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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, and we have a hot show for you this week. We're talking about fire, and we're talking about fire with Lenya Quinn-Davidson, my fire expert here. Lenya is a Humboldt County local and the fire advisor and the director of the University of California's Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network. Welcome to the show!

LEYNA QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Thanks for having me. Great to be on.

WHEELER:

So I think fire is top on people's minds these days, especially as we have the Boise Fire, which is burning outside of Orleans. There's also the Park Fire by Chico and we have a good deal of time before the end of this fire season. So there might be more fires to come. It's something that I think a good part of California thinks about probably like once a year, August, September, they might start getting smoke and it might be top of their mind then, but for the rest of the year, they don't think about fire. But you are a person who thinks about fire 12 months a year. Tell us about your job and what you do and why you are so fire-centric or fire, firephilic. I don't know what you are.

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Yeah, probably both of those things. Yeah, so like you said, I work for the University of California, Ag and Natural Resources. I've been with them for about 13 years, actually, based here in Humboldt County. I grew up in Trinity County, in Hayfork, so

WHEELER:

I said Humboldt County local, but it's close at Trinity County.

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

In Humboldt County for almost 18 years. So it's definitely, I feel pretty rooted here in Humboldt, but I did grow up just east of here in the little tiny town of Hay Fork, which those of you who know it know that it experiences a lot of fire. So I grew up around wildfire and really felt those impacts and for a long time was really scared of fire. And so it kind of evolved for me into my career focusing on how to have a better relationship with fire and how can we restore fire as the natural process that we know it is. California is so fire adapted, meaning that many of our ecosystems and communities are really evolved to have fire and to withstand fire, but also fire dependent. So much of California actually requires fire and that's not only ecologically but culturally, especially for our indigenous communities and a lot of our rural communities. We need to have a better relationship with fire. So I've focused over the last 15 years of my career really trying to restore that relationship and connection and make people feel like they can live with fire in a more productive way.

WHEELER:

And living with fire in a more productive way would probably be easier if we weren't scared of fire all the time. We've had a number of scary fires in the last couple of years, right? We've seen whole towns burned. We've seen lives lost. We've seen a lot of property lost. I think that the literature generally supports that we are experiencing larger fires now and more intense fires than we have at least in the last kind of a hundred year period. If you were to simplify, what is the root cause of this more intense fire behavior?

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

This is a really interesting question. And it's not as simple as some people might think. There are a lot of different layers to this story.

One of them would definitely be just the the legacy of our forest and fire management in a state. And so we have excluded fire for at least 100 years in most places. A lot of these landscapes haven't had fire in so long. And if you think about it, in a place that evolved with fire, maybe every five to 10 years, if you go 100 years without fire, you've missed so many cycles. And that results in a lot of fuel buildup in compositional change in like the trees and the plants that are growing in the forest or on the landscape. So we know that we have much more dense forests, we have areas that used to be open woodland, open prairie that have now filled in with brush and trees. And so just continuous fuels across the landscape. That's one piece of it. And then of course, there's this climate component, right? And the fact that things are getting hotter and drier, and we're having it's not a shock when we hear things like July, I think I just heard July 25, or something was the hottest day on record in history. Like we hear that all the time. And every year, it seems bigger and bigger of a problem.

This year, we had a really extended dry period that was extremely hot, that heat wave that came through that just cured all of the fuels and made everything so dry. And we saw our fire hazard indices really elevated and higher than usual. And that really set us up for an intense fire season. So there's this kind of fuels component and climate component. But there's also a component of the fact that we are in a fire suppression paradigm, where when fires start, we put them out, we've selected for the worst fires, because we're really good at putting fires out. We have the world's biggest fire department, Cal Fire, 12,000 people who work for Cal Fire, so much equipment, so much money, technology, highly effective fire suppression agency, we have a really similarly competent federal fire service. And so we are really good at putting fires out until we have conditions where we can't put them out. And that's what we see with fires, like the Dixie Fire, the Park Fire, where these fires happen in really unfortunate conditions, and we simply cannot control them.

So we've kind of selected for like the worst of the worst fires, and those are the only ones that end up being able to burn. And I think that that can't be overlooked. There's a paper that came out earlier this year that called that the suppression bias, where we effectively biased our fire behavior to the worst of the worst. And as we improve our technologies, and our early detection, and as things kind of get more and more competent in the fire suppression space, we'll just continue to select for the worst fire, it'll just get worse. So we need to rethink how we're doing things. And that's really the space that I like to think about is how, like, how could we do this in a different way and select for better outcomes?

WHEELER:

That's, that's fascinating. On this suppression bias, I've, I've heard people talk about. We've put out too many fires. We need to let fires burn. This has been something that I think has been well-known for a while, yet it still feels, and maybe I'm wrong. We are still in this suppression era, right? We are, we are still fundamentally trying to put out fires really early. Why, why hasn't that changed? Why, why, why haven't our policies caught up with the science there?

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Yeah, it's obviously really complicated. There's a lot of public pressure to put fires out. Of course, suppression is an important component for keeping communities safe and for being able to live in California with fire, but until we can start thinking about how to incorporate fire on a bigger landscape scale and have beneficial outcomes from that, I just don't see a change in advancing toward this future with even hotter, more severe impacts from fire. So there are conversations, definitely the scientific community understands and has been pushing for decades the need for what we call beneficial fire or good fire, things like prescribed fire or allowing wildfires to burn under certain conditions so that they can have good outcomes or cultural burning and having indigenous communities lead fire in their places and in their landscapes. But being able to get to that point at scale, we're just not getting there quickly enough.

WHEELER:

So something that's interesting then is part of the problem here is that it's our fear of fire that is causing us to suppress fire, which is then helping to lead to some of these mega fires, which are causing our fear of fire. So it's this like weird repeating loop. I think that there's also something here too, where the costs of fire have increased, right? Because we've allowed so much development in these high fire prone risk areas. And so when we have people and we have structures that increases our desire to have suppression, because it's a tragedy when somebody loses their, their home. And so it further drives this suppression mindset. So we have a big fire burning right now outside of Orleans, the Boise Fire. Should we allow things like the Boise Fire to, to burn? When you see a fire like that, what are you thinking about as, as kind of a fire expert?

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Yeah, so I mean, I should give the caveat that I'm, I'm not an expert on the Boise Fire. And I've been involved in that fire in any way. But just generally, when I when I hear about a fire when I'm watching a fire and trying to understand it in my own mind, you know, what are the impacts it's having on the ecosystem? What are the impacts it's having on communities? Are parts of the fire actually doing good work? You know, I certainly urge everyone not to think that just because there's a fire happening, and it's a wildfire that it is catastrophic, or that it's even having negative outcomes necessarily.

So for example, with the Park Fire, there were large parts of that fire, honestly, probably the bulk of that fire burning in areas that were grassland, oak woodland, some chaparral, those were areas that probably had a lot of benefit from the Park Fire, and have needed fire and haven't had it in a long time. And so I think that's an important thing to think about. And one of the things that we're hoping for at the state level is that agencies like Cal Fire, when they characterize burns, and they put out messaging, public messaging around fire impacts, that they really talk about the severity of the fire and the ecology and what that looks like.

I think, for example, the August complex was an interesting one -- the state's first million acre fire, back in 2020. But there were there were some areas of that fire that were really severe and really intense and where it moved 20 miles in a day and killed every tree in its path. And that's what we call high severity fire. And that has really significant impacts on the landscape. But then there were a lot of parts of that million acre fire that did great work. And if we were trying to prescribe burn 500,000 acres in that footprint of that fire, it would take us forever, it would take us decades and decades. And so we got some good beneficial impacts from that. And I think we'll see that on the Park Fire too. But then on a on the Park Fire, we also saw really high severity fire in that upper Mill Creek watershed. And that was an area that had what I've heard is some of the nicest old growth in that whole area. And it's an upper watershed for one of the last strongholds of spring run Chinook Salmon, that gives me pause.

And so it's it's very nuanced, we have to understand what the history of those places are what their landscape relationship is to fire. And maybe all of these fires are a place where we can go back in and do more work. They're they're footprints where we can do more work that butts up against them. So let's go burn unburned areas that might be adjacent to those areas. And we can use those wildfires as as long control lines for the next few years. So yeah, I think it's really complicated.

And with the Boise Fire, it's been kind of interesting, because it's just south of the Perch Fire that happened last year. And that that fire was the Six Rivers complex that was burning in the Orleans area last year was a real success story actually, because it was a there were a whole series of lightning ignitions that happened out there. And they started little wildfires, but the conditions were pretty mild. And so the team that was there worked with the tribe and with the community. And last year, they made a decision to take advantage of those good conditions, and to actually do strategic ignitions as part of the fire operation to expand the footprint of good fire. And so they actually took what were disparate little lightning ignited wildfires and connected them and were able to increase the beneficial fire in that place from about 25,000 acres, as I understand it to about 50,000 acres, which again, that's like 25,000 acres more good fire that they achieved during fire season, during a major incident that the community supported that the tribe supported, and that set them up for more success in the coming fire seasons.

So the Boise Fire is going to interact with it is interacting with that footprint of last year's fire. And that's a control point for them. It's not going to burn back through last year's fire footprint. And that like we start seeing this patchwork of self limiting fire footprints, which is in some ways a really good thing.

WHEELER:

Well, so we've had so many fires in the last 10 years, especially large fires. Should we anticipate to see a potential reduction in these large mega fires because they'll start to run into each other? Is that, is that a hope for us?

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Well, I mean, on some level, that's definitely true with the Park Fire, as we were watching the Park Fire advance, and my husband is a fire modeler. So he does a lot of the he's what they call a long term analyst. So he was working on the Park Fire and modeling the potential spread of the Park Fire, and certainly the Dixie Fire in his models. And just from practical knowledge, you're looking at it was like, that's a big catcher's mitt for the Park Fire, like the Park Fire is not going to blaze through the Dixie Fire footprint.

So the same thing happened with the Hill Fire. If you looked at the Hill Fire that started here outside of Willow Creek, just last month, I know we have so many fires, it's hard to keep track of all of them. But it was the same thing where there was that Ammon Fire to the north of that. And if you're looking at the fire maps, it's like, okay, it's going to hit that Ammon Fire, and it's going to drop to the ground. And it's going to have different spread and different fire behavior because of the previous fire footprint. So ideally, if we lived in a world that weren't totally focused on fire suppression, we would have a lot of fire footprints across the landscape that weren't all high severity fire footprints. Because the problem with a with a fire like the Dixie Fire is that that area is all growing back. And it's it's going to be growing back not as forest, but as shrubs and highly flammable fuels that are going to reburn again, and probably reburn again at high severity and get into a cycle of high severity fire that's going to be really hard for forest to come back in those in those areas. And we're seeing that across California that a lot of these high severity fire footprints are not going to come back as forest.

WHEELER:

The Econews Report. We are talking about fire with Leyna Quinn-Davidson, fire expert here.

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

So anything we can do to have good fire, good low to moderate severity fire in the places that we still have forest and that we still have things that we want to protect, that's our best bet.

WHEELER:

Well, let's talk about that work to spread good fire because that's your bread and butter. What are the programs that you manage to help get good fire back on the landscape?

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Yeah, so this is a huge passion of mine and something I've worked on for many years is prescribed fire or using fire as a tool proactively to meet certain objectives. And of course, with prescribed fire, it's not just like fire prevention that we're trying to do. We're not just trying to stop future wildfires, but often trying to have really important ecological impacts or cultural values that we're trying to protect. So across California, actually, in the last five to eight years, there has been a huge movement around prescribed fire and communities really getting organized and rising up to say like, we want to be using fire in our communities. We wanna protect ourselves from catastrophic fire. We want to preserve our Oak Woodlands. We want to deal with invasive species. We want this tool in our hands and we're sick of waiting around for other people to do it for us.

And so it's been pretty amazing to see here in Humboldt County, actually, we started the first community cooperative for prescribed fire in California. We call them a Prescribed Burn Association. And we started California's first Prescribed Burn Association here in 2017, 2018. And the idea behind that is just like neighbors helping neighbors, people getting together, training, getting training and leveraging their shared resources so they have tools and equipment and then implementing burns together. And so the Humboldt PBA has been operating now since 2017 and probably implemented about, I don't know, 2,500 acres of prescribed fire, mostly on private land here in Humboldt County.

But that model really inspired a lot of other places. And just in these last few years, we've grown from just having the Humboldt PBA to now having about 25 other Prescribed Burn Associations around the state. Most of those are county-based. So they'll be at the county scale. A couple of them are multi-county and then in a couple of counties, they have more than one. So there's just been this, again, like I call it a social movement around prescribed fire. And at the same time that we've been building that capacity at the community level, we've also been affecting a lot of policy change at the state level to better support that. So we were able to develop a state certified burn boss program that is training and certifying people who are really able to plan and lead those burns. So like really qualified folks.

But then also we changed the liability standard to offer more protections for prescribed fire and for cultural burning. And then just this last year, the state set aside $20 million for what we call a Prescribed Fire Claims Fund, which is essentially like a state-backed insurance fund for prescribed fire so that we can offer more support and fill the insurance gap around this work. So there's just so much going on. For the listeners who are here in the North Coast or even in Southern Oregon, there are prescribed burn associations across this entire region and you can get involved. Anyone can be involved. We welcome everyone. And it's a great place to gain comfort with prescribed fire and just to really get more comfortable with fire in general and understand how it connects to everything.

WHEELER:

So let's imagine, because this is going to have to be imagination because this isn't true, that I have 240 acres of forest land, that I have cabin out outside of like Zinnia or Alder Point or something like that. And I want to bring back fire on my landscape that I'm concerned about fire in my community. What are my options as a, as a property owner? How can I help to return good fire to the lands that I own?

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Yeah, no, exactly. Well, what I would do is I would call our Cooperative Extension office here in Eureka and get involved with the Humboldt County PBA. So we have a great guy named Henry Holbrook, who's our PBA coordinator and works here out of our office and is more than happy to go out and walk your property with you and get you signed up with the PBA, get you out on some burns so you can understand what that looks like and what the process is like. And then start thinking about planning a project on your property. There are funds through agencies like the Natural Resources Conservation Service that can help with some of the cost of preparing a unit and some of the planning behind that.

But you really don't necessarily need funding. I mean, especially if you're a landowner who has some equipment or has some time to do work on your land. Prescribed fire, I always say fire is free. It's not necessarily something you need big grant funds for or support for if you have time and energy. And the PBA helps with that because there are a lot of people, you'd be amazed how many people in this area want to help out on burns. We have, I think about 250 people involved in the PBA now. And so people come out and help you. It's really a cool

WHEELER:

model is very cool. So it seems like one of the challenges though, is that we have this big need to restore fire to the landscape. The landscape is huge, right? But if we do a prescribed burn, it might be a couple hundred acres here, a couple hundred acres there. So scaling up our use of good fire is going to be important. What are the structural barriers that still stand in the way? What, what are you still looking to help change either in Sacramento or in DC or wherever else to help increase the kind of pace and scale in which we are getting good fire back on the landscape.

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Yeah, no, it's a great question. Cause like you said, prescribed fire really is at least the way we use it now, it is small scale. And it's really about like specific resources at risk. I want to protect my Oak Grove. I want to bring fire into it, or I want to protect my forest land or build a fuel break around the community or whatever. And we really do need to be putting pressure on the forest service, on our legislators, on all of the agencies who manage fire. We need to be demanding something different. The current model is not working and we can't just keep pouring more and more money into a system that's inherently flawed.

I was with some folks this week, just talking about these issues and thinking about this large scale cultural change really that needs to happen within the way that we manage fire. I think we could liken it to the healthcare system, right? Where we don't take care of people until they're ill, until, and like costs aren't covered for preventative care or for people thinking about eating better or being more healthy, we don't provide those resources. It's the same thing with the way that we manage fire that we just don't think about the health and resilience of the landscape of our communities. We just wait until they're on fire and then we pour as much money as we can into dealing with the disaster. So I really urge folks to demand something different and to really see fire as the biggest, most important part of the solution that beneficial fire is really the direction we need to go. It's not, let's get rid of fire. It's okay, fire's here to stay, but we get to choose how we wanna receive it. Yeah.

WHEELER:

So thinking about things, some of my favorite critters like the Humboldt Martin or Pacific Fisher, fire is also great for them. Fire has this wonderful effect to help our forests become better wildlife habitat. Fires help produce complex features in our forest that would otherwise take longer to develop. They help produce things like cavities and structural complexity in forest. So I also get excited about fire thinking about we're taking a simplified ecosystem and we're making it more complex by the incorporation of fire.

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Absolutely. I think that's a really important point. And if you think back on pre-European settlement and what this landscape looked like, so much fire, so much heterogeneity, patchiness. We love patchiness in habitat. You want a stand of old growth trees here, and then an open prairie, and then some dead trees over here. And that patchiness is so important. And so we get that when we have in the forest that we have in our region, that low to moderate severity. We don't mind some patches of dead trees. That's great. And actually, in some areas, we really need to kill trees. We have so many more, so much more vegetation that our landscape is supporting right now than it did historically. And that has huge implications for water.

One of the folks I was with this week is a guy named Park Williams, who's a professor down at UCLA. And he does a lot of research on fire and water interactions, and showing that areas that burn and areas that have intact fire regimes have more water. We basically reduce the number of straws that are sucking water out of the ground. And that has huge implications for fish and for aquatic communities. And it's all connected. Actually, that's been an area that I've gotten more interested in, too. And I'm doing some work is on that fire and fish topic, because we need to connect the dots on some of this stuff. What's happening on the larger landscape is connected to everything else. And yeah, that biodiversity component fire is really strongly linked to biodiversity. But if we wait for it to burn at high severity, where we have 100,000 acre patches of dead trees, that's not biodiversity. You know, that scale, that's not good. And there's not much there for anyone at that point. So yes, we need that patchiness. And we need it at a smaller patchy scale. And right now, we've just been selecting for these fires that are having unreal impacts and creating these really homogenous landscapes that are void of the things that people and critters need to thrive.

WHEELER:

So we've talked a little bit about the cultural aspect of this too. We've talked about how Native American tribes have historically utilized fire, that they have their own cultural burning practices. Thankfully, we get to live in this area of California that has a really vibrant tribal fire program. And we have leaders at the Yurok Tribe, at the Karuk Tribe, at the Hoopa Valley Tribe who are bringing back cultural fire. How does cultural fire differ if it does from prescribed fire?

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Yeah, and you're right that we are really lucky because we do live in a place with so much tribal and indigenous leadership on these issues. I work really closely with a lot of those folks and super grateful. So cultural burning and prescribed fire have a lot of commonalities in the sense of using fire for good, people actively igniting fires for certain objectives, but there are really important differences too.

I think it's important to note that prescribed fire in the way that it's used in this modern day, it is really flowing out of the fire suppression complex. I mean, in the way, if you close your eyes and think of a prescribed burn, you're picturing firefighters who are implementing it. We're trying to change that. We're really trying to bring it back to the more local community-based approach. But prescribed fire in large part has been implemented by fire suppression agencies in recent decades. And so it often typically involves a prescribed fire plan that's a written document that might have fire modeling involved and very prescriptive about this is what we're going to do. And these are the specific resources that we'll have on site. And all of that really does flow from that fire management culture. Whereas cultural burning is really coming from cultural tradition, it's coming from a place-based knowledge. It's coming through generational knowledge. It's not necessarily as prescriptive. It might be that people know that place and they know when it needs fire and they have storytelling that goes back.

And so there is this really important difference and we try not to confound the two when we're doing policy work or when we're doing any of this work or even talking about it. We wanna make sure that there are protections for cultural burning and that prescribed fire is kind of a different thing. So I don't know if that is helpful.

WHEELER:

Oh, no, that's totally helpful. I I've heard stories before about people knowing when they need to burn because a plant will flower or, or there'll be some sort of environmental indicator and it's great knowledge that is really rooted in being in a place for thousands of years and, and knowing that landscape and how it's going to react to conditions. I think it's really cool that we are starting to recognize this traditional ecological knowledge. And so I I'm really jazzed that I get to also hang out and learn from, from these folks as, as you do. I want to give you an opportunity to plug anything that you want to plug for folks to get more involved or to learn more, where should they go?

QUINN-DAVIDSON:

Yeah, there are some great websites that folks might want to check out. Like I said, get involved with your local prescribed burn association. It's super fun. Even if you don't think you're in the fire, you should check it out because I have seen so many people come out on their first burn and it just changes their their life and even their world view sometimes. So do that and you can go to calpba.org. That's a website that has kind of a platform for all the PBAs in California. There is also a PBA in the Rogue River area. So if you're in southern Oregon, you can also tie in with your local PBA up there. You could also check out our UCANR fire network website and that just has a lot of great resources for fire ecology in California, for permitting, for what you can do to your house, for like home hardening, defensible space. So that's just a great resource and that's the program that I lead for the University of California. So I definitely recommend that and reaching out to your local extension office if you have questions about this stuff.

WHEELER:

Well, Lenya, I think that listeners will have really enjoyed this show. I learned a ton. I imagine other people will have as well. Thank you so much for joining us on the Eco News. Thanks for having me. All right. Join us again. Listeners on this time channel next week for more environmental news from the north coast of California.