On with Kara Swisher - WTF Can We Do About Deadly Wildfires?

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

From the tragedy in Hawaii — which has left at least 115 dead, and over a thousand more missing, making it the deadliest blaze in the last century of US history — to recent fires in Canada, California, Indonesia and Brazil, the world seems to be engulfed in a megafire crisis fueled by climate change. We bring on a panel of practitioners to discuss what’s behind these megafires, and how we can work to mitigate the crisis. Matt Weiner is the CEO of the nonprofit Megafire Action, with a background in policymaking; Lenya Quinn-Davidson is Director of University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network; and Chad Hanson is the Director of the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute, a research and advocacy organization focused on federal public forestlands.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And I mean stolen, not steel. Just kidding. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naeem Araza. As someone who has perfected the Zoolander Blue Steel, I think Trump needs a little more pout, a little less scowl. You know, I realized it was actually Vigigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2. If you look at I put a comparative thing and it's almost exactly the same. Everyone on social media took a different thing. People that are for him think he looks presidential. People who are against him think

he looks ridiculous and slash menacing slash weird and odd and just performative anyway but it was his first tweet back his first ex back is it called a tweet still no i don't i'm gonna call it a tweet it's fine um it's of course the first thing he posts uh because he wants to fundraise and of course elon boosted it etc as he likes to boost his friend's stuff um you know he, he's been very active on that platform. He did the Tucker Carlson interview that was kind of a flop. I mean, Did you watch it? No, I don't think it was. I don't think it was particularly relevant.

I hadn't heard him speak at that length for that amount of time in a while. And I forgot how masterful he is at the art of doublespeak, you know, leaving plausibility for the conspiracy. But he's not supporting the conspiracy, but it's possible, but it's not sure. And, you know, I don't want to weigh in, but I'm weighing in. And it was just, it was like, it was a bit of a mindfuck, a return to a hostage situation. Yeah, yeah, I know. It was interesting. Even Ben Shapiro was saying it was soft, you know, so that you know that's really, he was right.

He's actually, his criticism was correct. It was bizarre. In the very beginning, he starts off asking about Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies. And Tucker says, oh, I'm not a conspiracy man. I'm like, are you Tucker Carlson? I don't think it really had a lot of resonance. I think actually, if you look at the numbers for the Fox debate, the Republican debate, it did rather well. Vivek Ramaswamy was there to stand in. He was very Trumpy. He was Trump too. He's just, you know, Mark Cuban, actually, if you want to go look at a really good series, I had made a name up for him, which I'm not going to repeat right now. But Mark was pointing out how he does dog whistles and then says half things and then says things

he didn't say the other day. He's sort of Trump light or Trump tiny or whatever you want to call it. He's, you know, he's just, he was there because that's a nice slot because Trump wasn't there. So he was trying to occupy that particular lane. I don't think it, you know, it worked with some people. Women were repelled apparently. I thought Nikki Haley handled him rather well. And then same thing with Pence, actually, who you never see that lively. You know, who knows, he'll get a bump and then he'll be like Andrew Yang. Oh, God, what a fate. This is like when Ryan Mack told us Twitter was destined to become Yahoo Mail. Yeah, that is correct. But he was on stage, he was doing things like Vivek Ramaswamy saying, I'm the only candidate on stage who isn't bought and paid for. So I can say this. The climate change agenda is a hoax, he said. He said agenda. Do you notice he didn't say climate?

Because five months, a couple weeks ago or something, he said climate change was real. So I just, you know, that's, he's just playing with words. I don't even want to talk about him. Well, he won't even, he's not going to like this episode because we will be talking about climate change, which is not a hoax. But everybody on that stage was also afraid of the C word. The moderators asked them to raise their hands if they believed that humans contributed to climate change and chaos ensued. They were like, well, we're not children. Let's just debate. Let's not. They couldn't be binary. A couple of them did. Nikki Haley said it was real. It was, you know, that's why it was policy. It was fine. That's fine. As long as they articulate themselves, it's fine by me. If they have stupid opinions, that's different. But at least they articulated their opinion.

It tells you something about the political debate in the GOP that they are afraid of taking a stance on a binary issue with lots of science. Well, they're afraid of taking a stance on insurrection, so I don't know what to say. They were surprisingly supportive of Mike Pence. Yeah, they were. They were surprisingly supportive of Mike Pence. Yeah, they were. I should say. Anyways, despite the madness on the GOP stage, we are going to talk about climate change and moreover megafires today.

Megafires are defined as the kind of fires that burn over 100,000 acres. They're kind of part and parcel of life when I was living in California, and they also are happening all over the world. In places like Indonesia, it's almost seasonal. But when New York turned orange in June is when I thought, fuck. You know, a couple of years ago, if people recall, there was the same thing. The skies turned red and orange and smoke everywhere. Having people having to wear masks

because of the wildfires in Paradise and a bunch of other places. But it's an annual occurrence in California because of the drought. And it reached San annual occurrence in California because of the drought. And it reached San Francisco and it reached all over the Bay Area and also Los Angeles. And so people really do experience it in these cities to understand what's happening because it has a knock-on effect everywhere. And this year, I mean, California's had a relatively good year this year in terms of megafires. But there have been these megafires in Canada that I think have spread to over 30 million acres have burned in the country there's evacuations and

hitting almost every province there and then the recent fire in hawaii has killed 115 people and over a thousand are still missing at the time we're taping this hawaii is the deadliest wildfire we've seen in a century and really really sad to see an island where no people have nowhere where people are actually you know choosing do they stay in their home or jump into a hurricane ocean effectively a storm in the ocean yep yep and it was it's they haven't found a lot of the people because many people burned to death many people might have they might have jumped in the ocean and drowned they don't know they're not going to be able to find everybody. They're trying to get, they're desperately trying to get DNA of the people there.

But lots of people were just caught in their homes because of the speed of this thing. What we know is that what causes these deadly wildfires is very complex. Often the actual ignition is man-made, right? Wasn't there one, a gender reveal party in California? Yeah, I think it's always something. You know, sometimes it's lightning strikes. Sometimes it's people lighting fires. and sometimes it's power lines. In this case, they think it was power lines. You know, they can't fall down in the middle of dry grass, in the middle of hot winds. It's kind of a prescription for fire. Yeah. In Hawaii,

the county is actually suing the electrical utility, which I think was also that electrical code they were saying should have shut down power. Of course, the argument of the electric company is going to be, well, the electric pumps are actually used to charge the water that puts out fires too. So we couldn't have turned off the... It's complex. Probably multi-year lawsuit. And we should note that we taped the interview before that lawsuit was filed. But even though the ignition might be man-made, might be lightning, the U.S. policy of fire suppression has really led to this fuel buildup. A lot of material, branches, trunks, et cetera, that would usually get burned, cycled out of the environment are not

getting out of that. And then climate change has made for this drier, hotter, windier conditions, which basically create like a tinderbox. I think this is an issue all across the country as climate changes bring hot, dry winds. There's all kinds of, you know, fires aren't a new thing for this world, but it's certainly, they've been escalated by, you know, and it's not just fires, it's floods. It's all kinds of weird climate issues. You know, the heat in the Midwest is really overwhelming for that. And Europe. Yeah, and Europe. It's possible to look at something this catastrophic and constant and think we're screwed. But one of the things I found inspiring about that trip I took to Montana with Michael Dubin's nonprofit, Safe Woods, is that there are things we can do to mitigate these wildfires.

Yeah, 100%. We actually wanted to invite three guests on to help us understand what's behind the wildfires and what can be done about them. The first guest, Matt Weiner, was actually on the trip with me. He's the CEO of Mega Fire Action and comes to this from a long career on the Hill, having worked with California lawmakers and having made Mega Fire Action this nonprofit his full-time career after the 2020 fire season. And then the second guest we have on is Lania Quinn-Davidson. She's the director of University of California's Agricultural Natural Resources Fire Network. She actually grew up in the small California town and studied fire ecology at Berkeley

and now runs this Women in Fire Training Exchange, which is supposedly very cool. Maybe we should go there for a little camping trip. I'm not going on a camping trip. I don't camp anymore. Okay. And then finally, our third guest is Chad Hansen, who's a research ecologist and now the director of the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute. Yeah.

And we should note that while all three of these people agree on one idea, which is that to manage wildfires, we actually need to fight fire with more fire, whether that be prescribed burns, those kind of intentional fires ignited by park services to get rid of debris or forest fuel in the ground, or manage wildfires, which is letting fires naturally run a little bit of their course, they actually disagree on other aspects, especially on this practice of forest thinning. Chad in particular came to this from a timber perspective, and he has a wariness that thinning done under the auspices of fire management can be used as an excuse for logging and more timber, basically. Yeah, and here Chad Hansen is distant from the mainstream perspective on the science,

which overwhelmingly supports forest thinning. He often cites different scientific papers and has come under attack from folks at Berkeley and other ecology departments, but his views are well publicized in his numerous papers and in places like the LA Times and New York Times op-eds. So we wanted to hear him out and let Lania and Matt respond. Yes, that tension is part of the reality of the tension over the fire debate, and we wanted to let it play out here. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back with Matt Weiner, Lania Quinn-Davidson, and Chad Hansen. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?

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And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things, And it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new, reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Welcome. I'd love for you to talk about where each of you are, because you are in parts of California that have suffered from fires. So just locate yourselves for us right now. Matt, you first.

Yeah, sure. I'm in Topanga Canyon, so we have a different kind of fire than what we've been talking about lately, but right nearby where the Woolsey Fire was a couple years ago. And Lenya? a couple of years ago. And Lenya? I am up on the very north coast of California in Humboldt County. So I'm up where the redwoods grow, but actually surrounded by a lot of fire on the interior right now. We have a lot of fires in the inland of my county and in Del Norte County and Trinity County. So all of Northern California has a lot of lightning fire right now. And Chad? I live in the Southern Sierra Nevada. Right now, I'm doing some field work just west of Yosemite. Yosemite, where there were also fires and other issues. Absolutely. All right. So, all of us are Californians, so we're quite used to this. And at the time

that the, especially the Canadian fires in New York and other East Coast cities were being inundated with smoke, it was sort of like welcome kind of thing, not in a good way, not in a particularly good thing. But I remember thinking, oh, well, hello, this is what we've been going through in California for many years. Matt, why don't we start? What's a megafire? How do you define it? We define a megafire as a fire that's over 100,000 acres. 100,000 acres. Though I will say that the reason we use megafire is really to talk about the kinds of higher intensity, more catastrophic fire that we've seen across the West in recent years. So

it doesn't necessarily have to be size, though it tends to be over 100,000 acres. Okay. And Lenya, why do you think they're happening now? Well, I think it's really important for us to talk about fire in a nuanced way. I mean, it really depends on where you are and what the history is in that place and how it's California right now. So, you know, depending on where you are, it's a combination of climate, of past forest management and fire management, of fire exclusion. Explain what that is for people who don't know. So, well, so, you know, we live in a time where our primary way of managing fire is to put them out, to exclude them from the landscape. So that's a choice that we're making and something that's relatively recent.

And if you think about the history of people on this landscape and fire on this landscape. So actively excluding fire, I liken it to excluding rain or excluding sunlight. It's a key process that these landscapes have a relationship to. And depending on where you are, it can be more or less important. But this has been U.S. policy, correct? Fire suppression. The fire suppression policy is definitely a national policy that's had differential effects in different places.

OK. So we hear a lot about fires in California and Canada now, but last year the UN put out a report warning the likelihood of catastrophic fires will increase globally by a third by 2050 and 50% by the turn of the century. Chad, talk about fires as a global threat and what regions are increasingly vulnerable and unpack how climate change factors into this. Obviously, what Lenny was saying, fires are not a new thing for the planet. Talk a little bit about where it's headed from a trend point of view. Yeah. Fires are fundamentally weather and climate events. Fires are driven overwhelmingly by, obviously, you have to have an ignition. But once you have that, a fire will become larger

if you have hot, dry, windy conditions. And climate change is certainly a factor there because to the extent that we are getting more and more hot, dry, windy conditions in certain parts of the world, we're going to tend to have fires that are going to grow larger faster. And it's not about removing vegetation from the forest, from the wildlands. So if we recognize these are climate events, I think it informs our choices. So this is a point of disagreement between you, Chad, and what Lenya and Matt think.

Why don't you jump in, Lenya, on your thoughts on that? Well, I certainly agree with Chad that these are climate and weather-driven events. But I think depending on where you are and depending on what the landscape looks like, what vegetation is out there, how dry the fuel, we use the term fuels in the fire world to describe, you know, what the fire is is fueled by. So trees, shrubs and in urban fires, homes are fuel. So it really it just depends on, you know, what it's burning through. But I think that changes in the structure of our forests and the ways that we've managed the landscape can have a major effect and then climate's layered on top of that. And what we're seeing in Canada is going to be a lot different and maybe even more responsive to changes in climate. I mean, we're seeing parts of the world that were never available to burn previously, like permafrost, right?

Climate is opening up those as available fuels they've never burned before in the way that they are now. So a question for you, too, and some would cover, but let's be direct. Are megafires a solvable crisis? Give me, I hate to be reductive, a yes or no, and then the single most important solution you would headline. Matt, you're a fan of prescribed burns, so let's start with that. Well, yeah, and our goal is to end the megafire crisis in 10 years, so good place to start. Yes, the megafire crisis is solvable. Unlike other climate driven disasters, we really have a lot of agency here. And the question is whether we're going to use it or not. Okay. So, and you're the single most important solution you would headline. I know it's complex. I get it. There's a lot, but the three buckets we have, but the most important

one is landscape management at scale. We need to bring good fire back on the landscape. And that means getting the landscape prepared to actually take good fire again. Okay. Then home hardening and community resilience. And the biggest thing is here is nobody thinks we're on track to meet any of our targets. So it's better use of tools and technology to actually meet these goals. Okay. Chad, you have an alternate take. It's probably a more controversial one. It's not controversial. We have studies going back half a century, literally telling us that you don't need to remove trees before you reintroduce fire in the landscape. If you want cooler fire, you do it during milder fire weather. It's very simple. Earlier in the fire season, late in the fire season when there's been some moisture. It's all about that. Prescribed fire will not stop large fires. Large fires are

weather and climate events. When you have hot, dry, windy conditions, they will burn through an area that had prescribed fire just two years earlier. That happens all the time. We have lots of examples of that. There are reasons to do prescribed fire. There are reasons to do managed wildfire. There's reasons for Native American cultural burning. It's all good stuff, but it should not be applied based on the notion that it's somehow going to stop large fires. We can't stop them. All right. So, Lenya, you would say this is a controversial take. I think you would, correct? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I would say that Chad's response seems to be really focused on timber and that that is the lens that he's coming at this with, which I think, you know, that is a whole— I mean, I grew up in a small town during the timber wars. Totally get that that is a frame that you might approach this. I don't think that's the biggest issue that we face, at least not in California right now. We could sit around and argue about timber and meanwhile, all of our forests are burning in high severity fire, like the Dixie fire. So I think I absolutely agree with Matt that our number one thing that we could do that we're not doing well and that we really need to do better is figuring out how to incorporate beneficial fire. And that includes low, moderate and some high severity fire at a landscape scale in a way that we and protecting, you know, having communities be prepared for that,

it and protecting, you know, having communities be prepared for that, having communities really be adapted to fire, homes hardened, evacuation plans in place, notification systems in place. Those are the kinds of things we can do. I mean, I always say these fire problems are human problems, and in that way, they are solvable problems. We're not victims here. I think we need to really embrace that agency that Matt talked about. And I really do feel that we can use this whole set of tools that we have, and prescribed fire is one of them, but managed wildfire is one of them, and home hardening is one of them. And we have to use all of those things. Got it. It's not, there's no silver bullet. Okay. Go ahead, Chad.

Well, I was just going to say, I agree with everything Lenya just said. I think we need to do the home hardening and the defensible space and the evacuation assistance for communities. We need managed wildfire, Native American cultural burning, and in some cases, prescribed fire. And we need the mix of intensities because different groups of plant and animal species need that mix. They need it. Okay, so talk a little bit about, go ahead, Matt, go ahead. I think I just, to push back on the notion that some of these landscape treatments and prescribed fires don't help us from a fire and resilience standpoint. I mean, we have countless examples of how prescribed fires have protected towns, communities, protected forested landscapes.

And one great example of that is in the Caldor fire a couple of years ago. I mean, we had modeling that showed that that fire was going to take out South Tahoe and parts of Reno. And the Capel fire burn there, which is a prescribed fire that actually escaped and burned to double its size, up to 3,000 acres, was a key moment where the fire hit the ground. And if you walk through there today, you can see a healthy landscape where the fire hit the ground. And it allowed first responders to get in there and make a stand. And there were several other patchworks of treatment projects along the way that gave first responders, and they will all tell you this, whether it's the Forest Service or local firefighters, that that's what gave them a chance to stop this thing from completely wiping out South Lake Tahoe. Matt reminded me of something that I thought of when Chad was talking and

that notion that prescribed fires or that any of this work is meant to stop or prevent fire, that is like, we need to question that assumption because that's not our goal, right? Our goal is not to stop fire or to prevent fire. It's really to allow fire to have a role again. And so prescribed fire, yeah, I don't want prescribed fire to stop fires. I want it to make it so that when another fire comes through, we're in a position where we can have it where we want it. We're in a position where we still maybe have some trees after it goes through. It's really about what do we want left on the landscape after these things happen? And it's not necessarily about what do we not want.

Yeah, I think that's a key point. And I appreciate the clarification. I was really actually responding mostly to something that Matt mentioned, that the goal is to stop megafires within 10 years. And I don't think the goal of stopping fires is really something that's ecologically appropriate, what we should be talking about. My point is not that prescribed fires won't modify a wildfire behavior. If a fire comes two or three years later, it will. It will modify the subsequent wildfire behavior for a certain period of time. It won't stop the fires. And that's my point, is that it's not something that you're going to use to stop fires. It will modify it. But the problem is this, is that you can reaccumulate the material that really carries flames, the grasses, the pine needles, the dry leaves, the seedlings on the forest floor.

That's really the material that carries flames. You can reaccumulate that within two or three years after prescribed fire. Historically, these forests on any given acre burned every 20, 30, 40, 50 years, not every two or three. And so every time you do a prescribed fire, you might kill 5% of the trees. Are we going to burn every two years? I mean, if you do the math on that, you've got a lot of trees you're killing. We just can't do that. It's not realistic or a good idea. So Matt, your organization's goal is to enact a policy to treat 50 million acres by 2032. What is the policy recommendation? Why that number? And what will

it cost to get there? So the Forest Service has identified in their 10-year crisis strategy that there are 50 million high-risk fire sheds that are in immediate need of treatment in order to reduce our risk of catastrophic fire in key areas across the West. And so a big part of our focus as an organization is to help them be successful, both by helping them get the tools to succeed, but also by pushing them and demanding accountability in the way they get there. There are very good reasons for folks not to trust the Forest Service and the environmental community. And part of what needs to happen here is some real trust building as they move forward on a lot of these projects. And they recognize that, but they've got serious capacity constraints. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead, Shash. A big problem is that the U.S. Forest Service is in the commercial logging business under the existing laws. And this is,

you know, Congress's fault and responsibility, but the existing laws allow the Forest Service to sell public trees to private logging companies. The more the Forest Service sells, the more money they make, the more the logging companies make. And so it's a business. The problem is, is it does influence fire behavior. I'm going to read you a quote from a group of Forest Service scientists. This came out, this is Les Meister et al. 2021, a 30-year analysis. Here's what they found. More open forests with lower biomass had higher fire severity because the type of open, lower biomass forests resulting from thinning and other logging activities have hotter, drier,

and windier microclimates. And those conditions decrease dramatically over relatively short distances into the interior of older forests with multi-layer canopies and high tree density. In other words, denser forests actually have a cool, moist, shady microclimate that makes fires fire behavior more moderated on average and more open forests when trees have been removed tend to burn more rapidly and often more intensely. So I just wanted to mention that because there's an assumption to the contrary

in the popular dialogue. Well, I mean, again, I just think it's so important. I know we have a national, maybe even an international audience listening to a show like this. And we are talking about such a wide range of ecosystems and forests and communities in this conversation.

And so I just really caution us away from making these broad generalizations. But there is certainly a connection between forest density and fuel moisture and, um, recruitment of fuels and all of those things vary. And I don't, I don't think that you could say that a more dense forest is, um, less likely to burn under catastrophic conditions when we're during one of those big climate wind events.

I mean, the more dense forest is going to have more fuel available. And we see that. We see that those areas burn really hot and really severely. Right. Okay. Before you start, so I would love you each to talk about home hardening. You've all mentioned it separately. I'm aware of what that means, but talk about the idea of more concretely. You all agree this is an area that needs work. Why don't we start with you, Matt? Yeah. So a lot of it is stuff that makes sense to anyone who's lived in a fire zone, but not, as you said, might not be readily apparent to somebody who hasn't lived this. Right. But things like having a fire-resistant roof, having your intakes protected so that embers can't get into a home during a fire, having clear defensible space around your home

is really important. And things like not stacking firewood along the side of your house. Yeah, it's like having matches next to your house. Exactly. And it's something that's just really expensive to do for a lot of people. And one of the challenges here is that it's really hard for insurance companies to appropriately price risk and risk reduction measures here and create incentives for homeowners to do meaningful retrofits. Right. But what can policymakers do here to defray costs and incentivize people to put on the roofs or do the correct things? I think insurance regulators can make it easier for insurers to set prices based on adequate risks so that they can provide real incentives to people. And then we are going to need some sort of rebate or assistance programs for people in the West, whether that comes from utilities or others.

Go ahead, Lenya. Yeah, and I think a lot of it, you know, there is this kind of spectrum in home hardening of the more expensive things like replacing your roofing or your siding on your house. And then things that are free. And it's really about education. You know, I think in a lot of areas, people have, for example, wood mulch in their garden beds up against their house, right? It looks great. It's pretty. Well, in a fire scenario, you have embers landing on that wooden mulch and pretty soon the side of your house is on fire. So a lot of that is education and outreach. And we're doing that. And I think it's really, it can help people understand the

risk. Okay. So let me just, Matt, your organization is close to the world of VC funded fire tech, which is sort of like climate tech. What are we seeing in this field of innovation that would make an impact? I think we're seeing a lot. And I think a big reason that we're close to that world is because it's clear that we need to bring in new tools to do this job, right? And so what we're seeing is a lot of new revolutionary work in data and analytics. We're seeing some revolutionary work in robotics, and we're seeing some great work on software solutions. So, for instance, there's organizations that are trying to find ways to help the Forest Service and others turbo tax the National Environmental Protection Act, NEPA. And you look at some of the potential around creating an early warning system, right?

California and beyond is some of the most tracked and monitored landscape in the world. But a lot of these systems don't talk to each other. They aren't coordinated. And we have the technology now to track and detect fires in real time everywhere on the planet. And we don't deploy it in a usable way, right? everywhere on the planet, and we don't deploy it in a usable way, right? And if you combine that tracking and detection with AI and advanced modeling, you can make much better decisions, both about rapid suppression of fires that matter, and also to make better determinations about prescribed fire and managed fire in a way that will help us scale all of these efforts.

So, Lainey, when you think about this, this idea of innovation helping here, I question it sometimes. Is it really, is there money that needs to go into it? How do you look at that? Because a lot of this, as you said, has been done for centuries. Yeah, I mean, when I think of innovation, I kind of think more on the cultural side of things that I think we've really boxed ourselves in societally into a certain way of thinking about fire. We've totally disconnected ourselves from our landscapes and from understanding fire as a natural process. And so I like what Matt's talking about. I'm interested to talk more with him and to hear more about kind of the tech side, but I really see the solutions from my side of innovation in engaging new types of people in this work, making it a more diverse and welcoming place to be part of the workforce. I

mean, there are so many fundamental issues with the fire management complex. And I think we can break that black box open a little bit and engage tribes better, engage community members, women. Right. One is related to actual labor, correct? Like the ability to pay for it and immigration. Well, yeah, I mean, definitely investments in a workforce. And one of the issues we have with the fire workforce right now is that we can pour money into that and we can create new jobs. But we're getting to the point where there's no one to hire into those jobs. So how do we inspire new kinds of people to want to do this work? That's really the realm that I work in. How do we train people? How do we make them excited to be

in the natural resource field and to be out in the forest and to learn about fire? And I think there's just a ton of opportunity there that that workforce has predominantly been white men for so long. And there's nothing wrong with that. But let's add to that. Let's grow that. with groups like Defenders of Wildlife and Save the Redwoods League. I mean, these groups are all coming together around a shared vision for having more fire on the landscape and having humans be part of delivering it. I completely agree with her. And technology is not going to be a silver bullet here. I think just one thing is that fire departments for decades have been getting the best and most sophisticated tools

when it comes to putting out fires, and they've gotten pretty good at it. We should be extending those tools and thinking about how to equip the people Lenya and others are working with, with the kinds of tools that the fire services have as well. Yeah. And I just, can I just add one more thing on the tech side? I think one of the things that I hear a lot from people who have kind of tech solutions to fire is just more of the same of like, how can we put fires out better? And so I really like what I'm hearing Matt say, which is how can we integrate and restore fire better? And how can technology play a role in that? And I'm saying, how can people play a role in that? I think we're all speaking the same language. It's like,

how can we get more beneficial fire on the landscape? And we need to do it immediately. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't really matter. Luckily, there's Constant Contact. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform can help your businesses stand out, stay top of mind, and see big results.

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So let's talk about managing natural wildfires. A big picture question for each of you. Looking at wildfire management and response over the last decade, which countries or U.S. states are doing well in your book? Lenya, you first and try to keep it brief. Chad and then Matt. Well, I mean, I think states like New Mexico have some impressive programs where they've been able to do it. I mean, there aren't a ton of examples of places that have had the social license to do it. I think Yosemite National Park is a stellar example of a place that's been able to keep the fire regimes intact for many decades and let fires burn.

So that's a good one to look at. And there's a lot of research there to kind of quantify how that's benefited. All right, Chad? Yeah, Lenny is exactly right about Yosemite National Park. There's a very, very deep history going back to the 1970s about managed wildfire. And it's a very, very, it's a great success story. And it's mixed intensity, you know, different species are getting what they need. There's also an area in the southeastern part of Sequoia National Forest on the Kern Plateau that had a really, really good success run.

This is in California? Yeah, in southern Sierra Nevada, southern part of the state of California. The Forest Service really had a great run with a number of different managed wildfires for about 15 years on the Kern Plateau there in the southern Sierra Nevada. But most areas are really not embracing managed wildfire in the way they need to. And that's not being helped by the fact that the chief of the Forest Service basically just told them to stop. And we don't need that. We need these fires. to stop. And we don't need that. We need these fires. Ecosystems need them. And it's important on multiple, multiple levels. And so trying to turn the clock back to 1910, back to this idea that we could stop all the fires, which was never true and wouldn't be a good idea if it was true,

is not helpful. So we need more managed wildfire. Okay. Matt, and you can also, you've worked with a lot of policymakers. Who's good at that? There's a lot of folks who have been really great at this recently. I mean, Alex Petty has been relatively new, the Senator from California. He's been really excellent and a real leader on this issue. In the House of Representatives, you've got Frank Lucas, the Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, working with Zoe Lofgren, a San Jose Democrat, who's the ranking Democrat there, on wildfire science legislation. And they've been really doing some great bipartisan work out of that committee. So there's a lot of good leaders that are emerging.

Okay. And who isn't doing well? What's a clear example of what not to do? last year in shutting down all prescribed fire and shutting down all managed wildfire and just calling to question all of those practices on a large scale when there really isn't any question about whether those things are beneficial. So I thought that was a really, you know, that was a bad move. And I think there was an opportunity there to do something really big and really great and missed the mark. Yeah. Okay, Chad? I agree with that completely.

I second it. Okay, Matt? I would say that I think broadly there's a failure across the federal government on this issue. The wildfire issue just touches too many agencies, and we need to find a way to rationalize the American system of fire. I mean, right now there's no one person that gets fired if things go really bad because there's no singular point of accountability. That's a huge hole in our system. It's not the Forest Service. It's not the Interior.

It's not just the Forest Service. It's not just Department of Interior. NOAA has a role when it comes to fire weather. NASA has a role. Department of Defense has a role. EPA has a role. I mean, the list goes on. And there needs to be streamlined authorities and responsibilities. That's like everything in the government, right? It's a lot of things, but I think that... Yeah, but the government does operate like this, that antitrust goes across agencies.

Correct. But you think there should be a single... So there's an opportunity to consolidate that too. Yeah, yes, I know that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I do think there's a need and opportunity here that this is unique among a lot of other disasters, I would say, the breadth of how many agencies this touches. And that's a real problem.

So let's talk about the state of our wildfire emergency response. Maui is the deadliest fire the U.S. has seen in more than a century. Residents of Lahaina say they weren't given evacuation orders in time. of Lahaina say they weren't given evacuation orders in time. Hawaii's attorney general has said an outside organization will investigate the state and county preparation, a review that will take months. Is there anything to be learned here? Lainey, why don't you start? Well, I think we're seeing some interesting examples of the home hardening issue coming

out of Lahaina. So that's kind of interesting. And then also just thinking about how do we notify people? I mean, there was no stopping that fire. So how do you get people out safely and keep them from... Yeah, they didn't want to sound the alarm because they thought they'd think it was a tsunami. I'm like, well, then they'll leave anyway. Or they might've gone up north. They thought they would go to the hills. They thought they were going to go to the hills. As someone who lives in the coast, it is an interesting idea, right? I mean,

the tsunami alarm goes off and where do you head? Straight into the fire. So I think we need better and duplicative notification systems, because when cell phones go down, what do you do? What do you do? And people go leaving while others were on the beach having drinks, which was kind of horrifying. You think about it. Chad, evacuation has been an issue before. For instance, the Paradise Fire with all the roads. In 2018, the LA Times found that Paradise ignored repeated warnings of risk and did not have a plan to evacuate the area all at once. And people got caught on roads. And you saw those devastating pictures from everybody, speaking of cell phones.

Is there something broken across the board and how state and city governments or agencies should evaluate the risk of fire and set evacuation plans? It sort of looks like all hell breaks loose most of these times. What should be done differently? Yeah, yeah. Yes. In answer to your question, yes. There's something broken about the way we're doing things.

Our focus is out on the wildlands and trying to stop fire from reaching towns. That will not happen. These are weather and climate events. fire from reaching towns. That will not happen. These are weather and climate events. They will reach towns. The question is, when they reach towns, can we keep homes from burning? Can we keep lives from being lost? Can we make sure people and their animals are safe?

And the answer is yes. We know how to do it, but that's not where we're spending our resources. And so we need to focus on the communities. But we need evacuation planning, evacuation assistance. We need home hardening and defensible space. So much evidence that's affected. But we also need things like community fire safe shelters. The problem is, is that sometimes you have those extreme hot, dry, windy days and the fire starts just on the edge of town in the developed landscape,

like it did in Lahaina. And then it spreads into the heart of town. People only have minutes ahead of time, maybe 30 minutes, 60, 45 minutes or less sometimes. It's not always enough time to evacuate, even if there are good evacuation routes. People need fire-safe shelters in town, non-combustible structures with air filtration so the smoke doesn't get in, where they can take two minutes and walk to a safe space. Matt, you were going to say something? Yeah, I think what makes this so heartbreaking, besides the points that were already made, is if it's true that this was started by downed utility lines, we had something like 30 lines down that were potentially hot at the time of ignition. It's a lesson that should have been learned a decade ago after what we've already been going through in California.

And so it's just so heartbreaking to see something so avoidable. So many of the things the three of us talk about are big structural changes that will take time, even where we disagree. We all know that it'll take time. This one should have been done and it's really heartbreaking to watch. You were talking about a preemptive power shutdown and residents of- Yeah, either a PSPS event or hardening the infrastructure, or probably both. Residents of the town are suing the utility company Hawaiian Electric for not shutting it down despite incoming high winds. There's been photos of—it hasn't absolutely been certain that the utility lines blowing down have been that. But a preemptive power shutdown should have been in place after years of watching it happen in California. Yeah, and there's downsides to those things too, right? There's real impacts on people when you do turn off the grid and you need to strive for doing it as little as possible. But in a situation like this, it's hard to imagine any California grid operating. Yeah, absolutely. You've spent a lot of time in Washington,

obviously. Will accountability in Hawaii help move the needle or just are we going to get used to these pictures of fires and floods, actually? Yeah, my fear is that we get used to it and we resign ourselves to a kind of climate fatalism, that because climate change is making these disasters worse, that there's nothing we can do. But I do think there is, I will say, there's just overwhelming interest from across the country in solutions around fire,

whether it's smoke-specific things, structure-hardening, utility-specific things, landscape management, across the board. And the interesting thing is this is no longer, you know, if the San Francisco 2020 moment was this no longer being a rural Sierras problem, but coming into the city, now it's no longer a regional Western problem, but really viewed as a national and an international problem. And as devastating as the consequences are, it does present an opportunity here. Do you think that's the case, Laina?

Yeah, I mean, I think Matt's right that we're seeing an unprecedented level of interest and momentum around these issues and that people are ready to understand the solutions. And in the work that I do, they're ready to be part of it and they want to learn how they can engage more. to be part of it and they want to learn how they can engage more. So we need to kind of take advantage of that and activate that interest. And so, yeah. And Chad, you think the same thing? I think there is a moment here to potentially shift policy and funding in a better direction. I worry based on the conversations that are being had right now in Washington, D.C., and that ridiculous field hearing that the House Natural Resources Committee just held in Yosemite, I worry that what's happening is elected officials are taking the tragedies, the very real tragedies

that are happening, the fear and the misinformation and translating that into some worse policies and doubling down on mistakes of the past, and that communities are not going to get the technical assistance and the funding and the resources they need to become truly fire safe. And instead, we're going to be focusing more on landscape management that's not going to stop fires. Once again, just like we saw in Paradise with the Camp Fire, where thousands of acres had been thinned around the town. And that's what the fire burned through fastest and hottest before 86 people died and 14,000 homes were burned. That is not what we want to repeat.

So I think we have an opportunity, but we need to be smart about it. And we need to hold accountable politicians and interest groups that are using fear and tragedy to promote the mistakes of the past. Well, speaking about the last question for each of you, this has already been a tragic summer. These catastrophic fires are only becoming more common. It's easy to feel powerless and given feeling that in the wake of these kinds of disasters are made worse by climate change, which they are.

What one action can listeners take toward the issue? And I know it's sort of like saying, oh, you should recycle or you should do this. What is one thing each person can do that is actually real? Lainey, you start and then Chad and then Matt. Well, I would say two things. I mean, I think the efforts that people can take at their own homes, super important. It's something that everyone can educate themselves and take some action. But I also think that people should understand the role that fire has on the place that they live and try to understand what that means for the people they elect and the efforts that they support. So understanding fire as a process, let's all strive for that. Okay. Chad?

fire as a process. Let's all strive for that. Okay. Chad? I think people should call their members of Congress and ask them to take the billions and billions of dollars that are currently being spent of taxpayer money, subsidizing logging on public lands, and instead take that money and redirect it toward creating fire-safe communities. Matt? I'd like to see people start to call their policymakers, whether it's in Congress or at the state and local level, and demand to see more smoke in the air, which is counterintuitive. But I really want to see people demanding more good fire,

whether that's managed or prescribed, and change the way we think about interacting with fire in the United States. Okay. Thank you all. Chad Hansen, Lania Quinn-Davidson, and Matt Weiner. Wow, for people who disagree,

they were very civil. Well, I think any of them want more fires to happen, right? They want to figure out ways to do it. And there's going to be, you know, conflict on how to do it, as is many things

having to do with climate change. How to do, like seawalls, everything. People, should we have seawalls? Should we do this? Should we just not build the cities there? Everyone's going to have a different take. Yeah. Lainey was quite a diplomat, but she did push back on many of Chad's statements. Really a big pushback was really, you can't make blanket statements about this, you know, because some of his claims, the Paradise example, it's not so clear cut. The fire did spread quickly even over cleared areas, but also because of high winds and drought conditions, right? And some people like the California fire director have noted that thinning could have actually saved lives here. And also that other

studies, some of the studies he cited, you know, one of those, that 30-year study is actually in response to the environment of a spotted owl in a dense forest. So I think that was Lenya's point, that every piece of land and every fire is really different. Yeah. There's real consensus around the practice of forest thinning and prescribed burns. And that we have to be nimble as a government and as people in terms of dealing with these wildfires to save lives. That's exactly right. be nimble as a government and as people in terms of dealing with these wildfires to save lives. That's exactly right. And I think most things they agreed on, which is correct, is we've got to build buildings that don't burn down out of things that don't burn down. And there's a lot

of easy things, including moving wood away from your house, that kind of stuff. I even knew that. But, you know, I think there's just, there's a lot of things that we can do that we do agree on, including not building so closely, including water management. We're going to have these conflicts all the time going forward with all these different climate disasters. Yeah, and you're right. They agreed on a lot. They agreed that the role of climate change is playing. They agreed their answer on who was doing it best, New Mexico and Yosemite, was the same. And they agreed also on the greatest missteps, which was, they said,

the U.S. Forest Service last year shutting down prescribed fire and managed wildfires. What was interesting, what was really kind of motivating is that all three of them think this is a solvable crisis and that there's so much for humans to do. Yeah, I think that's right. And on all these climate issues, there's all kinds of ways we can mitigate what's inevitably coming and adapt to the new environment that we're in. You know, we're going to have to, we're all going to have to work together on something like this or not and burn together. I mean, that's really the choice, you know. And so, you know, our federal officials and our state officials are going to have to get involved and work together, even if they, what they can't do is deny it's happening. And that's really,

that's really been the problem is all these climate deniers. Or playing games like Vivek Ramaswamy did with climate hoax agenda. Agenda is the hoax. You don't even know what he's saying. And of course, he's trying to say climate change is a hoax. It's really cynical and terrible and full of lack of solutions, which is nice that these people all have different solutions. Yeah, they all have different solutions. They're also probably all a bit more left. I thought Chad raised two good points. One was his viability argument. Like, hey, if this stuff grows back every couple of years, are we really going to clear the land every couple of years? Maybe we are. And that might be it, right? And the second was the perverse incentives of the Forest Service. And that's something that Matt even hinted at.

Because I guess Teddy Roosevelt gave millions of acres of land to the U.S. Forest Service, but also they do all the contracts and they're able to use the proceeds from those contracts as they see fit, right, to cover costs and as they see fit. So in 2018, according to Forbes, they actually raked in $150 million annually from selling timber in national forests, right? Yeah. Which creates scrutiny for them. Well, all our agencies, the Department of Agriculture is captive of agriculture interests. The SEC is captive of company. You know what I mean? This goes on and on.

Yeah, but this is different. There's actually like money changing hands. You're giving contracts to private providers who have an incentive to log, right? So he's raising a distrust argument. But what also became clear to me in Montana is how much the politics matter here. I mean, speaking to these rangers, there's clarity that these magnifiers are kind of shrouded in politics, whether it be the politics of immigration and getting labor out, whether it be misinformation about climate change, whether it be distrust of the Forest Service that we discussed before, which is a place where the extreme right and the extreme left converge and,

you know, the environmental left are issuing lawsuits to try to stop projects from happening. So it's interesting to see that overlap of the political circle. 100%. What role do you think tech can play here? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe in materials and building and identifying and figuring out where we might think fires might come. I'm sure putting the data in will probably, there's probably some commonalities and patterns, I suppose. And in a lot of ways, just handing over some money to help people once they're

in these terrible straits, like in Hawaii. And people might not know this, but actually, Silicon Valley billionaires, or very wealthy wealthy people own quite a bit of Hawaii. Larry Ellison of Oracle owns Lanai. Mark Zuckerberg has, I think it's almost 2000 acres or close to it in Kauai, which is my favorite island. And Steve Case owns big stretches of land in Maui where he is actually, he's a Hawaii native and was raised there and he's given money to the victims of the fires there. And Mark Benioff also spends a ton of time in Hawaii.

Of course, yeah. Mark Benioff also has a huge estate there also. Yeah. They can just give money. Like they're rich people. They should help these people and bring tourism back and bring people back to these beautiful, beautiful islands. Do you think that you dream of moving back to Hawaii or moving to Hawaii or to moving back to California? Do these events give you pause?

No, I think you're not safe anywhere on this planet with climate change. I don't think you're safe in any, you know, I just don't think you are. I think it's, I think actually California is far along in figuring out how to live with it and figuring out solutions, given that everything happens there first, right? So I think you're not safe anywhere in this country. All right. On that uplifting note, please read us out. Megan Cunane and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Fernando Arrudo and Rick Kwan.

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