Ologies with Alie Ward - Fire Ecology (WILDFIRES) with Gavin Jones

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

As Smashmouth said, “My world’s on fire, how ‘bout yours?” Why yes, Mr. Mouth, it is, indeed, on fire. As so many of us around the globe are sharing in this burning sensation, what better time than now to sit down and fire off a lot of questions at Fire Ecologist, Dr. Gavin Jones. We talk about what fire is, how hot it burns, fire trends, tinderboxes, lots and lots of forest fire flim-flam, tolerant wombats, Angelina Jolie Movies, cunning pine cones, thick bark, Indigenous fire stewardship and more. This episode might get you pretty heated but that’ll only release seeds of new ideas and hope, because it's serotinous. That bad joke will make sense after you listen.Follow Dr. Gavin Jones on Twitter A donation was made to The Common Good Community Foundation More episode sources & linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts & bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, totes, masks… Follow @ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @alieward on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. Dwyer

Hem, oh hey, it's the pair of sunglasses that you leave in the car that's scratched. It's not your favorite, but it's better than nothing in a pinch. Alley Ward, back with a piping hot episode of oligies. It's top of mind for a lot of us out here, up here in the Northern Hemisphere, especially toward the west of the continent. Wildfires, fire ecology, blazing infernos, apocalyptic nightmares. This oligist, Sospesh, got his bachelor's in zoology, a master's in wildlife ecology, and a PhD in wildlife ecology statistics.

All from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He is currently a wildlife and terrestrial ecosystems research ecologist? Such a mouthful. He's a research scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, also an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico. He has been published on papers about fire refuges for wildlife, where they hide out, megafires, habitat loss. He's also just casually the editor at the Association of Fire Ecology.

So I have been following him online for a while. I reached out to casually ask him about pyrology versus fire ecology, and before I knew it, I was begging him to talk to me. So we hopped on to chat while fires were raging in the west this week. And I was in a muggy Florida hotel room for work, and it smelled like a turtle tank. But before we dive into the conversation, I want to thank everyone at patreon.com.com. It costs a dollar a month to join, and then you can submit questions to the oligists. Thank you to everyone listening and making us the number one podcast in the science category

on Spotify. And thank you for leaving reviews on Apple Podcasts to get us seen by other people. I truly read them all because I desperately want to make a show that does not suck. And to prove it, I'm going to read you a still glowing coal of assessment from Burt Lancaster, who wrote, Ologies is your cynicism, antidote. I simultaneously feel beautifully tiny and so expansive that I could burst after listening. Sometimes I just have to stand there and laugh to myself for a while.

Sometimes I cry. Emotions are weird. Love you, Dad Ward. Burt Lancaster, get a hanky, because your internet dad right here loves you right back. Okay, everyone who left a review, I read it. I love you also. Okay. I'm going to turn this fire off.

Some questions. Yeah. Okay. Open your ears for info on what fire is, how hot it burns, fire trends, tinder boxes, lots and lots of forest fire flim flam, tolerant bomb bats, Angelina Jolie movies, cunning pine cones, thick bark, tragic koalas, indigenous fire stewardship and more with researcher, scientist of the woods, desert dweller, owl cuddler, forest service employee, optimist and fire ecologist, Dr. Gavin Jones.

Yes, Gavin Jones and my pronouns are he, him. Got it. And you are currently in New Mexico. That's right. Great city of Albuquerque. Do you guys have trees there? You know, we do. Yes.

Okay. It's pretty much desert out here. So when the trees grow, they don't grow very tall. And now tell me how a fire ecologist from Wisconsin and Florida and now New Mexico. How did your life path lead to fire ecology? Oh my goodness. It was really an accident. I do consider myself a fire ecologist, but I was really trained and I did my graduate

work and all my studies in wildlife ecology. And when I was in grad school, I was doing some research out in the Sierra Nevada and California on the cutest cuddliest creature there is, the California spotted owl. And yeah, like pretty much anybody who spends enough time doing science out in fire prone lands like the Sierra Nevada, you eventually become a fire ecologist because a fire happens and then you have to try to figure out what to do with it. So that's exactly what happened. I was doing my master's degree.

I was at the University of Wisconsin with my supervisor, Zach Peary, and we were doing a study out in California on spotted owls trying to figure out what kind of forests they used, how they would respond to climate change. And just as I was finishing my master's degree, like just a month or two before I defended my degree, a big fire burned through our study area. Oh. Yeah. And at the time, to be honest with you, I was pretty devastated.

I was like, man, what does this mean for the work that I've been doing? Does this even mean anything anymore? It changed the game a little bit, but it provided an incredible opportunity to learn about how these animals, this owl that I was studying, responded to fire. It was basically a natural experiment. This fire burned through our study area in 2014 and it burned through about half of it. And so in ecology, when we're doing these field studies, we rarely get the chance to do experiments.

Like almost everything we do is observational. We go out and we see what we see and we record it and we try to make sense of it. We rarely get to do experiments like other folks get to do in the lab who are doing chemistry or other molecular things, but this was really a natural experiment to see how this species of owl responded to fire. And that's what launched me into, I guess, being a real sucker for fire and for learning about how it works in some of these systems, why it happens, how it happens, what its consequences are.

And I'm totally hooked now. How many of your owls were latered? How many of the owls survived that? Like what percentage of the impacted area, half of your study area? So some of them didn't make it. Some of them dispersed. Some of them left the fire. They were able to get out of the way.

And then there's large parts of the fire that didn't burn so severely that burned at lower severity where basically a lot of the trees, the big trees in the canopy, they survived and some of the understory burned a little bit more of what we call, quote unquote, good fire in some of these areas, which I'd love to talk more about. But a lot of those birds did great and are still persisting in some of those areas that experienced lower severity fire, those lower severity effects to the forest. But predictably, many bit the proverbial dust and returned to the earth as ash. Gavin told me that one of his colleagues was surveying the charred land and found a little

aluminum owl leg band that they used for tagging. And it encased a little crispy owl leg, did not go well for that one. And how did that wildfire start? Well, so that particular wildfire, that was a human started fire and it's actually a kind of a sad story is some guy, I'm trying to remember the details. You should look this up, Allie. But some guy was, I think, taking a video for his ex-girlfriend or something and lit some house on fire.

And then that started this gigantic, it was like at the time, one of the largest fires that had burned in the state of California. Okay. Buckle up. Here's the story. So this was 2014's King Fire. And it started in Pollock Pines and the Sierra Nevada's. And I already knew of this fire because my parents lived in Pollock Pines in 2014.

And my sisters and I had to plead with them to heed the emergency evacuation orders as pyro-cumulus clouds billowed over their hill where like, please get to safety. I'm sweating a lot. Don't make me come up there. I can't. The roads are closed. I booked my mom and dad a hotel in Reno out of harm's way. And the hotel turned out to have a mirrored ceiling and a very thrifty, but sensual vibe.

They tell me. I get the feeling that there were also hourly rates available at this hotel. I got them. I didn't read the reviews. Okay. It was an emergency. Anyway, the King Fire that reduced homes to ashes and dashed people's dreams. It flambéed Gavin's owls.

It was all started by a guy named Wayne Huntsman, who was not a Huntsman, but an arsonist. A formerly incarcerated firefighter, actually, who that sweltering September day had set several fires to impress a paramour. He took video for her, standing between two small, smoldering blazes that were just starting to take off. I'm just acting a little bit. I'm not sure how their relationship turned out, but as proof that we're living in a simulation, the burn area, the burn scar is absolutely shaped like a perfect 97,000 acre

dick in balls, all ablaze in one of the state's most infamous literal thirst traps. Okay. So how much is our horny, greedy species to blame? Oh, man. And that's another thing is a lot of the ignitions are human ignitions. People accidentally starting fires, machinery getting too hot, people driving over dry grass and things like that. So Gavin says that 80 to 90% of all wildfires are human-caused ignitions.

Half of California's largest fires in the last century happened in the past five years. By the way, a complex fire means a cluster of related fires in one area. So what's the difference between a wildfire and a forest fire? We talk about wildfires typically when we're talking about wildfires, those are unplanned. So fires that we as people don't plan. So you can kind of juxtapose that with a prescribed fire or a cultural fire. So prescribed fire is often fire that is purposely set and then managed by teams to achieve some type of objective.

Maybe they're trying to restore some area, restore fire. You probably hear a lot about people burning prairies and things like that. It's the same thing in forests, they go in and do prescribed burns. And then there's also a really important component of cultural burning. So indigenous communities using wildfire for their purposes, which until about 100, 200 years ago made up the overwhelming majority of the fire activity that was happening in a lot of these areas. For the last 10,000 years or so, indigenous peoples have been using fire in a really

important cultural way. And that has really changed in the past couple of centuries with colonization. But that is an increasingly important part of the solution to sort of this modern wildfire problem. Obviously, indigenous cultures and just the planet at large saw the benefit of prescribed burns. So what good do fires do either in prescribed burns or just in nature? Yeah, that's such a good question.

I mean, fires are a critical piece of ecosystems around the world. Every square inch of land that has vegetation has some type of fire regime. It has some sort of natural fire cycle. And fire is kind of a restorative process. There's many benefits of fire from we can think about it from a human perspective. We can think about it from a sort of an ecosystem perspective. You know, from the human perspective, you know, fires create more resilient forest when they burn the right way.

When we have sort of a natural kind of lower intensity fire in some systems like in the Sierra Nevada where I've spent a lot of my time, that reinforces healthy water supplies. It reduces erosion. Side note, a fire regime sounds like Satan's cabinet members farting flames in a Hades boardroom, but it's actually just a gentle term. A fire regime describes a pattern of fire. How frequent, how intense, what kind of fuel it gobbles. And maybe me just calling it Satan's cabinet members farting in Hades.

Maybe that's part of the root of Europeans fear of fire and thus this historical fire suppression by colonists. I wondered this and I begged myself not to Google it because this inside would be like 45 minutes long. But snap, I found a 2015 paper from the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B title fire in the mind, changing understandings of fire in Western civilization, what in which author Stephen J. Pyron writes, you ready for this quote, the Old Testament is in fact a cauldron of

stories, rights and beliefs simmering over a mix of religious fires. He goes on to say, the heartland of European forestry knew fire only as a human artifact, not a natural process. Most new and colonized lands were burned lands naturally, but the agencies found themselves in a continuous firefight. So fire became a political as well as practical challenge. He continues, the upshot has generally been disastrous. OK, so what does the land miss out on when natural fire is suppressed and indigenous

populations are fined, imprisoned, or even up until the 1930s in the US shot for fire stewardship? Well, from an ecology standpoint, those fires can help the water supply by eliminating excess vegetation and thus increasing runoff into streams and by preventing huge fires with more frequent smaller ones. Also erosion doesn't get out of control when there are regular fires like you see with post mega fire mudslides. Also the charcoal after a burn could trap carbon for millennia and the recovery

of vegetation takes more excess carbon from the atmosphere. According to the 2019 paper, how wildfires trap carbon for centuries to millennia. OK, but wildfires burn at 800 degrees Celsius. That's 1472 Fahrenheit, America. So the animals hate natural and cultural burns, too. Right. No animal wants to be trapped in a blaze. But I'm just going to stop myself from singing about the circle of life in your ears. And then from an ecosystem perspective and from what I like to think about a lot

is the biodiversity perspective. So, you know, what kinds of animals there are and the richness of animal life and plant life fires create this template for wildlife and plants to thrive. And also this creates this this natural dynamic where you have places that burn in one year and then don't burn for a while and places that burn frequently in places that burn at high severity and low severity. You can kind of think about it as this patchwork, this mosaic of different ages of forests that burned at different times.

And that creates a really diverse landscape that generates the habitat for lots of critters. It can be a really regenerative and restorative process to the land, both from an ecosystem perspective and also really, you know, fire is a necessary part of these systems. And so when we can put the right kind of fire on the landscape, it really benefits us, too, as people and as a society. So fire mosaic paints a beautiful picture of land in different states of recovery. And if you're looking to learn more about it, don't Google fire mosaic unless

you want to see a lot of tiling crafts that seem to be an homage to Burning Man. But look up the official term. It's patch mosaic burning. So let's talk different flavors of fire because it does matter. So you can think this is a really overly simplistic way to think about fire, because fire is a really complicated process. But the way that we often sort of describe it and think about it within fire ecology world is we think about natural, low severity fire regimes, you know,

in a given area, you might expect fires to sort of burn a lower severity, not too hot, not too all consuming. They burn along in the understory, nice and happy, crawl along and burn some logs here, burn some trees there, but generally don't destroy or consume the big trees in the overstory of the canopy. So that first end of the system, that's kind of frequent low severity fires. And then on the other end of the whole spectrum, you can think about infrequent high severity fires or fire regimes, rather.

So these are places in that area is for fires when they do burn to burn pretty big and pretty hot, and those are both natural, but they're natural in those different places. And so why is it? Why is it that you have some places that naturally burn low severity? And generally I'm talking about forest fires here and then other places, other forests that naturally burn at really high severity and really large. We can think about those two ends of the spectrum.

Also in terms of what's limiting the system. So in these low severity fire systems, those are generally systems that are limited by fuel. And so what I mean by that is the climate is such that on any given year, the conditions are right for fire, like if there's a lightning strike or another ignition, fire is going to burn and the fuel is dry. And the only thing that's keeping that fire, one of the primary things that's controlling that fire and where it burns is where the fuel is, where the trees

are, where the kindling, so to speak, is. And because those fires, those places, they ignite every year. There's ignitions all the time and the conditions are right for fire. They burn really frequently. And so you can think about places where the fires burn every couple of years. And when they do burn, they kind of clean out or burn in that understory. So sort of below the forest canopy, it's burning the smaller trees. It's burning some of the medium trees.

And it's burning some of the big trees, but mostly it just every time a fire burns, it burns all that fine fuel for a lot of it, right? And so that's the primary sort of control on how fire burns in some of these dry fuel limited systems. So in these areas, the way it's supposed to be is that fires don't get mega because blazes are more frequent. So burning all of the fallen wood and the understory. So an excess of fuel doesn't build up.

So that's one way that these giant devastating fires can be avoided. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have these climate limited systems. So rather than the system being limited by fuel, it's limited by climate. And so this is a place like the Pacific Northwest where it's really wet, right? It's generally wet most of the time. It's cool. There's maybe quite a few ignitions, but when those ignitions occur, the fuel is not really ready to burn.

It's too wet and maybe it burns a small fire or something like that, but it just kind of extinguishes itself. And you think about that system, though, those kind of areas. And when you end up getting those really big infrequent severe fires that occur there, it's because there's been a some sort of climate activity, like a drought that's caused all that fuel that hasn't burned in a really long time to dry out. And then it burns. And when it does burn, it burns really big because there's tons of fuel available.

Right. And so those are, that's kind of the two ends of the spectrum. And, you know, I was trying to think about this today. How do I describe that, that like spectrum in a way that's not so dry and academic? And I was thinking about like, okay, like the haircut that I get is like a frequent fire system. Okay. You know, I go to great clips or sport clips or whatever, just down the street

for me and I get my haircut every few weeks, maybe every month. It's, it kind of maintains the general structure. It never kind of goes super long and I never buzz it super short either. I just kind of keep it, you know, tamed. So I go in there frequently, I clean out sort of the, the growth, right? That's happened in between each cut. And on the other end of the spectrum, you could have somebody, and I did this once when I was in college, I think maybe right after college, you know, grew

out your hair super duper long. Like I didn't, I didn't cut it for, I don't remember exactly how long it was, but let's say, say you grow your hair for a year or five years or something, you know, get some pretty floppy, pretty, pretty crazy hair. At least if you got hair like me. And then you say, I'm going to buzz it. And so then you buzz it right off. That's kind of the, I don't know.

You kind of think about that as the two, the two ends of the spectrum, right? You've got like your frequent haircut system and you've got your infrequent high severity haircut system where, you know, you just let it grow and then you cut it all off. Okay. So in this analogy, the regular maintenance cuts are the low intensity fires, the ones that burn the undergrowth, that don't spread too far or that extinguish themselves because there's enough moisture to keep things from being

straight bone, dry powder, keg, kindling. But if those small fires don't happen, or if the fire resistant older trees are longed out, or if the climate is just super hot, then you get a situation that's much more dramatic. I'll pack up. And is that like long main to buzz cut? Is that what a mega fire is then? Yeah.

So that term, I would say that's a good way to think about it. Yeah. From the long man to the buzz cut, the term mega fire is a really interesting term and it really doesn't have a great definition. A lot of people, when they talk about mega fires, they're thinking about these basically really big fires, just fires that are giant in size. But you can have a really, really large fire that doesn't necessarily create that forest buzz cut, right?

It doesn't necessarily kill all the trees within its path. It may kill some trees in some parts, but not throughout the whole fire. So a forest mullet, maybe, but not the cool kind that Gen Z has. The warning, my cousin will probably hit on your wife kind of mullet, not ideal. You can have really large fires that are not necessarily super damaging. You can have smaller fires that are pretty severe and intense and destroy a lot of what's there in terms of the forests. There isn't really a single definition of mega fires.

A lot of people like to think about them in terms of their impact to society, too. So it's not just like how big or severe they are in terms of how many trees they kill. But it's, you know, how much that fire influences people and, you know, how much of the infrastructure it destroys. And there's a growing problem within the US and particularly the Western US, which right now, as you know, is experiencing quite a bit of fire activity. Is that there's there's a lot more people living in that interface, what we call the wildland urban interface or the wooey.

Yeah, wooey. So, yes, the US Forest Service defines the wildland urban interface as, quote, a group of home and other structures with basic infrastructure and services within or adjacent to federal land that is an at risk community, a.k.a. all the cute cabins that you save on Pinterest when you should be working on a spreadsheet for your boss, because you just want to get away for the weekend. But go to some places still has coffee shops. So more and more folks ditched the cities in the pandemic for these type of

living situations and might be getting their very first tastes of PSPS, which are public safety power shutoffs. When utility companies straight up cut power for a day, maybe a few weeks when winds are high in case otherwise live downed wires ignite the forest, realtors might not tell you about that until after you're done with escrow. So wow, we indeed. The wildland urban interface is kind of this intermingling of people and the forest, right, where they kind of overlap a little bit.

And there's a lot more people living there now than there was 10, 20 years ago. And so you can think about fires just generally having more of a mega impact on people now, because we're just more vulnerable in some ways to those fire effects when those fires do burn through. And now, as we're speaking, the Dixie fire is the one of the largest fires California has ever seen. There's the, is it the bootleg fire up in Oregon? Yeah, in Southern Oregon. That's right.

So I'm surprised you were able to even talk to me right now. Can you tell me a little bit about what your job entails? Do you have, is the busy season all year round because you're analyzing data that comes in or are you, do you have to go to the field a lot? Are you getting reports from people who are closer to each of the fires? Do you have to count all the fires, all of that? Yeah, yeah. So I am not one of the incredible people who are out on the front lines doing this work on the fires, right?

My work is really more focused on after fire burns, what can we learn from it? And there are also a ton of people, of course, who are out there responding to these fires like the Dixie fire and the bootleg fire and many others when those are burning. And those are the people who really deserve the, the applause and the praise, right? Who are out there doing this really dangerous work. And I'm relatively speaking, I'm a desk jockey compared to those people. So I spend a lot of my time here at the computer trying to take that data and

learn from the fires and trying to understand how wildlife respond to those fires. That's what I do most of the time. This last year, COVID year has definitely made things even more so away from the field. But I, boy, I love fieldwork. I've done quite a bit of it. I love getting out into those burned landscapes and trying to figure out what's going on. What is it like when you are doing fieldwork? What kind of samples do you have to collect and what kinds of observations

are you making? Yeah. So a lot of the work that I've done has focused on how this one little critter that spotted owl responds to these burned areas, these fires that have come through. And so myself and some of my really outstanding colleagues, both back from when I was in grad school that I established during my PhD program, some of those collaborators back at University of Wisconsin, as well as some of my fantastic teammates here at the Rocky Mountain Research Station with the U.S. Forest Service, we've done quite a bit of work

trying to understand how this bird, this spotted owl, responds to fires. We've gone out and spent quite a bit of time in these burned areas capturing owls and putting GPS tags on them to see where they move in these burned areas to see if they, if they like them or if they're using them. We literally go out into the woods and hoot at them alley. Do you really? We really do. It's, you walk into the woods where you think there's going to be an owl and you just start hooting with your mouth.

You just do it. And they hoot back because they're like, hey, who the heck is that? Oh my gosh. And then are you able to count them based on who hoots? Pretty much. Yeah. So we call them callback surveys. So we're calling and they call back and that's how we locate them. And oftentimes we're just interested in detecting them. So, OK, there's an owl here. There's an owl there sort of establishing where they are across the landscape. Did I look this up? Of course.

And please enjoy the absolute maestro of this art, Sierra Pacific Industries wildlife biologist, Kevin Roberts. What I like to do when I'm surveying for spotted owls and using my voice is kind of mix them all up and do something to the effect of. Oh, thank you, Kevin, we beg you to make a ringtone. Is it too much to ask? You can only answer that in owl hoots. But anyway, that is how you do a Jim Carrey level impersonation of spotted owls.

But a lot of the work I've done is focused on capturing those owls once we find them. And putting little GPS tags on them and seeing where they go. And then we get that we get that data and we see where they went. And we try to figure out, OK, how are they interacting with some of those burned areas? What can we learn from that about what type of fire they like? What kind of forest they like and how we might be able to manage the forests in a way that supports them. And how is a fire ecology changing with the climate, with droughts?

Why do droughts even happen? Is the water that would normally rain here raining somewhere else? So where is the water? So OK, so again, this is something that much smarter people would have a much better answer for. But I will say that something that is for certain is that we are entering into uncharted territory. With fire and fire ecology and fire behavior. And one of my good colleagues at University of California, Merced, Leroy Westerling, has said many, many times to me, and I've seen him write about this, too,

you know, there is no more normal in terms of fire. There's not even a new normal. It's a new abnormal, you know, because we just it's really it's becoming really difficult to predict what's going to happen in the future because we don't have a reference point anymore. We're sort of just going into uncharted territory. And so, you know, when it comes to to drought and climate change and things like that, look, those are definitely a part of the equation in terms of what's going on with wildfire and what's going to happen, particularly climate change and, you know,

how that interacts with with forests and drives out fuels and things like that. Sometimes it's hard to just talk about drought and climate change for many reasons, because it's hard as like a scientist who's interested in conservation. Like, what can I do about that? I mean, you know, I don't I don't mean to sound like nihilistic, like, oh, we can't do anything about it because we can, we absolutely can. It's never too late to make actions on those big problems like climate change. Right. But, you know, I have the the honor to work for this agency,

the U.S. Forest Service, that is in charge of managing a ton of land. And so what can we do on the ground to make a difference in terms of how these fires burn? Right. And, you know, considering climate change, like that plays a role, plays a really important role. And so does drought in terms of driving some of these wildfire patterns that we've seen. But there's also something to be said for how forests are managed and how how flammable forests are and how we can potentially manage them in a way that tries to mitigate those worst effects of fire when they do come through.

So it's really like you are going to hear people say, oh, you know, these fires are just because of climate change. There's nothing we can do about it. And then you're going to hear people say, oh, climate change has nothing to do with it. It's we just need to manage forests differently. And the reality is it's neither of those. It's it's kind of both, right? It's both climate change and, you know, the forest and the patterns of fuels

across the landscape are affecting how fires burn as a research scientist with the Forest Service. I'm thinking about how can I do science that informs how we manage forests? And that's one of the coolest parts about my job is that I work for an agency that has a really strong management component. You know, a huge part of the agency is people out there doing this work, you know, managing forests, coming up with with forest plans and management plans and fire plans.

And I get to do science that helps them figure out how to do that. And we work together, you know, in a collaborative way to figure that out. And that is where I think I like focusing on those solutions, right? How can we press the levers and make a make a difference from the ground? Is the leading theory on that is just more and better prescribed burns? Or is it humans stop living in the woods for a while? Like, what is what is the best tool you have? Yes. So that is a great question.

And I think this is a misconception that if humans just got out of the picture, it would all be better. Mm hmm. You know, I think it's easy to think that way. Like, oh, we're just the problem and humans suck. And we just need to get out of the picture and nature will do its own thing and blah, blah, blah. And look, you know, I understand that perspective. I'm sensitive to it.

But we have to remember indigenous peoples have been burning for 10,000 years. And, you know, we need more fire on the landscape, not less. It's just what kind of fire burns. This is kind of crazy to think about, but especially given you looking at these maps, I've got the New York Times wildfire tracker open here. I got another tracker on my desktop open as well. Like with all these big fires burning, you're thinking like, man, there's just got to be so much more fire now than there ever was.

Yeah, that's what I would think. Yeah, that's totally what you would think. But it's actually not the case. There's still less fire in the West, in West North America than there was many, many years ago, 100, 200, 300, 500,000 years ago. But they were smaller back then. Is that the thing? So they just burned differently.

I'll bring you through a little bit of a time warp. So we often in Western science delineate sort of this pre-colonial era. And in the pre-European or pre-colonial era, there was a lot of fire in the West. I mean, these are flammable landscapes, and they never really got put out, right? All these ignitions would just burn. And vast areas of the landscape would burn all the time, depending again on what kind of system you're in, right? So these frequent fire systems would burn very frequently.

Every couple of years, you'd have fires kind of returning to the same areas. Then when white settlers colonized and pretty much disrupted indigenous burning and began actively suppressing wildfires, the amount of fire in the landscape just dropped to almost nothing. We were very effective at suppressing fires for a long time in the Western US. And basically what's happened is only recently have we sort of lost our handle on our ability to put out fires. The level of activity that we're seeing now is still far less than the level of fire activity that used to burn. But the difference is that because in many of these forests, and particularly in these frequent fire forests or these dry forest systems that used to burn really frequently, they haven't burned in a century or more.

And so when they do burn, they burn really hot and really big, and that's not a natural kind of fire for this system. And also, you know, along with that, we have a lot more people again kind of living in those fire prone areas. And so we feel the effects a lot more as well as the population has increased. And so we still have way less fire activity on the landscape. It's just that these fires are typically burning in a way that is for those forests unnatural and for society really not acceptable, right? The other crazy thing is that we actually have in some areas, particularly, again, these sort of historically frequent fire systems, we have a lot more trees too than we used to have. Oh, how is that?

Yeah, which like it goes right along with that fire suppression. So we put out fires for 100 years or more. And all those little shrubs and saplings that would have burned in those regular fires grew up to be big, you know, medium sized trees. More trees? Isn't that good? Well, it's kind of like a garage that we have failed to Marie Kondo for a long time, which I'll be honest, is my garage. Got to clear some stuff out. I'm talking to myself. And so we have actually a lot more trees on the landscape now in a place like the Sierra Nevada where I've spent a lot of my career doing this research. Then we used to it's just like the kinds of fires are different.

The kinds of trees are different. We have a lot more smaller trees and medium sized trees and a lot fewer of those really giant old trees, which are really kind of an endangered species sort of in and of themselves because over the past 100 years or so, particularly pre 1980s, there was quite a bit of large tree logging going all the way back to the early 1900s and late 1800s. So a lot of those big old trees were removed. A lot of those smaller trees grew up with that fire suppression. And now we just have a ton of smaller trees on the landscape. And that, again, is kind of feeding back into why we have fires that are burning differently because these fires are burning through,

you know, these pretty thick, connected, like well connected forests that historically just didn't look like that at all. So forests look and behave much differently now than they were for tens of thousands of years because of colonial human tinkering. Don't you want to know all about indigenous fire stewardship now and cultural burns? So do I. And did I, hours before this podcast episode run up, decide to feverishly book an indigenous fire scientist to talk to me for next week? I did. So stay tuned. I just thought I'd plant that expectation for you.

And what about the effect of fire on seeds opening and certain plants saying like, sweet, there was just a fire, now's my time to shine. Like our ashes good for certain types of botany. So, so, okay, one of my colleagues, Jen Stevens, he's with the Forest Service as well. Now he's done some really awesome work looking at tree adaptations to fire and fire regimes. But one of the most common examples of how trees are adapted to fire is particularly when thinking about seeds is serotonin. S-E-R-O-T-I-N-Y. So serotonin is this trait that some trees have, not all trees, but some trees have this basically waxy kind of resin that, that encompasses their cones and their seeds. And they only open when fires burn because the fire melts that wax off of their, their seeds and the seeds drop and then they, the trees able to regenerate.

And typically, or at least in many cases, in some cases that I know of, those trees require a really severe fire to release its seed. Okay, so serotonin means later or following, and it is not to be confused with sertiline, which is the generic form of zoloft, which I googled wrong. So according to nationalforest.org, serotonin cones with full mature seeds can just chill out, closed up on a pine tree, like a jack pine or a table mountain pine, for years until a fire sweeps through and the resin melts and then the seed confetti party time happens. So this is also, side note, how indoor fire sprinklers work. They're not reliant on smoke, but on heat of over 150 degrees Fahrenheit. So there's a little glass capsule and fire sprinklers, and it's filled with glycerin and that heats up and bursts and opens the sprinkler valve. And apparently they open individually wherever it's hottest, not all at once, like in the movies. I'm looking at you lethal weapon for the Incredibles and Charlie's Angels and Mean Girls and Casino Royale and Kindergarten Cop and the Peanuts movie and all the other ones that I'm going to link on my website because I found someone with a YouTube channel who is very pissed about the sprinkler myth.

Anyway, heat, seeds disperse, it's natural. And so some trees have adapted that, that trait. And in, in other cases, trees have really thick bark. And this is the case for many of the trees in these frequent fire systems that experience fires all the time on a, you know, five, 10 year cycle or, you know, in that range. Trees have really thick bark because they need to survive that frequent heat and disturbance from fire. And so there's really remarkable adaptations that plants have to fire. And also increasingly we're, we're trying to learn about animal adaptations to fire. Typically we think about these in terms of behavioral adaptations.

So like how do animals interact with either fire itself or the post fire landscape in a way that tells us a little bit about it kind of opens the book on their evolution, how they evolved. So what are the spotty owls like? It turns out small patches of high intensity fires, which were more common in pre-colonial times. Spotty owls are like me at a cocktail party, just waiting for a tray of egg rolls to roll past. Now, in scientific terms, this is called a sit and wait predator. And the owls like to sit on the edge, on that green edge and hunt into that smaller patch of open forest where it can see little, you know, critters run across. And it has a better flight path and that sort of thing, while also concealing itself from its predator, like the great horned owl. So that's just one example that I've been involved in, but we generally expect, you know, not only plants to have these adaptations, but also animals to potentially have these behavioral adaptations too.

Oh, that's so interesting. Also, I didn't realize that owls had drama between them. You would think to be like, I'm an owl, you're an owl, let's make this happen, you know. No, it's so true. There is totally drama. And one of my mentors and colleagues, his name is Rocky Gutierrez. He's done some work looking at owl communities and trying to figure out like how owls can coexist in space. There's a lot of drama out there in the owl.

So much. Speaking of drama, have you seen the acclaimed dramatic film, Those Who Wish Me Dead, starring Anshali Nisholi, who is a person who lives in a fire tower? No, I have not. Well, well, well. If you like fires and people being miscast, you will love Those Who Wish Me Dead. Good. That's that's my main genre of movie that I like.

Wonderful. Miscasting. Yeah, that's great. If you like to watch a movie in the entire time, picture someone else playing the lead role. You will love Those Who Wish Me Dead. She is absolutely gorgeous. She's a stunner. I love her acting.

I don't know why they cast her in this movie. It seems so weird. Why did they put you in a fire tower? Well, I'm just lucky, I guess. Anyway, Those Who Wish Me Dead, just so much, so much forest fire and a lot of just breathing through smoke that seems like it should be thicker. But you can you can smell this movie. Listen, there are a lot of actors that are suited for certain types of cinematic environments.

OK, oh, but if you watch it, Medina Senghor is so good at it that I just looked up her name and then I followed her on Instagram. So some beautiful creatures are more well suited to some roles and environments. That's all. What about the term pyro diversity? Is that a real word? Oh, Allie, I'm so glad you asked that question. I am street smart and book smart.

Yes. So pyro diversity is is something that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about in recent years. It's kind of a fun buzzword, you know, like pyro diversity. Like, what does that even mean? Someone made that up and it's probably because well, somebody did make it up. It basically is another way to think about this this fire mosaic that we were talking about earlier, the term pyro diversity sort of emerged alongside this idea that

pyro diversity gives rise to biodiversity. So basically that the more different kinds of fire that we have on the landscape, the more different kinds of severities, the different fire ages, basically the greater mixture of different types of fire characteristics that are in a landscape is going to lead to greater biodiversity, which means more species, basically. So you have more kinds of wildlife, more kinds of plants, etc. More kinds of bees, more kinds of bats, more kinds of birds, etc. Because you have all sorts of different kinds of habitat for them that's been produced by fire.

OK, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. So it's it's an important idea because it it really kind of underlies this important role of fire in these cases with, you know, the Dixie fire and the bootleg fire, these fires that are really like destructive to human infrastructure and also, you know, to people's lives. I mean, this is really serious stuff that is is sad and it's hard to watch. But on the other side of the coin, we do need fire on the landscape, right?

We just we need a different kind of fire. We don't want to see more, you know, of the destructive fires that are out there. We want to see good fire. And what I mean by good fire is really kind of like this pyro diversity idea where we have a really nice mixture of fire that kind of restores. It cleans out the understory in some places. It kills some trees. It disrupts the system a little bit.

You know, some disruption is good. And you create that really sort of wide ranging variety of habitats for different critters to live. And that also supports all sorts of other great things like water quantity and quality. It reduces a runoff. It reinforces the resilience of ecosystems and forests. So like fire is so good. And it's like we want that good kind of fire.

It's really such a restorative thing. And it's just pyro diversity kind of encompasses this idea of like that beautiful mosaic on the landscape that is always changing. It's not just static. It's always changing, always being renewed. That's the idea of pyro diversity. Ha, can I blaze through a lightning round? Yes.

Pardon the pun, even though I'm not sorry. Okay. And before your questions, we donate to a cause each episode. And as a Forest Service employee, Gavin can't directly endorse anything in particular. So it was my pick this week. And a donation will be going to the Common Good Community Foundation. They have established a matching fund to assist all local communities impacted

by the Tixie Fire. And all donations will be distributed to Plumas County agencies involved in directly assisting communities and individuals most affected by the fire. More info is up at commongoodplumas.org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, let's tend to your smoldering curiosities. Great question from Nicole DG, Marie Charlotte Felcagard, Megan McLean, Daniel Kim, Liz Gross, Eden Sunshine, Talia Dunyak.

Nicole Kleinman also asked, in Nicole's words, what happens to wildlife when there is a fire? Daniel Kim wants to know, are there any animals that have adapted to survive forest fires? And Nicole asks, do they all leave or are some able to hide or survive in a sneaky way? Oh, that's so great. This is a great question. So I don't know if I can just do a super quick answer to this because I'm

going to be too excited about it. But yeah, so how do wildlife respond to wildfire? So here's the thing. It really depends. And that's like the greatest, you know, scientific smoke and mirrors. Like, hey, it depends, but it really does. Some species like fire, some don't. And it also depends on what kind of fire it is, you know, if it's really

severe or mild. So, for example, there's one species that some of my awesome colleagues have worked on. It's called the black-backed woodpecker. Many people think of it as a poster child of severely burned forest because it really needs these patches of totally killed trees. It depends on the insects that live in those recently killed trees. It needs those severely burned forests.

Several years after those fires burn and those trees are killed, it's no longer good habitat. Like, it's really kind of the short-term thing. They flock to these really severely burned places. They totally thrive and then they are out of there and onto the next fire. Oh, my God. So, some critters love that, others not so much. So, the spotted owl, the species that I spend a lot of time studying, it is

really kind of more of an old forest obligate. It doesn't love that severely burned stuff quite as much. So, basically, there are winners and losers. That's the answer is it's never as simple. It's never as simple as you make it. It's not just so all animals are going to die or leave when a fire burns. Now, some of them are going to do great and some of them are not. That's like part of the beauty of studying this stuff is like trying to figure out why.

Why do some animals love and some don't? The world is so complex and amazing. It's like really fun to try to figure that out. And then in terms of where animals go, some animals can escape fires, you know, fly out of the way, run out of the way. I always think of like Bambi, you know, movie Bambi. Like all the animals are like parading out of the forest. I don't want to ruin Bambi for anybody.

It's but you know, some animals can evade fire. Even, you know, flying critters cannot always fly away from fast moving fires. Some animals will burrow under the ground and wait for the fire to pass and then come back out, which is totally crazy. You should. Yeah, it's it's nuts. Oh, OK, burrowing critters hiding from fires. My heart burst into flames. So which animals burrow?

All right, some Australian possums hide out in tree hollows. Snakes hightail it down a burrow. But wombats also hit the basement during bushfires. And there were a bunch of internet rumors going around last year that they invite and usher other critters in these rumors spread like wildfire. But they are flimflam. They actually just tolerate other animals hiding out in their wombat doomsday bunkers. But same with gopher tortoises in the US.

And to hear all about that, you can amble slowly over to the Testudonology episode with wonderful tortoise scientist Amanda Hips. Now, what about rebel birds? There are other creatures. There's firehawks and they're down in Australia and they will actually like pick up burning branches and drop them to burn other parts of their habitat so that they can catch their prey. I have heard of these and it sounds so devious,

but they even will get together and wait for rodents to run out. That's wild. That's just wild. Yeah. There's winners and losers. Like there's such a variety of animals that respond in different ways to fire. And that's just the coolest thing. And that's one of the reasons why

pyro diversity going back to pyro diversity is thought to promote biodiversity because the more kind of variety of fire you have, the more different kinds of animals that are going to benefit from that variety. Right. So, you know, if you have sort of your forest that was killed by trees next to a forest that is totally green and old and, you know, decaying almost. We have this big mosaic of different kinds of forests that burn at different times. That's going to support all kinds of different critters.

So it's it's it's a cool thing. Now, that's a good thing. And several people, Rebecca Winesettle, India Lind, Nicole Kleinman, Jesse Hurlbert want to know, can I really prevent forest fires? Rebecca asks, or is this just another example of a giant corporation trying to force responsibility on to individuals? Nicole wants to know, was Smoky the Bear more helpful or harmful to forests?

What do you think about Smoky the Bear? OK, well, I think Smoky the Bear is super cute. I will say that we absolutely can prevent forest fires, not all of them. And we not necessarily should prevent all of them over. Think about prescribed fires, right? Like we do want to put some fire in the landscape. But as I mentioned before, a giant majority like 87 percent between 80, 90 percent. Humans cause 87 percent of all wildfire occurrences annually within the Western US.

Like that's crazy. That's a big number. Yeah. And a lot of those you can go look this up. There's this a couple studies out there that have shown, you know, these gigantic spikes of fire activity on the 4th of July every year. Oh, like we absolutely play a role in ignitions. A very small percentage of all of the ignitions result in those really big, big fires. Of course, many of the fires that ignite don't burn everything up.

But we absolutely, as people, can be careful about how we burn. I think that Smoky the Bear is just misunderstood. OK, you know, like because it's true, you know, we as people, like we absolutely do start fires, we start unintended unplanned fires that sometimes result in really devastating circumstances. There's sort of this perception that all fire is bad among some people. And maybe I don't know. I don't know if Smoky the Bear is associated with that or not.

But, you know, all fire is not bad. Like fire is so important. And the reason why some fire is really bad right now, in particular, is because we haven't had the kind of fire on the landscape that is natural in a lot of these systems. So a lot of patrons looking at you, Michael Davis, Peter, Ashley Herbal, Sebastian Pepinot, first time question askers Karla Jerez and Ada Smith, Chandra Mason, Bennett Gerber.

They all essentially asked, what do we do? It should firefighting teams approach it more strategically, like let it burn 25 miles over here, but let's stop it here. Or at this point, like, what do we even do? Yeah, so that is such a difficult and vexing question that much smarter people than me are like thinking really, really hard about. So I don't want to make any like really poorly informed statements about how firefighters should be doing their job

because they're doing an incredible job. But I'll say that generally, there's many times when fires are burning and there's a decision made to let the fire burn on its own for a little while when it's deemed to be safe, right? So especially in areas where there's not as many people in, you know, like kind of more wilderness type areas, because fires, fires can do some of that work for us to restore the natural structure of a system.

So fires can be really restorative, especially in those cases when we think it's going to burn in a, quote, unquote, healthy way or a natural way and there aren't people who are in danger. So that's kind of the idea of those managed wildfires, you know, in wildfires burning, we're kind of trying to manage them as opposed to just put them out or suppress them. And from Smokey the Bear, let's move on to goats. Ashley Mitten and Leanna Schuster

literally both started their questions. Goats, both of them. Please tell us about how goats are used to help produce fire risk in areas with excess vegetation. And Ashley says, I mean, a few hours and they chewed down most of the pasture, can goats save us? Man, I wish goats could just save us. That would be so great.

Just hand it all over to them. Yeah, I'm sure they've got it figured out. No, but I actually don't know about goats being used in wildfire management. That could just be my my naivety. So I'll I'll punt that one. OK. All right, goats, I tried to rent some for my hillside about two years ago, and it was a minimum, sadly, of five acres.

And I just moved in and it was too soon to ask my neighbors if they wanted to go in on a goat herd with me. I didn't want to come on so strong. But there are businesses like goatsrs.com that'll rent them out. I thought this was a pretty common practice hiring goats to eat your overgrown grass, because when I was in high school in Northern California, a lot of neighbors did that.

And then I read the FAQ on goatsrs.com. And what this business started in the tiny town I went to high school in around the time I was in high school. Holy literal smokes. As far as coincidences go, it's the greatest of all time. OK, so this next smoky query was asked by plenty of folks, including patrons Hannah, Aussie, Alana Wood, firefighter, supporter, Lizzie Martinez, Charlie Kakamo,

first time question asker, Ashley Martinez, Nina Eve, Zininger, Asmetic, Ada Smith, Joseph and Katie Kost. Let's see. Dylan McGuire says, I live in eastern Washington where smoke has become the fifth season. When will we have the giant forest rakes mentioned by Donald Trump? And they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. And do we need to rake the forest? So, you know, this is I think, again,

this is this is just a misunderstanding. So going back to smoke, this is a real problem, right? We don't like being exposed to smoke. You remember, I'm sure I don't know, Ali, if this happened where you were, I think this was up in the in the Bay Area. Yeah. Last year, you probably remember seeing all over social media, those pictures of, you know, San Francisco being just like orange. It was like some sort of Blade Runner or something.

The problem with smoke is that, you know, it's going to be there. It's going to happen if we're living in a in a system that has fire and that where we need to have fire, we're going to also have smoke. That's that's just a part of a part of it, right? Where there's fire, there's smoke. The real important question is, how do we want our smoke? You know, and that's that's how some people are trying to think about this problem of smoke, because it is a real serious public health problem, right?

With these sort of unplanned, big, quote unquote, megafires that happen, we all of a sudden get a ton of smoke. We didn't know it was coming. It disrupts our lives and puts us at risk. And there's a lot of smoke, right? That happens just this past week or two. There's I saw people on Twitter, you know, out on the East Coast, saying that they had, you know, they were getting some smoke

from some of the wildfires in the West. That kind of unpredictable nature is, I think, for many people not desirable. I'll say. And so the idea is if we can. Use more prescribed and planned fires and more cultural and indigenous fires, where we know when the smoke is coming, it's a lower amount. It's like, you know, less smoke in general is coming our way at any given time, but maybe a little more often.

You know, those are kind of the two options, right? We can either sort of have our smoke in big pulses when we don't know it's coming or we can try to make it a little more predictable. It seems like the the wheres and the whys are important here. That's exactly right. For sure. Yes. What about Maria Shuravleva wants to know underground wildfires? I understand how they start, but how do they keep going?

How is there enough oxygen for some to last for years? How deep do they go? Jeremiah Miller says, what's the strangest place there's been a wildfire? They're underground. Some, yeah, some fires do burn underground. It's kind of crazy. What? How? So one of the interesting kind of related phenomenon that I have witnessed

is sometimes in these areas that have recently burned, you come across a gigantic hole in the ground, like just a giant hole. There's, you know, tree, there's trees around you. And then there's just a gigantic hole in the ground. OK. When I started doing this work in these post fire landscapes, I was like, what in the heck is going on here? And I started asking around. And these are are basically trees that have burned

and kept burning and smoldering and smoldering. And the smoldering fire continued down through their root system underground throughout the whole root system. And maybe they'll they'll even pop up somewhere else, like, you know, a little ways away where the root kind of pops back up onto the, you know, ground. And basically these these are like gigantic casts for trees, right? Like where the tree and its roots used to be. So fires can absolutely burn, you know, in a subterranean way.

I've seen some of these sort of root holes following fire, which is just kind of wild to see. It is wild to see. And I know because I just watched a ton of videos of smoldering, flickering root systems. They can burn for weeks, months, maybe even through a whole season. And the fire will just pop up somewhere else. Also, somewhere in Pennsylvania, there is an abandoned

Centralia coal mine that's been on fire since 1962. And experts say there is enough fuel to just keep it burning for 250 years. No one knows what to do. They just all left town, except for five people who still live there. They're like, we're not going anywhere. They're like, that's cool. But yes, fires underground. Flames, flames, breathing, heaving. Oh, man, I didn't even know that was possible.

I would not have thought that. That is bananas. Oh, some of y'all patrons, Lizzy Maher, bushfire asker Brandy Harbaugh, first time question asker, longtime lurker, Adriana Alfaro, want to know what can we expect the normal amount of wildfires to be? Is there a normal? They all want to know numerically how much worse are big wildfires going to get? Give us numbers. We need numbers. So, you know, if you look at how fires have changed in the last 30, 40 years,

we have seen a lot more fire activity now than we did 10, 15, 20 years ago and 30, 40 years ago. So one of my colleagues, I just mentioned a moment ago, his name is Sean Parks with the US Forest Service and one of his colleagues. They put out a study recently showing that between 1985 and 2017, there was an eight fold increase in area that burned at high severity on an annual basis in the Western US. Eight fold. So there is certainly a lot more large fires now.

And there's also when those those fires are burning more severely now than they did 35 or so years ago, 35, 40 years ago. But that's like the sort of small scale context. But then if you zoom back out and look at sort of the whole context of the last several thousand years, we are seeing less fire now than we did way back when it's a different kind of fire that's burning, right? That's not necessarily natural in some of these systems. And then also we are we are experiencing more of the effects of fire

than we ever have as humans to the negative effects, because we're living in these fire prone areas where for a long time it was, you know, somewhat safe to live, right? Because fires weren't burning that much for the last 100 years in a lot of these areas, because we're pretty good at putting them out. But now that those fires are burning more severely and more intensely and we're living there and we have the news to cover it all the time. Yeah, we certainly are hearing about it more.

Right. And it is having a serious impact on people. As you know, you know, there's all sorts of really tragic stories of these fires burning through towns and one of those towns just, you know, the Dixie fire, I believe, burned through Greenville, California in the last day or two. And that's an incredibly tragic thing to have happened. And right, like we are we are living in a world that's really different now. Right. I know it's kind of like top of mind for everyone.

I feel like when you say, oh, I live in California, people ask you, like, is your city on fire? And you're like, I don't know, let me check Twitter. I just I just texted one of my friends who lives in California like, are you guys? Where are you? Are you OK? Are you burning? Yeah. So yeah. Literally, like this just in, according to an NPR report that dropped about an hour ago, the US Forest Service just announced

that wildfires will be aggressively extinguished this summer and all the preventative controlled burns are suspended. Apparently, fire season is predicted to be so bad that they can't spare any of the thousands of firefighters on the ground to go do prescribed burns, kind of like not being able to go to bed because you have a paper due, but then you can't finish the paper because you're too tired. Something's got to change.

Tune in next week for more on that. Now, on the topic of heavy hearts amid blazing wildfires, is there anything that is the most difficult thing about being a fire ecologist? I mean, I already the idea of like a charred owl leg is going to hurt my heart until the day I die. But anything that is just really frustrating or difficult for you? Hmm. I would say that one of the frustrating things is how difficult this problem is. It's just such a big problem.

And sometimes it's hard to sort of feel like we can get out of it. I'm I like to call myself a reckless optimist. You know, for me, like the glass is not half full. It's like, oh, my God, it's almost overflowing. It's like, you know, we can do this, you guys, like we can totally do this. This is such a difficult problem. It seems like we were facing the same problems every year. But I think that there is there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

And that light has to do with getting more of that good fire on the landscape. And that's something that I know is a priority for the agency I work for, the US Forest Service, and trying to restore the resiliency of these forests. And I think like what I the sort of nugget of goodness that I try to take is that we as, you know, at least on my side, the science side of this agency, we have this incredible opportunity to, like, learn about this, you know, about fires, why they burn, how they burn, what their consequences are and what we can do about it.

And we get to work with the managers and the people who are, again, out doing that stuff on the ground. We've got our hands on some of the levers. We can make a positive impact and we can make a change in, you know, how these fires are burning, even as we're thinking about, you know, these bigger problems like climate change, we can put our fingers on the lever a little bit. And so there's a huge opportunity in the coming decades to make a big difference

in sort of the next century of fire. Yeah, how do you think an average Joe like myself sitting around biting my nails at the news, what can we do? You know, I would say, follow Smokey the Bear's advice. So put him on the pedestal for a minute and say, just, you know, watch out for yourself and make sure that you are not contributing to any of the problems with, you know, these unplanned ignitions and fires. That's one thing you can do.

So, you know, maybe try to avoid, you know, explosive gender reveal parties. You know, that's good, probably not do that. Um, you know, don't be throwing your cigarettes out and don't drive your car or anything on dry grass and things like that. You know, like there's little little things like that you can do. But this is a big problem and it takes both sort of individuals to make sure they're, you know, not starting these these unplanned fires, but also these big sort of institutional actions and management to fight this problem.

So it's, you know, I would say don't don't bite your nails down to the to the bone, just make sure you're not the one who's starting that fire. Okay. Good to know. Don't start any fires. Don't try to impress any ex-girlfriends. Yes. Don't be starting a fire going to be impressed.

Not going to be impressed. The gender reveal party couple who started a fire last year, November, were charged with manslaughter for a firefighter's death. And that Love Lorne arsonist of the 2014 King Fire sentenced 20 years in prison and ordered to somehow pay $60 million to victims of the crime. So imagine what you could do with $60 million and 20 years of your life. Yeah. Think twice before doing any horned up fire tumflery.

Just get it. Just get him a cupcake or something with one cable. Get him a cupcake. Do that. Don't be on the news. Yes. What about your favorite thing about fire ecology? Like, is it putting puzzles together?

Is it being out in the field? I would say my favorite part about being a fire ecologist is similar to my favorite part about being a scientist, which is just that we, it's, the world is infinitely more complex than we think it is. And I learn new things every day about what's going on with these fires and how animals are responding. My preconceptions are always just kind of blown out of the water whenever I start digging into this stuff.

So it's just such a wonderfully rich world out there and fire is such a critical part of, of that whole system. And so being able to step into that complexity and try and just use my little, you know, pick to chip away at one corner of that, you know, vast unknown, the world of fire ecology is just the greatest honor and pleasure. I've got three little kids and, you know, I, when I sit down on my computer and start clocking away every day, I'm partly thinking like, what can I do to make this world better than I, you know, than when I came into it?

And, you know, sometimes it may seem that my little corner of the world is insignificant, but yeah, I like to think that, that me and all my wonderful colleagues within my agency and outside of it as well, working in this area, we're all pulling in the same direction and we're trying to, you know, make this world a better place as well and get that good fire back on the landscape and try and, yeah, change the game a little bit. I love it. I appreciate it so much.

I'm glad that you are not currently in the middle of a fire. Me too. And thank you for talking to me during, obviously, a very, very busy time for fire folks. It's been my pleasure. Absolutely. So, yes, fire off your birding questions to the coolest nerds out there. That is what we do. And stay tuned for a special follow-up episode next week.

Cross your fingers, I can make it happen. Anyway, learn more about Dr. Gavin Jones by following him on Twitter at EcologyOfGavin. We are on there also at oligies and I'm on there as Alie Ward with 1L. Same handles on Instagram. Come be our friends. Feel free to support the show for a dollar a month if you like it. If you like it at patreon.com slash oligies.

Merch is available at oligiesmerch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast. You are that for Managing Merch. Thank you, Erin Talbert for admitting the oligies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Emily White of the Wardery for making the transcripts. Caleb Patton bleeps them. And those are all available for free at the link in the show notes. Every other Thursday, we also release new smologies.

They are edited down, short, clean, classroom friendly versions of your favorite episodes. Thank you to Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas of Mindjam Media for editing those. Big thanks to Kelly Dwyer for website design. If you need a website, she's your gal, link in the show notes to her. Thanks, Noel Dilworth and Susan Hale for keeping the schedules running and for social media quizzes and Merch Monday posts. Thank you to Mainsqueeze and hottest hell editor, Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media for putting it all together and, of course, long time editing help.

Stephen Ray Morris of the podcast, The Percast and C. Jurassic Wright. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. He's in a band called Islands. They have a new album out, Island Media. And if you listen to the end, you know, I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is sometimes if I need a brain break, I'll go on Craigslist. And I'll just click the free section to see what people are giving away. So you could see things that people just put up that are free.

And I just sometimes like to look and see what people are getting rid of. And then I try to figure out like what a life story is for that. Why is this person giving away like a ballerina statue? What's up with this wheelbarrow? Let's look at a couple right now. You want to? OK, OK, let's see what's up there. Oh, there's two guinea pigs. And it just says need gone.

Damn, that is the meanest way to give away a guinea pig. I just want to get these guinea pigs. I have 10 guinea pigs needed for pickup. I can no longer take care of them and we'll have to release them. If I cannot find anyone to pick them up. Yikes, if anyone needs guinea pigs in LA, I didn't mean to make that so sad. A vintage artist portfolio case. Did they quit being an artist? I don't know. I hope not.

Oh, here's a six foot pine ladder. I don't need one, but it's fun to look. A lot of free pianos on here. Again, I don't want or need these things, but sometimes it's just nice to wonder how that person get the piano in the first place. And why don't they play it anymore? Anyway, I love when people I love when people spare things from landfills and other people get things for free.

What can I say? Oh, tap shoes. OK, bye bye.