Life with Fire

For a long time, fire research in the moist forests of the Pacific Northwest was dominated by two main assertions: that wildfires in the West Cascades are typically "high-severity, low frequency" (in other words, dominated by stand-replacing fires that don't happen very often), and that Indigenous burning largely took place in prairies, river valleys and low-lying oak ecosystems. But extensive tree ring sampling over the last decade has shown that, in fact, these assertions aren't telling the entire story. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Andrew Merschel, who is a post-doc at Oregon State University and lead scientist/co-director of the Tree Ring Lab at OSU. Andrew has spent years studying fire histories in the moist, doug fir, hemlock and cedar-dominated forests of the West Cascades. His findings through the Tree Ring Lab have brought to question many of our longest-held assumptions about how fires burned in the Pacific Northwest prior to colonization—and the takeaway is that it's not nearly as simple as we once thought.

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

For our fifth episode of the the Fire in the Southwest Series, we're talking managed wildfires, which has a number of alter egos depending on who you talk to in the wildfire world, some of which include "wildland fire use" or "managing wildfires for resource benefit". Dr. Jose "Pepe" Iniguez, a research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, is our fearless leader on this journey through the fraught, occasionally contentious world of managed fire. Pepe has had a long career studying wildfire impacts in forested landscapes while building a better understanding of how our public lands have been shaped by disturbances like wildfire. His takeaway? We can't effectively manage forests at the landscape scale without the help of wildfires, and managed fire is the most feasible answer to the question of how we reach "scale" in our ability to build landscape resilience.

With fire season escalating across the West this week, many people are downloading Watch Duty App for the first time. But what is Watch Duty all about? Why was it created? Where does their information come from? What do agency employees think about it? We spoke to Watch Duty CEO John Mills about the Watch Duty app as well as fire technology more broadly, and gave him a chance to respond to some listener questions from PIOs, wildland firefighters, community resilience experts and others in the Life with Fire community. His responses are about as no-BS as they come, and he provided an honest assessment of where the app is currently and where he'd like it to be in the near and far-off future. A few things they're adding in the near future include a version of the app just for first responders, which John speaks to in the episode, while in the longer term he's looking forward to exploring how Watch Duty can provide more opportunities for community education about wildfire and wildfire resilience.

Welcome to our third episode of our Fire in the Southwest series! In this episode, we spoke with Jon Martin, who is the Director of Native American Forest and Rangeland Management Programming at the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University. Jon spent three decades working in forestry before retiring, and now uses his extensive interagency background to find pathways that can help tribes achieve their management goals within a Western fire management framework. This topic is especially prescient right now, as the Wildfire Commission Report was explicit in its recommendations to incorporate more Indigenous knowledge into land management (see: recommendations 12, 15, 16). However, while this directive is a step in the right direction, actually accomplishing it will require overcoming significant workforce and budget constraints at the ground level, especially within tribal communities. Jon and Amanda spoke about what this integration of different management practices can look like, how to overcome those barriers, the differences between cultural and agency fire, as well as the fundamental question of whether or not the differences between cultural and agency fire can be meaningfully reconciled. Jon also provided a great example of this integration working (the San Carlos Apache Tribe's use of Crisis Strategy/Infrastructure Bill funding). Finally, we wrapped the episode up with a discussion about the nature of federal land agency employment, which all but requires employees to move locations every 3-5 years to move up in their careers. Jon spoke about how the collaborative/shared stewardship pathway that is needed to meaningfully integrate Indigenous management into Western management requires a wholesale commitment to developing interagency relationships, and how this should be a major priority moving forward. "It’s not about going out and managing forests, silvicultural prescription or even forest management," Jon said in our conversation. "It’s become all about people management, almost a social science. I think people are starting to realize that. It’s a softer approach but it’s very real.” This conversation and the rest of our Fire in the Southwest series is supported by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, as well as the Arizona Wildfire Initiative. We're so grateful for their support!

Welcome to the first part of our six-episode series all about the Southwest, sponsored by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Arizona Wildfire Initiative! In our introductory episode for the series, we spoke with Mary Stuever, who is the Cimarron District Forester for New Mexico Forestry Division. Mary has a breadth of experience across disciplines in the fire world, which is well-reflected in our conversation. She's worked in suppression, prevention, fire ecology, community education, post-fire support and public information, among other roles in her long career in fire. As such, we touched on everything from her background in suppression (and subsequent health problems from smoke exposure) to her time providing post-fire community support for the folks in Mora, NM, which was devastated by the 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire. Mora was not only impacted by the fire itself, but also by subsequent flooding and debris flows that destroyed wells, choked out acequias (critical agricultural waterways) and destroyed untold homes, properties and livelihoods. Mary reflected on the situation she found herself in in such a devastating post-fire environment, including what was needed and opportunities she saw for helping other communities prepare for similar situations. She also gave us a quick Southwest Fire Ecology 101 lesson, and was all around a great guest to chat about the huge diversity of wildfire issues facing the Southwest right now. Most of the topics we spoke to will be elaborated on in greater detail in upcoming episodes, so we hope you'll stick around and listen in as we release more episodes of this series over the next six weeks.

Today's episode is a special one. We collaborated with the Montana Media Lab—a program of the University of Montana's School of Journalism—to help support their winter "Youth Voices" workshop, which empowers young Indigenous storytellers to learn more about audio storytelling while sharing stories from their communities. This episode features five stories from high school students in Browning and Florence, Montana, all of which are centered around wildfire's presence in their communities. Story one (timestamp: 6:32) centers on the experiences of volunteer wildland firefighters on the Blackfeet (Niitsitapi) Reservation, as well as on the history of Indigenous burning on Blackfeet Nation ancestral lands. Story two (12:29) is a profile of one of the student's grandfathers, who spoke about his experiences as a Chief Mountain hotshot back in the 70s and 80s. Episode three (16:34) focuses on the experiences of a few modern day members of the Chief Mountain Hotshots. Story four (19:49) highlights how wildfires impact wildlife, and provided an opportunity for students to speak with employees at their reservation's fish and wildlife office. Finally, story five (24:11) shows the unexpected impacts of having an incident command post pop up at your high school during a major summer wildfire in your area. This episode and collaboration were made possible with support from the American Wildfire Experience and Mystery Ranch Backpacks.

In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Jessica McCarty—who is the Biospheric Sciences branch chief at NASA's Ames Research Center—about her career, her work on fire in boreal and arctic ecosystems, her perspectives on fire technology (spoiler: she's a bit fan of predictive modeling) and so many other topics that I couldn't possibly list them all here. Here's her NASA bio, which explains her background better than we ever possibly could: Dr. McCarty has more than 15 years’ experience in applications of Earth observations and geospatial and data science to accurately quantify wildland and human-caused fire management and emissions, agriculture and food security, climate change impacts and adaptation, and land-cover/land-use change.