Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with controlled burns?

Episode Date: June 9, 2016

Starting a fire to prevent fire seems counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense once you understand it. But controlled burns aren't just to help prevent forest fires. They're also a vital part of keeping the local ecosystem healthy and thriving. Learn all about how controlled burns work right here, right now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is sponsored by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog or an online store, it's all possible with the Squarespace website.

Go to squarespace.com and set your website apart. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. We'll be right back with a new episode of HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there and there's some coffee.

See a few posters. There's a Beasley brand storage thing. You getting some of that Beasley cash coming your way? Maybe. What was that all about? I hope it's Beasley. It could also be Beisley, I don't know. You know, I got a listener mail from someone

who went to get a bonsai tree in Boston after they were inspired after our episode. And the dude, she's like, have you been busy? The guy was like, this week we've been like, people want bonsai trees. The phone's been off the hook. No way. Yeah, we could be getting some of that bonsai scratch.

We definitely should be. We're getting nothing. Japan should be giving us money. Man. What's their monetary unit? The yen. Is it still the yen? The Japanese yen.

We need many yen coming our way soon. Many yen. And they're going to try to flash some numbers at you. You'll be like, wow, that's a lot. Just remember, it's about 100 yen to $1. I'll just let you do that. I'll let you negotiate that one. I think it's 10 now.

Yeah. I don't remember. And the other night, I turned on the television and Karate Kid was on. Oh, I saw that. Just moments before the wonderful bonsai scene. Yeah, I saw it. You took a picture of your television.

Yeah, and I put it on Instagram. I saw. Our Instagram, S-Y-S-K podcast. Yeah, we're trying to take more pictures. Yeah. Isn't that what you do? Share ourselves. So, but this isn't about bonsai.

No, I've got one more shout out though. There's a dude named Aaron Sites who, remember when we had our horror fiction contest years back? Sure. And we said that anybody who was a part of it, if they ever published anything, we give them a shout out. In perpetuity. In perpetuity.

And Aaron Sites published something. He published a short story collection called The Andrew Jackson Stories. Ooh. And he says that it was published by Lockjaw Magazine. And he said, they're about Andrew Jackson, about as much as Richard Broadigan's Trout Fishing in America is about trout fishing.

That means nothing to me? Well, it wasn't really about trout fishing. I could. But it's a slim little book. He sent it to us. I haven't read it yet, but he swears up and down that it's awesome. So we're going to go ahead and take his word for it.

But congratulations, Aaron Sites. And if you want to go get your hands on Andrew Jackson's stories, go look it up. Go to the Lockjaw Magazine site, I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. So that's done. And now we can talk about controlled burns.

Yes. Good band name. Control Burn. Yeah, depending on, like maybe if it was like a soft rock group. Yeah, yeah, they're like a 80s wedding band, Control Burn. Oh, sure. Good evening.

We are Control Burn, and this is by ELO. Right. Or Loggins and Messina. Yeah. I'm not dissing ELO, by the way. No, ELO is great. Did you see Kenny Loggins on Documentary Now? The two-parter?

Yeah. Which episode was that? It was the two-part one about the, what were the, what did, what was their thing? Oh, they were a band. They were. Oh, that's right. That was the band.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like the greatest band name ever. It was good. I want to say California Chrome, but that was that racehorse. I don't remember what they were called. Was it Control Burn? No. But that was a good one.

Yeah. That two-parter. Great show. Love that show. It's, there's a new season coming out, right? But they should. OK. So again, we're talking about controlled burning.

Not a band. An actual thing. Yeah, and this ties into our Wildfires episode. Yeah, which we did. Years back. Yeah. But Chuck, I always loved the opportunity to talk about 1491.

Oh, here we go. And here's one now. All right. So it wasn't until about. 1491, the book, by the way. Right. If you're new to the show. Oh, yeah.

Josh's long stated favorite book. So long. And you've talked about it a lot. At least 50, 60 times. Yeah. And I would have read it by now if you hadn't talked about it so much. You don't even need to now.

You know the whole book. So 1491, one of the premises of it is that our understanding of Native America in North and Meso in South America prior to Columbus coming over is just totally wrong. There were way more people. They were way more advanced than anthropology and archaeology is long given credit for.

Yeah, internet cafes. Pretty much they did, but it wasn't until like the early 2000s that this idea of the noble savage who treaded lightly on the ecosystem, on the environment, started to crumble. And we started to realize that a lot of the features, what the early explorers thought were natural features of North and South in Mesoamerica,

were actually really well-managed ecosystems. And one of the ways that Native Americans used or managed ecosystems was through fire. But again, there was this idea that Native Americans just had no idea what they were doing with anything. So whenever archaeologists up until about 2000, 2001 or 2002, the late 90s maybe, any time they came across evidence of a fire and it

seemed like the Native Americans had said it, they just assumed that either the Native Americans had said it to amuse themselves. Yeah, because they're big dummies. Or because a campfire got out of control. Because they're big dummies. Right. Boy, oh boy.

But this is what they came up with. They're like, oh, well, they clearly just wanted to set some fires for fun. Right. They couldn't have possibly had any point to it. But then more and more investigation has shown like, no, actually, not only did they know what they were doing,

like if you step back and look at North America, the whole continent was a managed set of ecosystems. And one of the ways they did it was through fire. The other thing that interested me, too, was depending on the explorers and the Europeans and the settlers that came over to North America, some of them came and that was not anything new to them. It turns out that using fire to manage ecosystems

is almost universal, basically. Yeah, and some of the reasons they might have done it, of course, these days, one of the main reasons we do it is to prevent forest fires from spreading, which we'll get to, but back then, they would use it to improve the foraging conditions for free-ranging cattle, increased visibility, access. There were all kinds of great reasons

to burn things in a controlled way. Yeah, supposedly the early explorers didn't really think about it, but the historians went back and looked at it. The explorers who used to say you can't get through the forests in North America were talking about swamp land, like lands that wouldn't burn. But you could drive a car through a forest in Ohio

or something like that. Although there's swamps in Ohio, a non-swampy part of Ohio because of the use of fire. Are there swamps in Ohio? Yeah, there were. They filled them in and built Toledo over it. So you were talking about when Europeans came upon the scene. It's really interesting.

I read this article called The Historical Foundations of Prescribed Burning for Wildlife, colon, a southeastern perspective. Beautiful. By A. Sidney Johnson and Philippe Hale. And it was, I think it was an academic paper or something, but it started dawn on me when they were talking about the founding of America,

why we ended up like we ended up. It just kind of all came together for me. I love reading stuff like that. It connects dots that weren't connected before. And this was a simple dot I should have connected before. But basically, in the northeast of the United States, it was largely settled by people from the southern lowlands of England, people that lived in cities and people that

had not, for the most part, lived on farms and didn't have a lot of experience with agriculture and certainly not with prescribed burning, which is another name for a controlled burn. And then in the south, particularly the southeast, we were more populated by people from rural areas of the UK and Scotland and Ireland and Western England. They had a lot of experience with farming.

And then I started to think, oh, wait a minute. That all just makes total sense. That's why the northeast became industrialized. That's why the south were a bunch of yokels. They were agrarian. And it was a very obvious thing, but it just coalesced in my mind in a very neat way. I knew that part already, the industrialization aspects of it.

But one of the things that coalesced for me was wondering how much of the Civil War was driven by rivalries that go back to England and Scotland and Ireland rather than just the context of North America and the US. Absolutely, because I think for the most part, once people came over here, they did things like they did them over there, which makes sense. Like Scarlet O'Hara's father had that Irish brogue, remember?

No. Yeah, her dad. I'm pretty sure he did, unless I'm losing my mind right now. Well, it's been a while since I've seen that movie. I'm pretty sure. I believe it. But it makes sense. And like you said, maybe the attitudes came along with that.

Yeah. Maybe that carried over into how people felt about each other pre-Civil War. Yeah, I'll bet it did. But the point of all this is that up north, there was fire suppression. That was the key driver. Like they would try to keep fires from breaking out

under any circumstances. Yeah, and don't get confused, because a suppressing fire is a controlled burn. Fire suppression is putting out fires. So maybe we should just say, up north, they didn't think that starting fires on purpose was smart. Yeah, they were like, no fires. And down south, they said, no, no, no, this is,

we've been doing it in England for years. They were like, fire, fire. Yeah, fire is a good way to manage things. Yeah. And that's how the nation was divided, at least at first. And then the Civil War happened. And interestingly, the Yankees came down and said, hey, this old plantation will make a really great hunting

preserve. And I'm going to buy it. And now that I own this enormous tract of land in the South, I'm a Yankee. And we don't believe in fire, so I'm going to make sure no fire ever breaks out here, even though everybody's been using fire techniques for generations.

Yeah, and interestingly too, the fire techniques that the founders in the South used were the same kind that the Native Americans in that area used. So they were on the same page, thousands of miles apart, and basically came and started doing the same thing or kept doing the same thing that Native Americans were doing.

And what makes that even more interesting is that using fire is not universal to ecosystems. Like, there's different techniques or not using it at all, depending on the type of ecosystem you're dealing with. Well, yeah, because in the southern lowlands, apparently, the forests were fire sensitive hardwoods and spruce trees.

So it sort of depended on what kind of forest you had. I guess theirs weren't as flammable. Right, or inflammable, which is a word I think we should just get rid of entirely. Inflammable? Yeah, it means the same thing as flammable, but it sounds like it means the opposite. It's just a stupid word.

Really? Yeah, inflammable. I've never heard of it. That's great. That's all the more reason to get rid of it. That's crazy. Inflammable means flammable. What's the point?

Man, what a dumb language. So the point of the whole thing is that fire is a natural feature of a living, thriving ecosystem. Yes. It's something humans are terrified of, but on the environmental level, on the ecological level, it's a necessary component to keep any or most ecosystems healthy, right?

Yes. And some groups of people understood this. The people who ended up running the show after the Civil War did not believe this, and it actually has had a very large impact throughout the 20th century in the United States, which we're just now overcoming. We can actually thank one guy for changing the attitude toward fires and using them

for wildfire management. And we'll talk about him right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so you teased the name drop. I did. Right before the break. In 1923, well, there was this one particular northern land owner that came down south and bought up

a bunch of plantations. His name was Henry Biedel, and he hated fire. Fire had burned his favorite horse. Maybe, you never know. So he hated fire. He was appalled at the idea of burning land. But other people, like we're saying in the South, said, no, it's a good thing.

So in 1923, they commissioned the US Bureau of Biological Survey, which was precursor to the Fish and Wildlife Service. And it was headed up at the time by a guy named Herbert L. Stoddard. He was the name that you teased. Right. And Stoddard, actually, the thing that kicked it off the most was that these guys who bought these huge plantations

and turned them into preserves, they like to hunt quail. Yeah. And they noticed. Bob White quail. Right. And they noticed that the Bob White quail population was declining every year. And they had no idea why.

So they brought Stoddard in. And Stoddard became a Bob White quail expert. Well, he already was. Oh, he was already. That's why they brought him in? Yeah. He wrote a book about it. And this guy was awesome.

He helped found the literally helped found a profession of wildlife management. Right. The whole field is basically this guy. Yep. He wrote some legendary books that are still used today. He was like literally the first critic of industrialized agriculture.

He's just this sort of champion. And a Georgian, a transplant to Georgia. Yeah, yeah. I think he's from Chicago, but did a lot of work here for sure. Yeah, yeah. So he starts looking into the quail situation down here. And he's like, well, you need to burn him. There's your problem.

You guys have a woody undergrowth problem. And I looked into this. And Bob White quail requires some of the most complex habitats you've ever heard of, right? Yeah. So they thrive in areas where you've got what's called woody cover, which are dense, shrubbery that's like mostly woody

that they can use as what's called covey headquarters. It's like little escape patches. And they need them all over the place. But in addition to this, they also need food sources. So they need like crops of a certain variety. And then they also need some grassy areas. And they need all this stuff in certain proportions. And if you have the proportions right, which apparently they

did, the quail populations thrive. But if you have too much of one thing, then the quail population is diminished. And that one thing that had grown up was the woody undergrowth. And the reason the woody undergrowth was allowed to grow up was because the Yankees came in and stopped using fire. That's right.

Isn't that interesting? I think so. It was all because these rich guys, these rich industrialists, who wanted to hunt quail, were like, war is all the quail. And they hired the government to come look into it. And this government guy came in and was like, oh, here's the problem.

You guys need to set this on fire. But the thing is, is no one listened to him. Well, no. He had a few people that, I mean, they hired him for his expertise. So he had a few people that got on board. But he fought for many, many years, like the history of control burning.

It wasn't until post-World War II is when it started to catch on a little bit. And then in the 50s and 60s, it became more commonplace. But it wasn't until 1971 that the US Forest Service had their very first symposium on prescribed burns. And that's what really turned the tide. But this was the 1920s, and it took all the way until the 1970s for it to become completely accepted.

It was the right way to do things. Yeah. And in the meantime, we had a lot of unnecessary wildfires. Well, and one of the reasons, too, was apparently all the forestry workers in the South were from the North. And so they had these bad experiences in England and elsewhere with devastating fires that kill people

and wiped out villages. And apparently, they also had this German influence, like a protectionist influence from Germans in forestry school that was taught to them that way. Gotcha. So they were doing it all wrong. Well, one of the other explanations I saw for why the Forestry Service was like, no,

you can't burn down here is because, I guess, one of the spoils of winning the Civil War was that the North came down and just clear-cut the south of its pine. And they figured, well, the pine forests have been so devastated. For what, for timber? Yeah.

That we can't let any fire happen or else no, this pine's never going to recover. So we really can't do any burning now. Man. Yeah. So eventually, everybody started listening to Stoddard. And now we use fire pretty much everywhere in the United States.

And there's a couple of reasons to set fires on purpose. And the coolest one is that if you set fires on purpose, you actually prevent wildfires down the line. Yeah, and we're not talking about completely burning down every tree in the forest. Well, yeah. They're mainly burning the stuff that will catch everything on fire, like the understory, the underbrush, the dead leaves,

dead branches, stuff on the ground. Right. And if you burn that on purpose, you burn out the fuel for, again, a future out of control wildfire. One of the other things you do is you open up the canopy. So you're burning out some trees. But for the most part, the older, more established trees can survive.

And since that canopy's opened up, more sunlight can come through. And when more sunlight can come through, you have smaller trees that can start to grow. So there's more reproduction, actually. Yeah, and if you're listening, thinking, well, this all sounds great, but doesn't that release a ton of carbon emissions in the air when you're burning things?

And if you're burning thousands and tens of thousands of acres a year on purpose, aren't you just adding to the problem? No. I was being coy. But the answer is no. Well, it depends. Well, it's a little bit of both.

I thought this was a little strange for the way that this was parceled out. So on the one hand, in this article, it says, nope, actually, they've done studies. And the large established trees that can survive a controlled burn actually lock in more carbon in the long run. So the controlled burn releases less than, say,

a wildfire that's burning out of control that burns those trees and unlocks that carbon, right? And then later on, in the last section of this article, the author's like, yeah, that really just depends on what kind of forest you're talking about. In some forests, it doesn't make a difference at all. And yes, then in that case, it's bad for the environment. I don't know about that last part.

I'm just saying, I just think it was weird. Well, I think it's cool, though, like what you just said, though, that the large trees capture that carbon. And if you burn off the small stuff underneath, what you said earlier, it's going to open up that canopy and let those big trees grow bigger. And that's going to be good in the long run. Short, long-term gain for short-term carbon emission

output. So and then also, in addition to opening up that canopy, allowing more sunlight so reproduction can happen, there's actually, they found some species of trees that depend on fire to reproduce. And chief among them is the giant sequoia. So beautiful trees. In Yosemite, and I think the 60s, yeah, the 60s,

they were like, the sequoias aren't reproducing. What's going on? And somebody, a guy named Dr. Richard Hertzfeldt, said, I think it has to do with fire. We stopped doing fire, and we want to do fire. So let's do some fire. And they're like, shut up, Hertzfeldt. You can't even talk right.

And he's like, I'm going to go burn some stuff and prove you guys wrong. So he started doing some tests. He'd do fire tests. And he found that when fire was applied to a sequoia forest, the sequoia cones opened up and their seeds could germinate. Yeah, and the big daddies are very fire resistant. So they were like, I'm a little hot underneath

in the undercarriage. But it feels nice. But it feels pretty good. And I'm going to stand strong. But what I'm going to do, like he said, is I'm going to open my cones. And the other thing it does is, when you drop seeds, if you have a woody understory, and the understory

is another word for that underbrush, under, what'd you call it, under cover, undercarriage? Woody cover for a bobwhite coil. That's what the bobwhite coils call it amongst themselves. All right, so imagine a seed dropping from a pine cone from 100 feet up. And the ground is covered in leaves and sticks and things. That seed might fall on a pile of leaves six inches deep

and just sit there. Just sit there and be like, I'm unfulfilled. AKA, it never makes contact with the soil where it needs to be to establish roots. Right, or even if it did, the sunlight is being blocked out by the understory. And fire solves all those problems. It does, because fire pops that pine cone open.

The seeds come out. They are in the newly burned ground, which has a lot of carbon fertilizer now in the form of ashes. And lots of sunlight coming through because the understory's been burned away. So fire is the greatest thing ever. Pretty amazing.

But again, we said before, it depends on the ecosystem, right, so especially out in California, they got kind of burn happy. They're like, oh wait, fire can actually suppress wildfires? We have tons of wildfires out here. We need to burn all the time. And they started burning and burning and burning in Southern California.

And it had zero impact on diminishing wildfires. And they couldn't figure out why. And they finally said, well, maybe we should study the ecosystem we're setting on fire and see what's what. And they found that they really shouldn't be burning the Southern California ecosystem to prevent wildfires. So that actually makes it worse in this case. Yeah, in Southern California,

they have what's called chaperrill. And it's the, I mean, if you've ever been to Southern California, you know that it looks lovely now in the neighborhoods because people planted stuff everywhere. But the hillsides are kind of gross. They're brown and they're thorny and they're shrubby. It's like all tumbleweeds. Yeah, it's just, it's not, it's just sort of gross

in those canyons. Right. And that's just my opinion. Yeah, well, that's chaperrill, right? Yeah, okay. And that chaperrill, well, if you leave everything to itself there, apparently it's super fire resistant. Right.

So every like, if you left it naturally, it would only catch flame every 100 years or so. Right, but they were setting fire to this every few years in order to try to prevent wildfires. And what they were ultimately doing was burning the chaperrill which was naturally flame resistant, right? Yeah. And in favor of the chaperrill,

what was, since it took a long time to grow back, the stuff that was beating the chaperrill out, that could grow faster was actually very flammable. Yeah. So they were promoting the growth of wildfire fuel in Southern California by burning these, the chaperrill too much. Good stuff.

It is, it's really interesting. All right, well let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about a little bit about climate change and how that factors in and then how you can do your own control burn. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews. Like, if you're a young man, you should be able to do the things that you want to do and you should do the things that you want to do. And then you can do the things that you want to do and you can do the things that you want to do

and you can do the things that you want to do and it's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends' beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, by the way, I was kidding. No one should try this ever, ever, ever. We should have probably not broken for a minute or so

before you said that. I don't think anyone just paused and said, oh my gosh, I'm going to run out because we didn't teach them yet. Oh, that's a good point. You should never start a fire. Yeah, don't start fires. Okay, got that out of the way.

Climate change is having an impact on these wildfires from between 1979, there's a season, a wildfire season we talked about in our episode when it's just more likely to happen. And between 1979 and 2013, the global fire season increased by almost 19%. Yeah, which means like the fire season grew longer around the world by that much.

Which is bad. And at the rate of 864 million acres worldwide of wildfire that burn every year, which is an amazing number, apparently that emits more than half the amount of carbon that fossil fuels put out in the atmosphere. Yeah, so it's awful. That's a tremendous amount, right?

Yeah, and it's a feedback loop. It is because it contributes CO2 to the atmosphere, which promotes the greenhouse effect, right? The greenhouse effect creates drought conditions. It heats things up, it lowers humidity, and it becomes a vicious cycle, right? Because when you have drought conditions, you have more dead trees that provide more fuel

for more wildfires and more wildfires put more CO2 into the air, which promotes the greenhouse effect and it just gets worse and worse and worse. There's more wind, too. Yeah, it's a big problem. Yeah, I was reading about the Fort McMurray wildfire up in Canada, and apparently they just had some freak weather. The Fred McMurray wildfire?

Yeah, yeah, he was like, I got no Fred McMurray jokes. The city, Fort McMurray, like a little outside town, they think the fire started somewhere out there. They're not sure what did it yet, but they had some freak weather where it was like 91 degrees. They still have frozen lakes up there right now, but the temperature was like 91 degrees. Humidity was at like 15%,

and winds were at about 45 miles an hour. So it was just ripe for a wildfire, and now it's up to about 450,000 hectares, which is exactly a ton of acres, I think. Yeah, man. All right, so how do you start a controlled burn? How do you do this? Carefully.

Well, first of all, you wanna work for the Forest Service, or Fish and Game, or? Yeah, the author of this article says, go to local authorities. I'm like, you can do this if you're not a local authority, but I guess you could. Like, he also mentions the landowner in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Yeah, that does his own controlled burns. Right. Surely you have to get, you got permitted if you're doing it yourself. Right, well, yeah, he's saying go to local authorities, but I was surprised that you can do it if you're not a local authority. Yeah, I didn't know that either.

Right. In fact, I'm still not quite convinced. At the very least, you want to collaborate closely with local authorities if you're not one. That's right. Okay. So yeah, I mean, this beginning stuff is, get your permits, find out what the best time of year

and all that stuff. What you need to do is just leave it to the people who do it best. Right. But this is what they're gonna do. But the first thing that you wanna do after you've gotten all your equipment and all that good stuff is look at the weather

and pick out a good time to do it. Yeah, you want it kind of damp? Sure. You want the humidity above 25%. Ideally. Low winds. Yeah. Basically everything the opposite of the weather

like it was in Fort McMurray on May 1st. Yeah, less than 80 degrees, ideally. And then once you've got everything all set up and you've got a great day picked out, you're gonna start a tiny little test fire in a corner. First, you wanna wake up and have a complete breakfast? Then you can go start your test fire. Test fire, basically just look at it

and say how are you gonna behave today? Yeah. Well, even before you set the test fire, you wanna plan out your area that you want to burn. And in the area, you wanna identify natural fire breaks. These are things like roads, bodies of water, that kind of stuff. Things that the fire's not going to spread across, right?

Ideally, yeah. And then you wanna create even more fire breaks around it where there aren't natural ones. You wanna plow and dig and cut and basically create an area to where the fire can't spread outside of the place you wanna contain it into. I wonder if dropping an atom bomb

on a wildfire would work. Operation plow, sure. Sure. I don't think so. Probably not. I think that would make everything a lot worse. So once you've got all your fire breaks, both natural and the ones you've just made yourself

with your hands, you wanna start your first fire called the backfire. Yeah. And the backfire is a downwind. Yeah. It's against that fire break. So you know it's only gonna be going in one direction. It's against the wind, so it's not gonna be super fast.

Right. And you're gonna be able to control it. Like you're kind of starting off nice and easy. Yeah, just don't kill yourself out of the gate. Yeah. Just take it nice and easy, like you said. Right. Then after you've got the backfire going,

you create flank fires, one on each side, right? Yep. And they are not necessarily going against the wind, so they're gonna burn a little bit faster. Yeah, they're at right angles to the wind. Right. Yeah. And one of the neat things about fire,

when you're creating a controlled burn, is the places you're burning first actually create fire breaks themselves. Yeah. For sure. Have you ever seen the gods must be crazy too? Didn't see the second one. There's like a bush fire,

and I can't remember the main guy's name. He's awesome. He saves his like companions by setting fire to the grass around them, so that the brush fire has nothing to burn when it gets to them. So he creates a fire break basically by burning the area around them

before the fire gets there. So he controls it himself. Was that good, the sequel? Sure. Yeah, both of them are really good. Man, I remember that when it came out, it was like kind of one of the first foreign sort of indie movies

that made a big dust up, I feel like. You know, that got a lot of attention. It's a good one. The gods must be crazy. Holds up. Does it? Yeah. We'll have to check it out again.

So, where were we? We've got our flank fires, we've got our back fires, we're creating larger fire breaks, and then you wanna ignite the big daddy, the head fire. Right. Yes. The head fire. It goes in the direction of the wind.

It's upwind. So it blows very quickly downwind and spreads quick. That's right. But because you said it lasts, there's less fuel for it to burn. It's gonna finish out the fire for you pretty quick. But it's not gonna go beyond the areas that have already been burned

because you just created those fire breaks by burning them on the back fire and the flank fires. Yeah. So after that happens, your fire should be done. And you can go home. Just forget about it. After you set that head fire, just get in your truck and go home.

No, there's a little bit more. You gotta stay there, my friend, until afterward. And then they call it mop up duty when you obviously put out all the flames completely with water, cut down any little trees that are on fire, and just extinguish everything and leave it a big smoldering nasty mess that is actually gonna be good for the environment.

Yeah. And you gotta tell everybody who drives by and shout at you for setting a fire that you're doing this because it's better off in the long run. Yeah. So the end justifies the means. Pretty neat.

Yeah, another tip, don't wear rubber clothing when you're part of a fire setting crew. Yeah. Because it can melt and stick to your skin. I wonder, this is something I didn't look into. I wonder if the, surely they're just wildfire fighting teams that are doing this, right?

It's the same people, right? I would guess. I would guess. I would hope. Because the thing is, it's like, yes, you can be told how to set a fire. I think that's probably the easy part. Like figuring out how to adjust

when it starts to get out of control or doesn't do what you think it's gonna do or the weather conditions change. Or if it jumps that fire break that you think is big enough. Right. That's when I think you need somebody who's experienced. Yeah, it's gotta be somebody.

Yeah, there should be the same people doing this who know what they're doing. Yeah, I'm sure it is. And if that's what you do, we wanna hear from you. So, shout out to us. Well, yeah, I think we heard from some fire jumpers in the last episode. We did from the wildfire one.

And that was a good one too. Go back and listen to that, everybody. Do it now. If you want to learn more about controlled burns, you can type those words in the searchbar at HouseToWorks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this Mind Blown.

Not my mind. Listener's Point. Hey guys, I was listening to the Landfills episode and the most important issue you brought up is the song Powerhouse by the Raymond Scott Quintet. Josh had hummed a snippet and Chuck said it was Looney Tunes. That was a moment of cognitive dissonance that rivaled almost anything I've suffered in my 41 years

because Josh was actually humming a bit of La Villa or La Via Strangiato by Rush. Not some dumb 50s band. I know that song, so this caught my attention. Powerhouse is from the 30s and it was like an orchestra. That's right. Not a 50s band. This guy's out of mind.

Well, yeah, maybe so. I couldn't believe you were singing a part of one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands and crediting someone else. As I watched the Raymond Scott video though, the universe refocused like when the candle holder resolves into faces or the Canadian flag is irreversibly changed into two angry guys pressing their foreheads together.

Case closed. Have you ever seen that? The Canadian flag? No, I've seen one that says like Jesus loves you or something like that. I never knew that the Canadian flag, if you look at it a certain way, looks like two guys. I went and looked and then, you know, sort of.

What about the man on the moon, you ever seen that? Hmm, I don't know. Well, then you haven't. Okay. You would know. We'll show it to you. Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, I guess I can see that. It's like the arrow in the FedEx logo.

Like once you see it, you can't unsee it. Unless you really want to and then you can't. No, okay. I don't see what this guy's talking about. With the Canadian flag? Yeah. Well, you have to type in Canadian flag faces and then someone will have, it's a bit of a stretch

if you ask me. Have you ever seen any Sister Wendy stuff? No. She is a nun who just understands art and art history, like no one else on the planet. Yeah. And she had like a PBS show for a little while and she would just point out things in art

that you would just never think to look for. Like in the negative space, like the illusion? Sometimes, but also more like the shadows surrounding a family or something. It makes them look isolated and you're like, oh yeah, I didn't really put my finger on that or whatever. She's just got this really great knack for explaining art in really interesting ways.

And I think it's online for free. Alrighty. Sorry about that. No, that's all right. So where are we? Canadian flag, two angry guys. Thanks for broadening my understanding of one of the first Rush songs I learned to play on drums.

Then I found this on songfacts.com and it sounds credible. Apparently this was an issue and Rush did not give credit to Scott for using Powerhouse. By the time Raymond Scott's publisher notified demands management of the infringement, the statute of limitations had expired of the challenge. But Rush's management out of deference to Mr. or Mrs. Scott, being the class act that they are,

offered a one-time penance payment feeling it was the ethical thing to do. All involved were happy with the resolution and Rush has no further financial obligations. Wow. Under the settlement. This is quite a story. I know, under the settlement they were required,

not required to accord Raymond Scott partial songwriting credit on the piece. So apparently, Powerhouse and Rush's Lobilo Strangiatto were similar and they nicked it from there. Never knew. I didn't either. And that is from Ken Rinker in Colorado Springs. Thanks a lot, Ken.

He says best to Jerry in the game. Jerry says thanks, I think. Yeah. Ken, that was awesome. I take back that you're out of your mind. You're interesting instead. How about that? Yes.

If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S-B-I-S-K podcast. You can join us on Instagram at S-B-I-S-K podcast too. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.