do?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So that is such a difficult and vexing question
Speaker 4: that much smarter people than me are like thinking really
Speaker 4: really hard about. So I don't want to make any
Speaker 4: like really poorly informed statements about how firefighters should be
Speaker 4: doing their job, because they're doing an incredible job. But
Speaker 4: I'll say that generally, there's there's many times when fires
Speaker 4: are burning and there's a decision made to let let
Speaker 4: the fire burn on its own for a little while
Speaker 4: when it's deemed to be safe. Right, So, especially in
Speaker 4: areas where there's not as many people and can you know,
Speaker 4: like kind of more wilderness type areas, because fires can
Speaker 4: do some of that work for us to restore the
Speaker 4: natural structure of a system. So fires can be really restorative,
Speaker 4: especially in those cases when we think it's going to
Speaker 4: burn in a quote unquote healthy way or a natural
Speaker 4: way and there aren't people who are in danger. So
Speaker 4: that's kind of the idea of those managed wildfires. Just
Speaker 4: you know, when wildfire's burning, we're kind of trying to
Speaker 4: manage them as opposed to to just put them out
Speaker 4: or suppress them.
Speaker 2: And from smoky the bear, let's move on to goats.
Speaker 2: Ashley Minton and Leanna Schuster literally both started their questions goats,
Speaker 2: both of them please tell us about how goats are
Speaker 2: used to help produce fire risk in areas with excess vegetation,
Speaker 2: And Ashley says, I mean a few hours and they
Speaker 2: chewed down most of the pasture. Can goats save us?
Speaker 8: Man?
Speaker 4: I wish goats could just save us. That would be
Speaker 4: so great. Just hand it all over to them. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm sure they've they've got it figured out. No, but
Speaker 4: I actually don't know about goats being used in wildfire manager.
Speaker 4: That could just be my naivity. So I'll punt that one.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right? Goats. I tried to rent some for
Speaker 2: my hillside about two years ago, and it was a minimum,
Speaker 2: sadly of five acres and I just moved in and
Speaker 2: it was too soon to ask my neighbors if they
Speaker 2: wanted to go in on a goatherd with me. I
Speaker 2: didn't want to come on so strong.
Speaker 7: But there are.
Speaker 2: Businesses like goatsarus dot com that'll rent them out. I
Speaker 2: thought this was a pretty common practice, hiring goats to
Speaker 2: eat your overgrown grass, because when I was in high
Speaker 2: school in northern California, a lot of neighbors did that.
Speaker 2: And then I read the faq on goats rus dot
Speaker 2: com and what this business started in the tiny town
Speaker 2: I went to high school in around the time I
Speaker 2: was in high school. Holy literal smokes. As far as
Speaker 2: coincidences go, it's the greatest of all time. Okay, So
Speaker 2: this next smokey query was asked by plenty of folks,
Speaker 2: including patrons, Hannah Assi, Alana Wood, fire fighter supporter, Lousey Martinez,
Speaker 2: Charlie Cacamo, first time question asker Ashley Martinez, Nina Eve Seininger, asthmetic,
Speaker 2: Ada Smith, Joseph and Katie Coast. Let's see. Dylan maguire says,
Speaker 2: I live in eastern Washington where smoke has become the
Speaker 2: fifth season. When will we have the giant forest rakes
Speaker 2: mentioned by Donald Trump?
Speaker 6: And they spent a lot of time on breaking and
Speaker 6: cleaning and doing things.
Speaker 2: And do we need to rake the forest?
Speaker 4: So you know, this is I think again, this is
Speaker 4: this is just a misunderstanding. So going back to smoke,
Speaker 4: this is a real problem, right. We don't like being
Speaker 4: exposed to smoke. You remember, I'm sure I don't know
Speaker 4: Ali if this happened where you were. I think this
Speaker 4: was up in the in the Bay Area. Yeah, last year,
Speaker 4: you probably remember seeing all of our social media those
Speaker 4: pictures of you know, San Francisco being just like Orange
Speaker 4: is like some blade runner or something. The problem with
Speaker 4: smoke is that you know it's gonna be there, It's
Speaker 4: going to happen if we're living in a in a
Speaker 4: system that has fire and that where we need to
Speaker 4: have fire, We're going to also have smoke. That's that's
Speaker 4: just a part of a part of it. Right where
Speaker 4: there's fire, there's smoke. The real important question is how
Speaker 4: do we want our smoke?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 4: And and that's how some people are trying to think
Speaker 4: about this problem of smoke, because it is a real
Speaker 4: serious public health problem. Right with these sort of unplanned
Speaker 4: big quote unquote mega fires that happen, we all of
Speaker 4: a sudden get a ton of smoke. We didn't know
Speaker 4: it was coming. It disrupts our lives and puts us
Speaker 4: at risk. And there's a lot of smoke right that happens.
Speaker 4: Just this past week or two there I saw people
Speaker 4: on Twitter, you know, out on the East Coast saying
Speaker 4: that they had, you know, they were getting some smoke
Speaker 4: from some of the wildfires in the West. That kind
Speaker 4: of unpredictable nature is I think for many people, not desirable,
Speaker 4: I say. And so the idea is if we can
Speaker 4: use more prescribed and planned fires, and more cultural and
Speaker 4: indigenous fires where we know when the smoke is coming,
Speaker 4: it's a lower amount. It's like, you know, less smoke
Speaker 4: in general is come in our way at any given time.
Speaker 4: But maybe a little more often. You know, those are
Speaker 4: kind of the two options, right. We can either sort
Speaker 4: of have our smoke in big pulses when we don't
Speaker 4: know it's coming, or we can try to make it
Speaker 4: a little more predictable.
Speaker 2: It seems like the whares and the whys are important here.
Speaker 4: That's exactly right for sure.
Speaker 2: Yes, what about Maria Suavleva wants to know underground wildfires?
Speaker 2: I understand how they start, but how do they keep going?
Speaker 2: How is there enough oxygen for some to last for years?
Speaker 2: How deep do they go? Jeremiah Miller says, what's the
Speaker 2: strangest place there's been a wildfire? They're underground?
Speaker 4: Yeah, some fires do burn underground. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 5: Who So.
Speaker 4: One of the interesting kind of related phenomenon that I've
Speaker 4: witnessed is sometimes in these areas that have recently burned,
Speaker 4: you come across a gigantic hole in the ground, like
Speaker 4: just a giant hole. There's no tree, there's trees around you,
Speaker 4: and then there's just a gigantic hole in the ground.
Speaker 6: Okay, when I.
Speaker 4: Started doing this work in these post fire landscapes, I
Speaker 4: was like, what in the heck is going on here?
Speaker 4: And I started asking around, and these are are basically
Speaker 4: trees that have burned and kept burning and smoldering and smoldering,
Speaker 4: and the smoldering fire continued down through their root system underground,
Speaker 4: throughout the whole root system, and maybe they'll they'll even
Speaker 4: pop up somewhere else, like you know, a little ways
Speaker 4: away where the root kind of pops back up onto
Speaker 4: this you know ground. And basically these are these are
Speaker 4: like gigantic casts for trees, right like where the tree
Speaker 4: and its roots used to be. So fires can absolutely burn,
Speaker 4: you know, in a subterrein way. I've seen some of
Speaker 4: these sort of root holes following fire, which is just
Speaker 4: kind of wild to see.
Speaker 2: It is wild to see, and I know because I
Speaker 2: just watched a ton of videos of smoldering, flickering root systems.
Speaker 2: They can burn for weeks, months, maybe even through a
Speaker 2: whole season, and the fire will just pop up somewhere else. Also,
Speaker 2: somewhere in Pennsylvania, there is an abandoned Centralia coal mine
Speaker 2: that's been on fire since nineteen sixty two, and experts
Speaker 2: say there was enough fuel to just keep it burning
Speaker 2: for two hundred and fifty years. No one knows what
Speaker 2: to do. They just all left town except for five
Speaker 2: people who still live there. They're like, we're not going anywhere,
Speaker 2: Like that's cool, but yes, fires underground, flames, flames, breathing, heaving.
Speaker 2: Oh man, I didn't even know that was possible. I
Speaker 2: would not have thought that. That is bananas. Ugh of
Speaker 2: y'all patrons. Lizzie Mahr bush fire asker Brandy Harbaugh, first
Speaker 2: time question asker, longtime lurker Adriana Olfaro. Want to know
Speaker 2: what can we expect the normal amount of wildfires to be?
Speaker 7: Is there a normal?
Speaker 2: They all want to know numerically, how much worse are
Speaker 2: big wildfires going to get? Give us numbers. We need numbers.
Speaker 4: So you know, if you look at how fires have
Speaker 4: changed in the last thirty forty years, we have seen
Speaker 4: a lot more fire activity now than we did ten, fifteen,
Speaker 4: twenty years ago and thirty forty years ago. So one
Speaker 4: of my colleagues I just mentioned a moment ago is
Speaker 4: named Sean Parks with US for As Service and one
Speaker 4: of his colleagues. They put out a study recently showing
Speaker 4: that between nineteen eighty five and twenty seventeen there was
Speaker 4: an eightfold increase in area that burned that high severity
Speaker 4: on an annual basis in the western US eight fold.
Speaker 4: So there is certainly a lot more large fires now,
Speaker 4: and there's also when those those fires are burning more
Speaker 4: severely now than they did thirty five or so years ago,
Speaker 4: thirty five forty years ago. But that's like the sort
Speaker 4: of small scale context. But then if you zoom back
Speaker 4: out and look at sort of the whole context of
Speaker 4: the last several thousand years, we are seeing less fire
Speaker 4: now than we did way back when it's a different
Speaker 4: kind of fire that's burning, right, that's not necessarily natural
Speaker 4: in some of these systems. And then also we are
Speaker 4: experiencing more of the effects of fire than we ever
Speaker 4: have as humans, and the negative effects because we're living
Speaker 4: in these fire prone areas where for a long time,
Speaker 4: it was somewhat safe to live, right, because fires weren't
Speaker 4: burning that much for the last hundred years in a
Speaker 4: lot of these areas because we're pretty good at putting
Speaker 4: them out. But now that those fires are burning more
Speaker 4: severely and more intensely, and we're living there and we
Speaker 4: have the news to cover it all the time, Yeah,
Speaker 4: we certainly are hearing about it more, right, and it
Speaker 4: is having a serious impact on people as you know,
Speaker 4: you know, there's all sorts of really tragic stories of
Speaker 4: these fires burning through towns. And one of those towns
Speaker 4: just you know, the Dixie Fire, I believe, burned through Greenville,
Speaker 4: California in the last day or two. And that's an
Speaker 4: incredibly tragic thing to have happened. And right, like we are,
Speaker 4: we are living in a world that's really different.
Speaker 2: Now, right, I know, it's kind of like top of
Speaker 2: mind for everyone. I feel like when you say, oh,
Speaker 2: I live in California, people ask you, like, is your
Speaker 2: city on fire? And you're like, I don't know, let
Speaker 2: me check Twitter.
Speaker 4: I just texted one of my friends who lives in California, like,
Speaker 4: are you guys? Where are you? Are you okay? Are
Speaker 4: you burning?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So yeah literally, b BITPB like this just in.
Speaker 2: According to an NPR report that dropped about an hour ago,
Speaker 2: the US four Service just announced that wildfires will be
Speaker 2: aggressively extinguished this summer and all the preventative controlled burns
Speaker 2: are suspended. Apparently fire season is predicted to be so
Speaker 2: bad they can't spare any of the thousands of firefighters
Speaker 2: on the ground to go do prescribed burns. Kind of
Speaker 2: like not being able to go to bed because you
Speaker 2: have a paper due, but then you can't finish the
Speaker 2: paper because you're too tired. Something's got to change. Tune
Speaker 2: in next week for more on that. Now, on the
Speaker 2: topic of heavy hearts amid blazing wildfires, is there anything
Speaker 2: that is the most difficult thing about being a fire ecologist.
Speaker 2: I mean, I already the idea of like a charred
Speaker 2: owl leg is going to hurt my heart until the
Speaker 2: day I die. But anything that is just really frustrating
Speaker 2: or difficult for you.
Speaker 4: I would say that one of the frustrating things is
Speaker 4: just how difficult this problem is. It's just such a
Speaker 4: big problem, and sometimes it's hard to sort of feel
Speaker 4: like we can get out of it. I'm I like
Speaker 4: to call myself a reckless optimist, you know, for me,
Speaker 4: like the glass is not half full, it's like, oh
Speaker 4: my god, it's almost overflowing. It's like, you know, we
Speaker 4: can do this, you guys, like we can totally do this.
Speaker 4: This is such a difficult problem. It seems like we're
Speaker 4: facing the same problems every year. But I think that
Speaker 4: there's there is a light at the end of the tunnel,
Speaker 4: and that light has to do with getting more of
Speaker 4: that good fire on the landscape. And that's something that
Speaker 4: I know is a priority for the agency. I work
Speaker 4: for the US four Service and trying to restore the
Speaker 4: resiliency of these forests. And I think, like what I
Speaker 4: the sort of nugget of goodness that I try to
Speaker 4: take is that we, as you know, at least on
Speaker 4: my side, the science side of this agency, we have
Speaker 4: this incredible opportunity to learn about this, you know, about fires,
Speaker 4: why they burn, how they burn, what their consequences are,
Speaker 4: and what we can do about it. And we get
Speaker 4: to work with the managers and the people who are
Speaker 4: again out doing that stuff on the ground. We've got
Speaker 4: our hands on some of the levers. We can make
Speaker 4: a positive impact, and we can make a change in
Speaker 4: you know, how these fires are burning even as we're
Speaker 4: thinking about you know, these bigger problems like climate change.
Speaker 4: We can put our fingers on the on the lever
Speaker 4: a little bit, and so there's a huge opportunity in
Speaker 4: the coming decades to make a big difference in sort
Speaker 4: of the next century of fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how do you think an average joe like myself
Speaker 2: sitting around biting my nails at the news, what can
Speaker 2: we do.
Speaker 4: You know, I would say, follow Smokey the Bear's advice,
Speaker 4: so we'll put him on the pedestal for a minute.
Speaker 4: Just you know, watch out for yourself and make sure
Speaker 4: that you are not contributing to any of the problems
Speaker 4: with you know, these unplanned ignitions and fires. That's one
Speaker 4: thing you can do. So you know, maybe try to
Speaker 4: avoid you know, explosive gender reveal parties. You know, that's good.
Speaker 4: Probably not do that. You know, don't be throwing your
Speaker 4: cigarettes out, and don't drive your car or anything on
Speaker 4: dry grass and things like that. You know, like there's
Speaker 4: there's little little things like that you can do. But
Speaker 4: this is a big problem and it takes both sort
Speaker 4: of individuals to make sure they're you know, not starting
Speaker 4: these these unplanned fires, but also these big sort of
Speaker 4: institutional actions and management to fight this problem. So it's
Speaker 4: you know, I would say, don't don't bite your nails
Speaker 4: down to the to the bone. Just make sure you're
Speaker 4: not the one who's starting that fire.
Speaker 2: Okay, good to know. Don't start any fires. Don't try
Speaker 2: to impress any ex girlfriends. Yes, don't buy starting fire.
Speaker 2: Are going to be impressed, not going to be impressed.
Speaker 2: The gender reveal party. Couple who started a fire last
Speaker 2: year in November were charged with manslaughter for a firefighter's death,
Speaker 2: and that lovelorn arsonist of the twenty fourteen King fire
Speaker 2: sentenced twenty years in prison and ordered to somehow pay
Speaker 2: sixty million dollars to victims of the crime. So imagine
Speaker 2: what you could do with sixty million dollars and twenty
Speaker 2: years of your life. Yeah, think twice before doing any
Speaker 2: hornt up fire tumfoolery.
Speaker 4: Just get it. Just get them a cupcake or something with.
Speaker 2: Get them a cupcake. Do that. Don't be on the news.
Speaker 2: What about your favorite thing about fire ecology, Like, is
Speaker 2: it putting puzzles together? Is it being out in the field.
Speaker 4: I would say my favorite part about being a fire
Speaker 4: ecologist is similar to my favorite part about being a scientist,
Speaker 4: which is just that we it's the world is infinitely
Speaker 4: more complex than we think it is, and I learn
Speaker 4: new things every day about what's going on with these
Speaker 4: fires and how animals are responding. My preconceptions are always
Speaker 4: just kind of blown out of the water whenever I
Speaker 4: start digging into this stuff. So it's just such a
Speaker 4: wonderfully rich world out there, and fire is such a
Speaker 4: critical part of that whole system, and so being able
Speaker 4: to step into that complexity and try and just use
Speaker 4: my little you know, pick to chip away at one
Speaker 4: corner of that you know, vast unknown in the world
Speaker 4: of fire. Our coology is just the greatest honor and pleasure.
Speaker 4: I've got three little kids, and you know, I when
Speaker 4: I sit down on my computer and start clacking away
Speaker 4: every day, I'm partly thinking, like, what can I do
Speaker 4: to make this world better than I, you know, than
Speaker 4: when I came into it. And you know, sometimes it
Speaker 4: may seem that my little corner of the world is insignificant,
Speaker 4: but yeah, I like to think that that me and
Speaker 4: all my wonderful colleagues within my agency and outside of
Speaker 4: it as well, working in this area, we're all pulling
Speaker 4: in the same direction, and we're trying to you know,
Speaker 4: make this world a better place as well, and get
Speaker 4: that good fire back on the landscape and try and yeah,
Speaker 4: change the game a little bit.
Speaker 2: I love it. I appreciate it so much. I'm glad
Speaker 2: that you are not currently in the middle of a
Speaker 2: fire me too, And thank you for talking to me
Speaker 2: during obviously a very very busy time for firefolks, It's
Speaker 2: been my pleasure, so yes, fire off your birding questions
Speaker 2: to the coolest nerds out there. That is what we do,
Speaker 2: and stay tuned for a special follow up episode next week.
Speaker 2: Cross your fingers. I can make it happen anyway. Learn
Speaker 2: more about doctor Gavin Jones by following them on Twitter
Speaker 2: at Ecology of Gavin. We are on there also at Ologies,
Speaker 2: and I'm on there as Ali Ward with one L
Speaker 2: same handles on Instagram. Come be our friends. Feel free
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Speaker 2: those are all available for free at the link in
Speaker 2: the show notes. Every other Thursday we also release new Smologies.
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Speaker 2: Dwyer for website design. If you need a website, She's
Speaker 2: your gal link in the show notes to her. Thanks
Speaker 2: Noel Dilworth and Susan Hale for keeping the schedules running
Speaker 2: and for social media quizzes and merch Monday posts. Thank
Speaker 2: you to Main Squeeze and Hottest Hell editor Jared Sleeper
Speaker 2: of mind Jam Media for putting it all together and
Speaker 2: of course longtime editing help Stephen Ray Morris of the
Speaker 2: podcast The Percast and See Jurassic Right. Nick Thorburn wrote
Speaker 2: and performed the theme music. He's in a band called Islands.
Speaker 2: They have a new album out Ilamania And if you
Speaker 2: listen to the end, you know I tell you a secret.
Speaker 2: And this week's secret is sometimes if I need a
Speaker 2: brain break, I'll go on Craigslist and I'll just click
Speaker 2: the free section to see what people are given away,
Speaker 2: so you could see things that people just put up
Speaker 2: there are free, and I just sometimes like to look
Speaker 2: and see what people are getting rid of, and then
Speaker 2: I try to figure out, like what a life story
Speaker 2: as for that, Like why is this person giving away
Speaker 2: like a ballerina statue? What's up with this wheelbarrow. Let's
Speaker 2: look at a couple right now? You want to Okay, okay,
Speaker 2: let's see what's up there.
Speaker 3: Oh, there's two guinea pigs.
Speaker 2: And it just says need gone. Damn, that is the
Speaker 2: meanest way to give away a guinea pig. Now, I
Speaker 2: just want to get these guinea pigs. I have ten
Speaker 2: guinea pigs needed for pickup. I can no longer take
Speaker 2: care of them, and we'll have to release them if
Speaker 2: I cannot find anyone to pick them up. Yikes, if
Speaker 2: anyone needs guinea pigs in la I didn't mean to
Speaker 2: make that so sad. A vintage artist portfolio case. Did
Speaker 2: they quit being an artist?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I hope not. Oh, here's a six foot pine ladder.
Speaker 2: I don't need one, but it's fun to look a
Speaker 2: lot of free pianos on here. Again, I don't want
Speaker 2: or need these things, but sometimes it's just nice to wonder.
Speaker 2: Have that person get the piano in the first place,
Speaker 2: and why don't.
Speaker 7: They play it anymore?
Speaker 2: Anyway? I love when people. I love when people spare
Speaker 2: things from landfills and other people get things for free.
Speaker 2: What can I say? Ooh, tap shoes?
Speaker 7: Okay, Bryebye, pacadermistology, ambiology, r doo zoology, lithology, nethnology, meteorology, phytology, napology, seriology, melinology.
Speaker 2: So how could we have avoided all of that? You're asking,
Speaker 2: please enjoy indigenous fire ecology. Oh it's so good, pass
Speaker 2: it on. Oh hey, it's that incense that reminds you
Speaker 2: of freshman year so much that you can only smell
Speaker 2: it sometimes because you don't want the nostalgia to fade.
Speaker 2: Alley Ward back with a follow up as promised episode
Speaker 2: of Ologies that serves as a companion piece to last
Speaker 2: week's fire ecology episode. So perhaps listen to that one first,
Speaker 2: come here from more context, or don't. Ultimately, none of
Speaker 2: my beeswax. Okay, so just a little behind the scenes
Speaker 2: on this one's format. Format is a little different than
Speaker 2: what you're used to. I spoke with this oologist while
Speaker 2: she was up in the wilderness of Canada on vacation,
Speaker 2: and the internet was spotty. So the first ten minutes
Speaker 2: or so, it's not the finest quality audio we've ever
Speaker 2: had on Ologies, but we did our best. And then
Speaker 2: she sent some standalone recordings answering more questions, and then
Speaker 2: after the break, we're featuring excerpts from her own indigenous
Speaker 2: fire ecology podcast, Good Fire with Matt Christoff, making this
Speaker 2: a real community effort and a fire mosaic episode. Indeed,
Speaker 2: So this Ologist got her master's and PhD and hazard
Speaker 2: management and fire science and works as a fire social
Speaker 2: scientist for the Canadian Forest Service. She is a Mayti
Speaker 2: woman from Treaty six Territory on land now known as Canada,
Speaker 2: and has authored papers such as Social Science Research on
Speaker 2: Indigenous wildfire management in the twenty first century and Future
Speaker 2: Research Needs. So she is well schooled on this. And
Speaker 2: then I saw she has a podcast called good Fire,
Speaker 2: recorded with Matt Christoff, who also hosts the Your Forest podcast.
Speaker 2: So this Ologist was on vacation wanted to chat with
Speaker 2: her the one week she was trying to relax, but
Speaker 2: she luckily was very up to take a little break
Speaker 2: and chat amid spotty internet and some techtiffs. Huge thanks
Speaker 2: to Matt for getting us in touch and for lending
Speaker 2: us excerpts from Your Forest and Good Fire at a future.
Speaker 2: Also thank you to everyone at Patreon dot com slash
Speaker 2: Ologies for making the show possible. This episode was informed
Speaker 2: by the questions you left about Indigenous fire stewardship and
Speaker 2: thanks to everyone who rates and reviews a podcasts. It
Speaker 2: matters more than you will ever know, and I read
Speaker 2: them all so I can prove it with a fresh
Speaker 2: shout out for one left this week, such as Sarah
Speaker 2: ib who wrote, I started listening to this podcast and
Speaker 2: got to the gynecological episode and decided to make my
Speaker 2: first Obgian appointment after turns out I have endometrial cancer.
Speaker 2: I had a hysterectomy and I'm currently doing radiation therapy.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Dad Ford for this informative podcast. Sarah, what
Speaker 2: what sending you the biggest, biggest hugs and the best
Speaker 2: vibes for a speedy defeat of that, and thank you
Speaker 2: for getting checked out. Okay, onward to the episode at
Speaker 2: Homology is Simple Indigenous means native fire has a root
Speaker 2: meaning fire and ecology the study of where we live.
Speaker 7: So we'll be.
Speaker 2: Covering cultural burns, dripped torches, forest debris, healthy trees, the
Speaker 2: legality of indigenous fire stewardship, fighting fires with strategy, napping
Speaker 2: on the fire line, evacuations and more with Fire Scientists Advocate,
Speaker 2: podcast host, Canadian Forest Service employee, scholar and Indigenous fire
Speaker 2: ecologist doctor Amy Christiansen.
Speaker 8: Yeah, no problem at all. It's great to have someone's
Speaker 8: attention on this topic as well.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's wonderful, wonderful to have you. So, now, are
Speaker 2: you at the top of an out and right now?
Speaker 2: Try to get cell service?
Speaker 8: No, I'm actually at my parents' cabin, but they do
Speaker 8: not have great internet. But does it sound okay?
Speaker 7: Yeah, it sounds great so far.
Speaker 8: Literally, they're at like the very north end of a
Speaker 8: lake called Shoeshwap Lake, and currently we're actually surrounded by
Speaker 8: three fires as well.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. And is that an area that you're
Speaker 2: pretty familiar with. Has your family been there for a
Speaker 2: long time?
Speaker 8: Yeah, my parents have this cabin that we've had in
Speaker 8: our family, I think for about thirty years now.
Speaker 2: Have you seen a change at all in how the
Speaker 2: summers go in terms of say, being surrounded by fire.
Speaker 8: So the area that we're in is actually kind of
Speaker 8: a rainforest area. We always kind of jokingly refer to
Speaker 8: it as that, and we used to get so much
Speaker 8: rain out here in the summer. In probably the last
Speaker 8: ten years, we've noticed it's been getting warmer in this
Speaker 8: area and we've been getting less rain and even the cedars,
Speaker 8: they're really starting to not look at how and then
Speaker 8: the last probably five years, we've had more summers of smoke,
Speaker 8: so it's really been Yeah, I've really noticed the change
Speaker 8: just even in my lifetime.
Speaker 2: And how long have you been studying fire? How long
Speaker 2: had you been a fire scientist.
Speaker 8: I grew up in northern Alberta. There's always kind of
Speaker 8: fires around my family, although we didn't kind of have
Speaker 8: the connection. We were disconnected from cultural burning practices, but
Speaker 8: my family was kind of always you know, I've been
Speaker 8: involved in fire and my husband's a wildland firefighter, and yeah,
Speaker 8: just growing up it seemed like kind of a normal
Speaker 8: thing in the north. And when I moved down south
Speaker 8: to an urban center, that was when I really realized,
Speaker 8: you know, that other people didn't have that, or you know,
Speaker 8: we weren't so used to that. I guess I started
Speaker 8: actually as a geologist, but I always loved hazards, but
Speaker 8: more volcanic hazards and things that I was interested in.
Speaker 8: So I did two is actually in New Zealand, where
Speaker 8: I did my master's on volcanic hazard management. But you know,
Speaker 8: I always kind of feel like bound to the forest
Speaker 8: in Alberta, so I ended up kind of coming back,
Speaker 8: and I even said to my PhD supervisor, like, you know,
Speaker 8: I'll study anything but fire. You know, I don't want
Speaker 8: to have fire in my life because I just, you know,
Speaker 8: it was around it all the time, and wanted something different.
Speaker 8: But yeah, kind of slowly got pulled back into the
Speaker 8: field and yeah, I've been at the Canadian Forest Service
Speaker 8: now for about ten years.
Speaker 4: Just when I thought I was out, they.
Speaker 2: Pulled me barking, oh my god, what is your what
Speaker 2: is your work like? And have you grown to appreciate
Speaker 2: it all? Are you still like a fire? Here we
Speaker 2: are again, you and me fire?
Speaker 8: Yeah, no, I think, yeah, it's kind of one of
Speaker 8: those things you have to realize that maybe you're just
Speaker 8: like I don't know, I don't want to say destined
Speaker 8: to be, but you know, I think that's living in
Speaker 8: the North. It's just, you know, I think that you
Speaker 8: have that experience with fire and seeing it around you.
Speaker 8: And that's one thing I always find interesting is when
Speaker 8: I meet, you know, other fire scientists who aren't, you know,
Speaker 8: from areas that experience fire, and I think sonize it's
Speaker 8: maybe hard for them to relate, especially when we're talking
Speaker 8: about fire risk and kind of how people act during
Speaker 8: a fire event.
Speaker 2: So one of doctor Christensen's areas of research and work
Speaker 2: is studying evacuations, so when to leave your home with
Speaker 2: just a few possessions and your life for what might
Speaker 2: be the last time. And it's something that she says
Speaker 2: fire scientists who haven't grown up around fire and had
Speaker 2: to themselves evacuate might not understand. And if you listened
Speaker 2: to last week's episode, I mentioned that my parents lived
Speaker 2: in the remote Sierra Nevadas for years and coercing them
Speaker 2: to evacuate during the King Fire was not easy, even
Speaker 2: with the promise of a night or two at the
Speaker 2: fantasy end with a mirrored ceiling.
Speaker 8: When I first started on at the Canadian for Service,
Speaker 8: there was like no interest really an indigenous fire management
Speaker 8: or cultural burning practices or indigenous firefighters. So I would
Speaker 8: say it was like a very lonely kind of first
Speaker 8: five or six years. And so my colleagues are actually
Speaker 8: international folks, so mainly folks from actually California and Australia
Speaker 8: who are in this field as well. But I think
Speaker 8: like pretty much since we've started having the big fire
Speaker 8: events in Canada, that's really what's forced people to kind
Speaker 8: of look at maybe a different way of looking at
Speaker 8: fire on the landscape. My interest in fire is also
Speaker 8: tied to like my own family's history. So my family's Mayti,
Speaker 8: So we're from northern Alberta, the Cardinal and Labcan families,
Speaker 8: and we kind of had like a weird kind of
Speaker 8: disconnection from culture, which most Mayte families in Canada actually
Speaker 8: experience during colonization. And so it's basically we weren't allowed
Speaker 8: to practice any of our traditions and other things. It's
Speaker 8: interesting to be because it almost parallels fire in a way.
Speaker 8: So when settlers, you know, first came to Canada, one
Speaker 8: of the first things that they brought with them was
Speaker 8: actually fire suppression. And as they moved kind of west
Speaker 8: across Canada, they basically just put into place fire suppression
Speaker 8: policies wherever they went. And the big reason for that was,
Speaker 8: you know, that they saw the forest of this wilderness,
Speaker 8: of this kind of natural place. But really now we know,
Speaker 8: like in lots of scientific studies now are pointing out
Speaker 8: that that wasn't natural, like many of those areas were
Speaker 8: actually stewarded by indigenous people. To look that way, Actually,
Speaker 8: the first fire suppression campaign was in sixteen ten in
Speaker 8: Newfoundland in Canada, where that was like kind of the
Speaker 8: first you know enactment of you know, thou shelt not
Speaker 8: light fires on the landscape.
Speaker 2: Amy says that she's from northern Alberta and there were
Speaker 2: only two fire rangers for the entire province.
Speaker 8: So even though they had like a fire policy, you know,
Speaker 8: those guys couldn't be everywhere obviously, so there was still
Speaker 8: a lot of culture warning that went on. So I
Speaker 8: would say that in where I'm from, it really only
Speaker 8: kind of stopped or halted around the sixties or the
Speaker 8: seventies where fire really stopped being allowed on the landscape
Speaker 8: in the north. And what we've seen with that, you know,
Speaker 8: is just a massive increase in fuel loading and also
Speaker 8: kind of these like monoculture forests where there are the
Speaker 8: stands and you know, all one species, like all similar age,
Speaker 8: and they're really vulnerable to pests. There's other disturbances like fire,
Speaker 8: and so we're getting these massive, big fire events that
Speaker 8: have come through. And so for indigenous people, you know,
Speaker 8: like my family and others, they my family were actually
Speaker 8: buffalo hunters and they used fire in the buffalo hunt,
Speaker 8: but also afterwards to improve the habitat for buffalo and
Speaker 8: other things that to help them in their hunting. When
Speaker 8: the settlers started coming across and saying like, no, you
Speaker 8: can't do this, like you don't know as much as us, like,
Speaker 8: you know, it really devalued indigenous people and their knowledge.
Speaker 8: And then when you add into that, you know, we
Speaker 8: had residential schools in Canada where indigenous people you know,
Speaker 8: were sent there and basically told you know that, you know,
Speaker 8: it said they were savages, that their way of knowing
Speaker 8: their family, of knowing the earth wasn't proper, and you
Speaker 8: know that they had to learn this new way that
Speaker 8: was much better. So we, like my colleague Fives al Mulla,
Speaker 8: he was telling me that they called that like a
Speaker 8: cultural severance activity, where basically you're just told that, you know,
Speaker 8: suddenly you know, you cannot practice your culture anymore. And
Speaker 8: so the impacts of that are just massive on people,
Speaker 8: not only on like, you know, their ability to use fire,
Speaker 8: but also just on who they are as a person,
Speaker 8: their pride and their family and other things. And so
Speaker 8: I too, like even now, I still have a lot
Speaker 8: of anger about that. And you know how I was
Speaker 8: able to learn from my elders about landscape stewardship and
Speaker 8: other things because of that, you know, like kind of
Speaker 8: dominant Western worldview, do you.
Speaker 2: Know or has there been research into how much of
Speaker 2: that knowledge is lost?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 8: So, Actually Henry and Lewis, who was a researcher, he
Speaker 8: actually started in California but then was at the University
Speaker 8: of Alberta.
Speaker 2: Doctor Henry T. Lewis aka Hank was an anthropology professor
Speaker 2: at the University of Alberta and was one of the
Speaker 2: first researchers to really document indigenous fire stewardship and its
Speaker 2: role in shaping the landscape. And he wrote the paper
Speaker 2: A Time for Burning. It was published in nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: two and a PDF to it is linked on my site.
Speaker 2: It's typewritten on a typewriter. It's wild and it details
Speaker 2: all of the different biomes and how indigenous cultures shaped
Speaker 2: them with fire and if you're like no reading, need visuals.
Speaker 2: He also made a sixteen millimeters documentary titled The Fires
Speaker 2: of Spring.
Speaker 9: All of this was managed by people who had dive
Speaker 9: all up the complex technology of fire to assure a
Speaker 9: continued successful adjustment to the Northern Royal Forest.
Speaker 2: Somehow this ended up on YouTube Hank.
Speaker 8: God he went up and worked with the Woodland Kreende
Speaker 8: people in northern Alberta, so actually kind of where my
Speaker 8: family's from as well. And what he was saying within
Speaker 8: the nineteen seventies when he did his work that he
Speaker 8: thought that between ninety and ninety five percent of that
Speaker 8: knowledge had been lost. So I mean that was now,
Speaker 8: like it's hard to believe it almost fifty years ago
Speaker 8: right when that was happening. So for me, like I
Speaker 8: often hear people say in meetings like you know, oh well,
Speaker 8: indigenous knowledge is inapplicable to today and cultural burning practices
Speaker 8: because you know, now we have climate change, like now
Speaker 8: there's more values on the landscape in terms of thinking
Speaker 8: about structures and other things. But I always argue against
Speaker 8: that because for me, like it's not about like Indigenous people,
Speaker 8: like we're alive today, we're part of the society, like
Speaker 8: we see all these things, like Indigenous people are on
Speaker 8: the front lines of climate change, like of course we
Speaker 8: don't if that's occurring. And you know, indigenous knowledge, the
Speaker 8: most beautiful thing about it is how adaptable it is
Speaker 8: to the local environment. So like for like, because you
Speaker 8: know you're living in that environment, you're dependent on it.
Speaker 2: Okay, So Amy's internet cut out again, So we tried
Speaker 2: a new way of recording just via the phone and
Speaker 2: her laptop and it sounds much better, which is great,
Speaker 2: so clear. In fact, you may even be able to
Speaker 2: discern the pitter pattern of children's footsteps on the cabin
Speaker 2: stairs as her family vacationed around her.
Speaker 3: Hi, maybe this will work. I can hear you great
Speaker 3: at home.
Speaker 10: It's funny because I have a pretty good setup with
Speaker 10: a podcasting microphone, headphones, and of course I'm like, oh,
Speaker 10: it's this week when I'm gone.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but no worries.
Speaker 2: But where were we? Yes that indigenous fire knowledge is
Speaker 2: starting to get more as climate change worsens and larger
Speaker 2: fires erupt. And as a fire scientist, what is her workday? Like?
Speaker 10: Sure, yeah, so with my job with this CFS, I
Speaker 10: most fire research scientists, I say, kind of do the
Speaker 10: same thing. So we have our research projects that we
Speaker 10: run or that we're a part of, so a lot
Speaker 10: of my day is actually kind of meeting about research
Speaker 10: and other things that are going on. So really similar
Speaker 10: to like you know, an academic researcher from a university.
Speaker 10: But then as well, we also kind of have the
Speaker 10: policy or the government side, So I said, on a
Speaker 10: lot of like national or international committees or working groups,
Speaker 10: you know, looking at fire and trying to direct policy.
Speaker 10: We just recently in Canada finished the Blueprint for Wildland
Speaker 10: Fire Science for twenty nineteen to twenty twenty nine, so
Speaker 10: looking at you know, topics that we should really be
Speaker 10: spending money basically in time doing research on. In one
Speaker 10: of those the themes from that was actually on indigenous fires.
Speaker 10: So we also have an evacuation database actually with the
Speaker 10: Canadian Forest Service, where we've tracked wildfire evacuations in Canada
Speaker 10: since nineteen eighty.
Speaker 6: So during this.
Speaker 10: Summer, like that's one thing is that we have like
Speaker 10: lots of our staff working on that doing data entry
Speaker 10: into it. Yeah, it's a big job this summer. Like
Speaker 10: in twenty twenty, I think we only had twenty different
Speaker 10: evacuations in Canada, but this year I think we're already
Speaker 10: at one hundred and twenty five different evacuation events. So
Speaker 10: it's a huge job.
Speaker 2: So this Blueprint for a Wildland Fire Science in Canada
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen to twenty twenty nine outlines, in its own words,
Speaker 2: a business case to increase investment in wildland fire science,
Speaker 2: and it is fifty seven pages really great strategies covering
Speaker 2: themes like understanding fire in a changing world, recognizing indigenous knowledge,
Speaker 2: and dancing knowledge exchange mechanisms to improve the ways in
Speaker 2: which wildland fire science and technology are shared, understood, and implemented.
Speaker 2: So Amy's team had been working on that, and for
Speaker 2: the curious, I will link to the full pdf on
Speaker 2: my website. Now, as far as the increasing evacuations, that
Speaker 2: issue gets more personal as this episode unfolds, even more
Speaker 2: personal than my parents in an hourly motel in RightNow.
Speaker 2: And this is something I think a lot of people
Speaker 2: have trouble wrapping their brain around. And maybe there is
Speaker 2: no good answer. But is it climate change? Is it
Speaker 2: human ignition and carelessness? Is it not letting the forest
Speaker 2: burn as it naturally would? How do you scientists come
Speaker 2: up with plans to tackle this issue? If it's kind
Speaker 2: of like a trifold problem.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I agree with you.
Speaker 10: It's just such a complex issue. I mean, there's also
Speaker 10: the fact that people are just building more in areas
Speaker 10: that are of higher risk to fire, you know, as
Speaker 10: communities get larger and kind of expand out into what
Speaker 10: you know, some people call the wildline urban interface. It's
Speaker 10: really increasing fire risks. I think that that's the hard
Speaker 10: thing too, is that there's no like magic bullet solution,
Speaker 10: right like even with cultural burning, like you know, I'm
Speaker 10: such a strong proponent of getting that back on the ground,
Speaker 10: but that doesn't at all tackle you know, how vulnerable
Speaker 10: some homes and other things are to fire at the moment.
Speaker 2: Climate change, she said, is also a pretty big frickin deal.
Speaker 10: But the one thing you know that I think locally,
Speaker 10: like you know, in our towns and stuff, that we
Speaker 10: can control is the fuels that are available to burn.
Speaker 10: And so that's why, you know, I think that cultural
Speaker 10: burning or landscape level fuel management, as well as the
Speaker 10: community wildfare mitigation is so important to do in combination.
Speaker 10: And lately too, I've been seeing I don't know if
Speaker 10: you are seeing in the States as much, but in
Speaker 10: Canada there's a bit of a movement to just kind
Speaker 10: of you know, fireproof communities or you know, keep homes
Speaker 10: or you know, structures safe from fire. But to me,
Speaker 10: that's really missing the point of like the landscape around
Speaker 10: your home. Like for me, I don't want to be living,
Speaker 10: you know, if my home is standing in like the
Speaker 10: middle of you know, a black and landscaping in Canada,
Speaker 10: it can take a long time for the forest to regenerate, sometimes,
Speaker 10: you know, twenty thirty forty years, and even then they're
Speaker 10: finding up north in the boreal forest that burns are
Speaker 10: just so hot that they're basically kind of killing the
Speaker 10: soil and any vegetation around. So, yeah, it's quite a
Speaker 10: complex issue. But I think when I think as an
Speaker 10: indigenous person, I look at the forest, I don't just
Speaker 10: see it as trees or timber values or other things.
Speaker 10: You see it as like part of who you are,
Speaker 10: right like your relations So you want to be able to,
Speaker 10: you know, steward and protect that area as much as
Speaker 10: you do you know, your own home or structure.
Speaker 2: And can you describe a little bit about prescribed fires
Speaker 2: and indigenous fire stewardship versus cultural burns. I think a
Speaker 2: lot of people maybe want to lump them in together,
Speaker 2: but can you describe a little bit about how they
Speaker 2: work or what they are.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so there's a bit of a danger of that
Speaker 10: this whole thing now where we're seeing prescribed fire and
Speaker 10: just kind of throwing cultural burning into that. So prescribed
Speaker 10: fire is you know generally what agencies do so where
Speaker 10: they're setting fire on the landscape, but in many cases
Speaker 10: they're setting you know, high severity fires.
Speaker 6: It's burning really fast and they.
Speaker 10: Want to burn a lot of land in a little
Speaker 10: bit of time. So we see like lots of aerial
Speaker 10: ignition of fires.
Speaker 6: We see them using you know, basically like helicopter ignition.
Speaker 10: And in Canada, like lots of times people put that
Speaker 10: together as you know, being a crown fire being these big, bad,
Speaker 10: kind of out of control fires that are burning up
Speaker 10: you know, mountainsides. That's generally the media that we see
Speaker 10: in Canada about prescribed fire, but it really differs from
Speaker 10: cultural burning because cultural burning is more about achieving a
Speaker 10: cultural objective around the forest around where you live. So
Speaker 10: you don't really want to have these big, large, standard
Speaker 10: placing fires that go through and can kill everything in
Speaker 10: a prescribed fire event. That sometimes is what happens in Canada.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so for.
Speaker 10: Cultural fire too, the thing is that most fires are
Speaker 10: actually pretty low intensity. In Australia, they call them like
Speaker 10: slow burns or cool burns, and they generally move through
Speaker 10: the understory and they're done it certain times of year
Speaker 10: where the potential fire behavior is very low risks, so
Speaker 10: you know where you're not getting, you know, potential of
Speaker 10: crown fire. There's lots of natural fuel breaks around the fire.
Speaker 10: In Canada that's usually snow still on the ground. For
Speaker 10: Indigenous people, cultural burning too, is like a family a
Speaker 10: community activity. So like when I'm doing burns and things
Speaker 10: like I take my daughters. My mom was on the
Speaker 10: last one that we did.
Speaker 2: There's a great photo that's run in a few news
Speaker 2: articles about Amy's work, and she's standing in a golden
Speaker 2: grassy field. It's hazy with smoke as a cultural burn
Speaker 2: grass fire she's overseeing lurches behind her, and there's a
Speaker 2: husky wolfy dog sitting to her right, staring off. And
Speaker 2: Amy's wearing black leggings and a red flannel shirt and
Speaker 2: is pregnant with what would be her second daughter. So
Speaker 2: the mood is very calm, unlike what most people's experience
Speaker 2: of land on fire might be.
Speaker 10: Lots of times, you know, we don't wear personal protective equipment,
Speaker 10: you know, like the kind of gnomes that you usually
Speaker 10: see firefighters wearing, because usually the fires are honestly just
Speaker 10: so slow and most people find them I think a
Speaker 10: bit boring.
Speaker 6: Too, because it can take a.
Speaker 10: Really long time to burn a really small piece of land,
Speaker 10: and so for agencies it doesn't really work well, right
Speaker 10: because that for them means more staffing, dollars and other
Speaker 10: things to achieve, like you know, a smaller area burned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when it comes to.
Speaker 2: How much fuel is in some of the forests, now
Speaker 2: that would be too much for say a prescribed burn
Speaker 2: maybe to tackle. I'm reading like there's so much you know,
Speaker 2: dead timber and fall and timber because we've suppressed fire
Speaker 2: for so long, Like where does fire management even begin
Speaker 2: to kind of tackle that issue?
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's it is a big issue, and I think
Speaker 10: people often get overwhelmed, Like I just hear you know
Speaker 10: all the time.
Speaker 6: Oh, it's so complex.
Speaker 10: There's so many things and so many people's competing values.
Speaker 10: But I think that we often lose the focus on
Speaker 10: like local communities. So in Canada, our first nations have reserves.
Speaker 10: And so if you go on to a reserve, many times,
Speaker 10: like when you speak to the elders and other people
Speaker 10: like this, they know what needs to be done in
Speaker 10: their area, Like they know if certain areas are too
Speaker 10: fuel loaded, and you know, they want to go in
Speaker 10: there and kind of mechanically treat the forests, so you know,
Speaker 10: by using machines and labor to go in and do
Speaker 10: thinning and other things before they can burn, to kind
Speaker 10: of keep the fuel load low in those areas. So
Speaker 10: I think for me, that's the biggest thing is that
Speaker 10: we really need to go back to kind of these
Speaker 10: local solutions to fire. And that's really kind of what
Speaker 10: our research is showing that, you know, local people want
Speaker 10: to be involved, so you know, I talk mostly about
Speaker 10: indigenous peoples, but you know, ranchers, farmers, other people who
Speaker 10: you know use the landscape for their livelihood, they also
Speaker 10: you know, really want to have a healthy forest and
Speaker 10: environment around them, and they know the areas too, and
Speaker 10: even forestry companies. Like the one nice thing about cultural
Speaker 10: burning is that because we're doing kind of these low
Speaker 10: understory burns, like we don't want to burn the nice, big,
Speaker 10: healthy trees, right because those are so important for cultural
Speaker 10: activities and for other other like our relations other animals.
Speaker 10: It's actually really nicely works together because you kind of
Speaker 10: can get cultural burns going through and really removing some
Speaker 10: of that dead fall and promoting those healthy big tree
Speaker 10: growth that like the timber companies love.
Speaker 2: And obviously this is something that is a family issue
Speaker 2: for you two, having you know, being married to someone
Speaker 2: who is a firefighter.
Speaker 6: At what point did you.
Speaker 2: Decide to spread the word about good fire? And the
Speaker 2: term good fire too is something that I'm I kind
Speaker 2: of just learned too. Can you can you talk a
Speaker 2: little bit about what good fire is?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 10: So if good fire I think comes just from the
Speaker 10: idea that you know, it's very obvious that we can
Speaker 10: have good fires on the landscape. You know that fire
Speaker 10: is something that is helpful to the environment and to people.
Speaker 10: And so I think indigenous people lots of times see
Speaker 10: fire almost in a dichotomy, so kind of, you know,
Speaker 10: these bad fires and then the good fire that we
Speaker 10: can use as a tools. But before colonization, indigenous people
Speaker 10: would use fire on the landscape in good ways. But
Speaker 10: then also we did have lightning fires obviously back then, right,
Speaker 10: but they would come across the landscape and kind of
Speaker 10: enter into this mosaic landscape that these indigenous ferns and
Speaker 10: other lightning caused fires like, and so as they would
Speaker 10: enter them, then the fire behavior would change. So as
Speaker 10: you know, it entered a meadow, the fire intensity might decrease,
Speaker 10: and then it would go back into the forest and
Speaker 10: maybe increase, and then it would hit like a deciduous
Speaker 10: stand of trees and go down again. And so this
Speaker 10: mosaic or patchwork on the landscape was actually really helpful
Speaker 10: for fire to kind of decrease the intensity of these
Speaker 10: fire events. But what we're seeing right now is because
Speaker 10: we've been suppressing those fire events, there's just so much
Speaker 10: fuel in the that we're seeing these bad fires. So
Speaker 10: even like I'm thinking, like the Dixie Fire in California
Speaker 10: right now, or we have like multiple fires in Canada
Speaker 10: at the moment too that are bad fires. Like lots
Speaker 10: of times, you know, we look at and say, oh,
Speaker 10: fire is natural, there's good ecologic benefits. But for me,
Speaker 10: there's nothing good about these current fires happening right now.
Speaker 2: So at this point, our FaceTime call cut out because
Speaker 2: of spotty internet. So Amy recorded a clip answering a
Speaker 2: few more questions because she is the best and knew
Speaker 2: that we only had a few days until this went up,
Speaker 2: and she's once again the best.
Speaker 10: I also just wanted to mention the importance of indigenous
Speaker 10: people in fire in Canada, but also in other countries.
Speaker 10: You know, We often think about Indigenous people in fire
Speaker 10: management as something that happened in the past. But we
Speaker 10: have a lot of amazing Indigenous firefighters in Canada, Indigenous
Speaker 10: fire managers and other people who are really you know,
Speaker 10: on the front lines trying to bring that good fire
Speaker 10: and indigenous fire stewardship and really out there every summer
Speaker 10: kind of protecting our communities from these bad fires. And
Speaker 10: especially in Canada, lots of times there we don't give
Speaker 10: enough attention, I think to those indigenous firefighters. Lots of
Speaker 10: times they're kept kind of from progressing in their careers
Speaker 10: because they might not have the appropriate Western education levels,
Speaker 10: you know, a degree or a diploma or something, but
Speaker 10: they have you know, might have twenty thirty forty years
Speaker 10: experience of being on the fire and so knowledgeable and incredible.
Speaker 10: And I think, you know, lots of times we need
Speaker 10: to look at where Western science as well got some
Speaker 10: of its ideas. Like I've spoken to many elders who've
Speaker 10: told me about drip torches and how they would use
Speaker 10: tree limbs and sap to create their own drip torches.
Speaker 10: That's what their ancestors did, and how they would spread
Speaker 10: fire across the landscape.
Speaker 6: Was in doing that.
Speaker 10: So now you know it's all canister with fuel in it,
Speaker 10: but it's kind of the same idea that indigenous people's
Speaker 10: had about how to use fire properly on the land,
Speaker 10: and just this incredible knowledge base and people in the communities,
Speaker 10: you know, had roles In Canada, some nations actually had
Speaker 10: families that were fire keepers. There were many people who
Speaker 10: knew about fire and had knowledge about fire activity.
Speaker 2: After the break, you'll hear a clip from Good Fire
Speaker 2: podcast hosts Amy Christensen and Matt Christoff talking about Indigenous
Speaker 2: firefighters experience on the fire line, and I admit I
Speaker 2: found this discussion hilarious. But before that, remember Henry T.
Speaker 2: Lewis Hank the anthropologist who wrote A Time for Burning
Speaker 2: and made that Fires of Spring film. So the retro
Speaker 2: sixteen millimeter film aesthetics are far from the coolest thing
Speaker 2: about his fireworks.
Speaker 10: One of the coolest things I think from Henry Lewis's
Speaker 10: work was when he was speaking to woodland crean Dana
Speaker 10: elders about how they would use fire to melt the
Speaker 10: frost in the ground. And I've seen actually a few
Speaker 10: kind of Western science studies lately on that, but that's
Speaker 10: actually an older technique that the communities would use. So
Speaker 10: you get kind of all the dry grass on top
Speaker 10: of a meadow or something, and they would go and
Speaker 10: burn that in the really early spring, because that's the
Speaker 10: most important thing about indigenous burning is the time to burn,
Speaker 10: when it's safe to do a good fire, and they
Speaker 10: would that would then turn that level that grass into
Speaker 10: you know, black, and so the black would absorb the
Speaker 10: heat of the sun and then start to melt the
Speaker 10: frosts out of the ground in the early spring, and
Speaker 10: that would give you much like earlier green shoots and
Speaker 10: green grass coming up that then moves deer other things
Speaker 10: could come in and eat for in that area, so
Speaker 10: it would make your hunting or other things a lot
Speaker 10: easier to do. So yeah, I think that that's those
Speaker 10: are things you know that and there's probably so much
Speaker 10: more out there that we don't even know that community
Speaker 10: used and how they would use fire in a good way.
Speaker 10: And I mean if people are interested as well. You know,
Speaker 10: Frank Lake, I think is probably one of the first
Speaker 10: kind of fire ecologists who also is an indigenous man,
Speaker 10: who you know, saw very early the importance of indigenous
Speaker 10: fire knowledge and bringing it and He's written some really
Speaker 10: great publications that I think for people who are eye opening,
Speaker 10: you know, about how we can use fire in a
Speaker 10: good way on the landscape and.
Speaker 2: To hear an earload of other incredible indigenous voices in
Speaker 2: fire ecology. We want to subscribe to Good Fire. It's
Speaker 2: a podcast series by Amy and Matt, and we are
Speaker 2: featuring audio from a discussion as they launched good Fire
Speaker 2: in twenty nineteen. They were gracious enough to let us
Speaker 2: steal some clips to round out the conversation amid our
Speaker 2: tech issues this week, and as it turned out, Amy
Speaker 2: and I had further trouble connecting because those three fires
Speaker 2: that she mentioned around her family cabin got bigger and
Speaker 2: they were forced to evacuate from their vacant So yes,
Speaker 2: her work is timely and personal, and she literally wrote
Speaker 2: the book on this, a volume titled First Nations Wildfire Evacuations,
Speaker 2: a Guide for Communities and External Agencies, alongside Tara McGee
Speaker 2: and First Nations Wildfire Evacuation Partnership. So I'm going to
Speaker 2: link to that in the show notes as well. Now
Speaker 2: in her name, we're donating this week to a cause
Speaker 2: of her choosing and she asked her to go to
Speaker 2: Indigenous Residential School Survivors THAT'SRSSS dot CA. For over twenty
Speaker 2: years they've assisted First Nation peoples in British Columbia to
Speaker 2: recognize and be holistically empowered from the primary and generational
Speaker 2: effect of the residential schools by supporting research, education, awareness,
Speaker 2: establishing partnerships and advocating for justice and healing. And the
Speaker 2: society asss survivors with counseling, court support, information, referrals, workshops
Speaker 2: and more. And you can find out more at IRSSS
Speaker 2: dot Ca. There's a link in the show notes. And
Speaker 2: in Canada, consider participating in Orange Shirt Day on September thirty.
Speaker 2: It's also known as National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Okay,
Speaker 2: So that donation was made possible by some sponsors of
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 1: Bionantma got boga on the hartnir the Hola, the Heymen,
Speaker 1: he call ah Ersen Ors Lance Ladeni, the tain Nudovshutarhu
Speaker 1: la Hula shrumparods on Udros Ors, lance Is Phaser, lad
Speaker 1: Gun's throw, Tasha Tapa Sernashka, august nav Is FuGO more
Speaker 1: heyrick h I. A punk ie is called lala on
Speaker 1: Tudoros or ras lense if we realt this in.
Speaker 5: The heron.
Speaker 2: And so many of you patrons asked about indigenous fire management, namely,
Speaker 2: and I'll list you all off at once, very quickly.
Speaker 2: Cameron Brown, Doug potential future fire ourcologist, rown In Jackie, Crisperhoer,
Speaker 2: Kimberly Hoffman, Ellen Skelton, Thomas and Wyndham, Brianna Freeman, Justin Roberts,
Speaker 2: Anthony Willis, Dnnell O'Neill, and Alexandra Quetul. And because our
Speaker 2: time chatting was cut short again, we're so honored and
Speaker 2: lucky to feature relevant clips from a conversation with The
Speaker 2: Good Fire podcast host Amy Christensen and her co host
Speaker 2: Matt Christoph. Okay, here Amy is talking to Matt about
Speaker 2: fears of fire.
Speaker 10: Even in our indigenous communities, Like lots of people are
Speaker 10: now worried about fire and scared of fire. And I
Speaker 10: think so for me, when I come across people like
Speaker 10: you know that kind of have that tendency to think
Speaker 10: of fire as bad, I always say, you know, well,
Speaker 10: there's good fire, and that's kind of you know the
Speaker 10: name from the podcast, so you know, when we're doing
Speaker 10: these kind of good fires, it's basically it's not a wildfire,
Speaker 10: it's totally different. Most Indigenous people want to bring back
Speaker 10: burning right and bring back that cultural practice to their
Speaker 10: landscape because most elders, when they look at the forest,
Speaker 10: the first thing that they say is that it's unhealthy
Speaker 10: and that it needs cleaning up. When I first started
Speaker 10: working a bunch of elders, I'd always hear this cleaning
Speaker 10: up phrase, cleaning up, And you know, it took a
Speaker 10: while till I realized that, you know, that meant fire
Speaker 10: that they want it, because you know, you don't normally
Speaker 10: think of that. You think like, oh, go out with
Speaker 10: the rake or st like Donald.
Speaker 6: Trump thinks that we're doing.
Speaker 10: But you know, it was actually, you know that they
Speaker 10: wanted to use fire to kind of clean up all
Speaker 10: that dead litter on the forest floor. So they just
Speaker 10: want to do that again in their territory. But I
Speaker 10: think they also realize that because of the fire suppression
Speaker 10: that we've had over the last you know, fifty to
Speaker 10: three hundred years, depending where you are in Canada, Yeah,
Speaker 10: that it's not that easy just to bring back our
Speaker 10: burning practices right, because we burned on intervals, so depending
Speaker 10: on where you were, you know, if you were burning
Speaker 10: a meadow, you might burn the meadow every three years
Speaker 10: if you're burning like you know, an old growth forest,
Speaker 10: and you might burn every twenty years. Like you know,
Speaker 10: it just depended on what you were burning or what
Speaker 10: objective you are trying to achieve. So you know, we
Speaker 10: and now we've excluded fire, So I mean the litter
Speaker 10: and the build up of fuel is crazy. So I
Speaker 10: think like now most of the elders I talked to,
Speaker 10: if they say, like if we went and tried to
Speaker 10: do this now, like we would basically burn down the
Speaker 10: forest because we'd be trying to start a low intensity burned,
Speaker 10: but there's just too much fuel on the on the floor,
Speaker 10: so it would immediately like escalate.
Speaker 2: So how do indigenous fire scientists and wildlands firefighters approach
Speaker 2: these really different schools of thought? Any explains to Matt.
Speaker 6: We call it like two eyed seeing. So that's kind
Speaker 6: of the new concept that's come up.
Speaker 10: So that's like, you know, where as indigenous people or
Speaker 10: even as non indigenous, like you know, you're looking at
Speaker 10: the world through one eye, through your western perspective, right
Speaker 10: because we're all trained in that.
Speaker 6: You know, like there's not.
Speaker 10: There's very few people that you know are born and
Speaker 10: raised in the bush and have that kind of only
Speaker 10: subsistence lifestyle. But then out of the other eye, you know,
Speaker 10: you can see with your indigenous eye, right, so you
Speaker 10: can see, you know, how you know where things could
Speaker 10: be better. And I think for me that's where fire
Speaker 10: management comes in because you know, I'm trained from the
Speaker 10: Western perspective, but I think you know, from like culture
Speaker 10: then like you know, there's things that Indigenous people do
Speaker 10: or know better. And you know, for me, part of
Speaker 10: my job is, you know, advocating for that and trying
Speaker 10: so you know, it's not saying like drop all Western
Speaker 10: science around fire, right, we need that, we need that too,
Speaker 10: But then indigenous people and our cultures also no ways
Speaker 10: you know for making the forest healthy. So to me,
Speaker 10: if you bring those two together, it makes like you
Speaker 10: know what I mean, it's then you have like an
Speaker 10: incredible knowledge base that you're coming from, right.
Speaker 2: Ah, the firefighter stories I promised you.
Speaker 10: One example is like talking to firefighters. So there's this
Speaker 10: one guy who is a non like a non indigenous firefighter.
Speaker 10: So it's kind of funny up on the you know,
Speaker 10: the fire crews, there lots of that.
Speaker 6: There's like thirty or.
Speaker 10: Forty year indigenous firefighters that have been on the fire
Speaker 10: line a long time, and they say, you know, these
Speaker 10: new kids, like university grads come up and start telling
Speaker 10: them what to do. So this one guy was actually
Speaker 10: telling me that he, you know, he started out of
Speaker 10: university as kind of a fire boss and went up
Speaker 10: on the one line and he had these native crews,
Speaker 10: and he said he was that he thought they were
Speaker 10: the laziest people in the world because he's like, they
Speaker 10: would get up in the morning and work a little bit,
Speaker 10: but and he's like, then they nap all day and
Speaker 10: then like in the in the bush, you know. And
Speaker 10: then he's like, but then you know, they would get
Speaker 10: up and kind of work all night. And then he's
Speaker 10: like and then I started like really looking and watching
Speaker 10: what they were doing. And he said that. Then one
Speaker 10: of the guys came up and told him, like, we
Speaker 10: fight the fire when it's the weakest, because we see
Speaker 10: fire as a living being. And why would you fight
Speaker 10: something at the height of its day, you know, like
Speaker 10: at two pm on a really sunny, hot day with
Speaker 10: high winds, right, like, why would you do anything? Right,
Speaker 10: Like the fire can just jump or yeah, you know,
Speaker 10: but if you you know, fight it in the morning
Speaker 10: when it's the weakest, or in the evening or overnight.
Speaker 9: High and the temperature is low, and so the activities.
Speaker 6: Yeah, decrease.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and everyone, well I should say generally now with
Speaker 10: climate change, who knows, but generally fire activity decreases at night.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 10: So Sony's but that these guys have got that not
Speaker 10: from textbooks, but from years of being out and watching fires,
Speaker 10: so I think. And so he was saying, like to me,
Speaker 10: like this non indigenous kid, that that it was just
Speaker 10: amazing thing to see that because he didn't learn any
Speaker 10: of that in school. And so for him, he said,
Speaker 10: he learned more that summer working with the native crews
Speaker 10: about fire than going to school. Basically not to say,
Speaker 10: you know, don't stay in school, kids, but like because
Speaker 10: that's important too, but you know, there's other ways and
Speaker 10: other things to learn as well about about fire. Lots
Speaker 10: of the indigenous fire guys they'd always tell me. One
Speaker 10: of the funniest things is like the when the fire
Speaker 10: season first starts in like in Cree, the word for
Speaker 10: white boy or whatever moonew. So they say, like, oh,
Speaker 10: it's so funny. One like the mooneal come on the
Speaker 10: fire because he's like, they're all just doing selfies with
Speaker 10: the fire in the background, and he's like and we're
Speaker 10: all like, you know, actually working, and he's like and
Speaker 10: you look and all the.
Speaker 6: Moonya are just lined up way away from the fire
Speaker 6: take itself.
Speaker 10: And then it was funny because then I started seeing
Speaker 10: on Facebook, like.
Speaker 3: Lots of people on Instagram.
Speaker 10: Yeah, but I think that that's like just maybe a
Speaker 10: bit of and it's kind of more of like because
Speaker 10: for Indigenous people, it's more of a lifestyle, right, so
Speaker 10: the they've been doing that that so it's it's a
Speaker 10: great career for indigenous people because they can go out
Speaker 10: in the summer, make money, be on the land, and
Speaker 10: then in the winter they can go and like run
Speaker 10: their chaplines or hunt, be with their families and like
Speaker 10: kind of participate in their their culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: So I think that that's why it's become like kind
Speaker 10: of a nice lifestyle for certain people.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2: So how do agencies and nations work together? How can
Speaker 2: ecologists and fire keepers spark those collaborations?
Speaker 10: People always say, oh, you need to engage with the
Speaker 10: indigenous communities and and well, like to me, that's a
Speaker 10: nice concept. I know that lots of non Indigenous people
Speaker 10: or companies get frustrated because you know, they go to
Speaker 10: these communities and try to engage and nobody turns up
Speaker 10: or you know, they can't get a hold of anybody.
Speaker 10: Nobody returns their calls. And so I think for me,
Speaker 10: like the thing to remember with that is, you know,
Speaker 10: for people to remember that, like first nations are under
Speaker 10: the Indian Act, right, so basically all their resources and
Speaker 10: you know, how their capital for how they're run all
Speaker 10: basically is decided in Ottawa almost you know, and.
Speaker 6: How much money comes down to them.
Speaker 10: So most of the times, you know, even though the
Speaker 10: communities have high capacity, you know, for forester, your other things,
Speaker 10: it's often very underfunded because of what comes down the
Speaker 10: stream from Ottawa.
Speaker 2: Ottawa is in eastern Canada, in Ontario, and did you
Speaker 2: know that Ottawa is the capital of Canada. I didn't
Speaker 2: until right now. So if you feel the same, it's okay.
Speaker 10: Basically there's not enough money, right so they you know,
Speaker 10: might not have a forestry coordinator, they might not have
Speaker 10: a lands person or you know, or the chief might
Speaker 10: be like that. You know, the chief has to manage housing, healthcare,
Speaker 10: like you know, everything like you get so I know,
Speaker 10: people get frustrated. But at the same time, I think,
Speaker 10: you know, there's needs to be a bit of patience
Speaker 10: and understanding there that lots of the nations are trying
Speaker 10: as much as they can, and some are great. Like
Speaker 10: there's some nations you know that have really gone into
Speaker 10: forestry there, you know, the community.
Speaker 6: Forests in BC.
Speaker 10: I think that those are really great ample of things
Speaker 10: that are working well. Or I know there's been partnerships
Speaker 10: like between different like forest industries and indigenous nations too.
Speaker 10: Most forestry people don't go into forestry because they want
Speaker 10: to you know, kill all the trees and everything, right,
Speaker 10: They go into because they love being in the forest, right,
Speaker 10: so they want to sustain that. Most indigenous people love
Speaker 10: being in the forest, right, So right there you have
Speaker 10: a match of you know, so then it almost goes
Speaker 10: to well, then, you know, if these are our shared values,
Speaker 10: how then can we you know, move forward together. But
Speaker 10: I think one of the problems is that there's a
Speaker 10: real lack of trust because there's been a lot of
Speaker 10: people that have taken advantage of indigenous communities, so you know,
Speaker 10: come in and said good things, said all the right things,
Speaker 10: and then you know, ended up taking money and you know,
Speaker 10: not involving the nation, and so it take it can
Speaker 10: take a while. I think like a helpful thing too
Speaker 10: is employing indigenous people. So you know, when you make
Speaker 10: or want to work in a certain nation or with them,
Speaker 10: you know, to employ people from that band and give them,
Speaker 10: you know, a sustainable you know, career. And there's lots
Speaker 10: of indigenous people that actually have forest tech diplomas and other.
Speaker 6: Things yep, that that can do that. So I think,
Speaker 6: you know, and I know it's not easy either.
Speaker 10: I don't want people to think like, oh yeah, you
Speaker 10: just sit at a table and decide your values and
Speaker 10: then everything goes away.
Speaker 2: Any explains that over the many years, promises have been
Speaker 2: made and broken and outside collaboration has seemed to come
Speaker 2: with a price tag. You know.
Speaker 10: I think you need to recognize, you know, if you
Speaker 10: want to do this kind of work, that there has
Speaker 10: to be some kind of benefit for the community as
Speaker 10: a whole as well, whether that's you know, monetarily or
Speaker 10: you know, supporting like a recreational forest or you know something. Yeah,
Speaker 10: to kind of come to that, I don't like, there's
Speaker 10: not I think an easy answer for you know, like
Speaker 10: just do this one step and you know, indigenous people
Speaker 10: will love to work with you. But for me, I
Speaker 10: think that forestry really has an advantage over say like
Speaker 10: the oil and gas industry because I think that there's
Speaker 10: many more values or like I think the worldview of
Speaker 10: an indigenous person and a forester is much more similar.
Speaker 10: So yeah, I think that that's kind of exciting almost,
Speaker 10: and you know, something kind of a future. And I've
Speaker 10: seen like a bunch of nations now you know, are
Speaker 10: opening their own little sawmills and other things, and to me,
Speaker 10: that's like exciting. So because it has to do with
Speaker 10: the housing crises we have, right so they want to
Speaker 10: be able to you know, harvest their own wood to
Speaker 10: build their own homes, which I mean, why we aren't
Speaker 10: doing that, I have no idea, you know, instead of
Speaker 10: shipping in the wood and timber and stuff. So I think, yeah,
Speaker 10: there's unfortunately there's not like a really easy answer. But
Speaker 10: I would say, like the biggest thing is, you know,
Speaker 10: to be genuine and patient and then understand that history.
Speaker 10: You know, that the situation that you're coming into. Because
Speaker 10: lots of people get like a I don't want to
Speaker 10: say white savior because that sounds really bad, but you know,
Speaker 10: these kind of like oh, I'm going to go to
Speaker 10: the community and help them or you know, like and
Speaker 10: I think the.
Speaker 6: Problem is that there's a revolving door.
Speaker 10: Of these you know, white saviors people that you know
Speaker 10: are coming to save them. And like even like if
Speaker 10: you go to a First Nation conference, like there's just
Speaker 10: kind of business people all over the place trying to
Speaker 10: sell the chiefs on different ideas and different different things.
Speaker 10: So yeah, it's almost kind of being becoming trusted in
Speaker 10: the community and then also working long term. And that's
Speaker 10: something that you know, are especially in government, like we
Speaker 10: don't really support because you know, everyone kind of wants
Speaker 10: to climb the ladder in government, whereas you know, the
Speaker 10: most trusted people are generally the ones from the community
Speaker 10: who've been in the community the longest, and that's generally
Speaker 10: who like an Indigenous person would trust. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 10: it's almost like doing these relationships long term too, And
Speaker 10: I think there's some great examples out there of things
Speaker 10: that are going really well.
Speaker 2: So, yes, trust and incentives really matter, as does plain
Speaker 2: old money.
Speaker 10: And I would say lots of that does come from
Speaker 10: like that funding issue. You know that sometimes they just
Speaker 10: don't have enough money. And then also other times, you know,
Speaker 10: we're dealing with lots of issues that have been brought
Speaker 10: up on by colonization, right, So like if you're dealing
Speaker 10: with a suicide crisis in your community, you're not really
Speaker 10: going to care about forestry, right, And so I hear
Speaker 10: people say that too, Like to me sometimes about you know,
Speaker 10: when I talk about how we're stewards of the environment,
Speaker 10: they'll say to me, like, have you ever been on
Speaker 10: a reserve and looked at like you know, there's garbage
Speaker 10: everywhere and you know, and people don't care about their houses,
Speaker 10: and like that's hardly an environmental steward, And to me,
Speaker 10: that's colonization, right, Like that's where where we've gone and
Speaker 10: where we've been pushed.
Speaker 2: So reminder that cultural burning practices were criminalized, but now
Speaker 2: they're becoming of interest to Western scientists, and Amy says
Speaker 2: that returning to that fired stewardship could be really healing
Speaker 2: for forests, for people who love the forest, and for
Speaker 2: the people who have been kept from doing it for
Speaker 2: so long.
Speaker 10: Moving forward, it's kind of like re like regaining our
Speaker 10: culture back, and so that's like where to relate it
Speaker 10: to burning. That's we're burning in those things because burning
Speaker 10: for us is a cultural practice, right, and so I
Speaker 10: think by getting fire back on the landscape, by kind
Speaker 10: of making our forest healthier, you know, than that promotes
Speaker 10: a healthier community. So you know, instead of kids sitting inside,
Speaker 10: you know, they're out on the land and like what
Speaker 10: kid doesn't like fire, right, So they're out with their
Speaker 10: elder like burning. And then it's those neat things like
Speaker 10: even just showing kids like how smart their ancestors were.
Speaker 10: Like the one elder that I was talking to was
Speaker 10: telling me about how drip torches actually came from First
Speaker 10: Nations people, which I didn't know, but I think, like that,
Speaker 10: to me, that's neat because you take kids out there
Speaker 10: and you show them like, well, you know, drip torches
Speaker 10: came from you, you know, and and and even like
Speaker 10: kids had jobs on fires, right. So oh man, I
Speaker 10: actually heard this fantastic well that also made me cry
Speaker 10: the other day from this guy in Australia and he
Speaker 10: was saying for them, burning is such a family affair.
Speaker 10: And actually that's what I hear too from all of
Speaker 10: our that people I've talked to here, is that you
Speaker 10: know it wouldn't just be the men that would go
Speaker 10: out and burn, it's the entire r family and the kids.
Speaker 10: Like one thing they would do is pick up like
Speaker 10: pine cones and you know, light them on fire and
Speaker 10: then from the fire and then throw them right.
Speaker 3: It's so like awesome for kids.
Speaker 10: And I know, like there's fire managers probably listening to
Speaker 10: this saying, oh my goodness, they're going to burn down.
Speaker 3: The Please do not do this.
Speaker 9: If you are just a kid listening, I don't want
Speaker 9: to start throwing flaming balls of fire. Don't do that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, but this was obviously under the direction of elders
Speaker 10: and you know also burning at like very low risk times, right,
Speaker 10: like this was not in the very yes, but so
Speaker 10: you know, it's to give the kids a job on
Speaker 10: the fire. And the one guy from Australia was saying
Speaker 10: that for his mob, that for them it was bringing
Speaker 10: children's laughter back to the forest because the trees hadn't
Speaker 10: heard the children laugh in a long time and they
Speaker 10: felt that that was needed for the trees to be
Speaker 10: healthy too. And I mean that kind of relates like
Speaker 10: obviously children's laughter does not you know, directly affect the tree,
Speaker 10: but it's more that like, if people are out on
Speaker 10: the land stewarding it, right, then that promotes health for
Speaker 10: the health of the trees.
Speaker 6: So anyways, to me, that was.
Speaker 10: Such a beautiful like quote because I think too often,
Speaker 10: you know, we kind of remove that or remove kind
Speaker 10: of the community.
Speaker 2: Patroon nit Niki DeMarco ass Is there any way we
Speaker 2: could go back to indigenous stewardship to help with this problem?
Speaker 2: Or does the red tape make it not feasible? So
Speaker 2: moving forward? What are the legalities of it?
Speaker 10: So on our like the reserves, we're technically allowed to burn,
Speaker 10: right because that's the you know the band, Well it's
Speaker 10: federal jurisdiction, but you know, the band kind of has
Speaker 10: a bit of control over it, so you know that
Speaker 10: you don't need provincial permission to do that. So, you know,
Speaker 10: lots of agents fire management agencies say, you know, oh,
Speaker 10: we're so supportive of indigenous people and we want to
Speaker 10: help that, you know, you know, support their practices, you know,
Speaker 10: until we say, you know, we want to burn something.
Speaker 6: And so you know what.
Speaker 10: I've seen even you know in BC is where I'm
Speaker 10: doing a lot of work right now, because the nations
Speaker 10: there are so passionate about burning. But you know, they
Speaker 10: they're going into these meetings and it's you know, like
Speaker 10: a really complicated process to get prescribed burning on the ground.
Speaker 10: And it's very Western base, you know, you have to
Speaker 10: know like fuel types that are out there. Yeah, it's
Speaker 10: like a crazy twelve step process. And most of the
Speaker 10: communities look at that and just say, you know, we'll
Speaker 10: screw this, we're burning ourselves.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 10: And then even when they want to burn, like I've
Speaker 10: heard of lots, you know where somebody sees smoke and
Speaker 10: then you know, calls the you know, calls the emergency number,
Speaker 10: and then you know, a helicopter will just come and
Speaker 10: put out their their little fires that they're burning right
Speaker 10: without you know, coming and dropping down and maybe talking
Speaker 10: to the people or are seeing what's going on. So
Speaker 10: there's a bit of a disconnect, and I can see
Speaker 10: it from both sides, right because especially in BC, like
Speaker 10: the fires has been so crazy that I think, you know,
Speaker 10: the BC fire manager or wildfire Service there, you know,
Speaker 10: obviously doesn't want out of control fires, yes, but the
Speaker 10: nations there want to burn. And so what I'm seeing
Speaker 10: right now is because they they're just like smashing heads basically,
Speaker 10: like they're supportive until we want to burn. And because
Speaker 10: of that smashing of heads, is that now the nations
Speaker 10: are saying like, well, screw you, this is our territory.
Speaker 10: We're doing what we want, you know, and then like
Speaker 10: it becomes like this real conflict situation and we're trying
Speaker 10: to work with like the agency and you know, maybe
Speaker 10: even introduce some sort of like cultural burn protocol or procedure,
Speaker 10: you know that's more indigenous based, that same thing, like
Speaker 10: you're kind of getting permission, you know, you're notifying the
Speaker 10: correct authorities, but it's not as crazy as this like
Speaker 10: existing process.
Speaker 9: Well, I think that's and we've just again it's a
Speaker 9: not a thing we've discussed a bit on the on
Speaker 9: the other episodes we did that, yeah, the Good Fire podcast.
Speaker 9: But talking about that, that's another big barrier to indigenous
Speaker 9: burning or cultural burning however you want to call it.
Speaker 9: Is the like the Western barriers on that because like
Speaker 9: you're right, we don't want out of control of fires. Yes,
Speaker 9: so yeah, the Western like the Western government, like we
Speaker 9: want to make sure that like any fire that is
Speaker 9: started is not going to become a problem for anything
Speaker 9: outside of the reserve or whatever. Right, But also at
Speaker 9: the same time recognizing that, like you, thank you were saying,
Speaker 9: Indigenous people have been working with fire for thousands of
Speaker 9: years and understand the relationship. So how do you make
Speaker 9: sure that government feels comfortable with this going on, but
Speaker 9: also ensuring that because it's entirely possible. Also like this
Speaker 9: is something that somebody who's playing Devil's advocate would say, right,
Speaker 9: is just saying that, like, well, how do we ensure
Speaker 9: that they know what they're doing, because it could be
Speaker 9: somebody who just because they're Indigenous, doesn't mean they know
Speaker 9: what's going on, right, they have to have that knowledge
Speaker 9: pass down and collected somehow.
Speaker 10: And you know, I've heard that all the time, like, oh,
Speaker 10: if we allow this, the Indians are going to be
Speaker 10: lighting fires everywhere.
Speaker 9: Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 6: And then that kind of fear, yeah, right.
Speaker 9: So there's that fear of will they take advantage of
Speaker 9: this and just do it for fun or whatever? And
Speaker 9: that exists, So we have to address that fear. So
Speaker 9: how do we There's going to have to be a
Speaker 9: collaboration somehow to be like, okay, we acknowledge that like
Speaker 9: these four people somehow. Unfortunately, that's the way it's going
Speaker 9: to happen. I think it's probably going to have to
Speaker 9: go that these are people in this band have the knowledge, yeah,
Speaker 9: and they have to be like I don't know, And
Speaker 9: this is super westernized for me to think, right, like,
Speaker 9: these people have the knowledge and understanding of how to
Speaker 9: do this, so if they're in charge, we're not going
Speaker 9: to worry about it. But I also feel like indigenous
Speaker 9: communities having to talk to the overlord the government, what
Speaker 9: they're doing on their own land is counter is exactly
Speaker 9: the opposite of what you're trying to accomplish here.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and so that's like so you know, like there's
Speaker 10: fireboss training, right or no burn boss training, So there's
Speaker 10: like different levels of that you can go through.
Speaker 6: Same thing.
Speaker 10: It's very Western, like I know that now, Like there's
Speaker 10: Bob Gray and other guys who train on that who
Speaker 10: are starting to incorporate a bit of Indigenous knowledge or
Speaker 10: you know the importance of Indigenous knowledge and burning. But same,
Speaker 10: it's very like kind of Western. You know, this is
Speaker 10: how we light a prescribe fire.
Speaker 9: And that's all we know. That's the only culture I know, right,
Speaker 9: So it's where my perspective is going to come from.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so we're doing brains some of the fire keepers,
Speaker 10: and we're like, you know, well they do a certification
Speaker 10: course to get that, so maybe what we need to
Speaker 10: do then is have a cultural burning certification course, right,
Speaker 10: so that you know, people would go through and then
Speaker 10: once they get that, then you know they can go and.
Speaker 6: And light fires or whatever.
Speaker 10: But then then we had a lot of fire keepers
Speaker 10: that were saying, like, no, that is basically just us
Speaker 10: trying to fit into a Western system, right, And they
Speaker 10: were saying, like the one guy actually at the fire
Speaker 10: keeper's conference, I just went to the government people were talking,
Speaker 10: and he stood up and he just said, you know,
Speaker 10: I find this really difficult because they were talking about,
Speaker 10: you know, like all the procedures you need to go
Speaker 10: through to get approved. He stood up and he just said,
Speaker 10: you know, for me, this is my families and like
Speaker 10: my nation's inherent right to steward the land, this is
Speaker 10: my responsiblity. This is why I was put on this earth,
Speaker 10: you know, So for me then to have to go
Speaker 10: and ask you for permission to do what is my
Speaker 10: responsibility and my right, that doesn't make any sense. And
Speaker 10: then he was saying, like, you know, one hundred years ago,
Speaker 10: you guys were telling us we couldn't burn because we
Speaker 10: were destroying the forest, and now you're saying, test, oh,
Speaker 10: only we can burn because you know you guys, because
Speaker 10: now the forest is destroyed. And he's like, you're the ones,
Speaker 10: you know who's practices because you wouldn't listen to us,
Speaker 10: you know, have led to this. If you would have
Speaker 10: listened to my ancestors, you know, then we wouldn't be
Speaker 10: in this predicament we're in now, so like, let us
Speaker 10: kind of take it over. So I think it's one
Speaker 10: of those like I don't hate. I don't really like
Speaker 10: that term like wicked issue, you know, where it's like
Speaker 10: super complex, but it is kind of like that in
Speaker 10: a way, right because you like you're worried the forest
Speaker 10: isn't healthy right now. I don't personally want to say
Speaker 10: to somebody like, yeah, go out and burn and then
Speaker 10: have you know, a massive crown fire start. But I
Speaker 10: think the thing is with indigenous fire practice is that
Speaker 10: it's you know, you're burning at very specific times. So
Speaker 10: you know, it's like early spring before the snow is left.
Speaker 10: In Canada, it's late fall, just like the day or
Speaker 10: two before the first snow fall. Right, you're not burning
Speaker 10: like obviously in the summer, So like I would think
Speaker 10: that that, you know, obviously still should be criminalized to
Speaker 10: some extent. You know, that you need to find people
Speaker 10: or whatever that are just going because that is very
Speaker 10: high risk.
Speaker 6: And so like what our.
Speaker 10: Like elders and ancestors say from like the different nations
Speaker 10: that I've talked to, is that, you know, our burning
Speaker 10: that we do is so low risk. That's why we
Speaker 10: don't need protective equipment. That's why we don't need a
Speaker 10: burn plan, because if we're doing it right, you know,
Speaker 10: there's there's literally very lower zero risk. Why I think
Speaker 10: they would say zero risk to what they're doing, you know,
Speaker 10: to starting an out of control fire or somebody getting hurt.
Speaker 9: It's amazing how complicated the situation is to try and
Speaker 9: navigate this, but I think, yeah, the only way forward
Speaker 9: is to.
Speaker 6: Come together and discussions.
Speaker 9: It seems like a cop out to say that, because
Speaker 9: it's just like like we need to discuss it, but
Speaker 9: unfortunately that's the truth.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Well, and on the Good Fire podcast, I think like
Speaker 10: that's what's interesting is because with the range of people
Speaker 10: that we talked to on there, like you know, you
Speaker 10: go from somebody who thinks, you know, like it's their
Speaker 10: right to burn and they're not working with any agency.
Speaker 10: And then to like other people who you know, are employed,
Speaker 10: like mean kind of by an agency, like Frank Lake.
Speaker 10: You know, he works for US Forest Service, and he's
Speaker 10: used his you know, work within this kind of western
Speaker 10: government structure to bring more fire back to his territory.
Speaker 10: So yeah, it's just it's really interesting to see kind
Speaker 10: of all the different perspectives.
Speaker 2: So that conversation was from the Your Forest podcast, which
Speaker 2: is hosted by Matt Christoff, who also co hosts Good
Speaker 2: Fire with Amy, And of course there's a whole Good
Speaker 2: Fire episode with Frank Lake, and there's so many other
Speaker 2: great voices in indigenous fire ecology. So I'm going to
Speaker 2: link that episode in the podcast in general on my website,
Speaker 2: and I will also put up a link to the
Speaker 2: wonderful forty seven page book called Blazing the Trail, celebrating
Speaker 2: Indigenous fire stewardship. So many resources, so much learning. Now
Speaker 2: to wrap up, though, let's talk about some pains in
Speaker 2: some assets. So the most vexing thing about Amy's job.
Speaker 10: I'd have to say, my least favorite thing about my
Speaker 10: job is the bureaucracy, which I think that most people
Speaker 10: who work in a government agency can relate to. It's
Speaker 10: sometimes really frustrating when you know, you know something needs
Speaker 10: to be done or what a solution could be, but
Speaker 10: then you kind of get held up in all sorts
Speaker 10: of bureaucratic processes.
Speaker 6: So I mean, that's my least favorite.
Speaker 10: Unfortunately, it takes up a lot of time that we
Speaker 10: could be, you know, devoting to other things.
Speaker 6: So that's frustrating for sure in.
Speaker 2: The standout best aspect, the most brightly glowing coal.
Speaker 10: But I think my most favorite thing about my job
Speaker 10: is that I'm able to work with communities and knowledge
Speaker 10: keepers from across Canada and then internationally sometimes as well.
Speaker 10: And I really realize that that's, you know, a position
Speaker 10: of privilege that I have and that I'm in to
Speaker 10: be able to do that, and it comes like with
Speaker 10: a lot of responsibility that often you know, keeps me
Speaker 10: awake at night, but for me, when I'm able to
Speaker 10: bring fire keepers or other people to events or other
Speaker 10: things and just see their pride and finally being recognized
Speaker 10: in their knowledge being known, and sometimes like I've been
Speaker 10: referring to that as kind of like you know, we
Speaker 10: had this big severance event with fire, but now what
Speaker 10: we're almost seeing is this reunion with fire where Indigenous
Speaker 10: people are coming back to it. And so, you know,
Speaker 10: we have the land back movement for Indigenous people, and
Speaker 10: often I think, you know, we need a fire back
Speaker 10: movement as well, where Indigenous people, you know, empowered again
Speaker 10: to make those decisions on the land. And what I'm
Speaker 10: seeing right now in Canada especially is that there is
Speaker 10: a movement where people want to be involved in fire
Speaker 10: management decisions that are happening in their territories.
Speaker 6: And so I think that's really exciting.
Speaker 2: So ask smart people exciting questions because sometimes the situation
Speaker 2: is impossibly complex and they can help break it down
Speaker 2: for you, like a focus on a fallen life. And
Speaker 2: so for more on this topic, you can get yourself
Speaker 2: some good fire podcast into your Ears. It's hosted by
Speaker 2: Amy and by Matt Christoff and it's linked in the
Speaker 2: show notes. Matt's podcast again is Your Forest Podcast. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much to him for letting us use so
Speaker 2: much of his interview with Amy. You can follow Amy
Speaker 2: at Christensen Amy on Twitter. There are more links in
Speaker 2: the show notes and up on my website Aliward dot com.
Speaker 2: Slash Ologies slash good Fire. You can follow us at
Speaker 2: Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with
Speaker 2: one l New full length adult friendly episodes continue to
Speaker 2: come out on Tuesday, and we're moving Smologies releases to
Speaker 2: the weekend I think Sundays or Mondays, so look for
Speaker 2: a new kid friendly episode next week. Also, I'm sorry
Speaker 2: that my neighbor's dog's barking.
Speaker 3: I can't really do anything about it.
Speaker 2: We gotta get this episode up. I'm so Sweaty. Merch
Speaker 2: is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you to longtime
Speaker 2: friend Aaron Talbert we met when we were four, for
Speaker 2: admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Emily
Speaker 2: White of the Professional Transcription Company for making transcripts for Ologies.
Speaker 2: They're available for free on my website. Thank you Caleb
Speaker 2: Patten for Bleeping episodes. Thank you Noel Dilworth for all
Speaker 2: the scheduling, and Susan Hale both of you for helping
Speaker 2: with social media quizz and such as always giant. Thank
Speaker 2: you to Resident editor by Resident I mean we live
Speaker 2: in the same bed, shared sleeper, who helped me stitch
Speaker 2: all these audio clips together. And also, of course to
Speaker 2: Steph Marie Morris for all the editing help and for
Speaker 2: working on Smologies now too and twenty twenty five Dad here.
Speaker 2: So since this episode first aired, also we have put
Speaker 2: Smologies in its own feeds, so there are free, classroom safe,
Speaker 2: kid friendly episodes available. Wherever you get podcasts, you can
Speaker 2: just look for Smologies, Smologies and the new green cover
Speaker 2: art for it. Also, since his episode verst Aared, we
Speaker 2: have added a few great Ologies team members such as
Speaker 2: Aveline Malick who makes our professional transcripts, Jake Schafe and
Speaker 2: Mercedes Maitland who edit, and managing director Susan Hale Nick
Speaker 2: Thorpe and wrote the theme music. And I told you
Speaker 2: at the very beginning, look at this, you made it.
Speaker 2: If you stick around until the end, I will tell
Speaker 2: you a fresh secret, a smoldering hot one. And for
Speaker 2: this one, I'm going to bring in editor and a
Speaker 2: legally wedded husband, Jer Sleeper.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think technically I own half the show.
Speaker 2: Actually do you own half the show? Because we're literally
Speaker 2: wed apecially, because it's a California's a fifty fifty save.
Speaker 3: Babe, damn getting into that here not have a Brena.
Speaker 2: So this shit better work out, Okay, We share a hoem,
Speaker 2: we share a baby daughter who's twelve years old, who
Speaker 2: is very hairy.
Speaker 5: We share life, we share a heart space, we share,
Speaker 5: we share a soul bond.
Speaker 3: What a life.
Speaker 2: I already was like, let's make this secret quick. And
Speaker 2: we're already like a minute into it.
Speaker 5: You're asking me to make a quick you say, you
Speaker 5: invite me on and say make it quick. No, what,
Speaker 5: I'm having the most mystical day I've had.
Speaker 2: Let's tell let's tell the secret, okay, because this made
Speaker 2: me cool. So I was in I was in Las Vegas.
Speaker 2: I was getting a flight home today. Now again, as
Speaker 2: you heard at the top, there are these horrific wildfires raging.
Speaker 2: The closest one to us, burned up like a thousand homes.
Speaker 2: And a really weird thing in La right now is
Speaker 2: people are finding pages of books all over because the
Speaker 2: winds are so intense that they've just taken these pages
Speaker 2: of books and scattered them miles and miles away, right, right,
Speaker 2: So I was in Vegas.
Speaker 3: I was talking to you on the phone.
Speaker 5: Yes, And I think it was pretty early this morning, right,
Speaker 5: I don't know, I think it was. I feel like
Speaker 5: I woke up and I was I remember I was
Speaker 5: very I don't know, shook or something by the not embers.
Speaker 5: They're not members, they're ashes, ashes falling down because the
Speaker 5: smoke wasn't as bad as it was yesterday, and it
Speaker 5: just kind of poetic, you know. It looks like snow,
Speaker 5: a little bit like this light snow. And so went
Speaker 5: outside and I was looking around, just at the yard
Speaker 5: and checking on things, you know, trying to make sure
Speaker 5: that nothing's on fire. See how it smells out there,
Speaker 5: not as campfirey. And I found a charred page.
Speaker 3: Of book creepy.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, because like you said, there's been people posting
Speaker 5: these and finding these little bits and pieces, and I
Speaker 5: knew you'd think it was cool. And I took picture
Speaker 5: of it, and then I was looking and the first
Speaker 5: thing that struck me was on the first page. It
Speaker 5: had some phrase on it about ashes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's already if you find a charge, Yeah that alone,
Speaker 2: if you find a charred book piece, a piece of
Speaker 2: a page of a book, a burn page of a
Speaker 2: book in your yard from miles away.
Speaker 5: And yeah, and it's referring to in ashes, and said
Speaker 5: ash that's referring to itself. Strange.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it said you could see along the lower half
Speaker 2: the words among the ashes.
Speaker 5: Right, and I was looking at the rest of the
Speaker 5: words trying to figure out it was. I flipped it
Speaker 5: over and more words. There's one in particular that referred
Speaker 5: to leaning on a grocery card, a green grocery card
Speaker 5: or something like that, and I had this inkling. I
Speaker 5: was like, this is from I think I might have
Speaker 5: read this. And I went and I did the Google
Speaker 5: book search thing, and first I was just typing in
Speaker 5: the dialogue and a million things were coming up for
Speaker 5: the phrases that I was finding, and then I was like,
Speaker 5: let me just see, and I specified the book. I
Speaker 5: thought it was The Road by Cornick.
Speaker 3: McCarthy, which is one of your favorite books.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is one of my favorite books. It was
Speaker 5: very moving book and a very formative book. I've always
Speaker 5: been pre obsessed with the post apocalypse stuff, but that one,
Speaker 5: in particular, Crank McCarthy's writing really impacted me. And I
Speaker 5: remember that book as being the first one that made
Speaker 5: me like ball. Yeah, that made me go, WHOA a
Speaker 5: book can make you ball. You can just read a
Speaker 5: few sentences and just be weeping to yourself alone. And
Speaker 5: that really struck me. That it was like extraordinarily beautiful.
Speaker 3: Book, and I've never read it.
Speaker 2: And part of where I've never read it is I
Speaker 2: feel like I've never been in like a headspace to
Speaker 2: get into something that's so bleak.
Speaker 5: Oh it's atrocious, it's really tough. I read that book.
Speaker 5: This is a funny pairing, but I remember I read
Speaker 5: that book back to back with World War Z, which
Speaker 5: is a great book. Actually it's it's you do it
Speaker 5: in the sob of an oral history, and that book
Speaker 5: has a chapter that involves cannibalism, and the Road involves cannibalism,
Speaker 5: and reading those books back to back just I never
Speaker 5: had a weird phobic like you know, it's a discussion,
Speaker 5: but it never was like after reading those books, I've
Speaker 5: been so creeped out by the idea of cannibalism, like
Speaker 5: in a.
Speaker 3: More intense way than every time turned me on.
Speaker 5: Every time I say that sounds crazy because you're like, well, yeah,
Speaker 5: we all, but you know what I mean in a
Speaker 5: way that you're oh, it's like it's so vistrong and
Speaker 5: just disgusting. Anyway.
Speaker 3: So Carmick McCarthy is the very beautiful book.
Speaker 5: Very intense book, and the themes of the book. The
Speaker 5: book is about this, I'll get very brief. The book
Speaker 5: is this follow spoilers, No, I'm doing best to do spoilers,
Speaker 5: but the premise and people are probably seen the movie.
Speaker 5: That movie with Vigo Mortonston is pretty decent. I don't know.
Speaker 5: But the book is about an awful post apocalypse, like
Speaker 5: just the most hellish version of it you could imagine.
Speaker 5: The world is destroyed and this man is alone with
Speaker 5: his son, and he is trying to protect his son
Speaker 5: through this wasteland. And the son is still very young,
Speaker 5: and the father, in trying to protect the son sort
Speaker 5: of manages to keep the sun kind of pure and naive,
Speaker 5: even like decent, and he's trying to protect the decency
Speaker 5: in this land that there's just none of it left.
Speaker 5: It's just like a cruel, vicious, uh landscape of a
Speaker 5: type of nature that like Thomas Hobbs would think up
Speaker 5: or something like that. You're just like life is cruel,
Speaker 5: British and short.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, bleak, bleak, And so this he talks.
Speaker 5: About that, he talks about the child though, he talks
Speaker 5: about child and be like the carrier of this light
Speaker 5: and that like that he carries the light of the world,
Speaker 5: and it's really beautiful and it really struck me when
Speaker 5: I was young. Anyway, So this page, this page, this
Speaker 5: page floats down the pages now, the hard remnant of
Speaker 5: a book that you when you touch it. When I
Speaker 5: touched it, a piece felt like every time I touch
Speaker 5: it falls apart more like unbelievably delicate.
Speaker 2: And the horror part about finding these ashes everywhere is
Speaker 2: that that was someone's house.
Speaker 3: That was in someone's house, That.
Speaker 2: Was a book that someone bought and read or lent
Speaker 2: to someone, and it carried on these eighty mile an
Speaker 2: hour winds as a remnant of someone who's is having
Speaker 2: the worst day of their life.
Speaker 5: Well, and you and I were having a discussion then too.
Speaker 5: You are asking this question which is plaguing us both
Speaker 5: and I think playing so many people out here, because
Speaker 5: this is just a symptom of a wider chaos we're
Speaker 5: all experiencing and going to experience more. Knowing about climate change,
Speaker 5: this question like what are we going to do? And
Speaker 5: what can we can? We were just struck by that
Speaker 5: all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like what can we do?
Speaker 5: And some of that question is very practical. They're like
Speaker 5: are we going to move or going to what? Are
Speaker 5: we going to do with our live what we're we
Speaker 5: gonna do?
Speaker 2: Mutually finds that we can amplify, which as this, as
Speaker 2: we learn more about which friends have lost houses, we
Speaker 2: can amplify.
Speaker 3: But right now it's like, what can we do? The
Speaker 3: fires are still zero percent contained?
Speaker 5: And it felt very spooky that this floats down and
Speaker 5: I'm prone to mysticism and receiving the signals when I
Speaker 5: can cries, I cry, I cry, I cry. Find this
Speaker 5: scene in the book, I find it confirmed to be
Speaker 5: this from the road, and the scene is a very intense,
Speaker 5: beautiful scene in the book. And in the scene of
Speaker 5: the book, the father and the son have have had
Speaker 5: recently this stroke of luck, and they found this readout
Speaker 5: with a cash of food and stuff in it, and
Speaker 5: they have all this extra like riches for where they're at,
Speaker 5: but it's dangerous to carry that stuff in this land
Speaker 5: that the father's really scared of it being stolen from them,
Speaker 5: to being a target now. So they're moving on and
Speaker 5: they come across this old man wandering by himself, and
Speaker 5: the scene the old man like is so scared to
Speaker 5: meet these people like that he assumes are going to
Speaker 5: victimize him somehow, that he like sits in the middle
Speaker 5: of the road and just is doing nothing. And the
Speaker 5: son is saying to say this to the old man,
Speaker 5: we're not robbers, we're not robbers, like he's this kid
Speaker 5: like that's the way he conceives of it, just robbers.
Speaker 5: And the man is like just sitting and the father
Speaker 5: is freaking out. And the father's going like, this man
Speaker 5: is probably here to set up an ambush. He's looking
Speaker 5: around for like, where's the rest of the gang, and
Speaker 5: this is a distraction, kill us and steal it from us,
Speaker 5: And the son is going, no debt. He's just scared, Papa,
Speaker 5: he calls him. He's just scared. And the dad is
Speaker 5: like saying, if it's an ambush, you're gonna go first,
Speaker 5: like it's so intense, and he's just saying, no, pap,
Speaker 5: He's just scared. And he begs the father to let's
Speaker 5: give him some food to feed him. He's like, please,
Speaker 5: let's just give him something, and the father basically like
Speaker 5: agrees and gives him a can of fruit cocktail and
Speaker 5: the old man's like, what do I have to do
Speaker 5: for it? And he can't even understand that they just
Speaker 5: want to help. They end up like eating a meal
Speaker 5: with him and it's just very beautiful. And it felt
Speaker 5: like holy shit, Like in this question that we're literally
Speaker 5: talking tolves what do we do? What can we do? Uh?
Speaker 5: It was like there's your answer. It's uh, you help
Speaker 5: everybody that you can when you can, and that these
Speaker 5: very basic, small feeling things make sure people have fool
Speaker 5: I mean I you know, I have a very strong
Speaker 5: conviction that truly the meaning of life from a very
Speaker 5: evolutionary and I think spiritual standpoint is to eat delicious
Speaker 5: things and laugh in safety with people that you love.
Speaker 5: And I think everybody could be afforded that and should
Speaker 5: be afforded that in this world. And that feeling of
Speaker 5: like when things are so intense, people are losing their homes,
Speaker 5: like very simple resources like how can you help the
Speaker 5: people around you? And that's where I've come to generally
Speaker 5: over COVID and what the internet has done to us,
Speaker 5: and the sense of helplessness and hopelessness that by focusing
Speaker 5: on like the hundred people around me that I can
Speaker 5: the people in my street, our neighbors, you and Gami
Speaker 5: are close friends, like just doing what you can as
Speaker 5: often as possible. A lot of people are citing I've
Speaker 5: posted about this, and I hear think about all the time.
Speaker 5: They refer to the mister Rogers quote about look for
Speaker 5: the helpers, and I always just think too, like, be
Speaker 5: the helpers, you know, absolutely look for the helpers. Don't
Speaker 5: ignore in the scope of all the bad things we get. Yes,
Speaker 5: look for the good people, but also be the good people.
Speaker 5: That's like really all we can do. And this idea
Speaker 5: from that of carrying the light that like, no matter
Speaker 5: how hellish the world feels, the only solace I've had
Speaker 5: for myself over the pandemic and different things in the
Speaker 5: world feeling darker and darker, And is that every time
Speaker 5: I feel dismayed at the world being the way it is,
Speaker 5: Why is it so mean? Why is it so cruel?
Speaker 5: Why is it so unjust? I think to myself, Well,
Speaker 5: the only thing I can do is try to be
Speaker 5: what I wish it.
Speaker 2: Was, which is the idea also of someone sitting in
Speaker 2: the road being scared of someone else who's scared of them.
Speaker 2: It's that's I feel like everyone's just like a shelter
Speaker 2: dog that's looking for the next blow. And so yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just defense on defense on defense and cruelty on
Speaker 2: cruelty and hoarding, on hoarding and greed, because no one
Speaker 2: feels like other people will have their back, so it's
Speaker 2: just every person for themselves.
Speaker 5: And I think a profound thing about the scene in
Speaker 5: the book is that the fears of the father are justified.
Speaker 5: The fears are legitimate and real. This could be an ambush,
Speaker 5: we could be in danger, we could be fucking idiots
Speaker 5: for stopping to help somebody out. Well, you do it anyway, and.
Speaker 11: That is like, that's I'm sorry, I'm losing my mind.
Speaker 11: But it's a scary, sad time for so many people,
Speaker 11: and it's only going to get scarier. And I think
Speaker 11: we in searching for compasion for ourselves and others. There's
Speaker 11: a lot of totally true stuff out there about.
Speaker 5: Like only do it you can, don't be beaten yourself up,
Speaker 5: don't overextend it, and that is all true. But I
Speaker 5: hope that we're moving to a place where those of
Speaker 5: us who are capable, if you are able to strengthen
Speaker 5: yourself and then do the scary, risky thing of helping
Speaker 5: and offering to help and trying, I think it's like
Speaker 5: that's the only thing that's going to change the world.
Speaker 3: The hell of a twenty twenty five already.
Speaker 5: Dude, the first.
Speaker 4: Fuck.
Speaker 2: And so that's the secret this week is we had
Speaker 2: an a.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 5: The secret is that your husband is becoming terminally mystical
Speaker 5: and you are you have one of the top science
Speaker 5: podcasts in the world, and you are unfortunately married to
Speaker 5: an absolute cook Listen.
Speaker 3: I think trying to find meaning and trying to find well.
Speaker 5: A charred page of a book fell out of the sky.
Speaker 3: Darling, you must have had the words among the ashes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, from one of those meaning books in my life
Speaker 5: about an apocalypse. Also, everyone listening to this should read
Speaker 5: Octavia Butler.
Speaker 3: Oh, Octavia Butler.
Speaker 5: I read The Whole Sewer, Pair of All Sewers, which.
Speaker 2: Which is set a few miles from where we live
Speaker 2: in Alta Dina.
Speaker 5: She literally wrote it in at Altadina, about Altadna about
Speaker 5: this year. Basically there's it features a fascist president who
Speaker 5: make America great again? Is that they is his slogan,
Speaker 5: that's his actual slogan in the book. It's like which
Speaker 5: I think was Reagan's or something like that as well.
Speaker 5: But she is We've been talking about this too, the
Speaker 5: the curse of reading. If you consume literature and history.
Speaker 5: Suddenly you start having these prophetic visions that come true
Speaker 5: all the time because you have accessed and consumed the
Speaker 5: shared wisdom of all the people that came before you.
Speaker 2: Pattern recognition becomes uh like so much more of a
Speaker 2: blow when you have that much more data, Yeah, to correlate.
Speaker 10: Well.
Speaker 5: It also can make you feel very lonely when everyone
Speaker 5: else is like, what are you talking about? What do
Speaker 5: you see?
Speaker 3: Everything's fine?
Speaker 5: Or I don't nobody can has any idea why this
Speaker 5: stuff is going on. Actually you're like, we do, Yeah,
Speaker 5: we could not do it.
Speaker 3: We can say something else to end it on an
Speaker 3: up notte.
Speaker 2: Help who you can, even in small gestures, taking in
Speaker 2: our neighbors packages right now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, checking in with each other. A lot of.
Speaker 3: People there are.
Speaker 2: You don't have to save the entire world yourself. You
Speaker 2: don't have to come up with some gram plan to
Speaker 2: reverse climate change on your own, but you could definitely
Speaker 2: check in on people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, check in on people.
Speaker 2: Offer to lend you got to pickup truck, Offer to
Speaker 2: help someone move something heavy if you can, or lend
Speaker 2: it it. Just stuff like that anyway.
Speaker 5: So much that, yeah, so much, and just be adaptable,
Speaker 5: be flexible, lead with love, carry the light.
Speaker 3: And maybe maybe we're in a simulation and it's getting
Speaker 3: goofy as hell.
Speaker 5: Well, and what I said to you about that, even
Speaker 5: if we're in a simulation, Yeah, the love is still
Speaker 5: loves real.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, thanks for telling the secret.
Speaker 5: Thanks for inviting me on for your secret telling.
Speaker 3: I love you.
Speaker 5: I love your show. Our show, well, our show, yeah,
Speaker 5: our show. Sure, our show.
Speaker 3: Get an emergency kit.
Speaker 5: Actually don't know if that's true. You might have invented
Speaker 5: the show before we were married, so legally, I just
Speaker 5: don't want you to feel weird about that. I think
Speaker 5: of it as your show. I don't think of it
Speaker 5: as our show.
Speaker 3: It's but it's but it's communal property in California.
Speaker 5: Baby, guys, who knows, I don't.
Speaker 3: Know who would get gone.
Speaker 5: Difference isn't you'd be through the rest of your life.
Speaker 5: You're stuck until I'm dead, so.
Speaker 3: Which we never know how long we've got done. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 3: Well that's it for this week.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go sleep because I have a headache,
Speaker 2: And next week fresh episode for you. I'm already mostly
Speaker 2: done with it, but I just couldn't pull it off
Speaker 2: tonight very exciting, Jim Mask.
Speaker 3: Put your o's on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, hey, put your respirator on first.
Speaker 3: I'm doing it. Thanks babes, thank you, love you, love
Speaker 3: you bybe.
Speaker 4: He leaned on his cane and lowered himself into the road,
Speaker 4: where he sat among the ashes with one hand over
Speaker 4: his head.