Life with Fire

How will the infrastructure bill impact wildland firefighting and our overall fire resilience? We spoke with Riva Duncan—who is the executive secretary of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighter Coalition—about the bill and its implications for the wildland fire workforce. In addition to providing some greater understanding of the bill and its provisions, Riva also answers a few of the most common questions she's been getting about the legislation.

Our first guest-hosted (an in-person) episode is live! In this episode, Zeke Lunder of "The Lookout" cameos as host of Life with Fire, and sits down with fire researchers Yana Valochovic and Eric Knapp at his office in Chico, CA. They spoke about Valochovic and Knapp's research on the Camp Fire, which deeply impacted the town of Paradise, CA three years ago this week...

In this episode, we explore one of the topics that is most requested by Life with Fire listeners—cultural burning. We spoke with Karuk tribal member Bill Tripp about his early experiences of cultural burning, and how those experiences reflect in his current work as Director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy for the Karuk Tribe...

In this episode we speak with Sasha Berleman, who has a whole lot of irons in the...prescribed fire? Sasha has a doctorate from UC Berkeley, is the founder and director of the Fire Forward Program through Audubon Canyon Ranch, is a founding member of the Bay Area Prescribed Fire Council and much, much more. Oh, and a former hotshot...

In this episode, we explore the new Forest Service directive requiring all new fire starts to be suppressed immediately. Fire scientist Matt Hurteau is our guide on this journey, as he discusses the directive itself, as well as the precedent it sets and its widespread criticism. He and dozens of other fire scientists voiced these criticisms in a letter to Forest Service Chief Randy Moore, which can be found here: http://www.hurteaulab.org/.../chief_moore_letter.....

After a bit of a fire-season-chaos break, we're back with an episode on probably our most requested topic—how wildfires impact animals. For this episode, we brought on Kendall Calhoun, who is pursuing a PhD at US Berkeley and does a majority of his research on how shifting fire regimes in California are impacting native wildlife species...

Liz Foster and Molly McCabe join us in this episode—the second of our Land Use and Resilience Series—to talk about fire-resilient communities and infrastructure, including the inherent inequities of disaster prevention, preparation, response and recovery. Liz is the former senior manager of Urban Resilience at the Urban Land Institute, which explores the wildland urban interface resilience to disasters like wildfires...

For the first episode of our mini-series on land use planning for fire resilience, we spoke with Molly Mowery about her background as a land use planner with a specific interest in preparing communities for wildfires, as well as about her work with the Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program. Listen in for some perspectives on community wildfire resilience, and stay tuned for the rest of the mini series, which will include interviews with other planners, builders and architects...

In this episode we spoke with Zeke Lunder, a pyrogeographer with a background in GIS and mapping on wildfires, and more recently with helping out on prescribed burns all over the West. We spoke about how the advancement of mapping and technology for use in fire suppression is misguided—and how those tech solutions would be better used as a way to get more prescribed fire on the ground...

In this episode, we spoke with wildfire research extraordinaire Crystal Kolden, who is an assistant professor at UC-Merced. Crystal has a breadth of interests and areas of expertise, and is probably one of our favorite follows on "Wildfire" Twitter. We discussed her humanities background and what led her to an interest in wildfire, the wildfire misconceptions that most irk her and how we can better talk about wildfire impacts and wildfire topics in general...