Life with Fire

The long-awaited beaver episode! In this episode, we learn about how beavers are not only champions of wildfire resilience but are also sleeper endurance athletes (climbing mountains to find new watersheds), dedicated anti-capitalists (not giving a **** about the regulatory or material concerns of humans), expert engineers (casually restoring entire watersheds) and pretty handy companions to have in our pursuit of restoring wetland habitat and landscape resilience across the West (and beyond)...

Today's episode is a special one. We collaborated with the Montana Media Lab—a program of the University of Montana's School of Journalism—to help support their winter "Youth Voices" workshop, which empowers young Indigenous storytellers to learn more about audio storytelling while sharing stories from their communities. This episode features five stories from high school students in Browning and Florence, Montana, all of which are centered around wildfire's presence in their communities...

In this episode, we had a chance to sit down with author John Vaillant, who published a new book last summer about the 2016 Fort McMurray fires in Northern Alberta. The book, "Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World" is an in-depth exploration of the fires, which released in June 2023...

In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Jessica McCarty—who is the Biospheric Sciences branch chief at NASA's Ames Research Center—about her career, her work on fire in boreal and arctic ecosystems, her perspectives on fire technology (spoiler: she's a bit fan of predictive modeling) and so many other topics that I couldn't possibly list them all here. Here's her NASA bio, which explains her background better than we ever possibly could: Dr...

In our second Backbone Scholarship episode—sponsored by Mystery Ranch and the American WIldfire Experience—we chatted with Nez Perce wildland firefighter Riston Bullock, who spoke about his experiences working in fire over the last decade, about the challenges that have come up as he has gotten older and become a father, as well as the challenges of the Nez Perce Reservation to have more authority over their own fire management...

Life with Fire Podcast, Mystery Ranch Backpacks and the American Wildfire Experience (AWE) have joined forces to bring you this episode with Junior Lazaro—a wildland firefighter who received a Backbone Scholarship from AWE to share his experiences of fire through the Mystery Ranch Backbone Series and Life with Fire Podcast. Junior is a young wildland firefighter who shared his experiences of working in fire during his third season on a BLM handcrew out of eastern Oregon...

Marek Smith—the North America Fire Director for the Nature Conservancy and member of the Wildfire Commission—came on the show to talk about the Fire Networks, the commission report, Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges and much more.

The Wildfire Mitigation and Management Commission, established in 2022 at the behest of Congress following the 2021 Infrastructure Act, recently released a substantial report highlighting recommendations that will shape the future of wildfire policy and action in the US. Fifty commission members were charged with creating the recommendations, one of which was Kelly Martin—who is a founding member of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighter organization and a longtime wildland firefighter...

You've probably heard of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), but how about Traditional Ecological *Practices*? In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Melinda Adams of the N’dee San Carlos Apache Tribe about translating Indigenous knowledge into Indigenous-led action—which means giving Indigenous practitioners the "space, opportunity and action" to see their knowledge systems play out on the landscape. We spoke about a whole lot more than that, though—we heard about Dr...

Isabeau Ottolini is one of the foremost experts on imbuing risk communications with values that are informed by communities themselves. As a PhD candidate on community-based communications at the Open University of Catalonia in Spain, Isabeau spends a significant amount of time thinking about how we can best reach those most at risk of wildfire's impacts, while also allowing those folks to inform how we approach them on this subject...