What are the benefits of prescribed burning? Why have wildfires gotten so severe lately? How can I help protect my home and community? Life With Fire podcast aims to answer these questions (and many others) while deepening our understanding of the critical role fire plays in America’s forests, lands and communities. Hosted by writer and former wildland firefighter Amanda Monthei, Life with Fire features interviews with everyone from scientists to fire management experts to Indigenous practitioners and folks doing the work on the ground. Through these interviews, Amanda hopes to explore our relationship with fire, as well as ways we can better coexist with it in the future.
https://lifewithfire.simplecast.com
episode 50: Fire in the Pine Barrens of the Northeast with Emily Dolhansky
Our 50th episode! In today's episode, we spoke to professional forester Emily Dolhansky about the fire-adapted ecosystems of her home state of New Jersey. Perhaps you've seen some footage of the Jimmy's Waterhole Fire (pretty good fire name tbh) in southern New Jersey—as of this writing, it's sitting at nearly 4,000 acres and 75% containment after exhibiting fire behavior that would be extreme by almost any geographic area's standards.
Emily filled us in on the fire ecology and history of the pine barrens, where she spent as a kid growing up in NJ. Emily wrote her master's thesis at Yale on the pine barrens of the northeast (which exist all over the northeast and midwest—not just NJ) and talked through some of the common misconceptions of Northeast wildfires while providing a good bit of context for all those wild videos we're seeing on social media this week.
To learn more about the fire history of the pine barrens, check out this piece that Emily penned while at Yale: https://www.firesciencenorthatlantic.org/post/pine-barrens-of-the-northeastern-u-s-emily-dohlansky-2018
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