Once again: the world is on fire. As wildfires burn across Canada and their smoke pours down the continent, we thought it would be a good time to encore these Fire Ecology episodes. First, Dr. Gavin Jones brings the heat talking about what fire is, how hot it burns, fire trends, tinderboxes, lots and lots of forest fire flim-flam, tolerant wombats, Angelina Jolie movies, cunning pine cones, thick bark, Indigenous fire stewardship and more. 

Then join co-host of the podcast Good Fire, Dr. Amy Christianson, to learn about how cultural burns and prescribed blazes can create healthy forests. She also discusses Indigenous history, collaborations between Western science & First Nations elders, Aboriginal thoughts on cultural burns, more flim-flam, evacuations, snowmelt, hunting strategies, land stewardship, happy trees, climate strategies, and the social science behind wildfire education. Also learning from Native wildfire fighters. Huge thanks to her and Matt Kristoff -- who also hosts the Your Forest Podcast -- for allowing us to use excerpts from their interview to launch Good Fire. Subscribe to both podcasts to get more ecological knowledge in your ears.

Oh, hey, so it's your partner who insisted on buying respirators during COVID who isn't gloating at all.

They're just glad that we have them when we need them.

Allie Ward here with a rather smoky encore.

It's a mega episode because the time has never been righter to explain what is happening over North America.

So we have a really good episode about scallops in the pike coming for you that we have been working so hard, you're gonna have to wait a couple more days for it.

But with the current situation, We thought we'd bring back these super hot fire ecology episodes to your attention if you're like what's going on over there Let me tell you a quick rundown.

What is happening currently on the continent of North America?

So the Canadian emergency preparedness minister Bill Blair said as of Wednesday this week 414 wildfires were burning in Canada with 239 of them out of control.

As of today, Wednesday, June 7th, Toronto has the third worst air quality in the world and New York City has the second worst dealing with the same smoke from all these Canadian fires Delhi India, I regret to inform you that you are the winner of this terrible contest, but right now North America isn't just sporting bizarre Hellish landscapes with smoky orange glowing skies that you may have been seeing posted all over social media.

It's also a real health hazard, especially after 3 years of a pandemic that involves respiratory infections.

So if you are being affected by the smoke at all, pay attention to your local authorities for up-to-date health alerts, as have been issued from New York to the Carolinas and as far west as Minnesota, according to the New York Times, where health officials are recommending that residents with health risks stay indoors and keep the windows closed.

The CDC has a bunch of recommendations about dealing with the smoke, which we'll link in the show notes for this episode.

But in case you can't stay indoors, hopefully with an air filter running, we thought we'd highlight what the CDC has to say about masks.

Quote, don't rely on dust masks for protection.

Paper, comfort, or dust masks commonly found in hardware stores trap large particles such as sawdust, but these masks will not protect you or your lungs from smoke.

So an N95 mask, properly worn, will offer some protection.

So bust out those N95s if you are somewhere with smoke right now.

Also speaking of health, another reason why I'm running this mega episode is I've been dealing with some health stuff and I will talk about it in this mega secret at the end of this mega episode if you care, if you make it all the way there, but take care of yourselves and please enjoy this mega encore double feature of fire ecology and indigenous fire ecology.

Oh, hey, it's the pair of sunglasses that you leave in the car that's scratched.

It's not your favorite, but it's better than nothing in a pinch.

Allie Ward, back with a piping hot episode of ologies.

It's top of mind for a lot of us out here, up here in the Northern hemisphere, especially toward the West of the continent, wildfires.

Fire ecology, blazing infernos, apocalyptic nightmares.

This ologist, so spesh, got his bachelor's in zoology, a master's in wildlife ecology, and a PhD in wildlife ecology statistics, all from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

He is currently a wildlife and terrestrial ecosystems research ecologist, such a mouthful.

He's a research scientist at the US Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, also an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico.

He has been published on papers about fire refuges for wildlife, where they hide out, mega fires, habitat loss.

He's also just casually the editor at the Association of Fire Ecology.

So I have been following him online for a while.

I reached out to casually ask him about pyrology versus fire ecology.

And before I knew it, I was begging him to talk to me.

Well, fires were raging in the West this week and I was in a muggy Florida hotel room for work and it smelled like a turtle tank.

But before we dive into the conversation, I wanna thank everyone at patreon.com slash ologies.

It costs a dollar a month to join and then you can submit questions to theologists.

Thank you to everyone listening and making us the number 1 podcast in the science category on Spotify.

And thank you for leaving reviews on Apple Podcasts to get us seen by other people.

I truly read them all because I desperately want to make a show that does not suck.

And to prove it, I'm going to read you a still glowing coal of assessment from Bert Lancaster, who wrote, ologies is your cynicism antidote.

I simultaneously feel beautifully tiny and so expansive that I could burst after listening.

Sometimes I just have to stand there and laugh to myself for a while.

Burt Lancaster, get a hanky because your internet dad right here loves you right back.

Okay, everyone who left a review, I read it.

Open your ears for info on what fire is, how hot it burns, fire trends, tinderboxes, lots and lots of forest fire flim flam, tolerant wombats, Angelina Jolie movies, cunning pine cones, thick bark, tragic koalas, indigenous fire stewardship, and more with researcher, scientist of the woods, desert dweller, owl cuddler, employee, optimist, and fire ecologist, Dr.

Yes, Gavin Jones, and my pronouns are he, him.

That's right, in the great city of Albuquerque.

So when the trees grow, they don't grow very tall.

And now, tell me how a fire ecologist from Wisconsin and Florida, and now New Mexico, how did your life path lead to fire ecology?

I do consider myself a fire ecologist, but I was really trained and I did my graduate work and all my studies in wildlife ecology.

And when I was in grad school, I was doing some research out in the Sierra Nevada in California on the cutest, cuddliest creature there is, the California spotted owl.

And yeah, like pretty much Anybody who spends enough time doing science out in fire-prone lands like the Sierra Nevada, you eventually become a fire ecologist because a fire happens, and then you have to try to figure out what to do with it.

I was at the University of Wisconsin with my supervisor, Zach Peery.

We were doing a study out in California on spotted owls, trying to figure out what kind of forests they used, how they would respond to climate change.

Just as I was finishing my master's degree, just a month or 2 before I defended my degree, a big fire burned through our study area.

At the time, to be honest with you, I was pretty devastated.

I was like, man, what does this mean for the work that I've been doing?

It changed the game a little bit, but it provided an incredible opportunity to learn about how these animals, this owl that I was studying, responded to fire.

This fire burned through our study area in 2014 and it burned through about half of it.

And so you know in ecology when we're doing these field studies we rarely get the chance to do experiments.

Like almost everything we do is observational.

We go out and we see what we see and we record it and we try to make sense of it.

We rarely get to do experiments like, you know, other folks get to do in the lab who are doing chemistry or other molecular things.

But this was really a natural experiment to see how this species of owl responded to fire.

And that's what launched me into, I guess, being a real sucker for fire and for learning about how it works in some of these systems, why it happens, how it happens, what its consequences are, and I'm totally hooked now.

Like what percentage of the impacted area, half of your study area?

So some of them didn't make it, some of them dispersed.

Some of them left the fire, they were able to get out of the way.

And then there's large parts of the fire that didn't burn so severely, that burned at lower severity, where basically a lot of the trees, the big trees in the in the canopy, they kind of you know they survived and some of the understory burned a little bit more of what we what we call quote-unquote good fire in some of these areas, which I'd love to talk more about.

But a lot of those birds did great and are still persisting in some of those areas that experienced lower severity fire, those lower severity effects to the forest.

But predictably, many bit the proverbial dust and returned to the earth as ash.

Gavin told me that 1 of his colleagues was surveying the charred land and found a little aluminum owl leg band that they use for tagging and it encased a little crispy owl leg.

So that particular wildfire, that was a human started fire.

It's some guy, I'm trying to remember the details.

But some guy was, I think, taking a video for his ex-girlfriend or something and lit some house on fire.

And then that started this gigantic, it was like at the time, 1 of the largest fires that had burned in the state of California.

So this was 2014's King Fire and it started in Pollock Pines in the Sierra Nevadas.

And I already knew of this fire because My parents lived in Pollock Pines in 2014, and my sisters and I had to plead with them to heed the emergency evacuation orders as pyrocumulus clouds billowed over their hill.

So I booked my mom and dad a hotel in Reno out of harm's way.

And the hotel turned out to have a mirrored ceiling and a very thrifty but sensual vibe, they tell me.

I get the feeling that there were also hourly rates available at this hotel.

It was an emergency Anyway, the king fire that reduced homes to ashes and dashed people's dreams It flambayed gavin's owls It was all started by a guy named Wayne Huntsman, who was not a Huntsman, but an arsonist, a formerly incarcerated firefighter, actually, who that sweltering September day had set several fires to impress a pair or more.

He took video for her standing between 2 small smoldering blazes that were just starting to take off.

I'm not sure how their relationship turned out, but as proof that we're living in a simulation, the burn area, the burn scar is absolutely shaped like a perfect 97, 000 acre dick and balls all ablaze in 1 of the state's most infamous literal thirst traps.

Okay, so how much is our horny, greedy species to blame?

And that's another thing is a lot of the ignitions are human ignitions.

You know, people accidentally starting fires, machinery getting too hot, people driving over dry grass and things like that.

So Gavin says that 80 to 90% of all wildfires are human caused ignitions.

Half of California's largest fires in the last century happened in the past 5 years.

By the way, a complex fire means a cluster of related fires in 1 area.

But what's the difference between a wildfire and a forest fire?

We talk about wildfires typically when we're talking about wildfires, those are unplanned.

So you can kind of juxtapose that with a prescribed fire or a cultural fire.

So prescribed fire is often fire that is purposely set and then managed by teams to achieve some type of objective.

Maybe they're trying to restore some area, restore fire.

You know, you probably hear a lot about people burning prairies and things like that.

And then there's also a really important component of cultural burning.

So indigenous communities using wildfire for their purposes, which until, you know, about

years ago, made up the overwhelming majority of the fire activity that was happening in a lot of these areas.

For, you know, the last 10, 000 years or so, indigenous peoples have been using fire in a really important cultural way.

And that has really changed in the past couple of centuries with colonization but that is an increasingly important part of the solution to sort of this modern wildfire problem.

And obviously indigenous cultures and just the planet at large saw the benefit of prescribed burns.

So what good do fires do either in prescribed burns or just in nature?

I mean, fires are a critical piece of ecosystems around the world.

Every square inch of land that has vegetation has some type of fire regime.

It has some sort of natural fire cycle and Fire is kind of a restorative process.

There's many benefits of fire from, we can think about it from a human perspective, we can think about it from a sort of an ecosystem perspective.

You know, from the human perspective, you know, fires create more resilient forests when they burn the right way.

When we have sort of a natural kind of lower intensity fire in some systems, like in the Sierra Nevada where I've spent a lot of my time, that reinforces healthy water supplies.

Side note, a fire regime sounds like Satan's cabinet members farting flames in a Hades boardroom, but it's actually just a gentle term.

A fire regime describes a pattern of fire.

How frequent, how intense, what kind of fuel it gobbles.

And maybe me just calling it Satan's cabinet members, farting in Hades, maybe that's part of the root of Europeans' fear of fire, and thus this historical fire suppression by colonists.

I wondered this and I begged myself not to Google it because this aside would be like 45 minutes long, but snap, I found a 2015 paper from the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, title, Fire in the Mind, Changing Understandings of Fire in Western Civilization.

In which author Stephen Jay Parn writes, you ready for this?

Quote, the Old Testament is in fact a cauldron of stories, rights, and beliefs simmering over a mix of religious fires.

He goes on to say, the heartland of European forestry knew fire only as a human artifact, not a natural process.

Most new and colonized lands were burned lands, naturally, but the agencies found themselves in a continuous firefight.

So fire became a political as well as practical challenge.

He continues, The upshot has generally been disastrous.

Okay, so what does the land miss out on when natural fire is suppressed and indigenous populations are fined, imprisoned, or even up until the 1930s in the US, shot for fire stewardship.

Well, from an ecology standpoint, those fires can help the water supply by eliminating excess vegetation and thus increasing runoff into streams.

And by preventing huge fires with more frequent smaller ones.

Also erosion doesn't get out of control when there are regular fires like you see with post-megafire mudslides.

Also, the charcoal after a burn could trap carbon for millennia, and the recovery of vegetation takes more excess carbon from the atmosphere, according to the 2019 paper, How Wildfires Trap Carbon for Centuries to Millennia.

Okay, But wildfires burn at 800 degrees Celsius.

So the animals hate natural and cultural burns too, right?

No animal wants to be trapped in a blaze.

But I'm just gonna stop myself from singing about the circle of life in your ears.

And then from an ecosystem perspective and from what I like to think about a lot is the biodiversity perspective.

So what kinds of animals there are and the richness of animal life and plant life.

Fires create this template for wildlife and plants to thrive.

And also, it creates this natural dynamic where you have places that burn in 1 year and then don't burn for a while, and places that burn frequently, and places that burn at high severity and low severity, you can think about it as this patchwork, this mosaic of different ages of forests that burned at different times.

That creates a really diverse landscape that generates the habitat for lots of critters.

It can be a really regenerative and restorative process to the land, both from an ecosystem perspective and also really fire is a necessary part of these systems.

And so when we can put the right kind of fire on the landscape, it really benefits us too as people and as a society.

So fire mosaic paints a beautiful picture of land in different states of recovery.

And If you're looking to learn more about it, don't Google fire mosaic unless you want to see a lot of tiling crafts that seem to be an homage to Burning Man.

So Let's talk different flavors of fire, because it does matter.

So you can think this is a really overly simplistic way to think about fire, because fire is a really complicated process.

But The way that we often sort of describe it and think about it within fire ecology world is we think about natural low severity fire regimes.

You know, in a given area, you might expect fires to sort of burn a lower severity, not too hot, not too all-consuming.

They burn along in the understory nice and happy, crawl along and burn some logs here, burn some trees there, but generally don't destroy or consume the big trees in the overstory of the canopy.

So that first end of the system, that's kind of frequent, low severity fires.

And then on the other end of the whole spectrum, you can think about infrequent, high severity fires, or fire regimes, rather.

So these are places in that area is for fires when they do burn to burn pretty big and pretty hot.

But they're natural in those different places.

And so why is it why is it that you have some places that naturally burn low severity, and generally I'm talking about forest fires here, and then other places, other forests that naturally burn at really high severity and really large, we can think about those 2 ends of the spectrum, also in terms of what's limiting the system.

So in these low severity fire systems, those are generally systems that are limited by fuel.

And so what I mean by that is that the climate is such that on any given year, the conditions are right for fire, Like if there's a lightning strike or another ignition, fire is going to burn and the fuel is dry.

And the only thing that's keeping that fire, 1 of the primary things that's controlling that fire and where it burns is where the fuel is, where the trees are, where the kindling, so to speak, is.

And because those fires, those places, they ignite every year, there's ignitions all the time, and the conditions are right for fire, they burn really frequently.

And so you can think about places where the fires burn every couple of years.

And when they do burn, they kind of clean out or burn in that understory.

So sort of below the forest canopy, it's burning the smaller trees, it's burning some of the medium trees, and It's burning some of the big trees, but mostly it just, every time a fire burns, it burns all that fine fuel or a lot of it.

And so that's the primary sort of control on how fire burns in some of these dry fuel limited systems.

So in these areas, the way it's supposed to be is that fires don't get mega because blazes are more frequent.

So burning all of the fallen wood and the understory, so an excess of fuel doesn't build up.

So that's 1 way that these giant devastating fires can be avoided.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have these climate limited systems.

So rather than the system being limited by fuel, it's limited by climate.

And so this is a place like the Pacific Northwest, where it's really wet, right?

It's generally wet, most of the time, it's cool.

But when those ignitions occur, the fuel is not really ready to burn.

And maybe it burns a small fire or something like that, but it just kind of extinguishes itself.

And you think about that system, those kind of areas.

And when you end up getting those really big, infrequent, severe fires that occur there, it's because there's been some sort of climate activity, like a drought, that's caused all that fuel that hasn't burned in a really long time to dry out.

And when it does burn, it burns really big because there's tons of fuel available.

And so those are, that's kind of the 2 ends of the spectrum.

And you know, I was trying to think about this today.

How do I describe that, that like spectrum in a way that's not so dry and academic.

And I was thinking about like, okay, like the haircut that I get is like a frequent fire system.

You know, I go to great clips or sport clips or whatever, just down the street from me and I get my haircut every few weeks, maybe every month.

It kind of maintains the general structure.

I just kind of keep it tamed, so to speak.

I clean out sort of the growth, right, that's happened in between each cut.

And on the other end of the spectrum, you could have somebody, and I did this once when I was in college, I think, maybe right after college, you know, grow out your hair super duper long.

Like I didn't cut it for, I don't remember exactly how long it was, but let's say you grow your hair for a year or 5 years or something, you know.

Get some pretty floppy, pretty crazy hair, at least if you got hair like me.

That's kind of the, I don't know, you kind of think about that as the 2 ends of the spectrum, right?

You've got like your frequent haircut system and you've got your infrequent high severity haircut system where you know you just let it grow and then you cut it all off.

Okay, so in this analogy, the regular maintenance cuts are the low intensity fires, the ones that burn the undergrowth, that don't spread too far, or that extinguish themselves because there's enough moisture to keep things from being straight bone dry powder keg kindling.

But if those small fires don't happen or if the fire resistant older trees are logged out or if the climate is just super hot, then you get a situation that's much more dramatic.

So, that term, I would say that's a good way to think about it.

Yeah, from the long main to the buzz cut.

The term mega fire is a really interesting term and it really doesn't have a great definition.

A lot of people when they talk about megafires, they're thinking about these basically really big fires, just fires that are giant in size.

But you can have a really large fire that doesn't necessarily create that forest buzz cut, right?

It doesn't necessarily kill all the trees within its path.

It may kill some trees in some parts, but not throughout the whole fire.

So a forest mullet, maybe, but not the cool kind that Gen Z has.

The warning, my cousin will probably hit on your wife kind of mullet.

You can have really large fires that are not necessarily super damaging.

You can have smaller fires that are pretty severe and intense and destroy a lot of what's there in terms of the forests.

There isn't really a single definition of megafires.

A lot of people like to think about them in terms of their impact to society too.

So it's not just like how big or severe they are in terms of how many trees they kill.

But it's, you know, how much that fire influences people and, you know, how much of the infrastructure it destroys.

And there's a growing problem within the US and particularly the Western US, which right now as you know, is experiencing quite a bit of fire activity.

There's a lot more people living in that interface, what we call the wildland urban interface or the WUI.

So yes, the US Forest Service defines the wildland urban interface as quote, a group of home and other structures with basic infrastructure and services within or adjacent to federal land.

That is an at risk community, aka all the cute cabins that you save on Pinterest when you should be working on a spreadsheet for your boss because you just want to get away for the weekend but go to someplace that still has coffee shops.

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Fire Ecology (WILDFIRES & INDIGENOUS FIRE MANAGEMENT) Mega Encore with Gavin Jones & Amy Christianson