Life with Fire

In this episode, we talk to Annie Schmidt, who works for the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network. Through her position at the Fire Adapted network, Annie has committed herself to helping communities build their fire-resiliency and, quite literally, learn to better live with fire. Annie offers some great perspective on how and why fire prevention work should be prioritized just as much as fir...

On this episode, guest Nick Nauslar—a fire meteorologist at the National Interagency Fire Center—explains what contributed to the so-called "Labor Day Firestorm," that devastated the Northwest and Northern California on the week of September 6. Nick discussed all the factors that made this conflagration so historic, and also discussed how climate change—which took a lot of the blame in national me...

In this episode, we talk with renowned author John Maclean about the decades he's spent investigating and writing about fatality wildfires in the West, as well as his latest project, a book about hotshot history and the Yarnell Hill Fire. We also touched on the influence his father—Norman Maclean, the preeminent voice of wildfire fatalities with his book Young Men and Fire—had on his early writing...

If you’ve ever worked in fire, there’s a good chance a few of Stephen Pyne’s fire books were laying around the station or office where you worked. Pyne is without a doubt the foremost expert of fire history in the US—in this episode we spoke about his concept of a “pyrocene,” about the evolution of fire management in the US since the Big Burns of 1910, and about how we can prepare to live in lands...

Lenya Quinn-Davidson has committed her career to changing the ways we think about prescribed fire. She also started the Women in Prescribed Fire Training Exchange program, or WTREX, which empowers women and people of color to gain experience as firefighters, mentors and leaders in fire management through the use of prescribed fire. We spoke about the importance of diversity in the fire world, and...

Jeremy Bailey is a prescribed fire manager with the Nature Conservancy, and the brains behind the Prescribed Fire Training Exchange or TREX. On this episode, we talk about his inspiration for starting the TREX program, about how firefighters, homeowners, Indigenous peoples and communities have used prescribed fire to manage the landscapes around them, and about how prescribed fire is a critical to...