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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. Is it the apocalypse?

Maybe. Stay tuned. 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. So we hopped onto chat.

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. Sometimes I cry.

Emotions are weird. Love you, Dad Ward. Burt Lancaster, get a hanky because your internet dad right here loves you right back. Okay, everyone who left a review, I read it. I love you also.

Okay. All right. Let's fire off some questions. Yeah? Okay.

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. Gavin Jones.

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

Got it. And you are currently in New Mexico?

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

Do you guys have trees there?

You know, we do, yes. It's pretty much desert out here. 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?

Oh my goodness. It was really an accident. 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.

So that's exactly what happened. I was doing my master's degree. 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.

Oh! Yeah. 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? Does this even mean anything anymore?

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. It was basically a natural experiment. 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.

How many of your owls were latered? How many of the owls survived that? 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. Did not go well for that 1. And how did that wildfire start?

So that particular wildfire, that was a human started fire. And it's actually a kind of a sad story. It's some guy, I'm trying to remember the details. You should look this up, Allie. 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.

Okay, buckle up. Here's a story. 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. We're like, please get to safety.

I'm sweating a lot. Don't make me come up there. I can't. The roads are closed. 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. I got them I didn't read the reviews. Okay. 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? Oh, man.

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 fires that we as people don't plan. 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. It's the same thing in forests. They go in and do prescribed burns. 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

100, 200

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?

Yeah, that's such a good question. 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. It reduces erosion.

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.

What? 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. That's 1472 Fahrenheit, America. 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. But look up the official term. It's patch mosaic burning. 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. And those are both natural. 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. There's maybe quite a few ignitions.

But when those ignitions occur, the fuel is not really ready to burn. It's too wet. 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 then it burns. And when it does burn, it burns really big because there's tons of fuel available. Right? 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. Okay. 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.

It never kind of goes super long. I never buzz it super short either. I just kind of keep it tamed, so to speak. I go in there frequently. 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. And then you say, I'm gonna buzz it. And so then you buzz it right off.

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. I take it. And is that like long main to buzz cut? Is that what a mega fire is then?

Yeah. 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. Not ideal.

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. Yeah, 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. So more and more folks ditched the cities in the pandemic for these type of living situations and might be getting their very first tastes of PSPS, which are public safety power shutoffs, when utility companies straight up cut power for a day, maybe a few weeks when winds are high, in case otherwise live downed wires ignite the forest. Realtors might not tell you about that until after you're done with escrow. Wowee indeed.

The wildland urban interface is kind of this intermingling of people and the forest, right, where they kind of overlap a little bit. And there's a lot more people living there now than there was 10, 20 years ago. And so you can think about fires just generally having more of a mega impact on people now, because we're just more vulnerable in some ways to those fire effects when those fires do burn through.

And now as we're speaking, the Dixie Fire is the 1 of the largest fires California has ever seen. There's the, is it the Bootleg Fire up in Oregon?

Yeah, in Southern Oregon, that's right.

So I'm surprised you were able to even talk to me right now. Can you tell me a little bit about what your job entails? Do you have, Is the busy season all year round because you're analyzing data that comes in? Or do you have to go to the field a lot? Are you getting reports from people who are closer to each of the fires?

Do you have to count all the fires? All of that.

Yeah, yeah. So I am not 1 of the incredible people who are out on the front lines doing this work on the fires, right? My work is really more focused on after a fire burns, what can we learn from it? And there are also a ton of people, of course, who are out there responding to these fires, like the Dixie Fire and the Bootleg Fire and many others when those are burning. And those are the people who really deserve the applause and praise, right, who are out there doing this really dangerous work.

And I'm, relatively speaking, I'm a desk jockey compared to those people. So I spend a lot of my time here at the computer trying to take that data and learn from the fires and trying to understand how wildlife respond to those fires. That's what I do most of the time. This last year, COVID year, has definitely made things even more so away from the field. But boy, I love fieldwork.

I've done quite a bit of it. I love getting out into those burned landscapes and trying to figure out what's going on.

What is it like when you are doing fieldwork? What kind of samples do you have to collect? And what kinds of observations are you making?

Yeah, so a lot of the work that I've done has focused on how this 1 little critter, that spotted owl, responds to these burned areas, these fires that have come through. And so myself and some of my really outstanding colleagues, both back from when I was in grad school that I established during my PhD program, some of those collaborators back at University of Wisconsin, as well as some of my fantastic teammates here at the Rocky Mountain Research Station with the U.S. Forest Service, we've done quite a bit of work trying to understand how this bird, this spotted owl, responds to fires. We've gone out and spent quite a bit of time in these burned areas capturing owls and putting GPS tags on them to see where they move in these burned areas to see if they if they like them or if they're using them. We literally go out into the woods and hoot at them, Allie.

Oh, do you really?

We really do. It's, you walk into the woods where you think there's going to be an owl and you just start hooting with your mouth. Just do it. And they hoot back because they're like, Hey, who the heck is that?

Oh my gosh. And then are you able to count them based on who hoots?

Pretty much. Yeah. So we call them callback surveys. So we're calling and they call back. And that's how we locate them.

And oftentimes we're just interested in detecting them. So, okay, there's an owl here, there's an owl there, sort of establishing where they are across the landscape.

Did I look this up? Of course. And please enjoy the absolute maestro of this art, Sierra Pacific Industries, Wildlife Biologist, Kevin Roberts.

What I like to do when I'm surveying for spotted owls and using my voice is kind of mix them all up and do something to the effect of...

Thank you. Kevin, we beg you to make a ringtone. Is it too much to ask? You can only answer that in owl hoots. But anyway, that is how you do a Jim Carrey level impersonation of spotted owls.

But a lot of the work I've done is focused on capturing those owls once we find them and putting little GPS tags on them and seeing where they go. And then we get that data and we see where they went and we try to figure out, okay, how are they interacting with some of those burned areas? What can we learn from that about what type of fire they like, what kind of forest they like, and how we might be able to manage the forests in a way that supports them.

And how is fire ecology changing with the climate, with droughts? Why do droughts even happen? Is the water that would normally rain here raining somewhere else? Where is the water?

So, okay, so again, this is something that much smarter people would have a much better answer for. But I will say that something that is for certain is that we are entering into uncharted territory with fire and fire ecology and fire behavior. And 1 of my good colleagues at University of California, Merced, Leroy Westerling, has said many, many times to me, and I've seen him write about this too, there is no more normal in terms of fire. There's not even a new normal. It's a new abnormal.

It's becoming really difficult to predict what's going to happen in the future because we don't have a reference point anymore. We're sort of just going into uncharted territory. And so you know, when it comes to drought and climate change and things like that, look, those are definitely a part of the equation in terms of what's going on with wildfire and what's going to happen, particularly climate change and how that interacts with forests and drives out fuels and things like that. Sometimes it's hard to just talk about drought and climate change for many reasons, because it's hard as like a scientist who's interested in conservation, what can I do about that? I don't mean to sound like not holistic, we can't do anything about it because we can.

We absolutely can. It's never too late to make actions on those big problems like climate change. But I have the honor to work for this agency, the US Forest Service, that is in charge of managing a ton of land. And so what can we do on the ground to make a difference in terms of how these fires burn? And considering climate change, that plays a role.

It plays a really important role. And so does drought in terms of driving some of these wildfire patterns that we've seen. But there's also something to be said for how forests are managed, and how flammable forests are and how we can potentially manage them in a way that tries to mitigate those worst effects of fire when they do come through. So it's really like you are going to hear people say, oh, you know, these fires are just because of climate change. There's nothing we can do about it.

And then you're going to hear people say, Oh, climate change has nothing to do with it. It's we just need to manage for us differently. And the reality is it's neither of those. It's it's kind of both right. It's both climate change and you know, the forest and the patterns of fuels across the landscape are affecting how fires burn.

As a research scientist with the Forest Service, I'm thinking about how can I do science that informs how we manage forests? And that's 1 of the coolest parts about my job is that I work for an agency that has a really strong management component. You know, a huge part of the agency is people out there doing this work, you know, managing forests, coming up with forest plans and management plans and fire plans. And I get to do science that helps them figure out how to do that. And we work together in a collaborative way to figure that out.

And that is where I think I like focusing on those solutions. How can we press the levers and make a difference from the ground.

Is the leading theory on that is just more and better prescribed burns, or is it humans stop living in the woods for

a while?

Like What is the best tool you have?

Yes, so that is a great question. And I think this is a misconception that if humans just got out of the picture, it would all be better. I think it's easy to think that way. Like, oh, we're just the problem and humans suck and we just need to get out of the picture and nature will do its own thing and blah, blah, blah. And look, I understand that perspective.

I'm sensitive to it, but we have to remember indigenous peoples have been burning for 10, 000 years. And we need more fire on the landscape, not less. It's just what kind of fire burns. This is kind of crazy to think about, but especially given you looking at these maps, I've got the New York times wildfire tracker open here. I got another tracker on my desktop open as well.

Like with all these big fires burning, you're thinking like, man, there's just gotta be so much more fire now than there ever was.

Yeah, that's what I would think.

Yeah. That's totally what you would think. But that's actually not the case. There's still less fire in the West in Western North America than there was many, many years ago,

100, 200, 300, 500, 000

years ago.

But they were smaller back then. Is that the thing?

So they just burned differently. I'll bring you through a little bit of a time warp. So we often in Western science delineate sort of this pre-colonial era. And in the pre-European or pre-colonial era, There was a lot of fire in the West. I mean, these are flammable landscapes and they never really got put out, right?

All these ignitions would just burn. And vast areas of the landscape would burn all the time, depending again on what kind of system you're in, right? So these frequent fire systems would burn very frequently. Every couple years, you'd have fires kind of returning to the same areas. Then when settlers, white settlers colonized and pretty much disrupted indigenous burning and began actively suppressing wildfires, the amount of fire in the landscape just dropped to almost nothing.

We were very effective at suppressing fires for a long time in the western US. And basically what's happened is only recently have we sort of lost our handle on our ability to put out fires. The level of activity that we're seeing now is still far less than the level of fire activity that used to burn. But the difference is that because in many of these forests, and particularly in these frequent fire forests, or these dry forest systems that used to burn really frequently, they haven't burned in a century or more. And so when they do burn, they burn really hot and really big, and that's not a natural kind of fire for this system.

And also, along with that, we have a lot more people, again, kind of living in those fire prone areas. And so we feel the effects a lot more, as well as the population has increased. And so we still have way, way less fire activity on the landscape. It's just that These fires are typically burning in a way that is for those forests unnatural and for society really not acceptable. The other crazy thing is that we actually have in some areas, particularly again these sort of historically frequent fire systems, we have a lot more trees too than we used to have.

Oh, how

is that?

Yeah, which like it goes right along with that fire suppression. So we put out fires for 100 years or more. And all those little shrubs and saplings that would have burned in those regular fires grew up to be big, you know, medium-sized trees.

More trees? Isn't that good? Well, It's kind of like a garage that we have failed to Marie Kondo for a long time, which I'll be honest is my garage. Got to clear some stuff out. I'm talking to myself.

And so we have actually a lot more trees on the landscape now in a place like the Sierra Nevada where I've spent a lot of my career doing this research than we used to. It's just like the kinds of fires are different. The kinds of trees are different. We have a lot more smaller trees

and

medium-sized trees and a lot fewer of those really giant old trees, which are really kind of an endangered species sort of in and of themselves. Because over the past 100 years or so, particularly pre-1980s, there was quite a bit of large tree logging going all the way back to the early 1900s and late 1800s. So a lot of those big old trees were removed. A lot of those smaller trees grew up with that fire suppression. And now we just have a ton of smaller trees on the landscape.

And that, again, is kind of feeding back into why we have fires that are burning differently. Because these fires are burning through these pretty thick, well-connected forests that historically just didn't look like that at all.

So forests look and behave much differently now than they were for tens of thousands of years because of colonial human tinkering. Don't you want to know all about indigenous fire stewardship now and cultural burns? So do I. And did I, hours before this podcast episode went up, decide to feverishly book an indigenous fire scientist to talk to me for next week, I did. So stay tuned.

I just thought I'd plant that expectation for you. And what about the effect of fire on seeds opening and certain plants saying like, sweet, there was just a fire, now's my time to shine. Like are ashes good for certain types of botany?

So, okay. 1 of my colleagues, Jen Stevens, he's with the Forest Service as well now. He's done some really awesome work looking at tree adaptations to fire and fire regimes. But 1 of the most common examples of how trees are adapted to fire is, particularly when thinking about seeds, is serotiny.

S-E-R-O-T-I-N-Y.

So serotiny is this trait that some trees have, not all trees, but some trees have this basically waxy kind of resin that encompasses their cones and their seeds. And they only open when fires burn because the fire melts that wax off of their seeds and the seeds drop and then the tree's able to regenerate. And typically, or at least in many cases, in some cases that I know of, those trees require a really severe fire to release its seed.

Okay. So serotinous means later or following, and it is not to be confused with sertaline, which is the generic form of Zoloft, which I googled wrong. So according to nationalforest.org, serotinous cones with full mature seeds can just chill out closed up on a pine tree like a jack pine or a table mountain pine for years until a fire sweeps through and the resin melts and then the seed confetti party time happens. So this is also, side note, how indoor fire sprinklers work. They're not reliant on smoke, but on heat of over 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

So there's a little glass capsule in fire sprinklers and it's filled with glycerin and that heats up and bursts and opens the sprinkler valve. And apparently they open individually wherever it's hottest, not all at once like in the movies. I'm looking at you, Lethal Weapon 4, The Incredibles, and Charlie's Angels and Mean Girls and Casino Royale and Kindergarten Cop and The Peanuts Movie and all the other ones that I'm gonna link on my website because I found someone with a YouTube channel who is very pissed about the sprinkler myth. Anyway, heat, seeds disperse, it's natural.

And so some trees have adapted that trait. And in other cases, trees have really thick bark. And this is the case for many of the trees in these frequent fire systems that experience fires all the time on a, you know, 5, 10 year cycle or, you know, in that range, trees have really thick bark because they need to survive that frequent heat and disturbance from fire. There's really remarkable adaptations that plants have to fire. Also increasingly, we're trying to learn about animal adaptations to fire.

Typically, we think about these in terms of behavioral adaptations. So like how do animals interact with either fire itself or the post-fire landscape in a way that tells us a little bit about, it kind of opens the book on their evolution, how they evolved.

So what are the spotty owls like? It turns out small patches of high intensity fires, which were more common in pre-colonial times. Spotty Owls are like me at a cocktail party, just waiting for a tray of egg rolls to roll past. Now in scientific terms, this is called a sit and wait predator.

And the owls like to sit on the edge, on that green edge, and hunt into that smaller patch of open forest where it can see little, you know, critters run across and it has a better flight path and that sort of thing, while also concealing itself from its predator like the great horned owl. So that's just 1 example that I've been involved in, but we generally expect, you know, not only plants to have these adaptations, but also animals to potentially have these behavioral adaptations too.

Oh, that's so interesting. Also, I didn't realize that owls had drama between them. You would think they'd be like, I'm an owl, you're an owl. Let's make this happen, you know?

No, it's so true. There is totally drama. And 1 of my mentors and colleagues, his name's Rocky Gutierrez, he's done some work looking at owl communities and trying to figure out how owls can coexist in space. There's a lot of drama out there in the album.

So much. Speaking of drama, have you seen the acclaimed dramatic film Those Who Wish Me Dead, starring Angelina Jolie, who is a person who lives in a fire tower?

No, I have not. Well, well, well.

If you like fires and people being miscast, you will love those who wish me dead.

That's that's my main genre of movie that I like. Wonderful. Miscasting. Yeah, that's great.

If you like to watch a movie in the entire time, picture someone else playing the lead role. You will love Those Who Wish Me Dead. She is absolutely gorgeous. She's a stunner. I love her acting.

I don't know why they cast her in this movie. It seemed so weird.

Why'd they put you in a fire tower?

Well, I'm just lucky, I guess. Anyway, those who wish me dead. Just so much forest fire and a lot of just breathing through smoke that seems like it should be thicker. But you can smell this movie. Listen, there are a lot of actors that are suited for certain types of cinematic environments, okay?

Oh, but if you watch it, Medina Senghor is so good at it that I just looked up her name and then I followed her on Instagram. So some beautiful creatures are more well suited to some roles and environments. That's all. What about the term pyrodiversity? Is that a real word?

Oh, Ali, I'm so glad you asked that question. I am street smart and book smart. Yes, so pyrodiversity is something that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about in recent years. It's kind of a fun buzzword, you know? Like, ooh, pyrodiversity, like what does that even mean?

Someone made that up and it's probably because, well, somebody did make it up. It basically is another way to think about this fire mosaic that we were talking about earlier. The term pyrodiversity sort of emerged alongside this idea that pyrodiversity gives rise to biodiversity. So basically that the more different kinds of fire that we have on the landscape, the more different kinds of severities, the different fire ages, basically the greater mixture of different types of fire characteristics that are in a landscape is going to lead to greater biodiversity, which means more species, basically. So you have more kinds of wildlife, more kinds of plants, etc.

More kinds of bees, more kinds of bats, more kinds of birds, etc. Because you have all sorts of different kinds of habitat for them that's been produced by fire.

Ah, okay. That makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's an important idea, because it, it really kind of underlies this important role of fire In these cases with, you know, the Dixie Fire and the Bootleg Fire, these fires that are really, like, destructive to human infrastructure and also, you know, to people's lives. I mean, this is really serious stuff that is sad and it's hard to watch. But on the other side of the coin, we do need fire on the landscape, right? We just, we need a different kind of fire.

We don't wanna see more, you know, of the destructive fires that are out there. We want to see good fire. And what I mean by good fire is really kind of like this pyrodiversity idea where we have a really nice mixture of fire that kind of restores. It cleans out the understory in some places. It kills some trees.

It disrupts the system a little bit. Some disruption is good. And you create that really sort of wide-ranging variety of habitats for different critters to live. And that also supports all sorts of other great things like water quantity and quality. It reduces runoff.

It reinforces the resilience of ecosystems and forests. So like, fire is so good. And it's like, we want that good kind of fire. It's really such a restorative thing. And it's just pyrodiversity kind of encompasses this idea of like that beautiful mosaic on the landscape that is always changing.

It's not just static. It's always changing, always being renewed. That's the idea of pyrodiversity.

Aha, Can I blaze through a lightning round?

Yes.

Pardon the pun, even though I'm not sorry. Okay. And before your questions, we donate to a cause each episode and as a Forest Service employee Gavin can't directly endorse anything in particular so it was my pick this week and a donation will be going to the Common Good Community Foundation. They have established a matching fund to assist all local communities impacted by the Dixie Fire. And all donations will be distributed to Plumas County agencies involved in directly assisting communities and individuals most affected by the fire.

More info is up at commongoodplumas.org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. OK, let's tend to your smoldering curiosities. Great question from Nicole DG, Marie, Charlotte Felkegaard, Megan McLean, Daniel Kim, Liz Gross, Eden Sunshine, Talia Dunyak. Nicole Kleinman also asked, in Nicole's words, what happens to wildlife when there's a fire?

Daniel Kim wants to know, are there any animals that have adapted to survive forest fires? And Nicole asks, do they all leave or are some able to hide or survive in a sneaky way?

Oh, that's so great. This is a great question. So I don't know if I can do a super quick answer to this because I'm going to be too excited about it. But yeah, so how do wildlife respond to wildfire? So here's the thing.

It really depends. And that's like the greatest, you know, scientific smoke and mirrors. Like, hey, it depends. But it really does. Some species like fire.

Some don't. And it also depends on what kind of fire it is, you know, if it's really severe or mild. So for example, there's 1 species that some of my awesome colleagues have worked on. It's called the black-backed woodpecker. Many people think of it as a poster child of severely burned forest because it really needs these patches of totally killed trees.

It depends on the insects that live in those recently killed trees. It needs those severely burned forests. Several years after those those fires burn and those trees are killed, it's no longer good habitat. Like it's really kind of this short-term thing. They flock to these really severely burned places, they totally thrive, and then they are out of there and on to the next fire.

So some critters love that, others not so much. So the spotted owl, the species that I spent a lot of time studying, it is really kind of more of an old forest obligate. It doesn't love that severely burned stuff quite as much. So basically there are winners and losers. That's the answer is it's never as simple.

It's never as simple as you make it. It's not just all animals are gonna die or leave when a fire burns. No, some of them are gonna do great and some of them are not. That's like part of the beauty of studying this stuff is like trying to figure out why. Why do some animals love and some don't?

The world is so complex and amazing. It's like really fun to try to figure that out. And then in terms of where animals go, some animals can escape fires, you know, fly out of the way, run out of the way. I always think of Bambi in the movie. All the animals are parading out of the forest.

I don't want to ruin Bambi for anybody. But some animals can evade fire. Even flying critters cannot always fly away from fast moving fires. Some animals will burrow under the ground and wait for the fire to pass and then come back out, which is totally crazy. Yeah, It's nuts.

Ooh, okay. Burrowing critters, hiding from fires. My heart burst into flames. So which animals burrow? All right.

Some Australian possums hide out in tree hollows. Snakes hightail it down a burrow, but wombats also hit the basement during bushfires. And there were a bunch of internet rumors going around last year that they invite and usher other critters in. These rumors spread like wildfire, but they are flim-flam. They actually just tolerate other animals hiding out in their wombat doomsday bunkers.

But same with gopher tortoises in the US. And to hear all about that, you can amble slowly over to the Testudonology episode with wonderful tortoise scientist, Amanda Hipps. Now what about rebel birds?

There are other creatures. There's fire hawks and they're down in Australia and they will actually like pick up burning branches and drop them to burn other parts of their habitat so that they can catch their prey.

I have heard of these and it sounds so devious, but they even will get together and wait for rodents to run out.

That's wild. That's just wild. Yeah, there's winners and losers. Like there's such a variety of animals that respond in different ways to fire. And that's just the coolest thing.

And that's, that's 1 of the reasons why pyrodiversity going back to pyrodiversity is thought to promote biodiversity, because the more kind of variety of fire you have, the more different kinds of animals that are going to benefit from that variety, right. So, you know, if you have sort of your forest that was killed by trees next to a forest that is totally green and old and, you know, decaying, almost, we have this big mosaic of different kinds of forests that burn at different times, that's going to support all kinds of different critters. So it's a cool thing.

Now that's a good thing. And several people, Rebecca Weinsettl, India Lind, Nicole Kleinman, Jesse Hurlburt want to know, can I really prevent forest fires? Rebecca asks, or is this just another example of a giant corporation trying to voice responsibility onto individuals? Nicole wants to know, was Smokey the Bear more helpful or harmful to forests? What do you think about Smokey the Bear?

Okay, what liberty to say?

I, I think Smokey the Bear is super cute. I will say that we absolutely can prevent forest fires, not all of them. And we necessarily not necessarily should prevent all of them. When we think about prescribed fires, right? Like we do want to put some fire on the landscape.

But as I mentioned before, a giant majority, like

87%,

between 80, 90%. Humans cause 87% of all wildfire occurrences annually within the Western US. Like that's crazy. That's a big number. Yeah.

And a lot of those, you can go look this up. There's this, a couple studies out there that have shown, you know, these gigantic spikes of fire activity on the 4th of July every year. Oh! Like, we absolutely play a role in ignitions. A very small percentage of all of the ignitions result in those really big, big fires.

Of course, many of the fires that ignite don't burn everything up. But we absolutely, as people can be careful about how we burn, I think that Smokey the Bear is just misunderstood. Okay. You know, like, because it's true, you know, we, we as people, like we absolutely do start fires, We start unintended, unplanned fires that sometimes result in really devastating circumstances. There's sort of this perception that all fire is bad among some people.

And maybe, I don't know if Smokey the Bear is associated with that or not, but all fire is not bad. Fire is so important and the reason why some fire is really bad right now and particularly because we haven't had the kind of fire on the landscape that is natural in a lot of these systems.

So a lot of patrons looking at you, Michael Davis, Peter, Ashley Herbal, Sebastian Pepinot, first time question askers, Carla Jerez and Ada Smith, Chandra Mason, Bennett Gerber, they all essentially asked, what do we do? Should firefighting teams approach it more strategically, Like let it burn 25 miles over here, but let's stop it here. Or at this point, like, what do we even do?

Yeah, so that is such a difficult and vexing question that much smarter people than me are like thinking really, really hard about. So I don't want to make any like really poorly informed statements about how firefighters should be doing their job because they're doing an incredible job. But I'll say that generally, there's many times when fires are burning and there's a decision made to let the fire burn on its own for a little while when it's deemed to be safe, right? So, especially in areas where there's not as many people in kind of more wilderness type areas, because fires can do some of that work for us to restore the natural structure of a system. So fires can be really restorative, especially in those cases when we think it's gonna burn in a quote unquote healthy way or a natural way, and there aren't people who are in danger.

So that's kind of the idea of those managed wildfires. You know, when wildfires burn, we're kind of trying to manage them as opposed to just put them out or suppress them.

And From Smokey the Bear, let's move on to goats. Ashley Mitten and Leanna Schuster literally both started their questions. Goats, both of them. Please tell us about how goats are used to help reduce fire risk in areas with excess vegetation. And Ashley says, I mean, a few hours and they chewed down most of the pasture.

Can goats save us?

Man, I wish goats could just save us. That would be so great. Just hand it all over to them. I'm sure they've got it figured out. No, but I actually don't know about goats being used in wildfire management.

That could just be my naivety. So I'll punt that 1.

OK. All right, goats. I tried to rent some for my hillside about 2 years ago, and it was a minimum, sadly, of 5 acres. And I had just moved in, and it was too soon to ask my neighbors if they wanted to go in on a goat herd with me. I didn't wanna come on so strong.

But there are businesses like GoatsRUs.com that'll rent them out. I thought this was a pretty common practice, hiring goats to eat your overgrown grass, because when I was in high school in Northern California, a lot of neighbors did that. And then I read the FAQ on goatsrus.com and what? This business started in the tiny town I went to high school in, around the time I was in high school. Holy literal smokes.

As far as coincidences go, it's the greatest of all time. Okay. So this next smoky query was asked by plenty of folks, including patrons, Hannah, Aussie, Alana Wood, firefighter supporter, Lizzie Martinez, Charlie Kakamo, first time question asker, Ashley Martinez, Nina Eve, Zininger, Asmatic, Ada Smith, Joseph, and Katie Coast. Let's see, Dylan McGuire says, I live in Eastern Washington where smoke has become the fifth season. When will we have the giant forest rakes mentioned by Donald Trump?

And they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and

do we need to rake the forest?

So you know, this is, I think, again, this is this is just a misunderstanding. So going back to smoke, this is a real problem, right? We don't like being exposed to smoke. You remember, I'm sure, I don't know, Allie, if this happened where you were. I think this was up in the Bay Area.

Yeah. Last year, you probably remember seeing all over social media those pictures of San Francisco being just like orange. It was like some scene from Blade Runner or something. The problem with smoke is that it's going to be there. It's going to happen.

If we're living in a system that has fire and where we need to have fire, we're gonna also have smoke. That's just a part of it, right? Where there's fire, there's smoke. The real important question is, how do we want our smoke? Ha ha.

You know, and that's how some people are trying to think about this problem of smoke, because it is a real serious public health problem, right? With these sort of unplanned big quote unquote mega fires that happen, we all of a sudden get a ton of smoke. We didn't know it was coming. It disrupts our lives and puts us at risk. And there's a lot of smoke, right, that happens just this past week or 2.

I saw people on Twitter out on the East Coast saying that they were getting some smoke from some of the wildfires in the West. That kind of unpredictable nature is, I think, for many people, not desirable. And so the idea is, if we can use more prescribed and planned fires, and more cultural and indigenous fires, where we know when the smoke is coming, it's a lower amount. It's like, you know, less smoke in general is coming our way at any given time, but maybe a little more often. You know, those are kind of the 2 options, right?

We can either sort of have our smoke in big pulses when we don't know it's coming, or we can try to make it a little more predictable.

It seems like the where's and the why's are important here.

That's exactly right.

For sure.

Yes.

What about Maria Shirov Leva wants to know underground wildfires? I understand how they start, but how do they keep going? How is there enough oxygen for some to last for years? How deep do they go? Jeremiah Miller says what's the strangest place there's been a wildfire?

They're underground?

Yeah, some fires do burn underground. It's kind of crazy. What? How? So 1 of the interesting kind of related phenomenon that I have witnessed is sometimes in these areas that have recently burned you come across a gigantic hole in the ground like just a giant hole there's you know tree there's trees around you And then there's just a gigantic hole in the ground.

Okay.

When I started doing this work in these post-fire landscapes, I was like, what in the heck is going on here? And I started asking around, and these are basically trees that have burned and kept burning and smoldering and smoldering. And the smoldering fire continued down through their root system, underground, throughout the whole root system, and maybe they'll even pop up somewhere else, like, you know, a little ways away, where the root kind of pops back up onto the ground. And basically, these are like gigantic casts for trees, right? Like where the tree and its roots used to be.

So fires can absolutely burn in a subterranean way. I've seen some of these sort of root holes following fire, which is just kind of wild to see.

It is wild to see. And I know because I just watched a ton of videos of smoldering, flickering root systems. They can burn for weeks, months, maybe even through a whole season. And the fire will just pop up somewhere else. Also, somewhere in Pennsylvania, there is an abandoned Centralia coal mine that's been on fire since 1962.

And experts say there's enough fuel to just keep it burning for 250 years. No 1 knows what to do. They just all left town, except for 5 people who still live there. They're like, we're not going anywhere. Like, that's cool.

But yes, fires, underground, flames, flames, breathing, heaving. Oh man, I didn't even know that was possible. I would not have thought that. That is bananas. Some of y'all, patrons Lizzie Marr, Bushfire asker Brandy Harbaugh, first time question asker, long time lurker, Adriana Alfaro, want to know what can we expect the normal amount of wildfires to be?

Is there a normal? They all want to know numerically, how much worse are big wildfires going to get? Give us numbers. We need numbers.

So, you know, if you look at how fires have changed in the last 30, 40 years, we have seen a lot more fire activity now than we did 10, 15, 20 years ago, and 30, 40 years ago. So 1 of my colleagues I just mentioned a moment ago, his name is Sean Parks with US Forest Service and 1 of his colleagues, they put out a study recently showing that between 1985 and

2017,

there was an 8 fold increase in area that burned at high severity on an annual basis in the western US.

8 fold.

So there is certainly a lot more large fires now and there's also when those those fires are burning more severely now than they did 35 or so years ago, 3540 years ago. But that's like the sort of small scale context. But then if you zoom back out, and look at sort of the whole context of the last several thousand years, we are seeing less fire now than we did way back when. It's a different kind of fire that's burning, right? That's not necessarily natural in some of these systems.

And then also we are, we are experiencing more of the effects of fire than we ever have as humans. So the negative effects because we're living in these fire prone areas where for a long time it was somewhat safe to live, right? Because fires weren't burning that much for the last hundred years in a lot of these areas because we're pretty good at putting them out. But now that those fires are burning more severely and more intensely and we're living there and we have the news to cover it all the time, yeah, we certainly are hearing about it more. Right.

And it is having a serious impact on people, as you know. You know, there's all sorts of really tragic stories of these fires burning through towns. And 1 of those towns, just, you know, the Dixie Fire, I believe, burned through Greenville, California, in the last day or 2. And that's an incredibly tragic thing to have happened. And right, like, we are living in a world that's really different now.

Right. I know it's kind of like top of mind for everyone. I feel like when you say, I live in California, people ask you like, is your city on fire? And you're like, I don't know, let me check Twitter.

I just I just texted 1 of my friends who lives in California. Like, are you guys? Where are you? Are you okay? Are

you burning?

Yeah. So yeah. Literally beepity beep beep like this just in. According to an NPR report that dropped about an hour ago, the US Forest Service just announced that wildfires will be aggressively extinguished this summer and all the preventative controlled burns are suspended. Apparently fire season is predicted to be so bad they can't spare any of the thousands of firefighters on the ground to go do prescribed burns.

Kind of like not being able to go to bed because you have a paper due, but then you can't finish the paper because you're too tired. Something's got to change. Tune in next week for more on that. Now on the topic of heavy hearts amid blazing wildfires. Is there anything that is the most difficult thing about being a fire ecologist?

I mean, I already, the idea of like a charred owl leg is going to hurt my heart until the day I die, but anything that is just really frustrating or difficult for you?

I would say that 1 of the frustrating things is just how difficult this problem is. It's just such a big problem. And sometimes it's hard to sort of feel like we can get out of it. I like to call myself a reckless optimist. For me, the glass is not half full.

It's like, oh my God, it's almost overflowing. We can do this, you guys. We can totally do this. This is such a difficult problem. It seems like we're facing the same problems every year.

But I think that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And that light has to do with getting more of that good fire on the landscape. And that's something that I know is a priority for the agency I work for, the US Forest Service, and trying to restore the resiliency of these forests. And I think like what I, the sort of nugget of goodness that I try to take is that we, as you know, at least on my side, the science side of this agency, We have this incredible opportunity to learn about fires, why they burn, how they burn, what their consequences are, and what we can do about it. And we get to work with the managers and the people who are, again, out doing that stuff on the ground.

We've got our hands on some of the levers. We can make a positive impact and we can make a change in, you know, how these fires are burning, even as we're thinking about, you know, these bigger problems like climate change. We can put our fingers on the lever a little bit. And so there's a huge opportunity in the coming decades to make a big difference in sort of the next century of fire.

Yeah, how do you think an average Joe like myself sitting around biting my nails at the news, what can we do?

You know, I would say follow Smokey the Bear's advice. So we'll put him on the pedestal for a minute and say, just, you know, watch out for yourself and make sure that you are not contributing to any of the problems with, you know, these unplanned ignitions and fires. That's 1 thing you can do. So maybe try to avoid explosive gender reveal parties. That's good.

Probably not do that. Don't be throwing your cigarettes out and don't drive your car or anything on dry grass and things like that, you know, like There's there's little little things like that you can do But this is a big problem and it takes both sort of individuals to make sure they're you know Not starting these these unplanned fires, but also these big sort of institutional actions and management to fight this problem. So it's, you know, I would say don't bite your nails down to the bone. Just make sure you're not the 1 who's starting that fire.

Okay, Good to know. Don't start any fires. Don't try to impress any ex-girlfriends.

Yes. Don't do that. By starting a fire. They're not going to be impressed.

Not going to be impressed. The gender reveal party couple who started a fire last year in November, were charged with manslaughter for a firefighter's death. And that lovelorn arsonist of the 2014 King Fire sentenced 20 years in prison and ordered to somehow pay $60 million to victims of the crime. So imagine what you could do with $60 million in 20 years of your life. Yeah, think twice before doing any horned up fire tomfoolery.

Just get him a cupcake or something with 1 candle.

Get him a cupcake. Do that. Don't be on the news. What about your favorite thing about fire ecology? Is it putting puzzles together?

Is it being out in the field?

I would say my favorite part about being a fire ecologist is similar to my favorite part about being a scientist, which is just that we, it's the world is infinitely more complex than we think it is. And I learn new things every day about what's going on with these fires and how animals are responding. My preconceptions are always just kind of blown out of the water whenever I start digging into this stuff. So it's just such a wonderfully rich world out there and fire is such a critical part of of that whole system. And so being able to step into that complexity and try and just use my little, you know, pick to chip away at 1 corner of that, you know, vast unknown, the world of fire ecology is just the greatest honor and pleasure.

I've got 3 little kids and, you know, when I sit down at my computer and start clacking away every day, I'm partly thinking like, what can I do to make this world better than when I came into it? And, you know, sometimes it may seem that my little corner of the world is insignificant. But yeah, I like to think that, that me and all my wonderful colleagues within my agency and outside of it as well, working in this area, we're all pulling in the same direction. We're trying to, you know, make this world a better place as well and get that good fire back on the landscape and try and, yeah, change the game a little bit.

I love it. I appreciate it so much. I'm glad that you are not currently in the middle of a fire.

Me too.

Thank you for talking to me during obviously a very, very busy time for fire folks.

It's been my pleasure. Absolutely.

So yes, fire off your birding questions to the coolest nerds out there. That is what we do. And stay tuned for a special follow-up episode next week. Cross your fingers I can make it happen. Anyway, learn more about Dr.

Gavin Jones by following him on Twitter at Ecology of Gavin. We are on there also at Ologies and I'm on there as Allie Ward with 1 L, same handles on Instagram. Come be our friends. Feel free to support the show for a dollar a month if you like it at patreon.com slash ologies. Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com.

Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast, You Are That for managing merch. Thank you, Aaron Talbert for adminning the ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Emily White of the Wordery for making the transcripts. Caleb Patton bleeps them and those are all available for free at the link in the show notes. Every other Thursday, we also release new Smologies.

They are edited down, short, clean, classroom-friendly versions of your favorite episodes. Thank you to Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas of Mindjammed Media for editing those. Big thanks to Kelly Dwyer for website design. If you need a website, she's your gal. Link in the show notes to her.

Thanks Noelle Dilworth and Susan Hale for keeping the schedules running and for social media quizzes and Merge Monday posts, thank you to Main Squeeze and Hot As Hell editor, Jarrett Sleeper of Mind Gem Media for putting it all together. And of course, long time editing help, Stephen Ray Morris of the podcast, The Per Cast and see Jurassic right. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. He's in a band called Islands. They have a new album out, Isla Mania.

And if you listen to the end, you know I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is sometimes if I need a brain break, I'll go on Craigslist and I'll just click the free section to see what people are giving away so you could see things that people just put up that are free and I just sometimes like to look and see what people are getting rid of and then I try to figure out like what a life story is for that. Like why is this person giving away like a ballerina statue? What's up with this wheelbarrow? Let's look at a couple right now if you want to.

Okay. Okay. Let's see what's up there. Oh, there's 2 guinea pigs and it just says need gone. Damn, that is the meanest way to give away a guinea pig.

Now I just want to get these guinea pigs. I have 10 guinea pigs needed for pickup. I can no longer take care of them and will have to release them if I cannot find anyone to pick them up. Yikes, if anyone needs guinea pigs in LA. I didn't mean to make that so sad.

A vintage artist portfolio case. Did they quit being an artist? I don't know, I hope not. Oh, here's a 6 foot pine ladder. I don't need 1, but it's fun to look.

Lot of free pianos on here. Again, I don't want or need these things, but sometimes it's just nice to wonder, how'd that person get the piano in the first place? And why don't they play it anymore? Anyway, I love when people, uh, I love when people spare things from landfills and other people get things for free. What can I say?

Ooh, tap shoes. Okay, bye-bye. So how could we have avoided all of that, you're asking? Please enjoy indigenous fire ecology. Oh, it's so good.

Pass it on. Oh, hey, it's that incense that reminds you of freshman year so much that you can only smell it sometimes because you don't want the nostalgia to fade. Alley Ward, back with a follow-up as promised episode of Ologies that serves as a companion piece to last week's fire ecology episode. So perhaps listen to that 1 first, Come here for more context or don't. Ultimately, none of my beeswax.

Okay, so just a little behind the scenes on this one's format. Format is a little different than what you're used to. I spoke with this ologist while she was up in the wilderness of Canada on vacation and the internet was spotty. So the first 10 minutes or so, it's not the finest quality audio we've ever had on Ologies, but we did our best. And then she sent some standalone recordings answering more questions.

And then after the break, we're featuring excerpts from her own Indigenous Fire Ecology podcast, Good Fire with Matt Kristof, making this a real community effort and a fire mosaic episode indeed. So this ologist got her master's and PhD in hazard management and fire science and works as a fire social scientist for the Canadian Forest Service. She is a Métis woman from Treaty 6 territory on land now known as Canada and has authored papers such as Social Science Research on Indigenous Wildfire Management in the 21st Century and Future Research Needs. So she is well-schooled on this. And then I saw she has a podcast called Good Fire, recorded with Matt Kristoff, who also hosts the Your Forest podcast.

So, this ologist was on vacation. I desperately wanted to chat with her the 1 week she was trying to relax, but she luckily was very up to take a little break and chat amid spotty internet and some tech diffs. Huge thanks to Matt for getting us in touch and for lending us excerpts from Your Forest and Good Fire to Future. Also, thank you to everyone at patreon.com slash ologies for making this show possible. This episode was informed by the questions you left about indigenous fire stewardship.

And thanks to everyone who rates and reviews podcasts, it matters more than you will ever know. And I read them all so I can prove it with a fresh shout out for 1 left this week, such as Sarah I.B. Who wrote, I started listening to this podcast and got to the gynecological episode and decided to make my first OBGYN appointment after turns out I have endometrial cancer. I had a hysterectomy and I'm currently doing radiation therapy. Thank you, Dad for this informative podcast.

Sarah, what? What? Sending you the biggest, biggest hugs and the best vibes for a speedy defeat of that. And thank you for getting checked out. Okay, onward to the episode.

Etymology is simple. Indigenous means native. Fire has a root meaning fire. And ecology, the study of where we live. So we'll be covering cultural burns, drip torches, forest debris, healthy trees, the legality of Indigenous fire stewardship, fighting fires with strategy, napping on the fire line, evacuations, and more with fire scientist, advocate, podcast host, Canadian Forest Service employee, scholar, and Indigenous fire ecologist, Dr.

Amy Christensen.

Yeah, no problem at all. It's great to have so much attention on this topic as well.

Oh, it's wonderful, wonderful to have you. So now are you at the top of a mountain right now trying to get cell service?

No, I'm actually at my parents' cabin, but they do not have great internet. But does it sound okay?

Yeah, it sounds great so far.

Literally they're at like the very north end of a lake called Shuswap Lake. And currently we're actually surrounded by 3 fires as well.

Oh my gosh. And is that an area that you're pretty familiar with? Has your family been there for a long time?

Yeah, my parents have this cabin that we've had in our family, I think, for about 30 years now.

Have you seen a change at all in how the summers go in terms of, say, being surrounded by fire?

So the area that we're in is actually kind of a rainforest area. We always kind of jokingly refer to it as that. And we used to get so much rain out here in the summer. In probably the last 10 years, we've noticed it's been getting warmer in this area and we've been getting less rain and even the cedars are really starting to not look as healthy. And then the last probably 5 years, we've had more summers of smoke.

So it's really been, yeah, I've really noticed a change just even in my lifetime.

And how long have you been studying fire? How long had you been a fire scientist?

I grew up in Northern Alberta. There's always kind of fires around my family. Although we didn't kind of have the connection, we were disconnected from cultural burning practices, but my family was kind of always, you know, a bit involved in fire, and my husband's a wildland firefighter, And yeah, just growing up, it seemed like kind of a normal thing in the north. And when I moved down south to an urban center, that was when I really realized, you know, that other people didn't have that or, you know, weren't so used to that. I guess I started actually as a geologist but I always loved hazards but more volcanic hazards and things that I was interested in.

So I did 2 years actually in New Zealand where I did my master's on volcanic hazard management but you know I always kind of feel like bound to the forest in Alberta. So I ended up kind of coming back and I even said to my PhD supervisor, like, you know, I'll study anything but fire, you know, I don't want to have fire in my life because I just, you know, was around it all the time and wanted something different. But yeah, kind of slowly got pulled back into the field. And yeah, I've been at the Canadian Forest Service now for about 10 years.

Just when I thought I was out, They pulled me back in.

Oh my God. What is your work like? And have you grown to appreciate it at all? Or are you still like, ah, fire. Here we are again, you and me, fire.

Yeah, no, I think, Yeah, it's kind of 1 of those things you have to realize that maybe you're just like, I don't know, I don't want to say destined to be, but I think that living in the North, it's just, I think that you have that experience with fire and seeing it around you. And that's 1 thing I always find interesting is when I meet other fire scientists who aren't from areas that experience fire. And I think sometimes it may be hard for them to relate, especially when we're talking about fire risk and kind of how people act during a fire event.

So 1 of Dr. Christensen's areas of research and work is studying evacuations. So when to leave your home with just a few possessions and your life for what might be the last time. And it's something that she says, fire scientists who haven't grown up around fire and had to themselves evacuate might not understand. And if you listened to last week's episode, I mentioned that my parents lived in the remote Sierra Nevadas for years and coercing them to evacuate during the King Fire was not easy, even with the promise of a night or 2 at the Fantasy Inn with a mirrored ceiling.

When I first started at the Canadian Forest Service, there was like no interest really in Indigenous fire management or cultural burning practices or Indigenous firefighters. So I would say it was like a very lonely kind of first 5 or 6 years. And so most of my colleagues are actually international folks, so mainly folks from actually California and Australia who are in this field as well. But I think pretty much since we've started having the big fire events in Canada, that's really what's forced people to kind of look at maybe a different way of looking at fire on the landscape. My interest in fire is also tied to my own family's history.

So my family's Métis, so we're from Northern Alberta, the Cardinal and Lavakin families, and we kind of had a weird kind of disconnection from culture, which most Métis families in Canada actually experience during colonization. And so it's basically, we weren't allowed to practice any of our traditions and other things. It's interesting to me because it almost parallels fire in a way. So When settlers first came to Canada, 1 of the first things that they brought with them was actually fire suppression. And as they moved kind of west across Canada, they basically just put into place fire suppression policies wherever they went.

The big reason for that was that they saw the forest as this wilderness, as this kind of natural place. But really now we know, like, and lots of scientific studies now are pointing out that that wasn't natural. Like, many of those areas were actually stewarded by Indigenous people to look that way. Actually, the first fire suppression campaign was in 1610 in Newfoundland in Canada, where that was like kind of the first, you know, enactment of, you know, thou shalt not light fires on the landscape.

Amy says that she's from northern Alberta and there were only 2 fire rangers for the entire province.

So even though they had like a fire suppression policy, you know, those guys couldn't be everywhere obviously. So there was still a lot of cultural burning that went on. So I would say that where I'm from it really only kind of stopped or halted around the 60s or the 70s where fire really stopped being allowed on the landscape in the north. And what we've seen with that you know is just a massive increase in fuel loading and also kind of these like monoculture forests where the stands are, you know, all 1 species, like all similar age, and they're really vulnerable to pests or to other disturbances like fire. And so we're getting these massive, big fire events that have come through.

And so for Indigenous people, you know, like my family and others, they, my family were actually buffalo hunters and they used fire in the buffalo hunt, but also afterwards to improve the habitat for buffalo and other things that to help them in their hunting. When the settlers started coming across and saying like, no you can't do this, like you don't know as much as us, like you know It really devalued Indigenous people and their knowledge. And then when you add into that, we had residential schools in Canada where Indigenous people were sent there and basically told that they were savages, that their way of knowing their family, of knowing the earth wasn't proper, and that they had to learn this new way that was much better. So we, like my colleague Faisal Mulla, he was telling me that they called that a cultural severance activity, where basically you're just told that you know suddenly you know you cannot practice your culture anymore and so the impacts of that are just massive on people not only on like you know their ability to use fire but also just on who they are as a person, their pride in their family and other things.

And so I too, like even now, I still have a lot of anger about that and you know how I wasn't able to learn from my elders about landscape stewardship and other things because of that, you know, like kind of dominant Western worldview.

Do you know or has there been research into how much of that knowledge is lost?

Yeah, so actually Henry Lewis, who is a researcher, he actually started in California, but then was at the University of Alberta.

Dr. Henry T. Lewis, aka Hank, was an anthropology professor at the University of Alberta and was 1 of the first researchers to really document Indigenous fire stewardship and its role in shaping the landscape. And he wrote the paper, A Time for Burning. It was published in 1982 and a PDF to it is linked on my site.

It's typewritten on a typewriter, it's wild, and it details all of the different biomes and how indigenous cultures shaped them with fire. And if you're like, no reading, need visuals, he also made a 16 millimeter documentary titled, The Fires of Spring.

All of this was managed by people who had developed a complex technology of fire to assure a continued successful adjustment to the northern boreal forest.

Somehow, this ended up on YouTube. Hank, God.

He went up and worked with the woodland Cree and Dene people in northern Alberta, so actually kind of where my family's from as well. And what he was saying was in the 1970s when he did his work that he thought that between 90 and 95 percent of that knowledge had been lost. So I mean that was now like it's hard to believe it almost 50 years ago right when that was happening. So for me like I often hear people say in meetings like, you know, oh well Indigenous knowledge is inapplicable to today and cultural burning practices because you know now we have climate change, like now there's more values on the landscape in terms of thinking about structures and other things, but I always argue against that because for me like it's not about like it Indigenous people like we're alive today, we're part of society, like we see all these things like Indigenous people are on the front lines of climate change. Like, of course, we know that that's occurring.

And, you know, Indigenous knowledge, the most beautiful thing about it is how adaptable it is to the local environment. So, like, for, like, because, you know, you're living in that environment, you're dependent on it.

Okay, so Amy's internet cut out again. So we tried a new way of recording just via the phone and her laptop and it sounds much better, which is great. So clear, in fact, you may even be able to discern the pitter patter of children's footsteps on the cabin stairs as her family vacationed around her. Hi, maybe this will work. I can hear you great.

At home, it's funny because I have a pretty good setup with a podcasting microphone and headphones. And of course, I'm like, oh, it's this week when I'm gone. But no worries.

But where were we? Yes, that indigenous fire knowledge is starting to get more attention as climate change worsens and larger fires erupt. And as a fire scientist, what is her workday like?

Sure, yeah. So with my job with the CFS, most fire research scientists, I say, kind of do the same thing. So we have our research projects that we run or that we're a part of. So a lot of my day is actually kind of meeting about research and other things that are going on. So really similar to like, you know, an academic researcher from a university.

But then as well, we also kind of have the policy or the government side. So I sit on a lot of like national or international committees or working groups, you know, looking at fire and trying to direct policy. We just recently in Canada finished the blueprint for wildland fire science for 2019 to 2029. So looking at topics that we should really be spending money basically in time doing research on. And 1 of those, the themes from that was actually on Indigenous fires.

We also have an evacuation database actually with the Canadian Forest Service where we've tracked wildfire evacuations in Canada since

1980.

During the summer, that's 1 thing is that we have like lots of our staff working on that, doing data entry into it. Yeah, it's a big job this summer. Like in 2020, I think we only had 20 different evacuations in Canada, but this year I

think we're already at 125 different evacuation events. So it's a huge job. So this blueprint for a wildland fire science in Canada 2019 to 2029 outlines in its own words a business case to increase investment in Wildland Fire Science. And it is 57 pages, really great strategies covering themes like understanding fire in a changing world, recognizing indigenous knowledge, and enhancing knowledge exchange mechanisms to improve the ways in which wildland fire science and technology are shared, understood, and implemented. So Amy's team had been working on that.

And for the curious, I will link to the full PDF on my website. Now, as far as the increasing evacuations, that issue gets more personal as this episode unfolds, even more personal than my parents in an hourly motel in Reno. And this is something I think a lot of people have trouble wrapping their brain around. And maybe there is no good answer, but Is it climate change? Is it human ignition and carelessness?

Is it not letting the forest burn as it naturally would? How do you scientists come up with plans to tackle this issue if it's kind of like a trifold problem.

Yeah, I agree with you. It's such a complex issue. I mean, there's also the fact that people are just building more in areas that are of higher risk to fire. As communities get larger and kind of expand out into what some people call the wildland urban interface, it's really increasing fire risk. I think that that's the hard thing too, is that there's no magic bullet solution, right?

Even with Cultural burning, I'm such a strong proponent of getting that back on the ground, but that doesn't at all tackle how vulnerable some homes and other things are to fire at the moment. Climate change, she said, is also a pretty big freaking deal. But the 1 thing that I think locally, like in our towns and stuff that we can control, is the fuels that are available to burn. And so that's why I think that cultural burning or landscape level fuel management, as well as the community wildfire mitigation is so important to do in combination. And lately too, I've been seeing, I don't know if you are seeing it in the States as much, but in Canada, there's a bit of a movement to just kind of, you know, fireproof communities or, you know, keep homes or, you know, structures safe from fire.

But to me, that's really missing the point of like the landscape around your home. Like for me, I don't want to be living, you know, if my home is standing in like the middle of, you know, a blackened landscape. And in Canada, it can take a long time for the forest to regenerate, sometimes 20, 30, 40 years. And even then, they're finding up north in the boreal forest, the burns are just so hot that they're basically kind of killing the soil and any vegetation around. So, yeah, it's quite a complex issue.

But I think when I think as an Indigenous person, I look at the forest, I don't just see it as trees or timber values or other things. You see it as like part of who you are, right, like your relations. So you want to be able to steward and protect that area as much as you do your own home or structure.

And can you describe a little bit about prescribed fires and indigenous fire stewardship versus cultural burns. I think a lot of people maybe want to lump them in together, but can you describe a little bit about how they work or what they are?

Yeah, so there's a bit of a danger of that. This whole thing now where we're seeing prescribed fire and just kind of throwing cultural burning into that. So prescribed fire is, you know, generally what agencies do. So where they're setting fire on the landscape, but in many cases, they're setting, you know, high severity fires. It's

burning really fast.

And they want to burn a lot of land in a little bit of time. So we see like lots of aerial ignition of fires. We see them using, you know, basically like helicopter ignition. And in Canada, like lots of times people put that together as, you know, being a crown fire, being these big bad kind of out of control fires that are burning up, you know, mountainsides. That's generally the media that we see in Canada about prescribed fire.

But it really differs from cultural burning because cultural burning is more about achieving a cultural objective around the forest, around where you live. So you don't really want to have these big large stand replacing fires that go through and can kill everything in a prescribed fire event that sometimes is what happens in Canada. Yeah, so for cultural fire too, The thing is that most fires are actually pretty low intensity. In Australia, they call them like slow burns or cool burns, and they generally move through the understory. And they're done at certain times of year where the potential fire behavior is very low risk.

So where you're not getting potential of crown fire, there's lots of natural fuel breaks around the fire. In Canada, that's usually snow still on the ground. For Indigenous people, cultural burning, too, is like a family, a community activity. So like when I'm doing burns and things like I take my my daughters, my mom was on the last 1 that we did.

There's a great photo that's run in a few news articles about Amy's work and she's standing in a golden grassy field. It's hazy with smoke as a cultural burn grass fire. She's overseeing lurches behind her. And there's a husky, wolfy dog sitting to her right staring off. And Amy's wearing black leggings and a red flannel shirt and is pregnant with what would be her second daughter.

So the mood is very calm, unlike what most people's experience of land on fire might be.

Lots of times, we don't wear personal protective equipment, like the kind of nomex that you usually see firefighters wearing, because usually the fires are honestly just so slow and most people find them I think a bit boring too because it can take a really long time to burn a really small piece of land. And so for agencies, it doesn't really work well, right? Because that for them means more staffing dollars and other things to achieve like a smaller area burned.

Yeah. When it comes to how much fuel is in some of the forest now, that would be too much for say a prescribed burn maybe to tackle. I'm reading like there's so much dead timber and fallen timber because we've suppressed fire for so long. Where does fire management even begin to kind of tackle that issue?

Yeah, it is a big issue. And I think people often get overwhelmed. Like I just hear you know all the time, oh it's so complex, there's so many things and so many people's competing values. But I think that we often lose the focus on like local communities. So in Canada, our First Nations have reserves.

And so if you go onto a reserve, many times, when you speak to the elders and other people, they know what needs to be done in their area. They know if certain areas are too fuel loaded and you know they want to go in there and kind of mechanically treat the forest. So you know by using machines and labor to go in and do thinning and other things before they can burn to kind of keep the fuel load low in those areas. So I think for me that's the biggest thing is that we really need to go back to kind of these local solutions to fire and that's really kind of what our research is showing that you know local people want to be involved. So, you know, I talk mostly about Indigenous peoples, but, you know, ranchers, farmers, other people who, you know, use the landscape for their livelihood.

They also, you know, really want to have a healthy forest and environment around them. And they know the areas too. And even forestry companies, like the 1 nice thing about cultural burning is that because we're doing kind of these low understory burns, like we don't want to burn the nice big healthy trees, right? Because those are so important for cultural activities and for our relations to other animals. It's actually a really nicely works together because you kind of can get cultural burns going through and really removing some of that deadfall and promoting those healthy big tree growth that the timber companies love.

And obviously this is something that is a family issue for you 2, being married to someone who is a firefighter. At what point did you decide to spread the word about good fire. And the term good fire too is something that I'm, I kind of just learned too. But can you, can you talk a little bit about what good fire is?

Sure. So good fire, I think comes just from the idea that, you know, it's very obvious that we can have good fires on the landscape. You know that fire is something that is helpful to the environment and to people. And so I think Indigenous people lots of times see fire almost in a dichotomy. So kind of these bad fires and then the good fire that we can use as a tool.

But before colonization, Indigenous people would use fire on the landscape in good ways. But then also we did have lightning fires, obviously, back then, right? But they would come across the landscape and kind of enter into this mosaic landscape that these indigenous ferns and other lightning caused fires. And so as they would enter them, then the fire behavior would change. So as you know, it entered a meadow, the fire intensity might decrease and then it would go back into the forest and maybe increase, and then it would hit like a deciduous stand of trees and go down again.

And so this mosaic or patchwork on the landscape was actually really helpful for fire to kind of decrease the intensity of these fire events. But what we're seeing right now is because we've been suppressing those fire events, there's just so much fuel in the forest that we're seeing these bad fires. So even like I'm thinking like the Dixie Fire in California right now, or we have like multiple fires in Canada at the moment too that are bad fires. Like lots of times, you know, we look at it and say, oh, fire is natural. There's good ecological benefits.

But for me, there's nothing good about these current fires happening right now.

So at this point, our FaceTime call cut out because of spotty internet. So Amy recorded a clip answering a few more questions because she is the best and knew that we only had a few days until this went up and she's once again the best.

I also just wanted to mention the importance of Indigenous people in fire in Canada but also in other countries. You know, we often think about Indigenous people and fire management as something that happened in the past but we have a lot of amazing Indigenous firefighters in Canada, Indigenous fire managers and other people who are really, you know, on the front lines trying to bring back good fire and Indigenous fire stewardship and really out there every summer kind of protecting our communities from these bad fires. And especially in Canada, lots of times we don't give enough attention, I think, to those Indigenous firefighters. Lots of times they're kept kind of from progressing in their careers because they might not have the appropriate Western education level, so a degree or a diploma or something, but they might have 20, 30, 40 years experience of being on the fire and so knowledgeable and incredible. And I think lots of times we need to look at where Western science as well got some of its ideas.

Like, I've spoken to many elders who've told me about drip torches and how they would use tree limbs and sap to create their own drip torches. That's what their ancestors did and how they would spread fire across the landscape was in doing that. So now, you know, it's a metal canister with fuel in it, but it's kind of the same idea that Indigenous peoples had about how to use fire properly on the land. And just this incredible knowledge base and people in the communities, you know, had roles. In Canada, some nations actually had families that were fire keepers.

There were many people who knew about fire and had knowledge about fire activity.

After the break, you'll hear a clip from Good Fire podcast hosts Amy Christensen and Matt Kristoff talking about indigenous firefighters' experience on the fire line. And I admit I found this discussion hilarious. But before that, remember Henry T. Lewis, Hank, the anthropologist who wrote A Time for Burning and made that Fires of Spring film. So the retro 16 millimeter film aesthetics are far from the coolest thing about his fireworks.

1 of the coolest things I think from Henry Lewis's work was when he was speaking to woodland creandene elders about how they would use fire to melt the frost in the ground. And I've seen actually a few kind of Western science studies lately on that, But that's actually an older technique that the communities would use. So you get kind of all the dry grass on top of a meadow or something, and they would go and burn that in the really early spring because that's the most important thing about Indigenous burning is the time to burn when it's safe to do a good fire. That would then turn that level, that grass into black. The black would absorb the heat of the sun and then start to melt the frost out of the ground in the early spring.

That would give you much like earlier green shoots and green grass coming up that then moose, deer, other things could come in and eat in that area. It would make your hunting or other things a lot easier to do.

That's genius.

So yeah, I think that those are things you know that and there's probably so much more out there that we don't even know that communities use and how they would use fire in a good way. And I mean if people are interested as well, you know Frank Lake I think is probably 1 of the the first kind of fire ecologists who also is an indigenous man who you know saw very early the importance of indigenous fire knowledge and in bringing it And he's written some really great publications that I think for people are eye opening about how we can use fire in a good way on the landscape.

And to hear an ear load of other incredible Indigenous Voices in Fire Ecology, you'll want to subscribe to Good Fire. It's a podcast series by Amy and Matt, and we are featuring audio from a discussion as they launched Good Fire in 2019. They were gracious enough to let us steal some clips to round out the conversation amid our tech issues this week. And as it turned out, Amy and I had further trouble connecting because those 3 fires that she mentioned around her family cabin got bigger and they were forced to evacuate from their vacation. So yes, her work is timely and personal.

And she literally wrote the book on this, a volume titled First Nations Wildfire Evacuations, a guide for communities and external agencies alongside Tara McGee and First Nations Wildfire Evacuation Partnership. So I'm going to link to that in the show notes as well. Now in her name, we're donating this week to a cause of her choosing and she asked her to go to indigenous residential school survivors. That's irsss.ca. For over 20 years, they've assisted first nation peoples in British Columbia to recognize and be holistically empowered from the primary and generational effect of the residential schools by supporting research, education, awareness, establishing partnerships, and advocating for justice and healing.

And the society assists survivors with counseling, court support, information, referrals, workshops, and more. And you can find out more at irsss.ca. There's a link in the show notes. And in Canada, consider participating in Orange Shirt Day on September 30th. It's also known as National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Okay, so that donation was made possible by some sponsors of the show. And so many of you patrons asked about indigenous fire management, namely, and I'll list you all off at once very quickly, Cameron Brown, Doug, potential future fire ecologist Ronan, Jackie, Chris Brewer, Kimberly Hoffman, Ellen Skelton, Thomas N. Windham, Brianna Freeman, Justin Roberts, Anthony Willis, Donnell O'Neill, and Alexandra Ketul. And because our time chatting was cut short, again, we're so honored and lucky to feature relevant clips from our conversation with the Good Fire podcast host, Amy Christensen, and her co-host, Matt Kristof. Okay, here Amy is talking to Matt about fears of fire.

Even in our Indigenous communities, like lots of people are now worried about fire and scared of fire. And I think, so For me, when I come across people that have that tendency to think a fire is bad, I always say, well, there's good fire. And that's the name from the podcast. So when we're doing these good fires, it's basically, it's not a wildfire. It's totally different.

Most indigenous people want to bring back burning, right. And bring back that cultural practice to their landscape because, um, most elders, when they look at the forest, the first thing that they say is that it's unhealthy and that it needs cleaning up. When I first started working a bunch of elders, I'd always hear this cleaning up phrase, cleaning up. And it took a while till I realized that that meant fire, that they wanted, because you don't normally think of that. You think, oh, go out with a rake or something, like Donald Trump thinks that we're doing.

But it was actually that they wanted to use fire to kind of clean up all that dead litter on the forest floor. So they just want to do that again in their territory. But I think they also realise that because of the fire suppression that we've had over the last 50 to 300 years, depending where you are in Canada, that it's not that easy just to bring back our burning practices, right? Because we burned on intervals. So depending on where you were, if you were burning a meadow, you might burn the meadow every 3 years.

If you're burning like, you know, an old growth forest, then you might burn every 20 years. Like, you know, it just depended on what you were burning or what objective you were trying to achieve. So, you know, we and now we've excluded fire. So I mean, the litter and the buildup of fuel is crazy. So I think like now most the elders I talked to, they say like if we went and tried to do this now, like we would basically burn down the forest because we'd be trying to start a low intensity burn, but there's just too much fuel on the floor.

So it would immediately like escalate.

So how do indigenous fire scientists and wildlands firefighters approach these really different schools of thought? Amy explains to Matt.

LS We call it like two-eyed seeing. So that's kind of the new concept that's come up. So that's like, you know, where as indigenous people, even as non-indigenous, like, you know, you're looking at the world through 1 eye, through your Western perspective, right? Because we're all trained in that, you know, like there's not, there's very few people that, you know, are born and raised in the bush and have that kind of only subsistence lifestyle. Yeah.

But then out of the other eye, you know, you can see with your Indigenous eye, right? So you can see, you know, how, you know, where things could be better. And I think for me, that's where fire management comes in because, you know, I'm trained from the Western perspective, but I think from culture, there's things that Indigenous people do or know better. And for me, part of my job is advocating for that and trying. So it's not saying drop all Western science around fire, right?

We need that. We need that too. But then Indigenous people in our cultures also know ways for making the forest healthy. So to me, if you bring those 2 together, it makes like, you know what I mean? It's then you have like an incredible knowledge base that you're coming from.

Right.

The firefighter stories, I promise to you.

1 example is like talking to firefighters. So there's this 1 guy who is a non-Indigenous firefighter. So it's kind of funny up on the fire crews there, lots of that. There's like 30 or 40 year indigenous firefighters that have been on the fire line a long time. And they say, you know, these new kids, like university grads come up and start telling them what to do.

So this 1 guy was actually telling me that he, you know, he started out of university as kind of a fire boss and went up on the 1 line and he had these native crews and he said he thought they were the laziest people in the world because he's like they would get up in the morning and work a little bit but then he's like then they nap all day and then like in the bush, you know? And then he's like, but then, you know, they would get up and kind of work all night. And then he's like, and then I started like really looking and watching what they were doing. And he said that then 1 of the guys came up and told him like, we fight the fire when it's the weakest, because we see fire as a living being. And why would you fight something at the height of its day?

You know, like at 2 p.m. On a really sunny, hot day with high winds, right? Like why would you do anything, right? Like the fire can just jump or, you know, but if you fight it in the morning when it's the weakest or in the evening or overnight.

When humidity is high and the temperature is low and so the activities, yeah.

Decrease, yeah. And every, well, I should say generally now with climate change, who knows, but generally fire activity decreases at night, right. So, But these guys have got that not from textbooks, but from years of being out and watching fires. So I think, and so he was saying like, to me, like this non-Indigenous kid that it was just amazing to see that because he didn't learn any of that in school.

And

so for him, he said he learned more that summer working with the native crews about fire than going to school basically. And not to say, you know, don't stay in school kids, but like, because that's important too. But, you know, there's other ways and other things to learn as well about fire. Lots of the indigenous fire guys, they always tell me 1 of the funniest things is like when the fire season first starts and like in Cree, the word for white boy or whatever is munial. So they say like, oh, it's so funny when like the munial come on the fire because he's like, they're all just doing selfies with the fire in the background.

And he's like, and we're all like, you know, actually working and he's like, and you look and all the Muni'ah are just lined up way away from the fire taking selfies. And then it was funny, cause then I started seeing on Facebook, like lots of people.

They do well on Instagram.

Yeah, but I think that that's like just maybe a bit of, and it's kind of more of like, cause for indigenous people, it's more of a lifestyle, right, so they've been doing that. That's so, It's a great career for indigenous people because they can go out in the summer, make money, be on the land, and then in the winter they can go and run their trap lines or hunt, be with their families and participate in their culture. So I think that that's why it's become a nice lifestyle for certain people.

Yeah, for sure.

So how do agencies and nations work together? How can ecologists and firekeepers spark those collaborations?

People always say, oh, you need to engage with the indigenous communities. And so and well, like to me, that's a nice concept. I know that lots of non-Indigenous people or companies get frustrated because you know, they go to these communities and try to engage and nobody turns up or you know, they can't get a hold of anybody, nobody returns their calls. And so I think for me like the thing to remember with that is, you know, for people to remember that, like First Nations are under the Indian Act, right? So basically all their resource and, you know, their capital for how they're run all basically is decided in Ottawa almost, you know, and how much money comes down to them.

So most of the times, you know, even though the communities have high capacity, you know, for forestry or other things, it's often very underfunded because of what comes down the stream from Ottawa.

Ottawa is in Eastern Canada, in Ontario. And did you know that Ottawa is the capital of Canada? I didn't until right now. So if you feel the same, it's okay.

Basically there's not enough money, right? So they might not have a forestry coordinator, they might not have a lands person or the chief has to manage housing, healthcare, like everything, like you can't. So I know people get frustrated, but at the same time, I think there's, it needs to be a bit of patience and understanding there that lots of the nations are trying as much as they can and some are great. Like there's some nations, you know, that have really gone into forestry there. You know, the community forest in BC.

I think that those are really great example of things that are working well. Or I know there's been partnerships like between different like forest industries and indigenous nations too. Most forestry people don't go into forestry because they wanna kill all the trees and everything. They go into it because they love being in the forest. So they wanna sustain that.

Most Indigenous people love being in the forest, right? So right there you have a match of, so then it almost goes to, well, then if these are our shared values, how then can we move forward together? But I think 1 of the problems is that there's a real lack of trust because there's been a lot of people that have taken advantage of Indigenous communities. So, come in and said good things, said all the right things and then ended up taking money and not involving the nation. And so, It can take a while.

I think like a helpful thing too is employing indigenous people.

So you

know when you make or wanna work in a certain nation or with them, you know to employ people from that band and give them you know a sustainable career. And there's lots of indigenous people that actually have forest tech diplomas and other things. Yeah. That that can do that. So I think, you know, and I know it's not easy either.

I don't want people to think like, oh, yeah, you just sit at a table and decide your values and then everything goes away.

Amy explains that over the many years, promises have been made and broken and outside collaboration has seemed to come with a price tag.

You know, I think you need to recognize, you know, if you wanna do this kind of work, that there has to be some kind of benefit for the community as a whole as well, whether that's monetarily or supporting like a recreational forest or something. Yeah, to kind of come to that. I don't, like, there's not, I think, an easy answer for, you know, like just do this 1 step and, you know, indigenous people will love to work with you. But for me, I think that forestry really has an advantage over, say, the oil and gas industry because I think that there's many more shared values. I think the world view of an indigenous person and a forester is much more similar.

So yeah, I think that that's kind of exciting almost and you know, something kind of a future. And I've seen like a bunch of nations now, you know, are opening their own little sawmills and other things and to me that's like exciting. So because it has to do with the housing crises we have, right? So they want to be able to, you know, harvest their own wood to build their own homes, which I mean, why we aren't doing that. I have no idea.

You know, instead of shipping in the wood and timber and stuff. So I think, yeah, there's unfortunately, there's not like a really easy answer, but I would say like the biggest thing is to be genuine and patient and then understand that history, you know, that the situation that you're coming into, because lots of people get like, I don't want to say white savior, because that sounds really bad, but you know, it's kind of like, oh, I'm going to go to the community and help them. Or, you know,

like,

and I think the problem is that there's a revolving door of these, you know, white saviors or people that, you know, are coming to save them and like, even like if you go to a First Nation conference, like there's just kind of business people all over the place trying to sell the chiefs on different ideas and different, different things. So yeah, it's almost kind of being, becoming trusted in the community and then also working long-term and that's something that, you know, our, especially in government, like we don't really support because you know everyone kind of wants to climb the ladder in government. Whereas, you know, the most trusted people are generally the ones from the community who've been in the community the longest. And that's generally who like an indigenous person would trust. So yeah, it's almost like doing these relationships long-term too.

And I think there's some great examples out there of things that are going really well.

So yes, trust and incentives really matter, as does plain old money.

And I would say lots of that does come from like that funding issue, you know, that sometimes they just don't have enough money. And then also other times, you know, we're dealing with lots of issues that have been brought on by colonization, right? So like if you're dealing with a suicide crises in your community, you're not really going to care about forestry. And so I hear people say that to me sometimes about, when I talk about how we're stewards of the environment, they'll say to me, have you ever been on a reserve and looked at, there's garbage everywhere and people don't care about their houses and that's hardly an environmental steward. And to me, that's colonization, right?

That's where we've gone and where we've been pushed.

So reminder that cultural burning practices were criminalized, but now they're becoming of interest to Western scientists. And Amy says that returning to that fire stewardship could be really healing for forests, for people who love the forest, and for the people who have been kept from doing it for so long.

Moving forward, it's kind of like regaining our culture back. And so that's like where to relate it to burning, that's, we're burning in those things because burning for us is a cultural practice, right? Yeah. And so I think by getting fire back on the landscape, by kind of making our forest healthier, you know, then that promotes a healthier community. Yeah.

So, you know, instead of kids sitting inside, you know, they're out on the land and like what kid doesn't like fire, right?

Oh, totally.

So they're out with their elder like burning and anyways, there's neat things like even just showing kids like how smart their ancestors were, Like the 1 elder that I was talking to was telling me about how drip torches actually came from First Nations people, which I didn't know. But I think to me that's neat because you take kids out there and you show them like, well, you know, drip torches came from your house, you know, and even like kids had jobs on fires, right? So, oh man, I actually heard this fantastic quote that almost made me cry the other day from this guy in Australia. And he was saying for them, burning is such a family affair. And actually that's what I hear too from all of our, the people I've talked to here is that, it wouldn't just be the men that would go out and burn, it's the entire family.

And the kids, 1 thing they would do is pick up pine cones and light them on fire, and then from the fire and then throw them. Right. It's like awesome for kids. And I know like there's fire managers probably listening to this saying, oh my goodness, they're going to burn down the forest.

Please do not do this. If you are just a kid listening and want to start throwing, yeah, flaming balls of fire. Don't do that. Yeah.

But this was obviously under the direction of elders and, you know, also burning at like a very low risk times, right? Like this was not in the heat of

the summer.

This was very controlled. Yes.

But so, you know, it was to give the kids a job on the fire. And the 1 guy from Australia was saying that for his mob, that for them, it was bringing children's laughter back to the forest because the trees hadn't heard the children laugh in a long time. And they felt that that was needed for the trees to be healthy too. And I mean, that kind of relates like obviously children's laughter does not, you know, directly affect the tree, but it's more that like, if people are out on the land stewarding it, right. Then that promotes health for the health of the trees.

So anyways, to me, that was such a beautiful quote because I think too often, we kind of remove that or remove kind of the community.

Patreon Nikki DeMarco asks, is there any way we could go back to indigenous stewardship to help with this problem or does the red tape make it not feasible? So moving forward, what are the legalities of it? So on our, like the reserves, we're technically allowed to burn, right?

Because that's the, you know, the band. Well, it's federal jurisdiction, but you know, the band kind of has a bit of control over it. So, you know, that you don't need provincial permission to do that. So, you know, lots of agents, fire management agencies say, you know, oh, we're so supportive of indigenous people and we want to help them, you know, support their practices, you know, until we say, you know, we want to burn something. And so what I've seen even in BC is where I'm doing a lot of work right now because the nations there are so passionate about burning.

But they're going into these meetings and it's a really complicated process to get prescribed burning on the ground and it's very Western based. You have to know like fuel types that are out there.

That's the culture we live in now, right? So of course there's going to be that kind of bureaucracy.

Yeah, it's like a crazy 12-step process. Most of the communities look at that and just say, you know, we'll screw this. We're burning ourselves, you know. And then even when they want to burn, like I've heard of lots, you know, where somebody sees smoke and then, you know, calls the, you know, calls the emergency number. And then, you know, a helicopter will just come and put out their, their little fire that they're burning, right?

Yeah.

Without, you know, coming and dropping down and maybe talking to the people or seeing what's going on. So there's a bit of a disconnect and I can see it from both sides, right? Because especially in BC, like the fires has been so crazy

that I

think, you know, the BC fire manager or wildfire service there, you know, obviously doesn't want out of control fires. Yes. But the nations there want to burn. And so what I'm seeing right now is because they're just like smashing heads basically. Like they're supportive until we want to burn.

And because of that smashing of heads is that now the nations are saying like, well, screw you, this is our territory, we're doing what we want. You know, and then like, it becomes like this real conflict situation.

Yeah.

And we're trying to work with like the agency and,

you know,

maybe even introduce some sort of like cultural burn protocol or procedure that's more indigenous based. That same thing, like you're kind of getting permission, you're notifying the correct authorities, but it's not as crazy as this like existing process.

Well, I think that's, and again, this is another thing we've discussed a bit on the on the other episodes we did that. Yeah, the Good Fire podcast. But talking about that, that's another big barrier to indigenous burning or cultural burning, however you want to call it, is the like the Western barriers on that. Because like you're right, we don't want out of control fires.

Yes.

So the Western, like the Western government, like we want we want to make sure that like any fire that is started is not going to become a problem for anything outside of the the reserve or whatever. Right. Yeah. But also at the same time, recognizing that, like you were saying, indigenous people have been working with fire for thousands of years and understand the relationship. So how do you make sure that government feels comfortable with this going on, but also ensuring that, because it's entirely possible also, like this is something that somebody who's playing devil's advocate would say, right, is just saying that like, well, how do we ensure that they know what they're doing?

Because it could be somebody who just because they're indigenous doesn't mean they know what's going on, right? They have to have that knowledge passed down and collected somehow. Yeah.

No, I've heard that all the time. Like, oh, if we allow this, the Indians are going to be lighting fires everywhere.

Yeah, exactly. Right. And then.

That kind of fear. Yeah.

Right. So there's that fear of, Will they take advantage of this and just do it for fun or whatever? And that exists. So we have to address that fear. So how do we...

There's going to have to be a collaboration somehow to be like, okay, we acknowledge that like these 4 people somehow, Unfortunately, that's the way it's going to happen. I think it's probably going to have to go. These 4 people in this band have the knowledge and they have to be like, I don't know. And this is super westernized for me to think, right? Like these people have the knowledge and understanding of how to do this.

So if they're in charge, we're not going to worry about it. But I also feel like indigenous communities having to talk to the overlord, the government, about what they're doing on their own land is exactly the opposite of what you're trying to accomplish here.

Yeah. And so that's like, so you know, like there's fire boss training, right? Or no, burn boss training.

Yeah.

So there's like different levels of that. You can go through same thing. It's very Western. Like I know that now, like there's Bob Gray and other guys who train on that, who are starting to incorporate a bit of indigenous knowledge or, you know, the importance of indigenous knowledge and burning, but same, it's very like kind of Western, you know, this is how we light a prescribed fire.

And that's all we know. That's the only culture I know, right? So that's where my perspective is going to come from.

Yeah, so we were doing brainstorms on the fire keepers and we're like, you know, well, they do a certification course to get that. So maybe what we need to do then is have a cultural burning certification course, right? So that, you know, people would go through and then once they get that, then, you know, they can go and light fires or whatever. But then we had a lot of firekeepers that were saying like, no, that is basically just us trying to fit into a Western system.

Right.

And they were saying like the 1 guy actually at the firekeepers conference, I just went to the government, people were talking and he stood up and he just said, you know, I find this really difficult because they were talking about, you know, like all the procedures you need to go through to get approval. He stood up and he just said, you know, for me, this is my family's and like my nation's inherent right to steward the land. This is my responsibility. This is why I was put on this earth, you know. So for me then to have to go and ask you for permission to do what is my responsibility and my right, that doesn't make any sense.

And then he was saying like, you know, a hundred years ago, you guys were telling us we couldn't burn because we were destroying the forest. And now you're saying to us, oh, only we can burn because you know, you got, because now the forest is destroyed. And he's like, you're the ones, you know, whose practices, because you wouldn't listen to us, you know, have led to this. If you would have listened to my ancestors, you know, then we wouldn't be in this predicament we're in now. So let us kind of take it over.

So I think it's 1 of those, I don't really like that term, like wicked issue, where it's super complex, but it is kind of like that in a way, right? Because you're worried the forest isn't healthy right now. I don't personally want to say to somebody like, yeah, go out and burn and then have, you know, a massive ground fire start. But I think the thing is with indigenous fire practice is that it's, you know, you're burning at very specific times. So it's like early spring before the snow is left in Canada.

It's late fall, just like the day or 2 before the first snowfall, right? You're not burning obviously in the summer. So I would think that that obviously still should be criminalized to some extent, you know, that you need to find people or whatever that are just going because that is very high risk. And so like what our elders and ancestors say from like the different nations that I've talked to is that, you know, our burning that we do is so low risk, that's why we don't need protective equipment. That's why we don't need a burn plan, because if we're doing it right, you know, there's literally very low or 0 risk.

Well, I think they would say 0 risk to what they're doing, to starting an out of control fire or somebody getting hurt.

It's amazing how complicated the situation is to try and navigate this, but I think the only way forward is to come together and have these discussions. It seems like a cop out to say that because it's just Like, we need to discuss it. But like, unfortunately, that's the truth. Yeah.

Well, and on the Good Fire podcast, I think like that's what's interesting is because with the range of people that we talk to on there, like, you know, you go from somebody who thinks, you know, like it's their right to burn and they're not working with any agency. And then to other people who are employed like me by an agency, like Frank Lake. He works for US Forest Service and he's used his work within this Western government structure to bring more fire back to his territory. So yeah, it's really interesting to see all the different perspectives.

So that conversation was from the Your Forest podcast, which is hosted by Matt Kristof, who also co-hosts Good Fire with Amy. And of course, there's a whole Good Fire episode with Frank Lake, and there's so many other great voices in indigenous fire ecology. So I'm going to link that episode and the podcast in general on my website. And I will also put up a link to the wonderful 47-page book called Blazing the Trail, celebrating indigenous fire stewardship. So many resources, so much learning.

Now to wrap up though, let's talk about some pains and some asses. So the most vexing thing about Amy's job?

I'd have to say my least favorite thing about my job is the bureaucracy, which I think that most people who work in a government agency can relate to. It's sometimes really frustrating when, you know, you know something needs to be done or what a solution could be, but then you kind of get held up in all sorts of bureaucratic processes. So I mean, that's my least favorite. Unfortunately, it takes up a lot of time that we could be, you know, devoting to other things. So that's frustrating for sure.

In the standout best aspect, the most brightly glowing coal.

But I think my most favorite thing about my job is that I'm able to work with communities and knowledge keepers from across Canada and then internationally sometimes as well. And I really realize that that's, you know, a position of privilege that I have and that I'm in, to be able to do that. And it comes with a lot of responsibility that often keeps me awake at night. But for me, when I'm able to bring fire keepers or other people to events or other things and just see their pride and finally being recognized in their knowledge being known and sometimes like I've been referring to that as kind of like you know we had this big severance event with fire but now what we're almost seeing is this reunion with fire, where Indigenous people are coming back to it. And so, you know, we have the land back movement for Indigenous people.

And often I think, you know, we need a fire back movement as well, where Indigenous people, you know, empowered again to make those decisions on the land. And what I'm seeing right now in Canada, especially is that there is a movement where people want to be involved in fire management decisions that are happening in their territories. And so I think that's really exciting.

So ask smart people exciting questions because sometimes the situation is impossibly complex and they can help break it down for you like a fungus on a fallen log. And so, for more on this topic, you can get yourself some good fire podcasts into your ears. It's hosted by Amy and by Matt Kristoff, and it's linked in the show notes. Matt's podcast, again, is Your Forest podcast. Thank you so much to him for letting us use so much of his interview with Amy.

You can follow Amy at ChristiansenAmy on Twitter. There are more links in the show notes and up on my website, allyward.com slash ologies slash good fire. You can follow us at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at allyward with 1 L. New full length adult friendly episodes continue to come out on Tuesday and we're moving Small Ologies releases to the weekend.

I think Sundays or Mondays. So look for a new kid-friendly episode next week. Also, I'm sorry that my neighbor's dog's barking. I can't really do anything about it. We got to get this episode up.

I'm so sweaty. Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to sisters Shannon Feldzis and Bonnie Dutch for managing merch. They host a podcast called You Are That, a comedy podcast. Thank you to longtime friend Aaron Talbert we met when we were 4 for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group.

Thank you to Emily White of the Wordery professional transcription company for making transcripts for ologies. They're available for free on my website. Thank you, Caleb Patton for bleeping episodes. Thank you, Noel Dilworth for all the scheduling and Susan Hale, both of you for helping with social media quizzes and such. As always, giant thank you to Resident Editor.

By resident, I mean we live in the same bed. Jarrett Sleeper, who helped me stitch all these audio clips together. And also of course to Stephen Ray Morris for all the editing help and for working on Smologies now too. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music and if you listen to the end, you know I tell you the secret. This week's secret, it's pretty juicy.

It's actually not. It's that I prefer dry pulpy oranges. I don't want a juicy orange. I want the pulp to hold all the juice. I don't want any juice on my hands.

I want a dry, pulpy orange. I don't know if it's a certain kind of orange or if I have to just let them sit on the counter longer. But if you are a pulpologist and you know this, holler. Let me know because every time I open an orange, I'm rolling the dice. I'm like, come on, give me a dry 1.

Is it gross? I don't know. I don't care. Anyway, bye bye. Hackadermyntology, homeology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, nephrology, nephology, seriology, cytology.

And now that you've stuck around to 2 episodes, I feel like you deserve to be burdened with a double mega secret, which is a freshie. This is no encore secret. It's June 7th, 2023. Thanks for dealing with a couple of encores recently. Your dad words, not feeling great.

I'm doing okay. Nothing is like scary or anything, but I have switched an antidepressant that I was on because I'm now medicated for ADHD, which is helping. But If anyone out there, there's a couple of you probably have gotten off of a Fexor or back on it. It's a toughie Don't Google it unless you want to be sad for anyone who's gone off it and not slowly tapered anyway, I've been feeling just just terrible And then it that coincided with my endocrinologist being out of the office for most of the summer and not having the hormones that I require to survive because I went through ovarian failure at an early age. So I'm a mess, just a goddamn mess, but your girl is doing her best.

I've cried so much today for no real reason, but thanks for sticking it out. Thanks for dealing with encores. Every once in a while I'll get someone who goes, why are you putting up an encore? And I'm like, because I can barely function. And that's just how it goes when you put out 50 to 65 hour long episodes a year.

So thanks for dealing with it. Thanks for rolling with it. This is a vulnerable secret. I appreciate you listening and caring. Hopefully I will be on the mend soon.

If you have dealt with anything like this, please know that you're not alone. Okay. Please Enjoy the fresh air if you have any and please enjoy indoor filtered air if you don't. Okay. Scallops next week.

Fresh episode. Bye.