Life with Fire

For a long time, fire research in the moist forests of the Pacific Northwest was dominated by two main assertions: that wildfires in the West Cascades are typically "high-severity, low frequency" (in other words, primarily characterized by stand-replacing fires that don't happen very often), and that Indigenous burning largely took place in prairies, river valleys and low-lying oak ecosystems. But...

Today's episode is about our favorite topic of all: wildfire information! Guest Noah Baker—the Wildfire, Climate and Community Health Specialist for the City of Flagstaff—guided us through the social science behind communicating about wildfire, the ways in which we need to modernize our communication pathways with the public, and why it has never been more important for wildland firefighters to ta...

Note: This episode was recorded in Spanish and primarily covers the resources and trainings that Manuel Machado and his colleagues at the Oregon State University Extension Program have created for Latine forestry workers. If you know anyone who could benefit from hearing about these programs and resources, please share this episode with them.  En el tercer episodio de nuestra serie sobre la Fuerza...

In the second episode of our Latino Forestry Workforce series, guest host Gaby Eseverri speaks with Manuel Machado, who is the Natural Resource Workforce Program Coordinator for the Oregon State University Extension Program. This episode was made possible with support from Rivershed SPC, and we are immensely grateful for their help in making this series happen.  Manuel works with community-based o...

We all hear a lot about the need to significantly scale up our forest adaptation and resilience work—that is, thinning, replanting, prescribed burning and other tasks that are essential in preparing for and recovering from wildfire. But what's often lost in this conversation is *who* is doing this work, and the future of that—at times, fraught—workforce in the face of increasing ecosystem needs in...

Welcome to our second episode with women and non-binary firefighters who have written books about their experiences working both in fire and on hotshot crews more specifically. Our guest for this episode is HOTSHOT author River Selby (they/them), who spent seven years as a wildland firefighter—four of which were as a hotshot—from 2000 to 2010. They've since gotten their undergrad and MFA (in ficti...

We're bringing you two, count em TWO, episodes with women and non-binary firefighters and writers who have written books about their experiences working both in fire and on hotshot crews more specifically. The first in this short series is with author Kelly Ramsey, whose book WILDFIRE DAYS was released in June. Kelly and I spoke about some of the emotional toll of fighting fire—including the terri...

Welcome to our second episode with THE Stephen Pyne! Stephen is a renowned author and fire historian who, in addition to his academic life, also spent over a decade working on a fire crew on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon early in his career. Given this background, he seemed like quite possibly the perfect person to chat with about the recent Dragon Bravo Fire in Grand Canyon National Park.  Fo...

Welcome to the third and final episode of our Community Wildfire Resilience Series, supported by Fire Aside ! In this episode, we spoke with Butte County Fire Safe Council Executive Director Taylor Nilsson. Butte County, CA has seen more catastrophic fire in the last eight years than most places in the West, possibly even the world. Starting with the Camp Fire in 2018 (85 killed, 14,000 homes lost...

Welcome to the second episode in our series about community-level wildfire resilience, supported by Fire Aside ! We spoke with Fire Aside CEO and co-founder Jason Brooks about how Fire Aside—a home assessment platform that allows agencies to have direct 1:1 engagement with residents on resilience actions they can take—fits into bigger picture policy, data and decision making around community wildf...

Welcome to the first episode in a three-part series about community wildfire resilience, sponsored by Fire Aside .  This episode explores a number of big, meaty topics you've likely been hearing about in the wildfire space, from wildfire insurance to categorical exclusions to NEPA to wildfire resilience policy in the era of urban conflagrations like those in LA this winter. Our fearless leader on...

Today's episode is all about post-fire—how to plan and prepare for post-fire challenges like debris flows and landslides, how to recover at a community and landscape scale, how to maintain a love of place after it's impacted by fire, and how we can reduce suffering in this often dynamic phase of wildfire response and recovery. Our guest on this topic is Collin Haffey, the Post Fire Recovery Progra...

There's been a lot of postulating about whether the firing of some 4400 (and counting) Forest Service and National Park employees on Friday will have an impact on fire operations this summer. We spoke with Riva Duncan, who has decades of experience in fire operations for the US Forest Service (before retiring with the agency), and her answer couldn't be more clear: yes, these losses in capacity ar...

In our sixth and final episode of the Fire in the Southwest Series—sponsored by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Arizona Wildfire Initiative—we explore the complex, multicultural fire histories and management dynamics in New Mexico, with Deputy State Forester and Tribal Liaison Lindsey Quam. New Mexico's recent relationship with fire has been fraught with distrust in the aftermath of...

For our fifth episode of the the Fire in the Southwest Series, we're talking managed wildfires, which has a number of alter egos depending on who you talk to in the wildfire world, some of which include "wildland fire use" or "managing wildfires for resource benefit". Dr. Jose "Pepe" Iniguez , a research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, is our fearless leader on this journey throu...

If you've found yourself wondering "where the heck is the aircraft?" while watching a fire burn near you, this is the episode for you. Guest Matt Lynde—a helicopter operations specialist for the Forest Service's Regional Office in California—gave us a run-down on why some fires have huge airshows and others have almost none, and even tackled a few common misconceptions about the use of aircraft in...

With fire season escalating across the West this week, many people are downloading Watch Duty App for the first time. But what is Watch Duty all about? Why was it created? Where does their information come from? What do agency employees think about it? We spoke to Watch Duty CEO John Mills about the Watch Duty app as well as fire technology more broadly, and gave him a chance to respond to some li...

Welcome to episode four of our Fire in the Southwest Series, supported by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium as well as the Arizona Wildfire Initiative ! Today's guest, Zander Evans, is the executive director of the Forest Stewards Guild , which has a mission of promoting ecologically-, economically-, and socially-responsible forestry as a means of sustaining the integrity of forest ecosystems...

Welcome to our third episode of our Fire in the Southwest series! In this episode, we spoke with Jon Martin, who is the Director of Native American Forest and Rangeland Management Programming at the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University. Jon spent three decades working in forestry before retiring, and now uses his extensive interagency background to find pathways that can...

What is it like to watch vegetation type-conversion in real time? How are invasive grasses changing the ecology of the desert and broader Southwest? What's being done to protect and restore Southwest ponderosa pine forests?  This episode with Tonto National Forest fire ecologist Mary Lata dives into the fire regimes of the Southwest, how they're changing by the year, how invasive grasses are influ...

Welcome to the first part of our six-episode series all about the Southwest, sponsored by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Arizona Wildfire Initiative! In this episode, which is serving as an introduction to the series, we spoke with Mary Stuever, who is the Cimarron District Forester for New Mexico Forestry Division. Mary has a breadth of experience across disciplines in the fire wor...

The long-awaited beaver episode! In this episode, we learn about how beavers are not only champions of wildfire resilience but are also sleeper endurance athletes (climbing mountains to find new watersheds), dedicated anti-capitalists (not giving a **** about the regulatory or material concerns of humans), expert engineers (casually restoring entire watersheds) and pretty handy companions to have...

Today's episode is a special one. We collaborated with the Montana Media Lab —a program of the University of Montana's School of Journalism—to help support their winter "Youth Voices" workshop, which empowers young rural and Indigenous storytellers to learn more about audio storytelling while sharing stories from their communities. This episode features five stories from high school students in Br...

In this episode, we had a chance to sit down with author John Vaillant, who recently published a new book about the 2016 Fort McMurray fires in Northern Alberta. The book, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, is an in-depth exploration of the fires, which released in June 2023. We not only spoke about his reporting process in the aftermath of a catastrophic wildfire, but we also touched...

In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Jessica McCarty—the branch chief for the Biospheric Sciences branch at NASA's Ames Research Center—about her career, her work on fire in boreal and arctic ecosystems (within the context of the Canadian wildfires last summer), her perspectives on fire technology (spoiler: she's a big fan of predictive modeling) and so many other topics that we couldn't possibly li...