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There was a burning dryness in the air.
The vast, virgin forests of the American west, verdant and teeming with life turned stifling.
The very air seemed tired and still, silent in this intense heat.
A steel scar cuts its tracks through these woods, once free of man, but now trafficked and logged; traded and transformed.
A machine of fire and steam invades these lands. Steel wheels on steel tracks, sparks flying through the dry air.
A dozen fires left behind as embers find their way to the brush.
But then the wind shifts.
It's easy to imagine the flames, towering over the great pines of these ancient woods. To feel the heat, hotter than a blast furnace and utterly suffocating. To know the smell, the smoke, the darkness of a sky blacked out. But for those that survived, what they were left grasping to describe was the sound.
A fire this size is deafening. Flaming tornadoes form in the heat, hurricane winds whip through the flaming landscape, trees explode from the heat like claps of thunder.
It deafens Niagra Falls, reminds soldiers of artillery fire, and seems to be a "thousand locomotives rushing over a thousand steel trestles."
And when the rains finally came, when the forest could breathe and we could count the dead, human and animal, what was most felt, was the deep silence.
[2:25] In 1910 the largest wildfire in US history swept across the forests of Eastern Washington, Idaho, and Western Montana. 3 million Acres were consumed in the blaze - the size of Connecticut - and many firefighters lost their lives trying to protect the towns that were ultimately destroyed.
[2:42] Although at the time the Forest Service and conservation in general were being attacked by politicians and businessman, the fire established the need for greater forest protection in the minds of the public, and firmly established firefighters as heroes.
For better or worse, a new era of fire management policies was set in motion.
I'm David Torcivia.
I’m Daniel Forkner.
[3:03] And this is Ashes Ashes, a podcast about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky the end of the world.
But if we learn from all this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn’t have to be.
[3:18] Now today we are happy to be joined by Tommy Nease and Tyler Marlow, both who work or worked with the US Forestry Service so welcome both of you.
Hello.
How’s it going?
Thanks for joining us.
[3:31] It's so great to have you two on here. Maybe if each one of you wants to tell us just briefly about yourself so we know which voice is who's, so Tommy do you want to start?
Sure, I’m Tommy Nease. I live in Roslyn, Washington. I’m a photographer and I work for the US Forest Service.
That’s me.
[3:52] Great and Tyler?
[3:53] I'm Tyler, I live in the Four Corners region in the Colorado and Utah deserts, I worked for the Forest Service for a couple years though I think that time has come to an end.
[4:04] Great you want to get us started Daniel?
So I saw the short film on you Tommy.
Yea.
I have to say it’s pretty incredible. You grew up in North Carolina, you bounced around to Atlanta, and eventually wound up in Chicago right?
I grew up in North Carolina, then moved to Chicago, and then ended up in Atlanta.
Okay. And at one point you got drunk one night and you got into a car with some people you had just met? And the day after that you woke up and you’re on your way to Montana.
That is correct.
Is that what kind of started you know this journey of traveling out West, taking photography of landscapes, and train hopping too?
Yea I think so. I lived in Chicago for a year, and then at the end of that year I went to Iceland with a couple of friends, and we were there for two months hitchhiking, hiking, and doing all that stuff and then our time their ended, and I was back in the States.
I guess I wasn’t done traveling, so that fateful night ended up paving the way for the next three years or so of just traveling.
[5:14] Tyler you and Tommy have traveled together right?
[5:17] Yeah Tommy and I have traveled pretty extensively in the US. We've been to Wyoming and Montana together. This last summer we went to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. We’ve been to Chile, Argentina, and Patagonia…
Tons of other trips around Western United States.
[5:37] I'm a little bit jealous that sounds awesome.
So I mean you both clearly have like a deep love of the outdoors right?
Correct.
Is that what pushed you into in the first place getting involved in the forestry services? Or is it just a convenient way to make some money while out in all this wilderness?
[5:55] I'd say my entry to that was after my first year of college, growing up in Atlanta and suburban Atlanta I was like “I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” and had some friends drive me to Maine, and hiked the Appalachian trail from Maine back to Georgia.
Through that some friends that had met there, after that they went on to do trail work and trail building through non-profit Conservation Corps organization, and that was kind of an eye-opener to me like.
“Whoa you can get paid to live outside and build hiking trails and have fun?” So that’s when that started for me and I did a couple years of that nonprofit Conservation Corps world, and from there transitioned into the Forest Service in Moab, Utah which is where I've lived and worked the previous two years.
How’d you get involved in the US Forest Service Tommy?
It was when I moved out to Washington in 2015. I went straight into the Fire Program. My first year was on a contracted engine crew. My second year I started on a fire crew with the Forest Service, and now I’m in the Wilderness Trails program.
[7:10] So you've done both the engine work and hand crew work. Can you tell us a little bit about just like the very basic overview of the fire services?
So in my experience, on the contracted engine, you’re on call the entire fire season, and the only time you’re working is when there’s an incident.
And the 2015 season in the Pacific Northwest was pretty intense, so I stayed busy that whole season. The next year, when I was on the agency crew, you work 40 hours a week even if you’re not on an incident, so that just entail a lot of physical conditioning and project work, and kind of going crazy.
But at least you have 40 hours of pay guaranteed to you.
You said that year was particularly intense. Is that just because of the hours you worked? Or the number of fires you were responding to?
Yea just the number of fires in the state of Washington and Oregon. It seems like every year is a record breaking year but that 2015 season was extraordinarily intense. Just huge fires, and there were a few instances where like a few big fires would merge into each other and create megafire, and there’s a huge need for the contractors because there wasn’t enough personnel within the agencies to work all the fires that were happening.
[8:43] And Tyler you've done a little bit of fire work as well, is that right?
[8:47] Barely. I've been on one actual fire assignment, just this last Fall, which in my experience was the biggest joke ever and the easiest and maybe second worst money I've ever made.
The only job I've ever had that was less enjoyable was working in a fish factory. With Tommy actually!
[9:09] Well what made this so particularly miserable?
[9:12] For 16 or 18 days we were paid 16 hours a day to literally sit on our asses and trucks. Of that time, maybe 5 days we did some work, and in a day that we would work we never did more than 3 hours of work in a day, even though we were being paid for 16… which I'm not complaining about but -
[9:35] Yeah it's frustrating.
Is that something that you’ve experienced as well Tommy? This like hurry up and wait?
Yea definitely, it’s kind of the name of the game a lot of the times. I feel like if you work in the field long enough, you see enough of those rolls where you’re not doing anything, and then the ones where you’re working your ass off for those 16 hours.
It’s kind of hit or miss and it can be within the same detail, on the same day. You could be sitting around doing nothing for like 10 days, and then on the last 4 days shit hits the fan and you’re busting ass.
But most of the time it’s just hurry up and wait, and it varies differently from the engines and the hand crews and the helitack. Just whatever crew you’re on.
[10:25] Well that's something I'm interested in. When you think – or at least when I think wildland forest fire, the last thing I think is engines out in the woods working on this. Maybe helicopters, maybe planes dropping those retardants or water, and definitely guys out there with hand axes and Pulaski’s and whatever.
[10:43] But definitely not engines out there like how does that work?
So it really depends on which region you’re in and what the road systems are like, but at least in the Northwest engines are fairly prevalent and it’s common for them to team 5 or so engines together, which they call a strike team.
So you have 5 engines if you need water, and then all the people working those engines can form a hand crew if the assignment calls for getting out and digging line or something like that. But they’ll usually establish water-fill sites and then have a water tender that will go and fill up the engines when needed. So that’s how they technically get the water out onto the line if it’s not there already.
[11:28] Fire engine in my mind immediately brings things like the big red fire truck from the city, but in wildland firefighting it could be like just a regular pickup truck with like a utility bed and a series of pumps on it, or it may be like some giant engine looking thing.
There’re different types that go everywhere from you know, small pickups, to tank-looking huge fire trucks.
And what really surprised me – I’ve seen some videos, some documentaries of firefighting in the wildlands, in these forests – and it surprised me how close you are to the flames even if you’re on a truck detail right?
They’re sitting right by the road and the flames look like they’re only 20 or 30 feet away, and you said Tommy that you’re busting ass right, I guess that’s an intense situation right?
And some of the dangers I was reading about are not just the flames themselves but you have to worry about, I guess they’re called snags which are flaming parts of the tree that might come down and hit you. You have to watch the ground where a stump could be burned out and it leaves a hole where your leg could go through and that can harm you.
Does it feel like a really dangerous situation when you’re out there? Or is it just like “okay I’m just doing my job,” and you’re just really focused?
It varies. I mean there’s plenty of things out there, as with any time that could easily kill you. So the snags are just dead trees and then usually in a fire environment there’s lots of instability in the atmosphere so high winds, and those can take down the snags and there’s been quite a few fatalities in the last few years of snags falling on firefighters, and yea then there are stump holes which are after the fire has come through, it burns through the roots and it will still be hot underneath, and there will just be a pillow of ash, really like a mine really, because you’ll just step somewhere and go through and burn your foot…
I mean among countless other hazards, but there’s definitely moments where I’ve had – usually when you’re right up to the fire digging hot line where it’s pretty scary, but a typical fire assignment doesn’t give you that sense of fear usually.
[13:45] Maybe you can help explain to us the difference between a hand crew and what would be involved in that kind of work versus the engine work.
The hand crew are 20 personnel usually, 21. When you’re on a hand crew you’re mostly digging line or mopping up, or lighting fires. Mostly, yea you’re on your feet and also sitting next to the rigs a lot of the times, but on an engine it’s more varied I feel like because you’re assisting other hand crews, or you’re out there digging line yourself, or you’re running water, or you could be doing dust abatement on the roads.
Usually for engines it can vary day-to-day what you’re doing, and they tend to move you to different parts of the fires more than they would a hand crew, and a hand crew is kind of just, they’ll be like “okay we need this 10 miles of line dug” or whatever and you just do that for a week.
[14:43] And you mentioned I think lighting fires too which is something I think a lot of people don't realize that fire management involves; it's not just putting them out it's creating fires.
Correct, yeah. They consider that indirect firefighting. You’re kind of working the fire further away, burning between you and your control line, and the active fire to remove any fuels that could carry it up to the line.
So this is a fire you strat when there’s a larger wildfire going on, and you’re trying to burn the fuel in a controlled way to prevent the bigger fire from like getting to this area?
Yea, so basically if you think about it like, you can have your stretch of line, and then if you’re the one lighting a fire under controlled circumstances, the atmosphere has to be favorable for the burning, but it’s way more easy to manage than if you just wait for the fire to come to your line.
Who knows how it’s going to behave at that point.
Have you ever done a controlled fire outside of a response to an active wildfire as just like a general way to reduce fuel in an overcrowded forest?
Yea. I’ve worked prescribed fires. Some of the most intense situations I’ve been in have been prescribed fires when things go south.
[16:00] Is that because of like poor planning or...?
I mean you can only plan a forest fire to a certain extent.
[16:09] Haha, yeah I guess so.
Or like rushing it, meeting deadlines, like we need to light this off and then knowing that the wind is going to turn the other way. And always on prescribed fires, if it turns into a wildfire that looks really bad.
[16:26] That actually happened on my district.
There was a prescribed fire to reduce fuel around near some campgrounds and just on a part of the forest that had too much fuel load, and they planned a prescribed burn for the late Fall when conditions were good, and somewhere along the line they lost control of it and then what was a small prescribed fire turned into an uncontrolled wildfire.
It jumped the line, crossed into an area they didn’t want to burn, and then it took a whole lot more resources and the whole weekend to get everything back under control.
[17:00] How much does that happen, both in prescribed fires and when battling a more out of control wildfire that a fire jumps one of these lines you've created to control it?
In my experience at least, it happens quite a bit, especially on back burning or prescribed fire. Technically when you’re lighting a back fire you have a lot of people working it, and so some people are actually putting fire on the ground; other people are just standing at the line and watching the area that they don’t want to burn, because the fire… every single time I think I’ve only worked one back fire operation where we didn’t have to run around putting spot fires out.
It’s okay if there’s a few spot fires, that’s fine, but when they pop up and get bigger and then merge into each other, someone’s got to make the call to get out of there. No one wants to make that call.
Isn’t one of the controversies around prescribed fires that, I mean the reason you do it right is to reduce the fuel. And some of the areas that need, or have the most fuel built up in them, these overcrowded forests, are near places where there’s also a lot of houses and a lot of development right?
And these areas might need more fuel reduction than others, but because there’s so many houses around there’s resistance to it. Does that play out?
Yeah they call that the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), and it’s kind of a new problem, because there’s so many structures in areas that usually didn’t, and we had a fire this past Summer that was like 2 or 3 miles from the town that I live in. And there’s plenty of vacation homes and stuff up the valley, so that was a huge part, and it took a lot of resources to cover those structures.
I mean one thing that it does do is it eases access to get in there in case there is an incident – there’s more roads and access to water and stuff. But it is a huge problem, and I mean I have my thoughts about building cabins in places that burn regularly.
I don’t think it’s super smart but typically if you’re in an area that’s prone to fire behavior, the citizens build an interest and become more fire savvy and are kind of more on board with the whole prescribed projects.
[19:22] Is there some other fuel reduction being done in those areas, like whether by hand or what?
I would say it’s mostly prescribed work. I know they do go in and thin by hand, especially with the Department of Fish and Wildlife here. Tends to work but doing prescribed fires, you can just get a lot more done, and it leaves a more natural stand of forest as opposed to just running chainsaws through ti.
[19:47] And I guess some trees also sort of need that burn as well as part of their life cycle, maybe not in every area of the country but certainly in some of them.
This could be a question for both of you. Tommy you mentioned building cabins in the Wildland Urban Interface, so building a cabin in the middle of these flammable forests might not be a good idea but…
As both of you being huge wilderness fans, do you feel like we in general just have this kind of strange relationships with nature because, on the one hand, we want to be in nature; we want to appreciate the wild, but we also can’t help building houses and grocery stores in the middle of it. Do you think there needs to be a shift in the way we as a society relate to nature?
I mean are we putting good conservation practices in place? Or is our development kind of encroaching a little bit too much?
[20:42] Yes we’re pushing too far into wilderness or wilderness qualities, deciding to build further and further out rather than you know intentionally designing cities that revolve around community and walking space, or small communities that may be rural but are more sustainable than a lot of the communities that we have around the country here.
Things that come to mind are places like Las Vegas that has no natural water sources or, Phoenix that is slowly getting too hot and too dry for massive…
[21:17] Maybe more than slowly.
[21:18] Yeah maybe very quickly.
Isn’t that the city where planes literally couldn’t take off at the airport just because it was too hot?
[21:25] Yea just this past summer.
[21:26] Yeah mailboxes were just like melting right off their post.
Yeah I mean right now my home, and my favorite place is the Colorado Plateau, and that's where dams like Lake Powell and Lake Mead which dam the Colorado go through, and the emerging controversy is the state of Utah want to siphon water out of Lake Powell, which is at historically low levels all ready, to feed growing communities in St. George, Utah which is in the Southwest corner - specifically to feed new subdivisions with huge pools and luxury homes in a landscape that has no water sources at all.
I find that to be entirely absurd, but that's where the development is going.
[22:11] This is a super interesting topic, something I'm really interested in, and the whole Colorado River Basin, and the water wars that are already happening over that - I mean much of LA's water actually comes from that, it's piped in over via aqueduct, and who knows how long that'll keep flowing as all these other siphons farther upstream get precedence over that.
It’s going to be interesting to watch that play out.
[22:33] It’s something that you can see very presently in the Southwest here. There's rivers in Utah like one that comes to mind is the Dirty Devil. It’s a small river in Central Utah that literally dries up by the summer once all of the local ranchers and farmers turn on the irrigation pumps and the river basically ceases to flow almost entirely.
[22:57] Does that have ramifications also for these wildfires? If this source of water which isn't just the water itself, but also provides moisture for the region around it, and has effects on weather patterns…
If we're sucking this region dry in addition to the climate change doing the same thing, then we're really sort of exacerbating a problem that’s already bad and getting worse right?
[23:20] Without doubt.
For people that might be living in these areas that are more fire-prone, what are some things that they should know about living more sustainably in these places, and helping to reduce the chance of these fires?
One thing that comes to mind is there’s a big push for defensible space. Building like an area around your property that it makes it less likely for fire to burn your house. Like not having cedar shingles on your roof, and stuff like that which I think is really important because a huge cause of firefighter fatalities is trying to save structures in these areas and a lot of the times they’re even structures that aren’t occupied. They’re like vacation houses or something.
But I think something that should happen in these communities is more education on why these fires happen more and more, and educating people about climate change and getting people to care about it because, I mean if the education you’re giving out is just “make your house so it won’t burn down,” you’re just treating the symp[tom to the problem because the fires are going to get worse and worse until it starts burning communities and your defensible space isn’t going to do anything.
A defensible space, is that just you clear the trees around the immediate area so that it’s more open and there’s no fuel for a fire to get closer to the structure?
Yea exactly.
That basically has been my life this past Fall, was working for a private company in Southwest Colorado doing fire mitigations on homes, which basically looks like thinning out the existing trees, and bushes, and scrubby plants and grasses so that if fire does come to your property it doesn't have you know a continuous canopy, or grasses that lead to bushes that lead to small trees that leads to large trees then to the roof of your house.
[25:17] Yeah it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out the next years as these fires get worse.
[25:22] And this past fire season, in California especially, was one of the most expensive ever. Insurance companies are on the hook already for 13 billion dollars I think. And so they're just going to get stricter about that but we still need to build more houses; they're going to continue developing these things in this Wildland Urban Interface, and it's just two sides pushing against each other and I don't know who's going to win.
I guess fire wins in the end right?
[25:46] Someone recently told me an interesting thought is that fire is the only natural disaster that we actually send people to try and stop.
[25:55] FEMA comes in after the fact, after a hurricane has come through, or a flood, or a mudslide even, but when a wildfire happens you actually sending people in front of the fire to try and stop it in its tracks.
[26:08] Pretty audacious.
[26:11] I'd love to see them try and do that to a hurricane.
“Quick guys, assemble the fans, blow it back to sea!”
And Tommy you mentioned a need to educate people on why these fires are getting worse and what we can do about it. Both of you, what do you see as being the biggest obstacles to educating the public, and not just them, but educating our politicians right who set these policies. On the right approach going forward with managing these fires and these wildlands?
The best you can do is educate people and make them care about climate change, but it seems like most people that care about climate change don’t live in areas where fires rip through for the most part.
I mean there’s definitely a lot of education out here and people that care, but a lot of people also don’t care and they have their cattle, and they need their resources to farm and
And so the economic incentives I guess win out in the short term over long term sustainability.
Right. As everything does, it seems like.
[27:13] Isn't that the running theme of everything that we talk about on here.
So I have a story. I’ll say it before I forget it. You had mentioned about what can politicians do to help.
So on the Jolly Mountain Fire this past Summer, the fire had burned past one of our contingency lines. They had said “if it goes past this point we’re going to shut down the Alpine Lakes Wilderness,” which is a large wilderness area in our ranger district, and so my job was, along with other rangers, get everyone evacuated out of the wilderness areas.
The first person we evacuated out of the wilderness area was the Governor of Washington. And he was very open to hear about the fires. He didn’t know about it, which is kind of alarming, but he was very open to hear us talk about it like what’s happening and actually came down to the main fire camp, gave a talk at the morning briefing, and kind of spread awareness about what was happening.
Which I thought was interesting. I mean I think it’s really cool that our governor was out on a backpacking trip on his time off. I think that’s kind of rare.
[28:22] Yeah that's encouraging.
[28:24] Probably the most memorable fire-related story that I have actually has nothing to do with firefighting but, thankfully, at the beginning of one of my seasons we were hiking down into the dark canyon wilderness.
My boss had told us to keep an eye out for maybe a smoldering campfire. He had gotten some reports of the smell of smoke, and I just assumed that someone left a campfire going, so as we hike down into the area where it should be we started catching these whiffs of smoke in the bottom of a giant Red Rock Canyon.
[28:55] And just literally followed our noses and walked around smelling for smoke until we stumbled into this clearing of maybe a half acre entirely burned area. Which turns out wasn't caused by a campfire, but a natural fire that had come down, burned a bit of an area, and then put itself out.
[29:15] Ahappy ending right there.
[29:16] Right well what really pleased me was that we reported it to my boss and he didn’t call the cavalry out and send, you know, 50 firefighters down into like a Wilderness Canyon hoping that they can use their chainsaws in the Wilderness Area so they can have fun and be heroes for something that doesn't need any management whatsoever.
Is this an example of how perceptions are changing within the Forest Service about the need to just conquer every single fire and have a more…
Enlightened?
…perspective for lack of a better word?
[29:46] I'd say that just shows the perspective of my supervisor who's a huge supporter of wilderness, and that there's no need to send you know 30 people down there and spend thousands of dollars for something that happens naturally.
I can't say that that's the perspective of the district at large, or firefighters in general, but as far as recreation and wilderness people, I would say that’s almost a universal perspective.
Well then that raises a good question: Is there division within the Forest Service about the right way to approach these fires?
They’ve for so long just put the fires out, just looking to the short term, but now it seems like they’re looking to the longer term and pulling all the resources from different departments in order to figure out what is the best thing to do.
[30:34] Long-term informed decisions
That's amazing. That’s something we sorely need in every area of life. So it’s amazing that forestry services, the governmental organization is able to do that right now.
Yeah. Fire is chaos and there’s so many people einvolved to where it’s not going to be perfect, but it seems like at least from the management position, they’re trying to be better about that.
[31:00] You both mentioned love of wilderness, and obviously you both love the wilderness, but how do you think you get people to care who don't live, you know, in the woods of Washington, or right outside Moab, or in these places that are beautiful, wild, wilderness but instead live in the suburbs of the East Coast; live in Los Angeles; live in New York City, and never really leave those places.
What would you say to these people about why the wilderness is important? Why they need to understand it?
And I mean everyone would say “yes of course, we need to protect the woods, the wild,” but maybe they don't understand just why it's so important.
First thing that comes to mind is just words from more eloquent people than I like Wallace Stegner, Aldo Leopold, talking about just the innate necessity of humans and wilderness to both exist simultaneously.
[31:48] Wilderness is a part of who humans are, but it's important for us to maintain wilderness to maintain that part of ourselves. It sounds like maybe a little hippy-dippy but that's something that I really believe in. I think there's an innate desire in anyone, anywhere, and as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Georgia, wilderness and exploration was the only way out for me.
[32:12] You know growing up as a kid, hiking around streams, or like little patches woods that were left in our neighborhood, led me to getting out and trying to see more and more, and the more I experience wilderness the more important it becomes to me.
I mean this whole topic is pretty inspiring to me.
David and I have been on a few caving trips ourselves, we have a lot of great caves in the Southeast United States, and it’s been a long time since I just like got out and immersed myself in nature, which I think is unfortunate because there is something really special about being in the environment where you might as well be a million miles from civilization.
Maybe you guys can answer this: for someone who might be listening right now, let’s say they’re in their 30s, they live in the city, and they grew up their whole lives in an urban environment. They might have an interest in developing an appreciation for nature, but don’t know how. Is it too late for them? I mean what can they do?
I feel like subconsciously everyone wants to return to nature. I think it’s easy to distract yourself to the point where you feel content just living in a city and never getting outside, but I think inherently people want to experience that, and especially with the internet age, I don’t know it seems like people sharing their experiences in the wilderness is inspiring other people to find their own experience and get outside.
Which I think is important.
[33:40] Even if you're only getting outside to get that cool Instagram picture, you're still going outside and when you're there you’re going to be pretty cool, assume that people are going to want to go back.
And the both of ya’ll traveled together in Wyoming and Montana I think it was, and you have a great video online of that, and maybe we can post that on the website so people can see that.
[34:02] So everyone listening can see all that they're missing right now.
You guys have anything else you want to say or add, or you feel like we missed?
[34:10] It seems like from the creation of the Forest Service and the creation of like massive industrialized wildland firefighting, we got really good at it, and decided that any fire that starts we’re going to put out, and disrupted a natural cycle that would be great to go back to, but at this point there's just too many houses, too many people, too much threat to property and loss of life, that we don't really have the option to just let fires return to a natural cycle without harming a lot of people and a lot of property.
That’s a conversation that we might have to have.
[34:41] Yeah that's such a great point.
Just like the prescribed burns where when it gets to property, when people’s houses or businesses are there, and they say “no you can’t do this,” or “we’re going to fight this,” you just have to suck it up and say “fine you’re going to catch on fire in a couple of years,” but when those fires come the Fire Service is going to be there trying to put it out.
[35:02] I mean it's putting people's lives at risk. It’s putting the property at risk. But is there a choice?
Yea I always in a perfect world thought it’d be nice to only fight fires that were human caused and let the natural ones just run their cycle, but also at the same time I’m in the process of buying a house and I would want someone to like stop a fire if it was going to burn it down. So I’m guilty as well.
[35:28] That's just part of the reality of living in these beautiful places I guess.
Right.
So Tommy you’re a really good photographer. You have a website that everyone should check out. What is that website, and where else can people find you?
So the website is www.tommynease.com.
And tumblr which is the other place I put photos on which is tommynease.tumblr.
And I just had an opening in Roslyn for my new series TOPOS, which is photos, most of them are of Tommy I believe actually, and it’s photos from all our trips in federally protected wilderness areas in 2017, with the intention of building awareness of wilderness areas.
Any sales that I make, I’m donating 30% to the Wilderness Society if anyone wants to buy some.
What about you Tyler, is there somewhere people can find you online, follow what you’re doing?
[36:36] Do you want people to?
Haha that’s the question I was asking myself.
Do you have anything you want to pitch?
[36:42] Right yeah I do.
I'd really love it if people looked into the fight for Bears Ears National Monument, which has recently been downsized by the great leader. And is now two much smaller national monuments, and the whole goal of the Bears Ears National Monument was to protect areas sacred to five tribes in the Four Corners region, and President Obama created the Bears Ears National Monument in December of last year, and that’s been a prolonged political battle, which we seem to be losing right now.
So I would ask people to support that fight in every way we can; we want those areas protected and we want the native and tribal sovereignty over those areas.
You can go to Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance website, or the Utah Diné Bikéyah, that's a Navajo organization that's fighting for Bears Ears.
That's great. That's a really great cause, and something we encourage everyone to check out and support.
We definitely don’t need less national land, we need more.
[37:48] As well as an opportunity to support native voices and native sovereignty.
Thanks guys for joining us.
Cool thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Thanks so much guys; we really appreciate both of you coming on here and giving us a little bit of your time in order to share your deep actual professional knowledge and personal experiences fighting these fires, spending time in the wilderness, with all of us who might just be sitting at home, or on the subway, or in the city, and these are very far thoughts from our mind, so bringing us that personal look I think it's a really valuable and I know I learned a lot.
I definitely learned a lot. I appreciate it too.
[38:21] And one thing I think we briefly touched on with Tyler and Tommy, but we didn't really dig into any depth was how we ended up with these poorly managed forests.
And all these wildfires that are out of control.
The forests that we see today David, they don’t look anything like the forests of 100 years ago, and those forests look nothing like the forests centuries in the past.
Our modern forests are overcrowded, and now because of climate change, they are exploding into more frequent and more destructive fires. More than we’ve ever seen before.
[38:53] Literally exploding at some time.
And the poor quality of our forests is largely due to human activity.
In the late 1800s we brought sheep and cattle with us – so this is the Western United States – and these animals they started to graze the grasses. And these grasses in the plains of Western America have historically been the main track by which fire was delivered to these forests, where young trees, seedlings, and brush could be burned up.
And these frequent low-intensity fires would now harm the tall pines that had thick bark and limbs that began 10 to 20 feet off the ground. These fires left the forests open and patchy, but the sheep and cattle grazing combined with our roads and our railways that interrupted grass fires meant that the fire could not get to the forest as easily. In addition, the logging industry took away some of the best trees. The really old ones that were thick and tall.
All this combined to encourage a proliferation of young and vulnerable trees, and plant species, which have worked together to really reshape our forests.
And Example of this overcrowding in our forests is in Arizona. A century ago there might have been some 20 trees per acre, for example, and today in some parts of Arizona that number is closer to 800 trees per acre. So by fighting every fire, by preventing natural low-intense fires to keep these forests under control, we unknowingly set the stage for much more massive fires in the future.
[40:24] And it's not just these human activities that have played into this, at least directly.
So climate change has also been a very big part of the proliferation of these fires and the fires themselves getting worse.
Something Tommy mentioned in the interview.
[40:37] Yeah exactly.
[40:39] That happened in a number of different ways, and of course I mean climate change is human-caused so we were indirectly bringing this about but it's not as direct as like poor farming, overgrazing, poor forestry practices but it is a major major factor now, and so it really ends up being just a couple of different areas on how this is playing out and making this worse.
[40:59] For starters, we're seeing less rain, and less water, and greater and longer droughts in the West, in the northwest, where these fires are getting bad, and these dry periods end up cooking the forest. Of taking all this extra scrub that isn't supposed to be there that is there now, because of the way these forests have changed over the past hundred plus years, and turning that scrub from scrub into fuel.
Once this tinder builds up because it’s been dried out, because it has died from the droughts, then it just needs a spark, whether that’s from lightening, whether it’s from human activities like camping or more intentional things, it doesn't matter because once that spark gets out all of a sudden this fuel which is now everywhere - which is now dryer than it's ever been - goes up all at once.
So not only are these forests becoming dryer, but the fire season itself has extended. The increased heat is causing snow from mountains to melt off months earlier than they used to, which means less water is filling streams with snowmelt at times when forests need the water the most.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, the warming and drying climate has expanded fire seasons in the western US by 78 days between 1970 and 2015.
[42:14] And one additional way that we don't expect this to make things worse is that it's not just about warming, it's not just about droughts, but greater variability in the weather, in the climate in general. So what might pop up as having droughts for a few years, and then suddenly you’ll have one year where it pours. Where it constantly, because of el nino or la nina or whatever weather phenomenon that’s happening more frequently because of this increased variability; jet streams, whatever it is, more energy is being pumped into this system – that’s what this heat is measuring in terms of global climate change and in terms of global warming – as the temperatures go up, that’s more energy in the system and more energy in the system encourages more variability.
So when you have one of these wet years, following years or drought, you see an explosion of life. All these sprouts, all these plants, these seedlings, that were waiting for that chance to get a little bit of water pop out of the ground, and it’s beautiful.
We had a super bloom in Death Valley this past year that was enabled by this. It was amazing, there were flowers blooming in places where they hadn’t been in a decade. Just absolutely gorgeous. But what happens when that rain disappears? When that drought returns?
[43:23] All this beautiful new growth turns back into fuel. And it turns into more fuel than there has been in a long time, and with no fires to burn it because you had just had a wet rainy season, the fires that happen then are bigger, faster, and stronger than any before.
So you get these cyclical, disastrous fire seasons because you have these variability in the climate because of climate change.
And in the middle of this, we’re building more homes, more towns. Today, 60% of all new homes built are in these flammable areas, and 1/4th of all the homes in the United State are within the boundaries of this, Wildland –
Uh you say it David, the phrase that Tommy said, what is it?
The Wildland Urban Interface, yea that’s it. That’s the one.
But David, I mean part of the whole problem right is we’ve been fighting fires that we should have just let happen naturally, and the fact that these forests have been starved of fires. I mean fires are a natural part of a forest ecosystem, not something we tend to think about.
In the grasslands for example, where fires typically start from lightning strike, and were more frequent than they are today, the sunlight that pours down on this black ground helps the growth of certain micrboes that recycle nutrients back into the soil, and grazing animals like deer enjoy better diets from this fresh grass that springs up as opposed to older stocks of grass.
And low-intensity fires lead to healthier forests as well. Some seeds can grow faster in slightly burnt areas, which leads to a higher diversity of young vegetabtion, which again can then attract a variety of animal species that can benefit from the better diet, and Tommy and Tyler mentioned how we’re just now learning to use prescribed fire to control the overgrowth in some of these forests, but there’s evidence that Native Americans – long before we came and settled in their land – understood this relationship between fire, grasses, and forests.
They used fire to attract deer and bison. They used it to clear meadows and forests to grow better food, and they even had a method of controlled fires during early and late times of the year to prevent larger and more destructive fires in later season. Which again is something that we’re just figuring out now as we’re seeing some of these megafires really proliferate.
[45:59] Some species of trees, mostly pine trees, are dependent on fire to survive. When their pine cones fall - normally they would open up and spread their seeds - but some of these are covered in a sticky resin, and they can’t open at all unless they are exposed to very high temperature, and these very high temperatures can only be brought about by fire.
And the evolution of this was that if it falls, a fire passes by, and the pine cone protects these seeds, melts off the resin and then in the seeds come out once the fire passes; now it has freshly fertilized, rich ground to grow on and dramatically increases the likelihood that those seeds will Sprout into a fully-grown tree someday.
Without the fire these trees can't reproduce.
That’s super interesting.
And so as these forests become overcrowded, it means increased competition for scarce resources like water. Some of these vulnerable tree species that would not normally be able to expand under normal fire conditions, they drink a lot of water! And combined with climate change it’s making a lot of these tall pines sick and dehydrated, leading to insect and disease infestations, which adds more dead fuel to fires in addition to the live fuel that comes from having a dense forest.
Since historically these forests were burned out frequently of low vegetation, fire never made it to the tops of these pine trees – the canopy – but now, because all this undergrowth provides a natural ladder for the fire to climb up to the canopy of pine trees, once that happens this fire can quickly jump from tree to tree, spreading like crazy, and causing unprecedented damage.
[47:33] And when these fires finally do roll through, with all this food on the ground, they burn much much hotter than they would during a traditional natural fire where these fire practices haven't been introduced, of preventing this from happening.
When these fires burn that hot, it damages trees that have bark that would normally prevent them from being hurt; it burns up these pine cones that we’ve talked about so they can't drop their seeds, and it actually even goes down into the soil itself and burns the top few inches or feet of the soil so that nothing can grow. The roots of these plants that would normally pop back up even though the top part was destroyed by the fire, are themselves destroyed, scorched, burned out and the entire plant is dead.
So there’s no regrowth after a fire anymore. When these ultra-hot, modern fires roll through fueled by these massive amounts of scrub, everything is dead; only moonscapes are left behind.
And then when the rain comes later, because the soil has been so scorced, the water can’t penetrate the ground and it results in top-layer mudslides right? Destroying even more roots, causing destruction for human development; I think we’ve seen some landslides in California.
[48:39] That took some lives unfortunately.
In a vicious cycle it prevents further hydration of these very thirsty forests.
[48:46] And we're seeing this all over the country, but maybe most dramatically in California.
Yea California is an example of a place where all these factors are coming together to wreak havoc for so many people.
In 2016, California saw 1000 more fires than the average 5yr average at the time. And in some places, they just expect fires at all time throughout the year. They don’t have the largest fires, but you have to remember, there are 40million people spread out in California. When these fires do occur, there is so much destruction in terms of homes and infrastructure.
[49:21] And historically these fires in California were in these wildlands, in these woodlands.
But as the scrub continues; as we can't make these prescribed burns in these Wildland Urban Interfaces like we talked about with Tyler and Tommy, these fires are really butting up right against civilization. This past year in 2017 we saw very dramatic imagery coming out of Los Angeles, out of Beverly Hills, of massive hellscape fires right on the interstate.
In fact even major artist situations like the Getty museum had to shut down everything, close off their stuff, and seal their art to protect it from the smoke, from the fires that were bearing down on these locations. The imagery from this is dramatic if you haven't seen it you should check it out, we’ll try and put some of that on our website.
But this is the future that we have. Whole neighborhoods were scorched, cars left in the street literally melted - their wheels melted onto the pavement, not the tires but the wheels, the aluminum steel wheels. That's how hot, that's how intense these fires have got because of all this over growth, because of all this additional fuel that is there because when these fires creep close to these settled places; to these urban lands, we have to put it out right? You're not going to let it burn through and burn people's houses, but what that means is there's more and more fuel. And when there's more and more fuel the fires get more dramatic, and eventually you get some that you just can't control.
Yea those wildfires in California – in December 27,000 people ended up having to be evacuated and one of the major freeways there was shutdown. People couldn’t get to LA without having to take this like 5 hour detour, and if you’ve ever been to LA you know the traffic is already pretty terrible there so
[50:58] I mean a 5 hour detour in Los Angeles might just be like a mile or two though.
And you mentioned all this dead fuel right that’s adding to this and quite literally fueling these fires.
[51:08] That's not funny Daniel.
Another factor that’s leading to all this dead fuel is: because these forests are overcrowded, and because they’re dehydrated, it’s led to an infestation of Bark Beetles. These beetles are about the size of rice, and they try to get inside a pine tree and lay their larvae, and eat the tree from the inside.
Normally a tree can push these beetles by literally just blocking the entrance and just pushing the beetles out with their sap and other compounds, but because these trees are so dehydrated they don’t have the resources to fight these beetles, they’re just going rampant and destroying a lot of trees which again just adds more dead fuel to these systems.
[51:49] This fire problem in California has gotten so bad they just can't find enough firefighters to deal with it, and so they've instead turned to prison inmates.
[51:58] They take thousands of prisoners, it depends on the season, so anywhere 2,000 and 4,000 prisoners - some of them are non-violent and some of them are violent offenders so they have to qualify for certain things - but they're put out there and they're out on these front lines with these professional firefighters, on these hand crews, out making fire line, digging out trenches, doing this very intense dangerous firework and paid: what is it $2 a day? Is that right Daniel?
Yea they’re paid $2/day BUT they get a little bit more compensation when they’re actually fighting a fire.
[52:30] When they're actively at risk of dying, they get hazard pay I guess?
Well they get a dollar an hour.
[52:35] It's good to give these prisoners skills I'll admit that, but the problem is a lot of them come out of prison and then can't get hired for this firefighting work because they have records and so instead this is just the state using quasi slave labor, and yes you can still have slave labor if you pay somebody $2 a day I mean that is, let's not beat around the bush and pretend “oh there's money changing hand it’s not slave labor.”
It's slave labor and the state using this to protect these very expensive homes, these houses that shouldn’t have been built there anyway, and giving these people basically no choice in order to do this. It's a very ridiculously messed up system, but again we talk about these options like they don't have any other options, they have to do this. They could pay them though.
Yea the future job prospects is what really makes that unfortunate, because they do! They receive the exact same training that a professional firefighter does, and they face the exact same risks. You know they’re out there making a dollar an hour, but then when they get out of prison you know they have to go back to these minimal wage, convenience store jobs I guess, and that seems a little bit unfair to me.
[53:38] It seems more than a little bit unfair.
But that’s just the reality of how bad this situation is.
[53:42] And some of this California has brought upon themselves in a great example of how bad we are at doing anything at all.
I think this was actually Australia planning the first full-scale invasion on American soil when they shipped California Eucalyptus trees in the mid-1800s during California’s gold rush.
At the time, the logging industry in California was looking to make a lot of money with these trees, but it all went bust when they realized the tree was useless in its juvenile state, and that it would take centuries for them to mature to an acceptable level. Australia had these Eucalyptus trees, but they were centuries old and at that point they’re good for lumber.
So we didn’t really know what to do with these trees, but they were kind of pretty so ultimately we used them for decoration and windbreaks for highways and farms. Well what we also didn’t know is that in addition to being bad lumber products, they also produce a highly toxic oil, and when they burn, even at low temperatures, compounds are released causing exploding fires in which burning embers are sent flying, and in the case of large-scale fires, these embers come drifting down on urban communities. If that wasn’t bad enough, at even higher temperatures – like some of these megafires we’re seeing – this flammable gas gets boiled out of these trees and when it gets into the air this gas will combust and send exploding fireballs raining down from the sky.
[55:06] These are all over California; they planted them everywhere, because they are pretty trees, and they're like “oh this is pretty and cheap, and we have to do something with it so we'll build that’ and instead they've just quite literally planted ticking Time Bombs all over the wild in the state.
If this wasn’t bad enough these trees also draw a ton of water from the soil, more so than any other tree, so they’re also contributing to the lowering of California’s water table and not helping the drought siutiation.
[55:34] Yeah I like you said I think this is an act of war from Australia.
You hear that Aussies? We’re on to you.
[55:39] We’re on to you guys.
But Australia is actually suffering with their own Wildfire problem.
Not just Australia. This is happening all over the world. Obviously we’ve been talking a lot about the western and northwestern United States, but this is a global problem.
China has the world’s largest coniferous forest, that extends from their Northeast territory into Siberia, and in 1987, this Black Dragon fire – that’s the name of the forest, Black Dragon – it burned more than 18 million acres, which devoured 10% of the world’s coniferous forests.
[56:13] That’s a lot of Fire.
And in Indonesia, they have a really big problem. More trees are being felled in Indonesia right now, than in any other country. And it’s all being driven by the need to plant more Palm plantations. So Palm oil is used for the world’s processed food, cosmetics, and also in some biodiesel industries. And producing it involves clearing huge tracts of rainforest by burning them usually, that’s the cheapest way they can do it, and the way they’ve been expanding these palm oil plantations – which they do by slash-and-burn – not only are they destroying diverse tropical forests with these single-species cash crop farms, depleting biodiversity, destroying these valuable old growth rainforests, but it’s also causing air pollution right? A lot of these crops, in this process, they’re releasing a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they end up sequestering.
These fires are getting out of control.
[57:10] In 2015 this fire in Indonesia got so bad that it's CO2 output from all this burning wood rivaled the fossil-fuel output of many industrialized countries for that year, and not only that but it had direct health effects on the people that lived in Indonesia. Over half a million people had to go seek medical care for respiratory issues; people wearing masks everywhere, they had to block up school windows with wet towels to try and keep the smoke out.
It was a disaster in every single possible sense of the word, but it's not just limited to Indonesia.
I just want to point out that a lot of the Palm Oil – so Indonesia exports half of the global demand for palm oil – and a lot of it ends up in products labeled “sustainable” in the West.
[57:52] It's one of the biggest scams going on right now in organic sustainable trade.
These fires happen all around the world; they leave scars in the landscape.
I was in Israel last year in the Summer, in a place called Nataf, which is between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It’s a small village in the middle of the mountains in what you would call the middle of nowhere, even though it’s 30minutes from either one of these cities. Distances are different there I guess.
But it’s this beautiful hilly landscape with these scrubby bushes, beautiful rocks and everything all around us, and they had had a huge fire that had to come through the year before.
This year 2016 in Israel had been a big fire year. Haifa, one of the larger cities in the country had to evacuate over 10,000 people because of the threat. This village Nataf came within just a few hundred meters of these structures here. People I know had to question “are we going to evacuate now or are we going to hope that these rocks, these hilly fire gaps are going to be enough to keep our homes safe?”
[58:48] But these are small fires compared to stuff that happens in like Russia. In 2012 there was a fire in Russia that burned 75 million acres okay? I can’t even, do we, I don’t even know if we have a good example of how much that is.
Well in comparison the US averages about 10 million acres a year burned. Which of course is increasing. We’re projected to hit 20 million acres a year.
Yeah I had friends in Moscow at the time this was happening, and they were telling me about how they had this smoke just in everything. It was in the air, it was in their houses, and it was a very hot, very dry summer that year, and so there was not so much air conditioning in Moscow, so you would have to leave your windows open to try and cool off, but as soon as you did, the smoke would come in and get all over everything.
People couldn’t see, they had smoggy days, and the sun was dimmer because of all this smoke. And all that smoke, all that ash in the air isn’t just affecting the people in these cities; it has to go somewhere right? It drifts down, eventually falls back to earth,
and when you have these fires in these high-latitude areas – in Russia; Canada, which has had a lot of similar fires in the past few years, some that have destroyed entire towns like Fort McMurray – when these fires burn in these high-latitude areas that ash is carried by these dramatic weather patterns of the north and deposits itself on ice.
So this happens in the Arctic ice; when it burns in Canada it deposits on the glaciers of Greenland, and this is really really bad, because ice naturally is white right? It reflects most of the light that comes down on it and with that it also reflects that heat. But when this ash blows out, drifts down, and lands on these icy areas, lands on these glaciers, which are already suffering rapid decline, it makes these areas dark and they absorb the sun very quickly, and you can see measurable dramatic increases in how quick this ice is melting because of these fires.
[1:00:41] Of course that exacerbates all the other climate change issues which makes the fires even worse, and we're caught in this positive feedback loop that is going to just ensure this problem keeps getting worse.
So these fires can threaten both individual pieces of property. They can threaten whole towns. They can threaten infrastructure. But they’re also contributing majorly to global warming. Directly through burning that CO2 like we saw in Indonesia, and also intensifying these albedo affects on the ice, on the glaciers, that are contributing to things like sea level rise, and all this is coming together to make wildfires one of the greatest threats that we’re facing in this rapidly changing world of climate change.
So what can we do about this?
That’s a good question David and obviously we always try to focus on what we can do to make a positive change at the end of these episodes.
I think one thing we should consider, you know in talking with Tyler and Tommy and they’re points about the importance of reconnecting with nature and changing our perspective to it, we need to challenge the ideas that growth and expansion is our right.
Wildfires were always seen – at least in the early days of settlement – as the last obstacle to Manifest Destination. This idea that: not only can we, but that it is our destiny and our fate to expand into every area of the natural world, conquer it, and build our civilization.
Given the rise of natural destruction all around us – not just locally but globally, and not just fire – this should be seen as an antiquated idea. An idea that we have been holding on to for too long. And as long as we continue to hold maintain that idea we’re never going to be prepared to truly make a change.
[1:02:26] Yeah exactly, and those are really good points you bring along with what Tyler and Tommy said about sustainable communities, and if I can add something that's maybe more practical: don't build your homes in fire fields.
Don’t go to these places where these wildfires are happening and say “yea this is a great place to build a house; let me build like a house and add cedar shingles and whatever.” That's a dumb idea! Stop doing that!
You don't have to live here; there other places. You can travel to these areas, and let these pristine natural areas be just that: pristine. And enjoy all the wildlife but not have to live in the middle of it, in these dangerous zones where your presence exacerbates these fires. Where you make it difficult to do these prescribed fires. Where you allow the buildup of this fuel by your presence, that contributes ultimately to these large, out of control, fires.
And if you do live in one of these areas, like Tommy said, think about how you can do your part in reducing the risk of these fires.
You know Tyler mentioned he, in his role working for the Forest Service, would go into some areas and do some fuel reduction stuff… you can do that as a community. Maybe get your neighborhood together and say “hey once a week, we’re going to go into the woods and chop down some of this undergrowth; we’re going to build more defensible zones,” and do a small part to help defend against the risk of fire destroying homes and communities.
I think we should also realize that there is a business component to this right? Tyler mentioned how he was proud of his supervisor that didn’t order like 30 people into an area that didn’t need anything to come in with chainsaws and all this… there is serious money that goes to small networks of private contractors who supply everything from: Helicopters, to chainsaws, to tractors and earth-moving equipment, in addition to these planes that come down and release this flame retardant during an active fire. Some of those planes cost like $6,000/hour to rent them.
So there is a huge economic incentive that a lot of businesses have in fighting these fires very aggressively, and putting a lot of equipment on the ground, and doing these large scale operations. And they’re always going to encourage that, but it may not be the best way to manage these fires. We might just need a very simple approach to reduce the fire, you know men and women on the ground with hand tools, doing simple work to reduce this fuel, and it may take more than just the Forest Service. It may take more than just our local fire department. That’s just part of I guess the education in getting everyone to understand that this is a serious problem for our climate, and also for our communities.
[1:04:58] In addition to that also paying attention to the regulatory nature of these fires, encouraging the Forest Service to be more conservative about what fires they put out, and what they allow to burn out naturally like they have been for millennia, and encouraging these governmental bodies all the way from municipalities up to the federal level to keep thinking long-term about all this and move past these short-term ideas of “the fires out by 10 a.m. the next day” like the forestry service used to try and do years ago after that great fire that we talk about in the introduction.
And keep thinking about how when we interfere with these fires, are we doing good long-term, or we going to make the problem worse for us somewhere down the line?
So that’s a lot to think about. We hope you enjoyed it; we certainly enjoyed having Tommy and Tyler on. Thanks again guys.
[1:05:40] If you want to learn more about any of the things we mentioned today; if you want to see some of these photos from Tommy or from these dramatic LA fires or any of the other materials we put on our website, we have sources, transcripts, and much much more at ashesashes.org.
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