[00:03:00] Host: Thank you. I even had this small record of the song Smokey the Bear, I think it was Gene Autry. Wildfire was an enemy to our beautiful landscapes and it had to be battled like a war. I want to start with this concept of fire as the enemy and talk a little bit about our nation's history of fire suppression, starting with Gifford Pinchot and the US Forest Service.

[00:03:37] Nick: We've had fires here long before we were a country. There's been fires on our landscape in what we think of today as America forever. These ecosystems evolved with fire, but especially as the country was settled and colonized, fire was something scary and something that could threaten lives and livelihoods. Although indigenous people, it's important to point out, did live sustainably with fire and use fire for millennia.

Things really came to a head in around 1910 when there was this huge burn that actually goes by the “Great Burn” or the “Big Burn” in the Northwest, millions of acres. It was at this time when railroads had started spanning the country and a lot of the fires were actually started from sparks from railroads. Conditions really aligned, drought, heat, and this huge burn blew up. Much like today when we hear about it in the news, smoke made its way over to the East Coast, and out of this event, fire became the bad guy.

Fire became something that we should seek to destroy, stop, and control. For many, many years we were really good at it. We put out all kinds of fires. We came up with something called the 10 AM Rule, which basically said, this fire, if we find it on land, it's going to be out by 10:00 AM the next day. Justin, take it from here.

[00:04:53] Justin: I would note that at this time, the United States Forest Service was in its sort of formative years and it was conceived and still exists within the United States Department of Agriculture. Just thinking of that conception of the bureaucratic institution as part of the Department of Agriculture, implicit in that construction is the view that trees are a crop, a natural resource to be managed. That puts an institutional spin on this dedication to putting out any and all wildfire.

[00:05:27] Host: You mentioned a couple of times in the books that many believe that there is a connection between the logging industry and the US Forest Service. Was this concept of protecting the forest from fire designed to protect the industry of logging as well, or it was more about the beauty and the nature and this wilderness concept?

[00:05:55] Justin: I think the truth is it's a little bit of both. The trees are a natural resource and the country's growing and wood is the primary building product at the time the Forest Service is coming into its existence. Protecting that natural resource makes sense. Three of us probably live in homes that have a lot of wood in them. It is a thing we use to build things. Balancing that natural resource with the beauty and the landscape and public access and all of those things, those values started to come into sharper focus later in the 20th century. At the onset, the balance of the viewpoint was more toward the natural resource view at the early days of the Forest Service.

[00:06:43] Nick: Early on too, if we look at this rhetoric that was in the discourse around wildfire, it was often discussed from the federal government's perspective like these fires are costing us X million dollars as they destroy forests. They're destroying this wood that is worth money, therefore, the country's losing money. In that sense, it was a very economic incentive to stop wildfires. At the same time, the environmental view that was being proliferated by Gifford Pinchot, who you mentioned, who was the first head of the US Forest Service and really instrumental figure in this time of US history.

He was a utilitarian. He wanted to find the greatest good for the greatest number of people for the longest time. While he was thinking about the value of these forests, he was also thinking about the value of the forests down the line, not just here in this time. Forests were to be managed for people according to these this early US Forest Service, but it wasn't just like we were going to log it all tomorrow. It was designed to be managed for future generations. I think that's important to point out as well.

[00:07:44] Host: I watched those ads. I listened to, you know, Smokey Bear. He's still everywhere. We haven't really moved that far away from fire is the enemy. We're still in that place. With this “stopping at all costs,” what is the detriment of keeping fires out of our forests?

[00:08:05] Nick: There's a couple of scales here to talk about. One is our forests evolved with fire. Fire is a way that helps keep our forests healthy, at least fire at a natural historic scale. If we're talking about a lower intensity burn in most cases, a lot of ponderous of pine forests in the country burn every 10 to 30 years. It all depends on elevation and tree type and ecosystem details and all kinds of stuff. Forests, historically, burned pretty often.

When they burn, it opens up the forest, it can create wildlife habitat. Fires often historically are not just this big massive blanket of burn, they burn in a mosaic pattern. You'll have one patch that is burned intensively, another patch that is less burned, another patch that is not burned at all, and creates this really diverse habitat type for species. Also, it can allow wildflowers and berries and other stuff to take hold and grow. There's this really important ecosystem role.

When we remove fire from the ecosystem, something else happens too, in that all this stuff grows up in between the trees. Many of these trees are evolved to be fire resilient, fire resistant, at least as they get old, and big. In between those big old trees, we get these smaller growths. What we can think of is fuel, stuff that could literally fan the flames, fuel the flames, feed the flames. Many forests across the country are overstocked with all this stuff that's a little more than kindling that can make fires burn bigger and more severely, because we've been putting out fires.

[00:09:37] Host: This concept of laddering, I think when you really visualize what laddering means in a forest fire and what crowning means in a forest fire, the difference between a light burn and something that is out of control. Will you talk about how laddering happens and how it can lead to crowning?

[00:10:01] Justin: Sure. Nick mentioned there a moment ago, the accumulation of fuel among large trees that have adapted to wildfire. You can see many times if you go into a forest or a stand of ponderosa, you can see some charring along the bark of these trees. It's meant to withstand periodic medium to low-intensity wildfire. That wildfire would often burn that accumulated smaller brush and vegetation. When you remove fire from the landscape that vegetation, as Nick mentioned, is allowed to grow and thrive. As it grows and thrives, fire can take hold in a landscape like that. Because that vegetation is filling that low to mid-elevation, it can transport fire from the ground, from the grass level, up into the canopy of the forest. Once the fire gets into the canopy, it's very hard to contain it, and at that point can be really damaging to the larger trees, which the fuel potential of those larger trees gets released once the fire is in the canopy.

[00:11:13] Jon-Barrett That's where that resiliency and resistance goes away once it's crowning or in the canopy.

[00:11:20] Justin: Exactly. Once it's in the canopy, it's burning at a higher intensity. Also, that creates a ton of embers and the embers are up high and exposed to the wind. Then the embers can transport fire for up to miles. Oftentimes, those embers can find homes and weaknesses in homes, and we'll probably talk about that at some point but it can also just allow the fire to move rapidly across the landscape. It can then become really difficult to contain because it's skipping over all sorts of the tactics that wildland firefighters use. Once it's in the canopy, it becomes a different kind of animal, so to speak.

[00:11:59] Host: Before the US Forestry Service, before really the colonization of the United States, lightning fires would happen. They would burn swaths of land. There were also, for centuries into millennia, indigenous people here who were utilizing fire as a tool. Talk a little bit about what they did and how they used the fire as a tool.

[00:12:27] Justin: In the reporting of Fireline and the book, we had a great opportunity to spend a day with members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe up on the Jocko Prairie. This is north of Missoula, south of Flathead Lake, and we drove into this stand of Ponderosa, and it was beautiful scene. The folks we talked to were describing what had happened on this landscape over the last 10 or 15 years that-- 10 or 15 years ago, it had been clogged with all kinds of flammable underbrush and you couldn't walk from place to place.

It just was an unhealthy, out-of-balance ecosystem. Tribal elders were talking about days where they used to regularly set fire to the landscape as part of their management of the landscape, but also part of their cultural traditions. Over a series of years and debate, the tribe found the courage to re-embrace some of those traditions and set fire to this landscape. One of the pieces of the story that I think is important too is that this tribe in particular, camas, the camas plant, and the camas flower played a large role in their cultural traditions, and that there had been camas on this particular landscape, but nobody could remember seeing it.

There was hope that it might come back if they introduced fire to this particular prairie, they didn't know how long it would take. It took less than a year for it to come back. The first cycle of camas flower started to thrive again, and it enabled the return of some of the traditions associated with that plant. It's also restored that particular ecosystem to balance.

It's now a much healthier place. If low-intensity fire moves through it, it'll just burn the grasses. The large ponderosa pines will be just fine. In fact, they'll probably be healthier. It will restore the ecosystem, recharge it, allow certain species to continue to reproduce, and just be in balance the way it had been for millennia, as Nick mentioned a few moments ago.

[00:14:42] Nick: Just to add even more to this, this is one example of one tribe doing really innovative work today. It's important to point out that their work, this cultural burning dates back millennia, but they were severed from it because of colonization. As fire became a bad guy, we outlawed that cultural burning, sometimes violently. There are documented reports of indigenous people being killed for starting these traditional prescribed fires.

Even though in Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, there were people known as fire keepers who kept the knowledge about how and when, and where to start these kinds of fires. Tribes all over the country are bringing cultural burning back, and tribes all over the country used this technique. There's scientific studies that have looked at forests and found evidence of human-induced prescribed burning from indigenous groups that utilize the area dating back millennia.

[00:15:35] Host: When you talk about the camas flower and revitalizing the ecosystem, it's reminiscent of bringing wolves back into Yellowstone and being able to see how that one reintroduction of a species can change the entire ecosystem. There were non-native scientists in the early and mid part of the 20th century who saw the benefit of fire. You wrote about Herbert L. Stoddard and Harold Biswell, but what was the pushback against what they had discovered? Why did it take so long to start seeing implementation?

[00:16:18] Nick: Fundamentally, we just have this entrenched idea that fire is bad. Stoddard studied I think it was quail especially, and the impact on quail populations. Biswell was really the bad boy of prescribed fire in the middle of the century. He was doing all kinds of studies about prescribed fire. I think some of the tension there, some of the tension we see today over prescribed fire, one is just that entrenched mindset. Two is the consequences if things go wrong. We hear about the prescribed fires that get out of control and the ones that threaten human resources, which happens, but it's like 0.01% of the fires in which this occurs.

This work on understanding the power of prescribed fire, how to do it, where to do it, and getting the resources to do it. This is a struggle that has been going on for decades. In fact, there was a coordinated effort on behalf of the Forest Service to suppress science for a time, saying, "No, fire's bad. Let's not think about good fire at all." We still feel echoes of that today when the agency's understaffed, under-resourced, and it's just hard to get fire on the landscape because it's hard, I think, for the public and politicians to understand a fire can be a good thing.

[00:17:30] Justin: Just as an addition to that or an adjacent comment is Nick mentioned a few Moments ago, the 10 AM Rule. All fires must be snuffed out by 10 AM the day after detection. That's a pretty blanket, simple policy. There's no room for nuance in that; prescribed burns and letting some fires burn. Fire is just immensely complex and managing it requires a lot of complex, thoughtful policy and a lot of agility. These are not things that institutions are known for. It has taken a long time for the Forest Service to get to a point where it can entertain some of that complexity. We see the Forest Service is trying to do better. They're trying to introduce fire to the landscape. They're even talking about letting some fires burn when conditions allow for that but it's really hard. There's a lot of risk in the system. They're under-resourced, as Nick mentioned, and it's just a hard thing to do.

[00:18:35] Host: As we move deeper into these effects of climate change, I imagine those fears become increased. You had a line, and I love this, I had to underline it three times in the book that “prescribed burning is like a vaccine that can help the forest stay healthy down the line.” Just as we've seen with vaccines that this fear that the cure can cause the illness as prescribed fires rage out of control, as you just mentioned, with the science that shows the benefits, with the risk seemingly worth the reward of creating fire scars to slow down conflagrations. Where is our dialogue to push for more of these prescribed burns or managed burns?

[00:19:37] Nick: No, I think part of it is just really hard for there to be a reward structure for people to understand why it's good. It's easy to say, "Oh, we stopped this fire, we didn't allow this fire to go." It's all punishment when a fire does escape. It's like, "How dare you let this fire burn that almost hit a community?" The risk compared to reward is pretty huge when it comes to prescribed burn. If you are the decision maker that says, "Yes, let's do this today," and then it doesn't fully go out and it creeps and blows up into the Hermits Peak Fire or which happened in New Mexico or something, that is on you and you have tremendous risk.

At the same time, like you say, climate change is a factor here, we're seeing reduced weather windows that can actually allow prescribed burning in a lot of cases. In some places in some years, it's hard to burn at all. From an institutional mindset, a lot of the forest services just still geared towards full suppression. A lot of politicians are geared towards full suppression. We'll get angry at the Forest Service if they try anything else.

Especially bringing things to the current administration and current political climate, we have a federal hiring freeze, we have a federal government hell-bent on decreasing funding across the board which we will see impact on our public lands and on wildfire. I think absent the right incentive structure, absent a more transparent dialogue about the benefits of fire, and absent the resources necessary to get it all done, it's going to be really hard to get more fire on the landscape. Then, of course, the whole topic we have in broach is regulation around it. The National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA is a hugely important piece of environmental legislation, but it also can be a real roadblock to getting forest projects done at the pace and scale that we need.

[00:21:26] Host: I feel like there's also an element of media coverage where this need to show the destructive nature of fire even on a fire that is not affecting anything but wildlife. As we just saw down here in LA, every fire that happened became this heavy-hearted story, even though a lot of the other fires weren't as detrimental as the two that needed the most attention.

[00:22:01] Justin: Yes. If it bleeds, it leads, and large exciting-looking flames are portrayed in the media commonly. That has all sorts of downstream effects. It perpetuates this fear of fire, this notion that it's bad. Then if you think about prescribed burning, there's opportunity where it has been done successfully. As you mentioned a few moments ago, Jon-Barrett, fire scars from previous burns can be tremendously helpful in stopping the advance of a wildfire. We don't often hear stories. Those are often success stories of where a fire was allowed to burn or maybe intentionally set as a part of a prescribed burn and then serves a benefit to the public later as a stopping point for another fire. We don't hear many stories around that. I think we could do a better job in the media in general just communicating that complexity.

[00:22:52] Nick: Yes. I think our collective short-term thinking is something to address here too. We see the same cycle of fire coverage and the way we talk about fires every fire season in the summer in much of the West or every time Santa Ana wind blows in California. Since we've written this book about fire, done this podcast about fire, it's really interesting to see this coverage because it does link up with us sometimes. It's an unhappy accident that the LA fires happened. I think you'd already reached out to us in the midst of all this. Every time there's a fire, that's when we get renewed interest in the work we've done. We need to be thinking ahead about wildfire in times that is not actively happening and not just be reacting when there are fires burning on the landscape.

[00:23:39] Host: Talk about the Prescribed Burn Associations. I got really excited reading about this concept and how it's spreading.

[00:23:48] Nick: Yes. This is a model that actually started in the middle of the country and in Nebraska and places like that, and places that we don't often think about with wildfire but historically did burn. There are great huge prairie burns that burned hot and burned fast. Basically, these are groups of ordinary citizens who get together, who are highly trained, and they do all the right paperwork and they do all the right planning and they get together to do prescribed burning on private land.

These are proliferating now. These groups have learned from people who've been doing it mostly on AG land in the middle of the country, but they've taken it to the coast. In California actually, they're doing really amazing work. The work can be extra powerful too, because they're working on private land, which means they're working on land usually close to properties. We could think about this impact as potentially buffering communities, buffering homes, buffering things people find valuable, and making those areas more resilient to wildfire in the future.

There are a lot of challenges. Insurance is one of them. Being able to actually make sure that incentives so that you're not on the hook for millions and dollars of damage if that neighbor's house-- you need a balance both. You need to be careful and be responsible, but there's different structures of insurance that basically can really penalize you for the slightest thing going wrong and be prohibitive or can be a little more progressive and allow this work to get done.

[00:25:14] Justin: Yes. The legal regime in the state also plays a role. If it's a strict liability state like many states in the West, the consequences for a landowner or a member of one of these Prescribed Burn Associations who sets fire to the landscape if things go awry, that person can be individually liable to a larger degree than some of the states like in the southeastern United States where they have a different liability regime.

[00:25:38] Host: We talked about buffering against homes and property. When I was a kid and I was watching those Smokey the Bear ads, my youthful brain, what I understood of the world, those wildfires were things that only existed in nature in forests like in Yellowstone. They didn't destroy communities. It wasn't until the Oakland Hills fire destroyed homes and claimed lives. My friend's parents who were firefighters in Napa, where I grew up, were called to battle the blaze were this concept of wildfire connecting to a community became a reality. I want you to talk about the concept of wildland-urban interface. It's brought up a lot as we see more and more of these wildfires destroy more homes and lives. What is it and why are so many millions of people drawn to it?

[00:26:39] Justin: The wildland-urban interface is the area where Nick lives, I live, you might live. It's the area where houses start to intermingle with burnable stuff. This is a tremendously popular place to live for many reasons. The stereotypical reason is fancy homes with views amidst the trees, but oftentimes, it can be the only way that people can afford to live in a community. That's one of the dynamics that's played out in Boulder, which is right in the heart of fire-prone landscapes.

People that want to come to Boulder and can't afford to live closer to town can find more affordable housing outside of town, deeper into the forest with less infrastructure. As we've built more and more of our homes deeper and deeper into the forest, that's not so much the wildfire problem. That's a people problem. We've put our homes in harm's way, and if you think of our homes as fuel, that's just more fuel for the fire.

A lot of times, the reasons people seek those areas is for some form of independence. They are resistant to codes and other regulations that indicate how you should build and the infrastructure that should be maintained to allow for water or fire engine access or other things that could build fire resilience into the planning of these sorts of developments. Yes, we've built our way into a lot of fire risk for a lot of homes. I think one out of every three homes now in the United States lies in the wildland-urban interface. Yes, that's a big problem that we've created.

[00:28:24] Host: You would never think of places like Oakland, California, or Los Angeles as wildland, but the Eaton fire, which we just finally have containment over started at the base of a national forest, of Angeles National Forest and then moved into the city of Altadena, which is in LA County. Our concept of this is skewed, but once this fire moves into a community, as you were saying, it's not a wildfire or it can't be fought like a wildfire anymore.

[00:29:01] Nick: Absolutely. When firefighters are dealing with a fire in the woods, in the forests, you're not necessarily spraying water directly. You're not at a hose attached to a hydrant spraying water on the fire like you would be doing on a single-home house fire. You're looking at the landscape and you're thinking about ways to contain that fire. You'll often hear this fire is X percent contained. That's thinking about when you're going, if you're thinking about a circle or a square around a fire, you're digging stuff called fire line or using natural barriers to make sure the fire can't go anywhere else.

In Fire World, you could think of it as a direct attack as directly confronting the flames in attack is more like digging line and trying to stop the fire from spreading. When it goes into a community, the game has changed. From a firefighting perspective, I think there's immediately a lot more on the line. Firefighters have talked about like there's just so much more emotion that goes into it. We want to save this house if we can. At the same time, you have to make hard choices. It might be clear this house has a bunch of flammable stuff around it. It's going to burn. We got to pass it by. It all depends on the severity of the fire, how fast stuff is moving.

If we're thinking about the Palisades and Eaton fires, those were hard to actually fight at all for a number of reasons. Instead of fighting fires when they're happening in communities, we need to be thinking ahead and thinking about how we can be resilient to fires in communities, and how we can make our communities and our own homes and our neighborhoods much possible to withstand these instances when say a fire starts in the national forest nearby and embers are blowing onto your roof, because that's how these things start.

It's not like a big flame front coming down into the community. It's like Justin mentioned, these fires are crowning maybe a mile away or more, and you have these big winds and these embers blow. They could get, say, on your wooden roof, in your deck, inside your attic. There are all these weaknesses. In the mulch in your lawn that's all dried up or in the tall grass near your house. All these pathways for the fire to burn. If we address how fire can spread on your own house and in your own neighborhood ahead of time, then we can make a real dent in the possibility of these fires occurring in this way at all.

[00:31:16] Host: For a lot of us, we can't choose to move out of the WUI or the wildland-urban interface. Our job, our family, the affordability as you mentioned, the generational connection to a place. There are so many factors that prevent getting out of the way of fire. Climate change is a big factor to the intensity of these fires. There's only so much that we can do as an individual to affect that, but as you mentioned, there's a lot that we can do to protect or strengthen our homes against wildfires. I'd love for you to talk about some of the things that we can do.

[00:31:53] Justin: There's a lot we can do. Some of it is cheap and easy and some of it is really expensive and difficult. At the cheap and easy end of the spectrum, we can do things like basic maintenance. We can clean our gutters, we can remove flammable debris from our roofs. We can trim back vegetation that hits our house. We cannot store flammable stuff anywhere near our house or under our decks for example. There's a whole list of great actionable things at firewise.org, is a great resource for this sort of stuff.

What we're describing here is this concept of the home ignition zone. The area around the house that presents all the vulnerabilities for fire. You can deal with some of those close to your home with basic maintenance. Then as you go further out, you can make sure your trees are spaced apart certain distances. You can make sure the canopies of these trees don't overlap, things like that. Those are relatively cheap. There are barriers. If you're not physically able to clean your gutters, that's a barrier. We need to figure out ways to help folks that are facing that challenge, but some of the challenges are much more expensive.

If you have a wooden roof, replacing a roof is a big proposition. There are grant programs that can help. I think a study by the Headwaters Economics here in Montana found that there are some two million homes in the American West with wooden roofs, and it would cost about $6 billion to fix these. Some amount of public financing is necessarily appropriate, but it's a large scale problem that's going to require some public-private partnership to figure out.

[00:33:39] Host: We deal with that with retrofitting for earthquakes. I would think that something similar would be able to happen for wildfires, especially as intensive as they've been.

[00:33:50] Justin: Yes. Those are hard choices. Another piece of this too and a big piece is that this is a collective action problem. Homes are often quite close together, and you can do a lot to protect your own home, but if your neighbor's house goes up in flames, that doesn't do you much good. Because once a house in a community goes up in flames, that's a tremendous source of risk and fuel. The fire can spread from that tremendously quickly. A single home is only as safe as the homes around it. We need to get entire neighborhoods to embrace this notion of the home ignition zone and get communities to collectively take these actions to make themselves more resilient to wildfire as well. That's tricky to get people to coordinate.

[00:34:34] Host: What do you recommend for this community level? You mentioned at one point in the book that it may take something serious. I don't remember specifically what you wrote, but it may take some fire that is at a serious level to change how we look at how we do things in the West. It seems like this fire that we just had in LA maybe something along those lines. Do you think that we're at the place where we could start looking in our communities of how to make these changes?

[00:35:09] Nick: I sure hope that we are. The quote you're referencing I think was from a Headwaters Economics researcher in the book who basically was saying-- I think it was Paradise Fire that she was referencing, "We all thought this would be the event that would force us to rethink things, and it didn't." I think we are so collectively shortsighted. I don't know if this will be the event that makes us rethink things. I do know that often after events like this there are policy windows, especially locally where you can get stuff done. I hope to see that.

I think there's a lot of innovative things being attempted from very voluntary things, like community tool libraries where people are helping lend out tools to help get some of that work done, or their own expertise saying, "Here's my chainsaw. I'm also happy to teach you how to use it." Two things that use incentives. A group in Boulder, Colorado has worked with local insurers trying to give people insurance breaks for doing a lot of that work.

In fact, California actually has experimented with some regulation to make that happen, although who knows how that's relatively recent and now these fires are shaking everything up. Zoning and codes can go a long way in terms of new building and retrofits, but like Justin mentioned, lots of people, especially in the West are very resistant towards zoning and codes. There is no single solution. It depends on the community, it depends on the resources of that community. I think it does take a big federal and local investment as well to get a lot of that work done to give people the resources necessary and education necessary to help this happen. I don't think everything should be federally funded, but definitely some of it.

Also, fundamentally, there are existing organizations in a lot of communities that are prone to wildfire. Hundreds of them across the country that have a lot of expertise and institutional knowledge about how to better work on your home. Justin has had one of the local organizations in Missoula come to his house to check things out. If you're somebody that's living in a fire-prone area, I highly encourage you to find out more about your local community organizing. If there's groups around you that could help you get more resources or learn more about how to live more resiliently with fire.

[00:37:22] Justin: A way to look at particularly what happened in the Palisades for example, we have an opportunity to rebuild an entire community from the ground up. There are so many innovative building materials and designs that can really mitigate a lot of fire risk. I'm not talking about building homes out of cinder block cubes. They can be very aesthetically pleasing, and here's an opportunity to put a lot of those new tools to work.

It's going to take some effort, it's going to take some expense, it's going to take probably some market mechanisms like, "Hey, if you want this house to be insured, you have to build it in a certain way. If you want to get a loan to finance this house, it's got to be built in a certain way with a certain design, with a certain set of materials." That's going to take some political will and some brute market force to make happen, but what an opportunity to have it play out in an area that once we rebuild, the risk is there. The risk of fire to that area of the country is not going away.

[00:38:28] Jon-Barrett You talked about the rebuilding in Talent Oregon and in Paradise and the planning that once you have this devastation that there's this ability to plan ahead moving into the future. The buffer zone that they're trying to create in Paradise. That gives me hope, but there's a lot of communities that are already in place. That's the challenge. It's easy from building from the ground up, but how do you change what's already in place?

[00:39:03] Nick: That's the big question these days. Like we've said, there have to be resources available for homeowners and for renters alike, especially for those without the means to tackle stuff on their own. There have to be incentives for doing the right thing and potentially punishments for doing the wrong thing. Also, one factor in all this we haven't mentioned is forest projects. One common thing we'll see in any of these fires, like you mentioned on the Eaton fire, you're next to a national forest and that's where this ignition potentially started.

Although there are exceptions to this rule, but forest projects done the right way using prescribed fire especially can go a long way in the right place towards making communities more resilient to wildfire. What research shows is that a forest project can mean a lot of different things. One common thing it generally means is removing trees. How many trees, how those trees are removed, the size of the trees that all differs.

If you do forest thinning, meaning getting rid of a lot of that fuel that's built up over the years, followed by prescribed burning safely in the right time, and, of course, that you have to continue to burn every few years into the future, that pays the biggest dividend of anything else if a fire comes through. If we can do that work, especially in areas around communities, essentially creating buffers through forest projects or also areas around other resources like reservoirs or sources of drinking water, things like that, then we go a super long way towards living more sustainably with fire and not have to worry so much about a fire encroaching on town in the first place.

[00:40:41] Justin: I guess the one thing I would just reiterate, and we've touched on so much of it in this conversation, is just these things are complex. They don't fall neatly along party lines, although politics plays a part. Just take the forest projects concept that Nick talked about before. It involves intentionally setting fire to the landscape. It does involve or can involve logging. There is often a reflexive no-nimbyism to a lot of this.

Even in communities that are facing extreme wildfire risk, we've seen it here in Missoula. There's a forest, a dense forest that presents a lot of wildfire risk just north of my house, and there's been a lot of resistance to what the Forest Service had planned to do in that community. That pattern repeats itself. People need to sort of embrace or accept that this is a complex problem. It's going to need a lot of different strategies to confront, and we have to figure out ways where we can be a part of the change because we have to change our ways, and we all have a role to play in that change.

[00:41:49] Host: We'd like to thank Nick Mott and Justin Engle and Bloomsbury Publishing. The Fire Problemis produced by Past Forward and Chapman University. To learn more about these issues, visit us at pastforward.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.

[music]