Foreign. Hello and welcome to Live like the World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Inman Narrowan, and today we're going to be talking with a dear friend about fire and saws and all of and all of her hot takes on on all of these things. But before we get to all that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchist podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.

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And we're back.

If you could introduce yourself with your name pronouns and a little bit about your background in fire and stuff.

My name is Theo. I live in the desert Southwest. That's region three for people who are absolutely cooked. And I have worked in wildfire, prescribed fire, cultural fire, for about 10 years. And I am a residential arborist and a tree feller. Yep. In those spaces as well as I just quit a job running a SOT program for a large conservation nonprofit that will remain redacted for this time. I also work for the. I don't know. Yeah. Is this relevant?

Maybe. Yeah. I don't know.

You get it. Structural fire, wildfire, chill entry stuff.

Cool. Let's start by talking about doing a famous, famous Inman thing. Immediately going completely off script of the things that we said we were going to talk about. But can you tell us a little bit about, I guess, what is the state of fire or like wildfires in, I guess, the West?

I don't know. I have a block around knowing that kind of thing on a large level. Yeah, I can tell you that where we live, it is definitely the well on the district that I work in New Mexico, they have like 130 years of pretty detailed weather data. And I can tell you that so far this is the probably either the 129th or the 130th, warmest, driest year on record, which has predictable effects on fire weather outlook. But everywhere is different. Yeah, I am trying to free up the part of my brain that tracks things like this to participate in my own life again instead of fire. But if I was still deep on R Wildfire, the Reddit, the new administration is making like a unified command system. So the whole structure of federal US Firefighting seemingly is changing. Everyone who works for the Forest Service, including myself, was asked to sign the Protecting Women Against Gender Ideology act in last February, which I at the time was like, had totally lost it and But I don't live where my station is, so I don't have like a lot of day to day trust or connection with those people. But I thought it was going to be really important that I thought it was going to mean a lot that they signed it. And I thought it was also going to mean a lot that I refused to sign it. And it turns out at least now that neither of those things kind of seemingly meant anything. And if people weren't in that part of the news at the time, that was like the act that promised to never use the word gender and only use sex and only have two options and this kind of thing. But structurally the Forest Service would be extremely hard to control if they decided that they wanted to be in antagonism towards federal policies because the Forest Service physical environments are extremely rural, difficult to access and basically except for pay, totally autonomous in terms of every station has its own just like lock code that they, they could really do their own thing minus the pay aspect if they wanted to from the Fed. So I was like disappointed that my district, which I only fill in on. So yeah, really just like cowed to it. But they may have had the correct impulse which is that like acting compliant doesn't mean being compliant or something. I don't know.

Yeah. Do you mean that like, like a lot of like rural fire stations to have the, like they could they have the ability to, if they wanted to not get paid.

Yes.

Act pretty autonomously.

Yeah, it's just like some guys and some of them are like long, long, you know, forest logging roads in the middle of nowhere in like irregularly mapped areas that only the like old heads that have been packing mules around there for 40 years, like actually really Know all the ingress and egress. Just like, it would be really hard to make a forest service station do something that they didn't want to do and including, like, bow to this, like, insane, like, gender reactionary kind of like, bureaucracy. But yeah, it's just, like, possible that signing that or not doesn't actually, like, make a big difference for the, like, lived realities of queer and trans people in rural New Mexico. And I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but it's definitely possible that's true. So I was just one of those things where I don't. I can't claim to know the downstream effects of kind of whatever choice. But. Yeah, that is what I mean.

Cool. Yeah, I mean, that's cool. That's cool that people can. Or it makes sense that those structures are kind of like, what the fuck would the federal government have it anything to do with, like, what is going on in some rural county.

Yeah.

And what they're doing except to, like, monetary resources or whatever. To talk, I guess, to get into, I guess what will be the main meat of, like, what we're going to be talking about today. I hate that I just said meet. It's just. It feels like a strange word today.

Said meat.

What is home hardening?

All of these things that I'm talking about, they're actual experts in. And I think it's righteous and good that everyone has the right to be kind of bad at their job. And since this whole field has been my job for a while, I. I reserve the right to be ignorant about large swaths of it. Although there are definitely, like, pockets of, like, independently pursued passion within it. But fire was, like, originally my gig and never, like, truly my passion. So there are people who know. This podcast is for people who know a lot less about me than this and for people who know more, a lot more, which there are many. Sorry in advance. Which is to say I don't actually know where the whole world of fire and forestry has many rivers that contribute to it culturally and that also really varies region by region. And some of those rivers are just overt violent colonialism. And so there's a lot of linguistic inheritances that I'm not interested in reproducing. And this is all to say I don't actually know where the term home hardening comes from. I think it's just a kind of like, probably out of the Missoula fire lab or something. But if it is, if it has a horrible history, I'm. I apologize in advance sound off in the Comments Anyways, home. But what. What is referred to as home hardening is kind of preparing your home to end like immediate living surround to be more resistant to fire and more resilient in the wake of a fire. When prescribed fire and wildfire people learned about the term resilience, they lost it and are really into actually resilience isn't really into separating resistance and resilience. And probably it's intuitive the difference one is preventing the bad thing from happening and the other is, you know, improving the capacity to recover after a disturbance which is maybe that's just widespread but different ecosystems and different strategies have like meaningfully different approaches around that stuff. So nonetheless I'll probably be using them more or less interchangeably. But yes, that is what it is is resistance and resilience in like your home space. Whether that's on an individual or kind of slightly larger level to make your house less likely to be on fire. Yeah, cool.

Yeah, I like when my house isn't on fire.

Yeah. It's mostly used in regards to what in the industry is called the WUE or the wildland urban interface. W U I and all that means is people who live like adjacently to forested or wild spaces that do have fire regimes. Okay. Where we live, which is in the Sonoran Desert, like that desert and all its plants did not evolve with fire because it's never had continuous enough fuels to sustain wildfire.

So it's weird that we have wildfires.

Yeah, it's bad. I mean like up on Mount Redacted, that area evolved with fire and so those species do. But like the saguaro is facing an existential threat due to the grassification of the desert because basically these invasive grasses have been introduced honestly mostly by hikers shoes which is depressing. Like really truly in my lifetime I could have or will and you could. Or will to introduce a new species of grass to a place it never has been on your shoe and start like an a micro ecological collapse in that place. So yeah, I'm pretty like checked out from individual solutions to this kind of thing. And so it's only recently that I've like started. Unfold your car hearts folks. If you're coming to visit the desert, that's awesome. Come to know more deaths. But like actually look at the shoes that look at the seeds that are on your shoelaces and be intentional about them because all the like lidar and drone footage from the desert, from these desert grassification kind of like remediation attempts just like it's like seeing like Waterway. But the waterways are just the trail systems. Like these grasses are growing out from the trail systems. That is an aside.

Yeah.

So that was all to say. Yeah. In our lifetime or in another lifetime shortly, there could be no more saguaros if invasive grasses in the Sonoran aren't stopped because those invasive grasses can sustain wildfire. Saguaros can get smoked by a wildfire and take like up to 10 years to die and then just die. They did not. They never had to evolve around the disturbance of fire. So they didn't. And it's the only place in the world that they grow.

Dang. I think I always thought they were fire resistant because they didn't immediately die. They just take a long time to die.

Yeah. Anyone who's been to like a desert, a certain bombing range in the desert, you can see like half smoked saguaros which give. Yeah. They just have a slow response.

Yeah, I know. Up on redacted pass like all of those. This is a fun joke. Now all of those saguaros are. They all look exactly the same because they're all the same age because a wildfire took everything out.

Oh wow.

And so all the saguaros that are up there now are. Are the same age because they all grew after the wildfire that took all the other ones out.

Totally. That's cool that they were. That it was able to redesert like to basically be re established as a Sonoran Desert ecotone up there.

Yeah.

Yeah. I guess I'll introduce this idea of fire regime which is again people who are way deeper on this. I didn't go to college or high school flex. But yeah. So close your ears. A fire regime as a concept is like how often during. Around how often was a so called normal frequency for this ecosystem to encounter fire. And that doesn't mean stand replacing wildfires like that. But yeah. And there's actually a really cool. There's dendrochronology or the study of tree rings is like a big tool in that kind of historical fire regime study. Yeah, I'm going on too many tangents. You don't have to look at tree rings if you take seriously and if you are. There's oral histories of fire regimes that are much more accurate than tree rings. That I don't mean to imply that basically fossil study is the only way to learn about the fire history of a land. Because the fire history of most lands on Turtle island are human fire histories. But many asides later. So once these grasses take hold in the Sonoran, that fire regime goes down in time a lot, they become more frequent because those grasses build, create, thatch and cure and are available for wildfires on a pretty short turnaround, probably like two years, three years maybe, and then they'll burn again. Then the only things that can recover on such a short timeline in those two years is more of the grass. And then these grass savanna deserts just spread and spread. And so in our region, we're kind of at the bottom of what would be a parabolic rise in grassification of the desert. And unfortunately, what firefighting looks like here is mostly spraying invasive grasses very intentionally with poison or just removing them by hand, which lots of retired bird watchers do. And it's so sweet.

Yeah, I love that guy who's just all over local social media or whatever is just get rid of the buffalo. We're getting rid of buffelgrass.

Yeah, he actually has develop. I mean, I'm not big in the invasive management world, but to my eyes he's developed like new protocols that other people are not doing like a like cut and spray tactic for bermudagrass. Anyways, that's why I go to other regions because I like cutting. Unfortunately, I just really like lying down on marshy meadow mats of pedicularis and like cutting down big trees. And that's firefighting instead of like walking in 104 degree weather in spring, genetically altering poisons onto grass. But if I was like a better person, I would just hold it down here all through the fire season. Anyhow, what was the question?

We were talking about home hardening. But you know, we could. I do want to, I actually want to talk or ask one more question about this or rather make a connection where it's like, I know this is like a, it's like not just a thing, the grassification, you know, it's like not just a thing here in the Sonoran Desert. But it was one of the major contributors to why the wildfires in Hawaii were so bad. Like two years ago was invasive grass completely taking over where there were fire resistant grasses and they'd been crowded the fuck out by these invasive non fire resistant grasses that just grew really big, were a lot of the fuel that spread that fire.

Totally. And I just want to say I know that invasive and native grasses is like a troubling paradigm. Yeah, yeah, I know. So don't, don't talk to me about it. Yesterday I had to like negative shock load an Aleppo pine top into a tiny courtyard that was a monastery while a bunch of Dominican friars watched. And I just can't. There's a lot of things in this field to be good at and I can't. And I can't. I don't claim to be good at them all.

Yeah.

Anyways, home hardening. Oh yeah. What is that whole point was to say that like what I wouldn't necessarily call someone who lived on the outskirts of our town in the so called WUI wildland urban interface because the wildland that they're adjacent to isn't like a fire. But that doesn't matter. The point being is yeah, home hardening is generally focused on people who live like very rurally but like surrounded not necessarily by farmland or like. Yeah, there's probably a banging. There's probably like an institutional short term. But I hope people get the point. That's usually what it. Structural wildfires like the ones that ripped through LA a little over a year ago are a whole. Which came from the wildland urban interface, the Wooey. And like there's so many post game analysis is on the. And insurance rackets and everything with that. I'm not. I just. Yeah, I'm not going to get into that because it's such a big topic and so many people know so much about it. But if you are listening and like you or a loved one have been like negatively affected by wildfire. I hope that I'm not sounding insensitive and I can't speak to these massive urban fires because there's so many other structural and financial elements.

Yeah. It seems like it's a different game. Like all fire is not the same. Turns out.

Yeah.

So for I guess people who live in places that might be more affected by wildfires in this. The wuwee. Is it. Is that what we're calling it? The woo. Oh yeah.

Isn't that funny?

It is funny. I thought you were talking about. I thought you were making an esoteric point about a different kind of woo at first. But for people who live in the WUI that's fun to say. What are components of home hardening that people can do to either to make their where they live like hopefully less likely to burn or. Yeah, yeah, I know a big component of it for you is like where do you build your house?

This is fully off the dome. I did not prepare for this. There are lots of cool resources. The Missoula fire lab which I think was basically developed after the Man Gulch fire which was a. I didn't. Yeah. Like I said in repair fatality fire in either 39 or 41. Anyways they are doing all sorts of really granular experiments. If you're really interested in does this kind of treated porch versus this other kind, is it more likely to sustain an ember? You can check out the amber, but yeah. So there's kind of individual house choices you can make around how you set up your home space and then there's kind of like neighborhood or community level and then there's regional level and then yeah, like I said before we started, punks love to live in the most beautiful places on earth and squat the ridge top of the woods and that's awesome. But that probably is just where fire is going to go. And whether you stack your firewood next to your house or away from it probably isn't going to make a difference. So if you know you live in a fire adapted ecosystem and you build your house on a ridge top, at the top of a, of a chimney or a slot canyon, you should just build to rebuild on whatever, whatever fire regime that forest is on. That's the first thing I would say. So just like build an awesome 10 year house or something if that is your angle.

I think it's like it's like an uncomfortable reality to accept that. It's like there's maybe places where it's like, like just like there's not probably not much you can do to deal with the current reality of like what, how fires are happening, you know. And so it's like if you are, if you live in a place like that or you're considering moving to a place or like building like something that there's like big things to consider that might be unfortunate like where a fire is going to happen and how it might not be stoppable with any intervention that you can individually take.

Yeah, yeah. Or the interventions that you could take would be probably like outside of an ethical paradigm that I would ever suggest which would be like basically removing all fuels, which is to say plants in the total path of. Yeah, but even that doesn't work. Really. Yeah. I mean there are massive landscape size things that people have done that stop wildfires and that's like you could turn a forest into a football field and irrigate it and then you wouldn't have a fire. But maybe you should just build your shack at a slightly different aspect of the mountain. But yeah, so people in California who are like the producing except for maybe the southeast is like where most of the neologisms around fire in this country come from. They talk about firesheds which is basically kind of like a watershed. It's like the whole region that is going to be really affected by micro topography, weather and fire within it. So if you lived in a giant valley that had real exposed rocky ridges and a very unique wind system, maybe everyone in that valley is in your fireshed. And so you could start thinking about how fire moves across the landscape. I know that I am talking about the mountain west and the southeast has in terms of this country probably, and people can fight me on this, but I would say it has the most intact fire culture, except for pockets of pockets of California and Oaxaca and stuff. But basically because of the way that colonialism occurred and resource extraction and timeline in both these places, there's a lot less public lands that manage fire in the southeast. And people never really stopped burning there. Anyways, what was I talking about? Okay, so I'm kind of talking about the mountain west, but you could imagine it for other places or something. Places tend to have regional winds and seasonal winds. And so you can learn and know like in my area, during the season that wildfires are most likely to occur, where are the dominant winds coming from? And so then you kind of have your direction fires are fire. What make, how you can tell where a fire is going to move is going to be topography, wind. And oh my God, this is like literally the Fire 101 fuels what kind of plants are growing there. Thank you. And so you got your, you can study your regional winds, understand kind of the directions of fires. Maybe you live in a place that as the great basin heats up and rises, you're getting these hot dry winds from the east or you're getting warm wet winds from the west. And so eastern winds are more likely to start wildfires because of the nature of them or something like this. And then you have your topography. Fire runs most by convection and not by conduction. So the superheated air as a fire builds is preheating the so called fuels. Sorry, that I'm calling beautiful plants fuels. And so that's why it tends to run uphill, because it takes a while for something for like a piece of wood just from getting really hot to burn. But these like gusty winds carry fire very quickly. So they're going to tend to run uphill in the direction that the topography indicates and that the wind indicates and the available fuels. So that's like how you could start looking at a landscape and thinking about the directions that fire wildfire would likely run. And there will be like natural breaks, like maybe fields of boulders or an area where there's almost no plants or a really moist area or you know, just on the lee side of a large ridge. As those hot gusty winds push over the ridge, they might not. Yeah, things like that. You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, that makes sense. Is this like one of those instances? I feel like I have this stereotype, the right word in my head of like this is like in like Appalachia. But it's like this, is this an instance where like living down in the holler is like actually better for like fire or for not getting swept up in a wildfire? Because okay, I feel like there's this very class stratified mentality that a lot of wealthier people build their houses on fucking ridges and shit like that and that poor people live down in the holler. And I'm seeing this also funny thing where it's like, oh, maybe living down in the holler is a better place because of fires. Not so much for other reasons, but for fires.

Every site is super different. But you know, if you go to like Big Sur, you see these mansions up on ridge tops and like I have no interest in risking my life to protect rich people's houses who made the choice to live there, for example. But if I see a mid elevation shack like I will repel, I'll repel in or something. But they're also, you know, in mountainous regions there's a thing called a thermal belt where because of the inversion basically warm air will get trapped like mid way in a valley. And so those fires will tent, it'll be colder on the ridge tops, colder down in the valley. And then fires can burn through the night in that mid. So it's just, it's unique. But yes, in general that would be like a good. It's very difficult to stop a fire when it's making a wind driven uphill run. Yeah. And so in large scale wildfire approaches like there, people with familiarity in the area will identify natural fire breaks that say it's a ridge top or a really wet valley and that's like they're going to let the fire either back burn off of that or let the fire come to that. This is very simplified and it's obviously changes a lot in terms of resources at risk and whatever, whatever. But there are natural places where the fire is likely to slow where maybe you could so called catch it. And those would also be places to where you could have a defensible home.

Yeah, yeah.

And then okay, so yeah, just kind of like understanding your environment and looking at it and asking for help to look at it and imagining how fire would move through it fire is like a little bit like water in that well, it moves in the opposite way. But yeah, it has like a flow. It moves in. It's going to move in a direct. It moves in kind of like a river. And then on a community level there's all sorts of stuff going on. And I have worked all over the country and a little bit out of the country and so I'm speaking to a really wide swath, but everywhere is so different and I'm like running roughshod over a lot of different subtleties. So obviously I can't like generalize. But in some rural areas there there's been like a rise of prescribed burn associations. There's an LA county pba. There's a bunch of California. You can look at a map online and it's like people who have gotten together to help each other do either fuels reduction or prescribed burns on their, on their properties. Like knowing that if your neighbor kind of under the basic presupposition that if like you're a wildfire is less likely to rip through your neighbor's house and it's less likely to rip through yours and you can all kind of like come together and that I think probably has a lot greater likelihood of being effective. It tends to. It ends up kind of being a way that ranchers use idealistic Berkeley students who are really into the idea of prescribed fire as free labor to just do their agricultural burning. But also it has a million other different things going on and is often very, or is sometimes hand in hand with tribal fire and fire sovereignty, which is my interest and in my opinion the most beautiful stuff that's happening with fire right now in the area that we the like country that we live in.

What is fire? Can you explain this concepts?

Oh yeah, sorry, let me just circle back.

Totally. Yeah, yeah.

You could look into PBAs where you live or see if there's one or just like see if there's idea. Even if you don't start a pba, you could see if there's like ideas from them that maybe you could get together with a couple neighbors. And then when people do like fuels reduction projects for a whole area, they basically have someone that probably isn't even very much smarter than me. Look at their whole region, identify high risk places and potential fire breaks, like places where you could catch a fire. And then they'll do prescribed fire projects or thinning projects on those ridgelines to help like keep that whole community safer. So that's kind of on the community level. I can go into where you want to keep your firewood if you want me to. But fire sovereignty or let's.

Let's come back to fire sovereignty, actually. Okay. Or yeah, maybe going into. I feel like this is like a funny. It's like a. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about individual stuff. Even if it's like it seems like individual stuff is like stuff that it's like it might. It. It only. It seems like the individual stuff maybe only works if like actually your community is also doing stuff and if your region is also doing stuff like it's not there. Like it doesn't seem like there's a way to. You're not going to magically protect your house in like an island of like fire around it if, like if, if that is all that's been done. Right.

Yeah. You're not going to magically protect your house in a island of fire. But like let's say there's a wildfire.

Totally.

And a literal mile away. Wildfires can easily throw firebrands for a mile ahead of their flaming front. So like it could be the difference between an ember falls on your house and starts a house fire when otherwise it wouldn't be, you know.

I see.

Versus but yes, if there's a. If your house is surrounded on all sides by wildfire where you move your propane tank isn't going to make a big difference. But there's all sorts of other situations where maybe there's a very like, maybe there's a two foot flame length that's just coming, eating across irrigate like a seasonally irrigated field and there's all sorts of houses that are just going to be just fine. So yeah, there, I don't mean to be so there. There are lots of like gray area kind of like risk reduction things one can do. But if someone is like fully a homeowner that lives in a place that is that fire prone, I would hope slash think they would already have access to this information. And I don't even mean homeowner, but like someone who has the agency and capacity to change things about their lived environment.

Yeah.

But yeah, you know, things that the horizontal surfaces of your home environment are the ones that are most important because that's where emperors can like sit and stay. And so reducing the number of places that are flat enough that an ember can stay on there and themselves are flammable. So like 10 rooves instead of gorgeous cedar plank. Yeah. Roofing. The vertical surfaces are just really the last I heard from the Missoula fire lab Is just really not that big. Like not that huge of a difference because it's mostly about ember residents time. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

All the weird little nooks and crannies that they could fall in.

Yeah. But more just like large flat surfaces like decks and roofs where they could really be there and become established. Some people, depending on where they live, have like sprinkler systems that they can set up to direct onto their roofs for, you know, they. If they need to evacuate, they could set that up. That of course, depends on irrigation and money and kind of priority.

Yeah.

And then, you know, keeping your firewood not stacked up against the side of the house.

But it's such a good place because

I know it's amazing. It's like, it's literally also like if I lived there, if I. The places that I spent the nice parts of my childhood in California growing up are so the houses themselves are very not hardened. They're like insanely beautiful cedar shake houses that have wooden porches and have climbing vines all up on them and a giant oak tree that's directly above it, shading them with their amazing shade and yeah. Dropping acorns on them. Like that is the kind of house I would want to live in.

Totally.

But like if you. Those like horrendous. Just like there's a gravel driveway all the way around and there's. And it's just baking in the sun. That is like technically more fire safe. But how it costs really. But yeah, like just thinking about the plants that you. You know, green trees are resistant to fire. But you know, maybe oaks, like famous oaks, oak savannas in California were co evolved with people to be burned regularly and are not totally fire dependent, but are definitely part of a fire spectrum. And oaks have all these like amazing old burls and knots that catch embers. And an entire limb of an oak can catch on fire and burn off without the oak dying.

Wow.

So maybe even if you are planting a tree around your living space, just consider what species it's resistance to fire, that kind of thing. If you're going to plant vines, are they winter deciduous? As in, are they going to be green and juicy in the summer and not available to light on fire and then light your house on fire or do they kind of like brown back in the dry season? Just things like that.

Cool.

Okay.

Those are all reasonable things. I feel like it is really hard, this tension of what you're talking about with living in the idyllic place that you want to live in. That's good for so many reasons. And confronting the reality of what the risk of fire is.

Yeah. And then the surrounding acres to your home. You know, if you had like the money and time and resources then you could be doing regular relative. Every place is different. But like in this idyllic imagination of Northern California or whatever, you are tending to the acres around your home with low flame length prescribed fires every couple years. So that when a wild. When a wildfire is in that space, the plants that. Or yeah. It's going to be running through the ground plants instead of through the canopy of the trees. Does that make sense how like a bushy forest with a lot of mid canopy fuels would burn really differently than like kind of more of a oak savannah? There's a guy in Sonoma county who's white. Sonoma county has like a real intersection of a history of brutal fires, a lot of money and a lot of like interest from. From like people from the bay around fire as well as Miwok and Pomo people who are burning. And so there's like a lot of. It's like a very dense place to. Yeah. Be doing work around fire. And there's a guy that's on these Listers that I'm on that is like he's white and he's really. I think he's white. That's what I heard. My bad. If you're listening. And. But yeah, he's. He's like people's obsession with prescribed fire is just their colonial imagination that all woods should look like the Sherwood Forest and like be able to like drive your fucking horse through. And it's not like that here. That's not how they're supposed to be. So I think that's a cool like reactionary take to kind of like horseshoe around. There's like a weird kind of like political split around the approach to prescribing cultural fire that. But I think it's kind of fun when it gets. When it's unexpected that he has like a colonial critique of an interest in prescribed fire. But yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting.

It's normal in the south to burn your lot as. Yeah. Like people like sweep the pine straw off of their immediate area. That is literally a fire prevention thing. And then like burn the pine straw, which is pine needles, but the longleaf pine and even the loblolly pine there, if you haven't been there, are so long that they're called pine straw, brush

and brush and like fucking trash fires in the South.

Yeah.

I feel like. Are those good helpful? Is that fire Prevention.

I don't tell people what to do with their trash.

I just, I feel like a regular part of my childhood was witnessing these like, like anor enormous like rubbish fires that were controlled, you know.

Sure, yeah, yeah. There's just like a lot, a lot more comfort across the board in the south of the fire. And it's also more common like ins. Instead of like everyone having like a little house site and then there's a national forest there. It's more common for people to have like 10 acres and maybe they have just like a tiny loblolly forest back there and every so often they log it. And so there's kind of like micro forestry that happens here instead of state, there instead of state forestry. So that leads to different practices. And I think I haven't spent a ton of time in the south, mostly working fire. But what I saw there is yeah, people would like burn their little 10 acres of loblolly just to burn this draw off the ground so that. Or they would sell this or they would hire people to come pick the straw up and sell it as bales, whatever. Either way it's removing it. And that is like a fire prevention thing. So that there's not that highly available, highly dry fine needle fuel which is kind of like kindling, you can imagine that's just like ready to take any cigarette spark or someone is dragging a trailer down the highway and the chains are skipping across the highway.

Yeah. But it's like this concept is sort of in tension with other kind of like I feel like people's ideas around what healthy forests are need.

Yeah, that they need non intervention from humans. Is that kind of what you're gonna ask?

Yeah, sort of. It's like the. Because I know especially in the southeast, old growth, for example. I mean there's literally one stand of old growth trees in the south at this point and globe.

There's a couple.

Yeah, yeah. But it's like old growth in that part of the world, for example, from what I've heard at least, obviously I'm not an expert. Has more to do with the level of decomposition on the ground than it has to do with the age of

the trees, for example.

Because the trees there aren't living to be multi hundred year old trees. And it's like if all of the small whatever things like brush is constantly being burned, then it's not decomposing. And so it's like these fungal networks and stuff like aren't kind of building up, you know. So it's like the. Is it the thing where are practices like that preventing some forests from being able to reach being old growth or having that level of decomposition?

Fire exclusion.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a weird question.

Yeah.

I don't know the definition of old growth and I don't know if it's universal or I think, think that it's separate forest by forest. And there used to be hundred year old. There still are a couple. Couple hundred year old stands and there used to be in the Southeast. But yes, depending on the forest, fire is like a fundamentally necessary process to overturn nutrients. I mean, probably for a spiritual reason or something. I don't. But from like a western whatever secular perspective, because that's what they did for the last 10 to 70,000 years. So that's like how they work. That's like, you know, people talk about fire as like an ecological process which can have all sorts of effects, but. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Okay. Yeah, I don't, I don't know if that's true. That's just. I feel like a question that I have in my head. Tell us about fire sovereignty.

Sure. Oh, if people are interested in the longleaf ecosystem, there's a very sweet book by iconic Baxley, Georgia resident kingpin whose name I just forgot. Oh my God, I had dinner with her. Anyways, the book is called Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. It talks about her growing up in Baxley and about the longleaf pine system. It definitely like kind, kind of talks about that land as being owned by like Scott Irish border weavers instead of the people whose land that they stole it from slash were like deputized to dispossess. So just like a heads up on that. But if that is something that you are comfortable navigating around, it has some really beautiful reflections on how the longleaf ecosystem, which once spread from essentially, I think Maine, although you know, along the coastal shelf that's. That goes through Georgia like down to north Florida and is where, you know, oh, whatever. People from the south know all this way better than me. So. But that's where. That's where Tar Heels come from. It's like, it's the entire like bloody history of this country is like soaked in the turpentine and byproducts of the longleaf pine. So yeah, fire sovereignty, again, another phrase that maybe like sent. Maybe current academic discourse has moved on or through or something. But when I first did a prescribed fire and was learning about the geophytes of the remnant Salish sea savannas and the first foods of that area, that is what that, that's what people were talking about. And a lot of the story of the fire exclusion of the west, which is to say this orientation towards wildfire, that it should be stopped as soon as possible in every context, which along with climate change famously has led to the current wildfire crisis we're in, at least that is like the most simple story to tell and it's a little more complicated than that, but that's like a good enough story probably for most people to get by with. Anyways.

Sorry. The clarifying question that the idea that fire must be stopped at all cost has sort of contributed to or exacerbated. There's the state of wildfires now.

Yeah. Well, they're like kind of the dominant, non dominant narrative would be the last 150 years of the smokey the bear era of wildfire suppression has led to the fuels crisis of the west, which is to say the intense buildup of available to burn plants that would have normally been altered the fuel composition by regular burning or either start like human started burns or burns that were started by other causes and then humans allowed to let burn.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

The idea that that is why we are here now is like true enough and it's more complicated and in every place that timeline is a little different and how people use fire is different of course, but fire, there's this book, there's a book by Theodore Catton, American Indians in the National Forest, which is, which is about like kind of how the US Forest Service began and the dispossession of the people whose lands it now claims. But fire, to my understanding, the control of fire has, has always been partially, at least or largely about the control of the people who use fire to live, especially in like the California mission system. Like controlling fire was an overt attempt to control people's access to their food so that they would be forced to like farm in a. In the way. That was the vision for the. Yeah. For like the cultural genocide of the West. But so fire sovereignty, again, I'm not an expert and I'm just like a dumb firefighter, but is kind of the idea around supporting and restoring indigenous people's right to use fire on lands and on their lands as a stewardship and cultural tool just writ large. And there's all sorts of cool inspiring and complex projects around that different tribal fire initiatives, nonprofits and just like individuals and collectives are doing all over. Yeah. And yeah, like I said. Yeah. Sometimes in conjunction with PBAs and sometimes not.

Yeah, what like sorts of, I guess like, what sorts of things are communities doing or wanting to do that they

can't currently, that they can't. Can't.

Yeah, yeah. Burn. Yeah. You know, there's like, so much. Every state has different restrictions, insurance legalities around that stuff. Cal Fire, which is the state, California state forestry or fire agency and the most powerful fire organization in the US Minus the Forest Service, in terms of, like, resources and stuff, has had. Has as a whole, maintained a very patronizing approach to people who are like, you bought our land as like, green, green bucks or what is it, carbon credits for this insane, you know, power plant. You are not stewarding it. We have the tools, knowledge and capacity to steward it. Like, just. Just let us at it. And there are places I don't. That I don't think I want to. I don't know if they're like, if it's cool to say these names or maybe it's better to just leave them private. So I'm just going to err on the side of like. But there are places that people have gotten their land back and are tending it with fire, doing, like, roots and shoots, burns for basketry materials, burning for all sorts of different foods, and just like, having it as a space to gather and chill. But pretty much all have had to be, like, either donated or purchased from individuals or small organizations or really fought tooth and nail. Cow fired to be given that. Yeah. And then there's other people who are working in conjunction with the Forest Service and that has every single burn and every single situation just has so many different layers of restrictions and. Yeah. So it just looks really different. But. Yeah, or maybe people, like, as a collective, don't have the resources and need to, you know, anyone has the resources to burn. But in this day and age, you know, there's like, rules around how many gallons of water you have to have a site. Maybe they don't have a water tender of the sufficient height and they. And they need to work in partnership with larger agencies to be able to, like, hit those. Yeah. Prescribed fire would be a lot cheaper and more accessible if, like, the US Was less densely populated. If rich people just stopped having like one cabin every nine miles out in the middle of nowhere or something, because then all these resources have to be protecting property. And if it goes like one foot onto private property, it's a huge deal. And the prescribed fire insurance world is. If you want to be autistic about something, that would be a great thing to get into. It's like, yeah, twists and turns.

Yeah.

Does that answer your Question.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. I feel like it's. I feel like there's this inherent weird tension here of like, like in the world of fire, of like, we want, like, we want to live in beautiful places. We want to have the homes of our dreams and the places where we want them. We don't want them to burn. We don't want other people's houses to burn. But a lot of that is in tension with what is mayhaps good for forests and what the much longer prevailing practices around fire have been. Yeah, and the law. And the law. Yeah, that's hard.

I will say. This is maybe not relevant to. Okay, so there used to be a thing called the 10 o' clock rule, which was like, you put out a fire by 10am Whatever it takes. It is that kind of rule that led to the Man Gulch fatalities, for example. That was just like, we're here. We showed up to put out a fire. Why wouldn't we put out a fire? In the last like 10 to 20 years, maybe there has been more massaging of that kind of orientation. They've. I went to this, like, fire managers meeting and people were talking about. For like half an hour. They were specifically talking about what is the name of this practice, which is there's a wildfire. It is not threatening anyone's home, any, you know, major thoroughfares, any people. It is like, at a severity that seems ecologically appropriate for its regiment. Basically, like, this fire is like doing good work. I'm putting up air quotes for listeners. It's just munching through. Yeah, you can imagine this. So, like, what is the practice called that is letting that fire burn and monitoring it and just like blocking off maybe a highway corridor or some other thing. Like it can do its thing until it gets here. Which is a great practice in that it saves firefighters lives, it saves like, money and resources, and it is ecologically beneficial. And that used to be called like naturally managed wildfires or controlled wildfires. And then people are like, well, you can't control a wildfire. And then it was like, what. What about natural use fires? Or ecologically. Like there was this whole long conversation. It was like six years ago we said this, but now we can't say this. And people are like, well, the. The term that makes most sense is naturally, ecologically managed resource benefit fires or whatever. These same men who are sitting here in synthetic polos who are. Can talk about this forever, literally can't handle a pronoun because they, quote, can't, like, remember all those words. Or whatever. And they can't keep track, but they are wrong. So just needed to say that. So I'm just gonna call this practice, like, naturally mana man naturally managed wildfires. Cause I don't really care that much about the special pronouns these men have, which is to say their special little words around it, which are, like, tied up in, like, the kind of a condescending orientation towards the public and what they're going to hear. Plus legality and forest supervisors and hierarchy, whatever. So that practice has been, like, more supported in the last 10 years than it was during, like, a very militaristic. Our forests are what's going to beat the commies. We need to preserve every board foot. In case it's not clear, wildfire in the US Is mostly about. A lot of it is protecting logging interests. Because fires are under the usda. They're made to be managed for logging.

Yeah. I was talking to someone recently about this. I don't think it was you, but it was like, about like they were talking about, like, being like, yeah, I don't actually want to get deployed to a fire to pre. To protect, like, mining and mining interests. And how like, a lot of, like, fire management, like, a lot more than we think is like, maybe not actually to protect people's homes, but to protect mineral and extraction industry.

Yeah. And also even protecting people. I don't want to risk my life to protect someone's home, not even my own. But that's easy for me to say because I live in a relatively low fire. Whatever. I love. It's fun to say, oh, all fires are about logging interest. Because it's fun to just have something be bad and be like, oh, you think forest fighters are good. Wrong. They're actually just logging shells. They're just logging cannon fodder. That's not, like, totally true. There's a million forests that have, like, basically no logging interest because of. They're just like juniper high step. And they also respond to wildfires. But that is like, that is the culture that the U.S. forest Service was born from.

Yeah. It's not across the board, I'm sure, like, a lot of wild, like, wildfires that are fought or like, whatever, like, protect people's homes and lives.

Yeah. Protect people's lives in this region, as people probably know U.S. or Southern, Southern Southwest rivers can, like, carry, like, up to. Oh, man, I keep forgetting. I'm like, I'm gonna nail it with this statistic. But since I don't remember the number, it doesn't really matter. It's either 30 or 60% silt by weight. But just like after wildfire, there's wildfire in the highlands. Then the monsoonal rains come, and it just, like washes a mountain off. And so that's where those, like, famous videos from landslides come from, which is a big deal because those mountains are. A lot of those mountains are sacred sites and they get, like, washed into a river because a wildfire went up them that was so hot that it, like, basically sterilized the soil, burnt out all the root systems that keep that mountain on its mountain face. And then. And then all the fish in that river get drowned by silt, you know. And so, like on the Gila, they freaking fished every Gila trout out of a river after, I think, the blackfire, and then like, put them in another river so that then the silt, like the landslides would come, those monsoons, and they put them back, which is so cute. And that's all Forest Service people. Like, there are other reasons that wildfires are fought that are for, like, cute, good reasons, like the Chihuahua chub, which is an endangered species of fish that lives on forks of the Gila.

Anyways, yeah, I feel like we're. What. What we're not saying is the entire wildfire fighting world is bad and chills for corporate interests. That's not.

Yeah, I mean, I probably would say that for fun, but that's because I'm broken. But, yeah. Anyhow, this orientation that is militaristic, the 10 o' clock rule, kind of has been being massaged into like, a more complex, nuanced things over the last 10 years. The new Forest Service chief, whose name I don't remember, who can get. Not that the old one was cool, but he's even worse. He wants to. He. He, like, has been advocating for reinstating the 10 o' clock rule, like, in this current wildfire regime. So no more, at least on paper. I'm sure, like I said, the Forest Service is very dispersed, even though it's extremely hierarchical. I'm sure there's individual land managers that are going to do their own thing and they're going to have to think up new language for this thing that is naturally managed wildfire. But yeah, right now in the Forest Service, they're trying to reinstate this militaristic rule that's going to kill a bunch of firefighters and just have even have bad downstream ecological effects.

This, the 10 o' clock rule being like, is. Is the thing. They're like fire, like putting out a fire as quickly as possible.

Every fire gets put out as possible. It doesn't matter like if it's somewhere where maybe it should burn or if you stop this one. Yeah, there's going to be a way worse one in five years when whatever it didn't eat up lights or like. Yeah, yeah. Just like there's no new, no decision making allowed. Every fire out, even if it's dangerous or if you waited one day, you could catch it at somewhere you don't have to have a helicopter in or just something like this.

Yeah, yeah, that's bad. That sounds stupid.

It's bad and stupid.

I feel like these are people who

would like for the sake of never having a tsunami would stop waves in the ocean.

Yeah, they would never, they would never surf for fear of the tsunami.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's about all the time we have for today. We did not talk about saws like we planned to, nor did we talk about some arboristic tendencies. But is there anything you want to talk about before we go below? I have no idea what you prepared also, by the way, this has been a very funny conversation.

Yeah, well, maybe we can. Well think we can talk about sauce another time if we feel like it.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't text me if you want a fire job. I was reading that like, at least according to this. This is maybe the only thing I wrote down on this topic. At least according to that guy Theodore Catton, like estimates that California pre contact, 2% of California burned every year. And so for context, in 2025 there was like about half a million acres of fires. That was, that was that really severe year, which is like half a percent. And in 2020, those really drastic big wildfires, that was like 5%. But so yeah, pre contact there were just so many, many, many small fires. What is that, where's that phrase from? Like a million tiny fires, tiny fires everywhere or something?

Yeah, it sounds like it's from.

It. Someone can correct me. It sounds like it's from like an indie album. But that. Yeah, I don't know what's a good ending?

Oh, I just had a thought. Imagine me with a thought. I guess maybe some funny, a little bit of wrap up for the conversation today. It's like fire is really complicated. There are individual and community and like regional things that you can do to be less at risk for fire. But it's like, but we are living with this very strange tension of like trying to control the world around us in ways that like, are maybe not good for it and are maybe not ultimately good for us and it's like, I don't know, the tension of property even when it is ours and we don't want it to be destroyed, but we also don't want to do good things for the forest around us are really complicated and maybe there's just uncomfortable realities that a lot of us don't know how to deal with or don't know how to process. And it's like, God, I'm going to quote Nietzsche. If you don't want to be swept up in a volcano, don't build your house on the edge of a volcano.

Dang, is that so. Is that a Nietzsche coat?

That is a Nietzsche coat, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you want to have the vibe of living next to a volcano and you're okay with your house being swept up in a volcano, eventually.

Eventually, maybe, yeah.

Then that's a fine thing to do. This is a strange conclusion to make temporality.

Embrace temporality.

Yes, we didn't get that. And figure out what the historic fire regime of the place you live in is and the seasonal patterns. And it seems like a big thing, but you can learn about it. You don't have to be intimidated. And there's this. Sorry, there's this woman who did her like sociology, former forest service person, did an anthropology, I think, PhD and I've heard her talk a couple times around public perceptions of wildfire. And so I guess we talked a lot about prescribed fire. And I know it brings up a lot of different things for people. And what she said was that actually the public can tolerate. You don't have to have a couple of pithy advertising type phrases. And the public can tolerate a lot more nuance and gray area than is like norm normally offered. And in this case like the public being like non fire professionals or whatever, but. Or not professionals, you know, non fireheads. Anyways, what she said is like, yeah, tell people the truth about prescribed fire, which is that some truths about it are like, depending on the area. It's really important for, for foods, for people and animal and other animals, for like cultural products, rituals, ceremonies, for the ecology of the land itself, for prevention of larger wildfires. And also it has impacts on smoke and people's health. Prescribed fires regularly get out of hand. The biggest fire in New Mexico was escaped prescribed fire. They. Yeah, they have like all sorts of. Also like what would be perceived as positive and negative effects. So that's just real. And so do wildfires. Wildfires also have positive effects and negative and. Yeah, yeah.

And you know, I'm going to make a hot Take right here at the end. It seems like the biggest problem that we have with fire is that we live in a society and culture that is deeply incompatible with the realities of fire.

We live in a society and that is the biggest problem we have. Well, no, we actually live around fire all the time. The lights that we're under are just like we are obsessed with combustion so much that we took it and we made it into these little things. We're surrounded by combustion. We're obsessed with fire.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool. Well, thanks for coming on and talking about this and maybe we'll talk about saws another time. Maybe we'll finally do our, you know, listeners. Just seeding an idea. Would you be interested in hearing a tell all gossip infused episode about unethical apprenticeships, work, trade situations, trad skills.

Trad skills meetups and convergences gone wrong?

Yeah.

Yeah. Were you Annprym in your late teens or early 20s? And if so, do you want to talk about it? And if not, do you want to hear about it?

Let us know.

Can they? How can they let you know?

You can send us [email protected] or find us on social media or email us your story.

Please email us your story and know if you're open to it being read on air.

It can be anonymized.

And would you do a call in episode if we did such a thing?

Yeah.

And do you want to hear an episode about chainsaws, crosscut saws, the history and the application?

There's a rousing anecdote about a child's bicycle that we will not explain right now.

Yeah, you can hear my takes on rotational symmetry in general.

Thanks so much for listening.

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