Reframing Our Relationship With Fire Through Mentorship And Stewardship With Dr. Sasha Berleman

People have lived collaboratively with fire, and fire has brought and supported life since time immemorial. This was something Dr. Sasha Berleman heard when she was a young adult enrolled in an educational program at a nature reserve that her grandmother used to take her to. This sent her on a lifelong journey to explore and educate others on living harmoniously in a fire-prone environment.

Known as the Fire Poppy, Dr. Berleman shares insights on wildland and prescribed fires, stressing their vital role in fire-adapted ecosystems. She talks about the challenges of using fire and changing how people see it. Dr. Berleman also talks about the Fire Forward program, which helps more people use prescribed fires safely. The program focuses on leadership, working together, and helping communities. She also talks about how the government and groups can learn from each other and how everyone can work together better. Dr. Berleman underscores the need for collaboration, resource sharing, and mentorship, concluding with a focus on the recipe for success and the potential for future growth, as well as the importance of mentors and paying it forward.

---

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Reframing Our Relationship With Fire Through Mentorship And Stewardship With Dr. Sasha Berleman

This episode is going to be brought to you by Mystery Ranch, built for the mission. If you haven't been rocking a Mystery Ranch Fire Line Pack for the entirety of your career, that sucks to be you because they make the best damn fire packs in the game. They are well known for a ton of other load-bearing essentials.

If you want to hike the PCT, they make a solution for you. If you want to peel a trophy elk off the side of the hill, they make a solution for you. They make it all. They do it damn well. It's all backed by one of the best damn warranties in the game. They are located at www.MysteryRanch.com. Go over there and check them out now because they are also giving back to the wildfire community in a huge way. They are the ones responsible for the Backbone Series and the Backbone Series Scholarships.

If you have a compelling story and want to share your voice and story across the world with Mystery Ranch's Backbone Series, you'll have a chance to win one of these $1,000 Mystery Ranch Backbone Scholarships. What can you use it for? Do you want some continuing ed? Do you want to pursue your passions, excel in your career, and do some stuff that's going to be beneficial for your future? That's what that money is going to be used for. Head over to www.MysteryRanch.com and check out the Backbone Series.

If you want to support these Backbone Series Scholarships, it's easy to do. Take a look at the three-way briefcase or some of the other packs that they have, like the three-day assault in wildfire black. Anything in the wildfire black colorway is going to be funneling money back into the boots on the ground that are needed the most for those continuing ed, career development, and all the other storytelling missions that this provides.

This episode is going to be caffeinated by none other than Hotshot Brewing. It's kickass coffee for a kickass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. If you're looking for all of the tools of the trade to get your morning started right, or a whole slew of Wildland Firefighter-themed apparel, or some kickass coffee for a kickass cause, look no further than Hotshot Brewing. You can find them at www.HotshotBrewing.com.

There's a little secret hidden page on there. It's not hidden. It's in the nav menu, but you can get some Anchor Point merch while you're over there. They've been supporting the show since the beginning of it. If you want to find out more, go over to www.HotshotBrewing.com, where you can find all of the tools of the trade to get your morning started right, all of that Wildland Firefighter-themed apparel and some kickass coffee for a kickass cause. Go check them out.

The show is not sponsored or brought to you, but it is one of those close relationships I have with Bethany over there at The American Wildfire Experience. I want to show her some love for as long as I possibly can because I believe in her cause and her mission, and she's got some rad stuff going on. If you don't know what the American Wildfire Experience is, they house The Smoky Generation. A lot of people out there have seen that rolling around. It's awesome. It is a digital storytelling platform telling the story of a wildland fire. There have to be over 250 of these stories out there, but it's preserving the legacy of the folks in the field and the story of wildland fire. Some of these stories date back to the 1940s.

If you want a history lesson or if you want to sign up for the Smokey Generation Grant Program, if you've got a compelling story and you're telling the story of wildland fire through the lens of a video camera or a still camera, a vlog, or animations, there was this one dude out there who made We Move Mountains with Spoons, and it's kickass. They're a Smokey Generation grant recipient. The sky is the limit. Tell the story. It's awesome. If you want to find out more, go over to www.Wildfire-Experience.org, and you can check it out. Bethany, you have a kickass organization over there. Keep it up.

---

We are fast approaching the 2024 wildfire season. I hope everybody has acquired their fitness rather nicely over the course of the winter. I hope everybody is ready for the upcoming season. Let's do a call to action before we get into this episode. We all know that Congress is kicking the can down the damn road with the whole WFPPA, the Wildfire Paycheck Protection Act, and Tim's Act, and it's getting on my nerves.

There's a handful of people in Congress that are fighting for us. One, in particular, is Joe Neguse. He's introduced legislation. We need supporters and a mass educational campaign to go along with that. We can inform the general public, gain their support, and educate other congressmen who are sitting up there on Capitol Hill and don't understand what we do.

What I want you all to do is share the story of grassroots, your stories, and the stories of the National Federation of Federal Employees, AKA NFFE, because they're the ones out there leading the charge and making these changes up on Capitol Hill. Let's politely and civilly motivate our congressional members to make a positive difference in wildland firefighters' livelihoods. Go over to www.GrassrootsWildlandFirefighters.com and www.NFFE.org. You can join the fight. That's the only announcement that I got.

This episode's going to be sick. On the show, we have Dr. Sasha Berleman. She is going to be the Executive Director over there at Fire Forward. If you haven't been following her around, she's also known as the Fire Poppy. She has one kickass thing going over there at Audubon Canyon Ranch. We're going to talk about fire ecology, the importance of prescribed fire, what it's like to be a doctor in the wildland fire field, and educating the public on the good fire movement and all things prescribed fire. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my good friend, Dr. Sasha Berlemen. Welcome to the show.

---

On the show, I've got Dr. Sasha Berleman, AKA the Fire Poppy. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. How are you, Brandon?

How long have I been trying to get this episode?

Maybe for several years.

Tell us about yourself.

I'm from rural Southern California. It used to be Temecula. It had dirt roads and sheep when I was growing up. Now, it's massive.

I'm from San Diego, East County.

I've been working with fire since 2010. I started in that practitioner space by volunteering my time and traveling around the US to get opportunities to light fire, learn about fire in different ecosystems, and meet cool people. I did an education in fire. I got out with running interagency hotshot crew. Here I am.

What year were you going through Redding?

I first joined Redding for their fire season part in 2017. I came back in 2018 for their full training season and the actual fire season. I've been in detail with them almost every summer since then. I did one summer where, I went with the Grass Lake Wildland fire module instead for a while. I didn't get out with them, but hopefully, I'll continue to go out once in a while.

You're doing your own thing. You have the ability to keep your own quals current at this point.

It's working out, but it is a good experience. It’s good to meet folks on the crew and see more cool fire. I love it.

Those are the times I cherish in my fire career now that I'm well out of the game and driving a desk for a living. The training crews are an underrated thing because it's a safe environment to develop those skills and see some different fires in different areas. It's all walks of life. We have ologists, fire personnel, and fuel people on those crews because that was on Redmond in 2016. It’s parallel to the years that we were on those training crews.

The Redding crew focuses on small-unit leadership development. There's a lot of leadership training in that crew. They've turned out some incredible people who've gone on to do neat things in their careers. It was an irreplaceable experience working on small unit leadership development on a hotshot crew.

All those skills were developed into where you're at now with Audubon Canyon Ranch and all the other stuff that you're doing. Those skills last you a lifetime.

You're forever building on them, but that groundwork is irreplaceable. It's incredible. That was a massive game-changer in my career path.

It was a massive game-changer for my career path. I'm out of the game. I can't talk about it driving a desk. It afforded me a lot of opportunities to take those small unit leadership tactics, the crew cohesion, everything they do with leadership like fire behavior, and everything that those programs have to offer and translate it into what I do now. It's cool. I'm sure you're in the same boat.

In their training season, their spike week opened my eyes in a whole new way to what I'm physically capable of, even when my mind is trying to tell me that I'm done. I'll carry it with me forever because it changed what I know I can do, which is empowering.

What was your inspiration behind getting passionate about wildland fire and prescribed fire, in particular, the preventative side of things? That's what you're focused on nowadays. Let's talk about it.

That's how I got into all of this. The fire was a big deal to me as a kid growing up in Temecula during some of the biggest Southern California fire years. I saw a lot of wildfire behavior in my childhood. When I transferred to UC Berkeley, I got involved in environmental science classes. They have a great, fiery ecology class at UC Berkeley. It’s taught by Dr. Scott Stephens. He impressed upon me that we have great science on how much good fire on the ground in California is needed. We don't have enough people implementing that. The actual activities on the ground do not match the science that we have, saying we need it and how we need it.

I took this one great class. It was a California trees identification class, and we traveled all over California to get outside and learn about ecosystems and trees. On one of those weekends, we went up to the Klamath, and I met Dr. Frank Blake up there, who's an indigenous leader and works for the Forest Service as an ologist. I got to sit with him around a campfire that weekend. He was telling me about how badly we need more prescribed fire on the ground and how we need to overcome the hurdles keeping us from doing it.

We badly need more prescribed fire around the ground, and we need to overcome the hurdles keeping us from doing it.

Between those, I knew that the education piece was important if I was going to make an impact, but those two lines of education telling me the implementation was where the gap was drove me to want to focus on that and figure out how I could contribute my career to getting more implementation on the ground.

In 2011 or 2012, I had the opportunity to go to Nebraska and burn with a nature conservancy in tall grass prairie. It was incredible. I had done one prescribed burn before and got out there. We're burning 1,200-acre tall grass prairie units with buffalo in the background and groundhogs. I had this awesome female mentor who took me under her wing for that two-week assignment and taught me all of the basics of the fire line. Her name was Emily Homan. It was such a cool experience getting to be out there. I swim in the river at the end of each day.

That sparked me on the implementation side. Before that, I knew that's what I wanted to try to do to make a difference, but I got that experience and was like, “This is amazing. I want to do this.” That was the first time I ever learned about what a burn boss was. I'll starry-eyed and young and new to it. I was like, “Someday, I want to be the burn boss so I can get more fire on the ground.” It started a whole path of researching what it would take to get there and working on it.

That led to your doctorate program.

The doctorate program was interesting. I had no plans. I've never been an academic type person. I did community college and transferred to UC Berkeley. I did that because I got in and I had a full-ride scholarship. I was like, “I have to do this.” Before I graduated as an undergrad, I worked in a lab in addition to working in restaurants. In the Scott Stephens lab, I’m trying to engage myself in fire. I was told that if I wanted to pursue it, I could do a PhD in the Scott Stephens lab and do it funded through research. It was another one of those moments where I was like, “I can't say no to that. Even though I don't feel like an academic person, I've got to at least try.”

I've been doing research in the lab. It seemed like I could transfer some of that research toward the PhD and have that leg up. I decided to do the PhD. For the whole time, I was excited to be getting through that challenge. PhD was hard. It took a lot of different types of skill-building around self-motivation to figure out how to learn how to code without taking classes in it and how to do statistical analysis when that wasn't something I had known how to do before.

The whole time, I kept asking Dr. Scott Stephens if I could spend the summer out on the hotshot crew instead. He was like, “No, you have to focus on your research and get through this PhD.” I was like, “I'm going to get through it. I hunkered down and did that while intermittently going out on prescribed fire assignments throughout. As soon as I graduated, I was like, “I need to get out on a crew.”

The fire ecology was one of your major passions. I want to pick your brain and get some insight into how important prescribed fire is. We're exclusive to the State of California. Up and down along the West Coast, it's a fire-adapted ecosystem. Fire is not the solution for every landscape. I'm not saying it's a silver bullet or magic wand, but we need to put more fire on the ground.

A lot of people are lost on this because when they see smoke, the general public thinks it's an emergency. However, you and I know being operational at one point in our lives while you're still operational, I'm not that we know that even if in the suppression context, putting fire on the ground to stop the main fire is one of the safest, most effective and ecologically beneficial ways to stop a fire. Why aren't we applying that in a preventative context? What are your thoughts on that?

Putting fire on the ground to stop the main fire is one of the safest, most effective, and most ecologically beneficial ways to stop a fire. So why aren't we applying that in a more preventative context?

We have to acknowledge the many millennia that indigenous peoples have been stewarding this landscape with fire. When colonizers first came to California, they were like, “This place is beautiful. It almost looks like a tended garden.” It's because it's true. It was being tended. California, the West Coast, a lot of the US, and a lot of the world where people have been for a long time is adapted to fire, particularly in Mediterranean environments.

Where I work in the North Bay Area, we have oak woodlands, redwoods, and coastal prairies, which are the three ecosystems that I focus my mind on, and they are frequently fire-adapted. We have chaparral, which is adapted to infrequent fire and more intense fire behavior. In terms of that frequent fire that requires people to apply it because it doesn't happen by nature, those three ecosystems need it. Across the West Coast, you get into forest service-held lands and mixed conifer forests. Those are adapted to mixed-severity to low severity fire with small patches of that higher severity, if any.

The fire assignments that I got to be on with Redding, and this is why I love going back out with them, are that they often end up on fire assignments where they're doing huge indirect firing operations. They're beautiful and effective. It's a dream come true for someone who does prescribe burning and wants to see prescribed burning reach a scale that would be beautifully effective for the way we live with fire. To go out with a crew in the middle of a wildfire event, do some beautiful burning operations, and have all of these resources available to us to burn thousands of acres well is a pretty remarkable thing, especially when it's being done in the middle of a wildfire season and wildfire event.

It's the most austere fire conditions you can imagine, and people would be successful without it.

It does not even move the forest, but it has beautiful fire effects even in those conditions. If we can do that under this emergency scenario, we should be able to do that outside of an emergency scenario. It's about how we're investing our resources.

What do you want to do? Do you want to try to get ahead of the curve and prevent a stand-replacing fire in a place that's not at its interval for a stand-replacing fire? Do you want to be like, “Strip and rip? It looks like we lost X amount of thousand acres.”

Those acres are meaningful to people. Our forest provides habitat and recreational value. They give us beautiful water that we can use. We're connected to the landscape, even if we think of ourselves as separate. You can't overstate the importance of stewarding these landscapes in a way that they provide all of those resources that we love about them. We get all that benefit and can live in harmony with the land around us.

As a human culture, we need to reframe our relationship with fire because looking into it and how deep indigenous burning goes is crucial and critically important for the health of ecosystems around the world. If you look into it, there is not a single continent besides Antarctica on the planet where indigenous cultures haven't burned previously.

I'm a big game hunter. I'm a fly fisherman. That's one thing. It tracks games. The next season, these burn on the edges of the burn scars, where this fresh forbes is, and all this rich, nutritious food for these animals is where you hunt. However, there's a difference between catastrophic wildfires and ecologically beneficial wildfires. The indigenous cultures were onto it, and we've some degree lost that, but it's making a comeback.

For every acre of fire that we suppress, we are possibly getting another 5 to 10 acres of catastrophic wildfire.

Those indigenous cultures are still around here. Many of those elders are still practicing and passing on that knowledge to the next generations. We have all of that many thousands of years of indigenous scientific knowledge. It is a science and process that they've spent thousands of years developing. We also have, in combination with Western science, some other verbal frameworks for how we communicate about these things.

We have the natural fire return interval and fire regimes. We have frameworks from Western science around how we talk about the specific ways in which individual ecosystems are adapted to fire. We can combine those in a lot of ways. We have robust knowledge about what types of fire each of these ecosystems need and on what frequency.

You almost start creating friendships with each of these landscapes, knowing what those friends are looking for and needing from us to steward them. In addition to that, we have knowledge about the way people live now and the way that life is going to look in the future. We can put all of that knowledge together to have a robust understanding of what's needed if we want to live in a harmonious and positive way with the world around us.

We need to have a robust understanding of what's needed if we want to live in a harmonious and positive way with the world around us.

Look at the scale and scope of this land management. You want to call it land management, stewardship, or whatever you want. If you look at the landscapes in the North American continent and all around the world, all these things need to be managed. We have a problem here in the US with the 10:00 AM policy where a bunch of foresters from the East Coast decide to write a prescription that says, “Suppress a fire by 10:00 AM the next day.” That's built up a bunch of fire debt. We've turned off nature's garbage disposal, and some of these lighting fires. Why are we putting them out? What's going on here? We're in this situation where we have these catastrophic mega-fires.

It's no surprise to me and to you, but how do we get into the position where we can scale this up and even democratize the use of fire in the appropriate context? There are going to be suppression times in the middle of August when it’s an East Wind event. It's a hundred and f my life out. We're going to have to put a fire out. I don't think suppression is going to go away, but if we can fight fire on our terms with more prescribed fire, we're going to be managing a lot more effective stewardship to the land.

There's that combination that we see when we look at the bigger picture now that we're going to need to be managing rather than suppressing as much as we can of the wildfires that we have. Looking at the perimeters and looking at, “We've got communities and houses. We're going to have to suppress this side, but over here, it's moving into wilderness. It's not directly impacting human populations. We're going to encourage this side to continue moving and use pre-designated locations where we will contain it.”

The more effectively and efficiently we can shift toward that approach, the better off we're all going to be. In addition to the piece of the way that we manage wildfires, it is going to be democratizing the use of fire and empowering people to work within communities to get good fire on the ground and steward the lands that they're responsible for.

It's that question that we always hear. How do you burn a million acres?

You train a million people to burn an acre.

It's easy. That's the democratization of fire. They had a good case study this year where there was a lightning fire. Within a prescribed fire unit, it was pretreated, punked around, and cleaned up the forest. It was a huge success. They got 1,500 acres of beneficial fire use or fire monitoring multiple management objectives. We should be doing more of that. Who was it that said? Was it you that said, “For every acre of fire that we suppress, we are getting another 5 to 10 acres of catastrophic wildfire?”

I didn't say that, but I believe it. I don't know who said that, but it makes sense to me. We're making progress on this. I went out on a field observer assignment on the Six Rivers lightning complex this past summer. The story from that should be sung from the mountaintops because it was beautiful. It’s like the stem sauce one you referenced.

These are reasonable weather conditions. It was a whole bunch of lightning strikes in strategic and valuable locations. It started many small fires that weren't negatively impacting folks and the teams that managed that work with the local communities. Will Harling was involved in this. They were doing indirect ignitions for more acres. It ended up being about 50,000 acres of good fire on the ground from that lightning complex because they decided only to suppress where it was going up against houses. Other than that, they encouraged it to burn in beautiful places in ways.

It’s the perfect mosaic pattern with a low-intensity burn.

Because of the way our structures are set up, not our homes, but the infrastructure around fire management, that's work that would not have been able to be done in their current setup in any other way. They needed that lightning wildfire context to get that good work done. Until we can flip the way we're managing this whole system, that's going to be the best way for us to reach significant improvements.

It's a double-edged sword because you have some of these areas, especially in the Western Sierra. Some of these forests haven't seen fire in so long that they're completely overstocked. They're deceased. It's the population concentration versus the virulence of a disease. It's the higher population density. The faster something is going to spread. Something detrimental is going to spread. How do you pretreat all these acres to prep them for burning? You need boots on the ground, tech, fire use, and natural fire starts. There's no silver bullet for it.

You need all of it. You need to make use of every opportunity you have when you have the right weather conditions, and you can get the resources, people, and equipment in place. You need to take advantage of that. Even these overstocked areas that are in poor health right now can be dealt with, or at least significantly improved, by fire as a first-century treatment if it's lit in the right way and in the right weather conditions and fuel conditions.

It's a narrower burn window. If it's way overstocked and there's way too much fuel on the ground, you're going to have a higher likelihood of it burning too hot during a lot of those burn windows, but there are burn windows where you can get that more mosaic pattern, even if it's overstocked in the first place.

You are doing it at the right treatment, place, and time.

You shouldn't be waiting for the burn window. You can get all of those resources working and getting those different treatments on the ground. In the meantime, it is going to take that all-hands approach. Let's get everyone working on this together. 

The Forest Service is trying to reach some ambitious targets with fuels, especially with the implementation of the designated landscapes project. That's 16 million acres in some of the most fire-prone areas across the West. That's ambitious.

It's exciting. It’s ambitious, but it's good. It's what we need.

There are a lot of administrative barriers to promoting the use of good fire. We have NIFA, community involvement, and politics. What are we going to do here about the population of Tahoe doing a massive prescribed fire in that burn window when everybody wants to go and ski? Do that springtime skiing. This is arbitrary, but how do you message it?

Before colonizers got to California, the low end of the estimate these days is agreed to be around four and a half million acres a year of fire on the ground in California.

That's low-end in California a lot.

Scott Stephens published a paper that came to that number. That might been in 2007 that came out or after that. There have been other papers since then that estimate the number to be even higher. Conservatively, it’s four and a half million acres a year. The only year we hit that in the last couple of decades was maybe 2020. The way in which those acres are burning is massively different because they’re overstocking things. We're getting way more high severity, large patches now.

The four and a half million acres a year before colonizers got here meant that the skies were smoky most of the summer. That's something that artificially people nowadays haven't been living with. We live with blue skies most of the year. We have these events where it's crazy, smoky. It’s smokier than it would've been pre-historically on most days.

If we're going to see a change in this, it's going to be a huge public messaging and public buy-in hurdle that we're going to have to cross because it's going to be a lot more consistent smoke. We can burn under those where the smoke lifts better and moves in a direction that we feel good about that doesn't impact or expose people as much as those wildfire events now. The smoke output is going to be a thing. We will be putting up smoke more frequently across the year with better outcomes and the way that that smoke lifts and moves, as well as the wildfires that people are getting now.

One thing I do want to look into is the East, specifically Florida, Carolinas, and all those areas where they're burning like crazy every year. It's no problem for them to light off 2,000, 2,500, and 5,000 acres in a day. People are cool with it. How do we implement that public perception over here on the West Coast?

Part of it is it never went away. They've been burning consistently for many generations. It's the norm. We did a good job of eliminating that here for quite a long time to everyone's detriment.

We have huge swaths of land. One of the places that I usually go to is Hat Creek. I usually do like a boy's trip. We are fly fishing. Coming up above Susanville, California, where the hog fire scar is. That was 2019 or 2020. To this day, that place is a deadscape. It is completely sterilized because that forest was overstocked.

They were doing some thinning logging, but it wasn't at the scale that was needed to prevent some catastrophic wildfire like the hog fire. It burns intensely on that plateau above Susanville. There's nothing growing. There are no invasives in the forest. The only thing that's growing is in the imported soil. That's the road base. The only thing that's growing is invasive species that have been carried by tires, mud, and trucks. Otherwise, it's dead.

It's not setting us up for a good future. I hear people use the narrative like, “Once a wildfire is burned through, it's like that reset buttons. You can do a lot of good stewardship from there.” In a lot of these places, that wildfire is not acting as a reset button. It is acting as a nuclear bomb. That is way harder to restore and come back to a place where there's resilience and ecosystem value in that location.

In a lot of places where wildfire is not acting as a reset button, it is acting as a nuclear bomb. That is then way harder to restore and come back to a place where there's resilience and ecosystem value in that location.

I'm constantly battling with that narrative because there are places where it is the case. It's a reset button, and now you can maintain it rather than having that difficult entry for a century to treat. In a lot of these places, it's the opposite of a reset button. If you miss that window before the wildfire comes, it's tough.

It's burnt intensely there. It's killed the mycelium layer and the microbiome in the soil. It's nuked everything. Everything is standing dead trees and a bunch of snags. It's a snag patch. Preventing that is going to be the key to the future, especially if we're going towards statistical data frequently spiking in intensity and sky size of wildfires. Why don't we try and change the environment and get ahead of the curve?

Making use of those opportunities where we can get that mosaic pattern with fire on the ground, whether that is a wildfire that's burning under conditions where it's not completely nuking out massive thousands of acres of areas and doing those prescribed burns when we're not getting those natural ignitions that we can then steward under good conditions and other tools. It's both of those things and more.

It is an ugly truth about fire ecology. I'm not a doctor like you. However, there is also a necessity for stand-replacing fire behavior, but it's infrequent. What are your thoughts on that?

In most ecosystems, that would be appropriate in small patches. You get other ecosystems that are adapted to that standard of placing fire. That's what they want and need. Knobcone pine grows around here. That's adapted to standard replacing fire. Those are all standard placing fire regime areas. The main thing for public education is to not build your house up against chaparral, knobcone pine, or bishop pine.

They're going to burn at some point. When they burn, they will burn with high severity fire, and that's what they need and stand-replacing fire. You don't want your house by it. Live in a place where that's not the way fire is adapted to move. In our other areas, high-severity fire is a part of ecosystems, but generally, in those other ecosystems, that's an adaptation for small pockets of that fire. We're creating little patches of openings. It's part of that mosaic structure and pattern.

A lot of people are confused about what standard replacing fire is, especially the public. They don't understand fire. It's important that organizations like Fire Forward have a huge education component to them. Can you talk about that?

I'm the Director of a program called Fire Forward that operates within the Nature Conservation Organization in Audubon Canyon Ranch. It has been around since 1962. They started protecting a piece of land from development along the Bolinas Stinson beach area of the coastline. They ended up acquiring other properties across Marin and Sonoma Counties.

I joined Audubon Canyon Ranch in 2015. I was still finishing my PhD. I was hired for the express purpose of trying to get prescribed fire on the ground in their own preserves. We’re having a hard time of it. They hired me specifically with the intent of having me plan a prescribed burn on one of their preserves in the Sonoma Valley.

I was starry-eyed. I was like, “I can do this. I've been burning for a while now. I know what it takes to do it. I can make this happen.” I took the job. That was October 2015. I immediately started trying to get a prescribed burn planned in May of 2017. We finally got a burn on the ground. For anyone who works in fire, this is going to sound insane, but we were trying to do 21 acres of grass burning with dirt roads all around it in the Sonoma Valley.

It’s a perfect box. It seems like your control lines have already been put in.

There are some oaks in the grass units. The oaks still have green grass underneath them. This is after a year and a half of planning more. We ended up with 75 firefighters on scene, thirteen engines, two dozers, and a helicopter on standby to burn 21 acres of grass that had dirt road surrounding it. It was heavy-handed.

We had brought in Ben Jacobs, who's this type one burn boss from the National Park Service, to be the burn boss. He got removed from the burn boss position by local and state firefighters and was turned into not even a firing boss, but he helped run ignitions. There were misunderstandings, a lack of trust, and no infrastructure for this to happen.

I talked with the director of Audubon Canyon Ranch. This is a much bigger need. This isn't about getting a prescribed burn done on one of our preserves. This is about creating capacity for doing prescribed burning as stewardship work because these landscapes need it. It's almost impossible to get it done on private lands now. We don't have all of that training, knowledge, and background that the feds have that allows even the possibility of prescribed burning, whether or not they're getting acres. The number of acres done this new is another question.

What is the target there?

We decided to set out to launch Fire Forward. That was with the intent of it being a more broad prescribed fire capacity building program. Fire Forward has been dedicated to an approach of seeing what the hurdles are and trying to knock down those hurdles. Progressively, as we knock down one hurdle, there's always another one. We keep identifying what those are and trying to model what could be done better and how we might be able to continue making progress and change.

As we knock down one hurdle, there's always another one. We need to keep identifying what those are and try to model what could be done better and how we might be able to continue making progress and change.

We started by building an equipment and gear cache. Relying on the local fire departments was not going to be a solution because they needed all of that gear and equipment in case they got a call. It’s reasonable. We built up all the gear, equipment, and cash. We realized we were burning the Sonoma Valley in the bougie area. There are lots of fancy homes, vineyards, raceways, telephones, and power poles. Every burn almost leans toward a Type 1 burn in some way. It's through mitigations that we can bring things down to lower complexity. We do a lot of mitigation.

We started training volunteers through the Federal qualification system. We started offering basic S-130 and S-190 for basic weld and firefighter training. We teach S-212, the chainsaw class. We teach pumps and water use. We teach leadership classes, L-280 and S-131. At this point, we've trained up to around 400 people in this community, who've dedicated years now to volunteering their time on prescribed burns and taking these classes. They have all of the formal skills and training that they need to do this work well.

We've done thousands of acres of burning now, and 320 or 400 ish people that we've trained come out to our burns on a regular basis. From there, we developed all of these other programs because we kept seeing other hurdles. We developed a fellowship program for folks who work in ecology and land management for other agencies and organizations. Their agencies or organizations send them to us for about 300 hours a year to get those courses and more hands-on training on how to plan and implement a prescribed burn.

We're trying to train them up through the capacity of the California State Certified Burn Boss curriculum, which is a way lower bar than RXB2, but California supports it and likes that as a way of getting more people officially certified to implement burns. With that comes some backing from the state regarding protections regarding liability and claims fund access.

We have that fellowship program. We launched an apprenticeship program. That's five full-time, eleven-month term position folks that work on our team as a prescribed fire practitioner or apprentice squad. They're brand new when they come in. They usually have S-130 and S-290, and that's about it. If they've been on 1 or 2 burns, they know they love it, but they haven't had access otherwise. We're paying them for eleven months to do the work and learn as much as they possibly can.

That's not just learning about firefighting or fire implementation, but it's also learning about ecology, doing botanical surveys, how to do monitoring, and how to make sure they're doing this work in a way that is genuinely stewardship. Prescribed fire as stewardship. That's been effective and incredibly fun. Awesome folks are coming into that program. They're getting cool jobs after that.

That was exciting, but we saw there was still a challenge. If you hire someone for one year and give them all these skills and California is still building the infrastructure for what this workforce looks like, we need to have career-track positions for people to stick around. We're standing up a twelve-person prescribed fire module that works full-time year-round. That's going to be two squads, the apprentice squad and the practitioner squad, which are folks with more experience who are still at firefighter two levels, but they operate smoothly, and they've been doing it for a while. We've got two squad leaders and a crew module lead.

I'm excited for them to start because that's where we start seeing a demonstration of true career pathways for people who are coming in from entry-level. They have more experience. They're leading at some level or leading at a higher level. People can move into planning positions over time or leading programs. If we can model what that infrastructure would look like to dedicate resources, time, and energy to the prescribed fire career track, we could start seeing real change at the pace and scale that we want.

You're democratizing fire. How do you burn a million acres? You're doing it.

We still have that volunteer base, that 400 people that we train that come out on burns, but we're also creating paid positions. For folks who can't volunteer their weekends or vacation days to come out on burns, we have ways for people to do this in a paid and equitable way. There are multiple ways for people to engage at different points in their careers or lives.

Across multiple NGOs in Northern California, we're setting up an all-hands, all-lands agreement where we can share those resources across the nonprofits, even from nonprofits to Federal lands. If we can build that out, that's starting to demonstrate infrastructure because it's similar to wildfire. If there's a wildfire here, we're sending firefighters from all over the place to support it. In this case, we're saying, “During the different prescribed fire windows that we have in Northern California, we're sending fire practitioners across Northern California to support those burns and make sure they can happen.”

Look at the meteoric rise in Prescribed Burn Associations in California. Some of these folks who come through and train at your property on Audubon Canyon Ranch can go onto these PBAs and continue their education. You're on a track to amplify the workforce because you and I were ever at the Red Sky Summit in Oakland, Alameda.

I appreciate what you said during one of your discussions because what it boils down to is, at the end of the day, this is not glorious, sexy work. It's hands-on, tactile, and dirty. It requires boots on the ground. If we don't have those boots on the ground, all this tech, fancy stuff, and suppression budget, our costs are going to go up. We need boots on the ground, or else all this stuff will be worthless. I want to give you a shout-out there. What you said in front of all those people was impressive.

It's key because not only does this work take people on the ground, but it's human work. It’s that connection to the landscape that helps people understand where they fit in the world around them and gives them a sense of place. Through all of that, we're doing education in a bigger picture around the way we want to live with fire. The more people we can engage in that conversation and in a visceral, hands-on way, the more effective we're going to be at creating change in the way we live with fire.

That's part of it. Not only do you reach a million acres by teaching a million acres to burn or a million people to burn, but you have a million people who are constituents of culture and believe in the need for that million makers to burn, and all of the people that they know who they influence toward that. If we exclude people from the solution, we're never going to be able to implement the solution even if we have the tech to do it because the public is not going to be bought in. If we include people in their own agency to make a positive difference, engage in the world around them, steward these landscapes, and connect to nature and community at the same time, we can see culture change in addition to getting the work done.

If we include people in their own agency to make a positive difference, engage in the world around them, steward these landscapes, and connect to nature and community at the same time, we can actually see culture change in addition to getting the work done.

It's the original viral marketing context. If people are going to word of mouth and tell each other, “This is an amazing thing, and this is why,” they're going to have more of an interest in it to get involved. They're going to get involved. They're going to tell their friends. Prescribed fire is an art form. You're like Bob Ross, teaching these people how to do this stuff in a safe manner. It's cool to see that evolution.

We've been following each other for several years now. It's cool to see “Bob Ross's Journey” because prescribed fire is an art form. That's something that I have never gotten into with my career path. I was always focused on suppression. If I could go back and do it again, I'd split it 50/50 between fuels and fire management and suppression. Getting ahead of the curve and painting that landscape with a drip torch as your paintbrush is the best way to do it in a lot of areas specific to ecology that's required there.

That is easily the most flattering analogy I've ever received for what I do. I am going to hold onto that little nugget forever as if I were like Bob Ross. It is amazing. I like that analogy because it's not that Bob Ross is like a Vincent van Gogh of art. The whole idea here is anyone can do this. It's an accessible art form. If you come out, join the community, and spend time watching, learning, and participating, it's intuitive for people. It's part of what we are as the human race. It should be accessible, like free television, for people to engage in.

It's crucial because not only does that change the narrative and public perception of prescribed fire and fire use and when it's appropriate to suppress a fire, but it also empowers people. That's a big thing. If you empower that million people to burn one acre safely in the right place and time, that has cascading effects across the country. I guarantee you that amoeba is going to spread eventually.

I’ll bring it back to the Bob Ross thing. He might not have been the Van Gogh or insert stellar artist here, but he was relatable. He was the common person. If he can do it, I can do it. It’s the same thing with you. If you can teach these people, if she can do it, you're real. It's visceral. It's hands-on. You're no BS. If they realize that they have that connection with you and you can do it, even though you're far advanced in your career, you have a lot of relatability to empower people to do what you can do. That’s the way I see it.

It's the way it should be because it is intuitive to people. We need to empower people with that accessibility and help them see that it's not some mystical thing. There's art and science in it, but if you pay attention and dedicate your time, energy, and resources to it, you can do it. We learn intuitively about the landscape when we're doing that work.

We learn very intuitively from the landscape when we're doing that work.

We borrow a lot from all of that Federal suppression paramilitary infrastructure that goes into suppression. We pivot it toward community building. We use the chain of command, but for us, it's that chain of accountability. We're making sure we're keeping accountability for our people, knowing where people are, and that everyone is staying safe.

We're using trainees and trainers. We can pass on knowledge to folks who are newer. We try to bring out the voices of the folks who are newer. We get their new perspective on what they're seeing and learning. There's so much value in all of the knowledge that comes from all the different backgrounds that exist and blending them together. People get the most robust experience they can when they learn these tools.

It's a culture change. The crash course into fire culture is not for everybody. If you can make it easily digestible so that it's not hardcore and rigid but within the bounds of normal operating procedures, that even makes it more relatable and comfortable for the people who are learning how to do this.

I'm a stickler for the way we communicate on the radio. I was brought up in this field and mentored by someone who's communications dialed. I've carried that forward into the way I work and teach. I'm a stickler for the way we use the radio, but it's for a reason. There's good reason. Communications are always important. It's not loosey-goosey and no rules, but it's clearly understanding and explaining why we do certain things the way we do them and the way in which that creates a safe working and learning environment for everyone and allows us to be successful in this work and pass on knowledge.

What about the continuing mentorship? A lot of your program has a lot of continuing ed and mentorship. You've mentored me. I'm sure you've mentored thousands of other people out there, but how does that mentorship, especially when it comes to like the women in fire? A lot of folks will look up to you and look at what you've accomplished. A lot of people want to be chasing, not necessarily your coattails, but want to be like you. They're inspired by you. Let's talk about that a little bit.

I don't see myself as a great leader, mentor, or educator, but I love community. If and when I can share something that helps empower someone else, I like to do that. Our fellowship program has been a cool key way that I've seen opportunities for mentorship because those folks signed a document saying they were dedicating 300 hours in a year to focusing on this work. That's the start. Three hundred hours in one year is enough to dip your toes in this art form.

What we're doing right now is a Fellowship 2.0. We had two cohorts of around fifteen people who had learned those basics and had been dedicated all that time. All of those 30-ish people are continuing that education with us in a fellowship 2.0. They're coordinating some workshops. In exchange, we're continuing to mentor them on how to write a burn plan, how to do a site visit and see whether a prescribed burn is possible, how to do these assessments, and how to implement them on the ground and be a good leader.

It's cool to see people change and grow over the years. That's something that has become one of the most rewarding parts of my job. I see people come in initially, and they're struggling. I was like, “I hope they can get through this hurdle.” A couple of years later, I'm watching them give a briefing at a prescribed burn. They planned and crushed it. They're reaching out to me for little tidbits here and there.

Over the course of a couple of years, I see that incredible transformation. It's inspiring. I'm constantly growing and learning for myself, like how to continue improving my mentorship of others and trying to make that as accessible to as diverse an audience as possible. A big thing is how we make sure we're not cutting people out by accident in the way that we set things up from the beginning.

It’s something you weren't aware of previously.

Growing awareness of like, “Does the way that we set up this Google form make it harder for some people to get involved than others?” Simple things like that can have consequences. I find myself trying to zoom out and pay attention to those little things that create inequities in the way that people can get involved and trying to identify how we can knock down those hurdles and barriers.

Pay attention to those little things that create inequities in the way that people can get involved or not, and try to identify how we can knock down those hurdles and barriers.

I never thought that I would be someone whom anyone would call a mentor or a leader. It's been like this accidental thing that's come with my passion for this field, sharing it and helping others get access. In my career, I'm finally getting to the point where I'm like, “I need to put some intention behind how I do this so that I make it as positive a part of my career as possible for others.

How many acres do you guys manage over at the Audubon Canyon?

We have about 5,000 acres across three big preserves. There's one that we've been doing incredible work at, which is the Martin Griffin Preserve out on the Bolinas Stinson beach area of coastline. That's 1,000 acres. It has three canyons and a series of ridge lines between the canyons. It's got a bunch of beautiful old coastal prairie that still exists but almost completely blinked out over the last several years. In the ‘80s, we had over 200 acres of coastal prairie on that property. Several years ago, we were down to sixteen acres of coastal prairie or maybe even less.

It’s disappearing because of the removal of fire and large herbivore grazing. It was covered in coyote brush, which is a native species. We also want coastal prairie. We don't want everything to be coyote brush. After the coyote brush came in, we got Douglas-firs encroaching and growing up in there fast. It's become an incredible training ground for our team to learn about stewardship in this long-term, intensive way. We can restore that coastal prairie structure.

Coastal prairie is the most diverse grassland habitat in North America. There's less than 5% of it left. That's largely due to development but also to fire suppression.

Indigenous peoples, for thousands of years, have been stewarding these coastal prairies because they are key grazing areas that attract deer and elk to them. They have different bird species in their habitat. They're remarkable areas. With our crew and this core team that's been in Fire Forward for several years now, we go out there year-round doing stewardship work. We've got redwoods out there. We do redwood burning in the winter. We're burning of coyote brush in Douglas-firs. We can bring that coastal prairie back. Year-round, we're out there doing good work, and it is such a nice training ground.

We love bringing folks out from the community to join us whenever we go out there. There have been some cool projects where we know we're standing in what used to be coastal prairie. We did a crazy hot prescribed burn in 2019 of a badly Douglas-fir encroached area of ten acres. It’s heat on all those Douglas-firs. We torched a lot of them out in 2019. It's almost entirely coastal prairie, or at least half of the area, which is a robust, beautiful coastal prairie in that ten acres.

We've been teaching S-212 classes out there since 2019. You can see the whole of Bolinas Lagoon and the Pacific Ocean. You can see the Pharaon Islands. When I started working out there, it was like the Blair Witch Project. You couldn't get through the trees. It was terrifying. It could be a sunny day, and it would be pitch black in the understory of the Douglas-firs. It is gross.

It’s cool to have access to properties that we can work at for a long time over the years and to create access to a place like that for other people interested in doing stewardship work and reconnecting people with land in that way. We burn all over many different ownerships across the region. We burn on tons of folks' private land and bring the community out to those properties to do that. Nowadays, we also support burning regional parks, properties, and state parks properties in Sonoma Land Trust, various land trusts, other agencies, and NGOs.

You rolled in that twenty on the diversity of landscapes and what you're doing over there because you have the diversity of landscape and different subtly different ecosystems to train folks on. That's critical because if you're relegated to one space or one ecosystem like oak savanna prairie, that's all you know. If you get into the timber, it's going to change. You have to develop those slides. It's cool that you have the ability to train, educate, and put in meaningful stewardship work on a diverse amount of landscapes.

We had talked about the complexity of burning out here, given all the infrastructure of houses, highways, power pools, fences, and vineyards. There's the complexity of the actual landscape itself. We have few places that even have 30 acres of one contiguous fuel type. It's nonhomogenous. The terrain is complex. The habitats or ecosystems that grow on those different terrains are as complex as the land itself. It's this huge benefit to where we're working and a huge challenge because we have to quickly learn or develop some artistic and scientific expertise in burning many different fuel types and in different situations.

The habitats or ecosystems that grow on those different terrains are just as complex as the land itself.

Redwood Forest from Sonoma to the Marin Coast has two entirely different fuel types. The redwoods exist and grow differently across those areas. It's wildly complex and hugely valuable. It's still a drop in the bucket. We help our nature conservancy partners burn in Idaho, New Mexico, or North Carolina, and it's different. We go up and help burn the Klamath, and it's different again. It's wildly diverse here with the landscapes we're working in. We're constantly still being exposed to other places that are different from anything here.

Another thing that's cool about the diversity and the amount of land that you have is your unique ability to try new things. You can implement different strategies for shaded fuel breaks, some tech, and different patterns of burning. You have the ability in this controlled setting to have a test bed to see what works best for ecological benefit.

A huge part of our program is experimenting. There hasn't been a lot of prescribed burning around this region for quite a while since colonization. There's been so much to change with the absence of stewardship. We're constantly experimenting and learning from what we're doing, trying new things, and doing things better, which is fun.

I have such an incredible team. The community here is remarkable in that we can talk about those things openly and learn every time about what we can do better and keep adjusting and improving. Hopefully, we can share those lessons learned as we get more finesse around all of this. I'm stoked because we got to the point where we have capacity in our team to do the science that we've been wanting to do on the work that we're doing. We can then share robust results around what works and what doesn't.

Another thing is the mentorship, stewardship, and development of these programs. It extends far fast. You're traveling nationally to put fire on the ground in the best places or where it's needed. Not only them, but you're also working with policymakers and private industries like Mystery Ranch. You're helping develop some of their tools or some of their packs.

Down the street, you got the tech industry, which is crazy. I've got my opinions on that. I'm in tech. You have this ability to do all of this stuff. That's unique. What inspired you to continue to do that, especially with policy? You're changing some of the game in California. You're helping direct some of those projects and infrastructure behind the California Burn Boss program.

It's a huge perk. What has kept me in the nonprofit space is that we have the flexibility to engage in candid ways in the various aspects of this work that we see need an impact and change. Rather than being stuck behind a bunch of red tape, we can be nimble, move, and address the challenges that we're seeing. That's been huge.

Being close to the tech space here in the North Bay has been cool for being able to find opportunities for partnership. That's been hugely valuable. 2020 was the first time Simon came out with an Ignis drone and did some aerial ignitions for us on one of our burns. That was cool being like, “This opens up many areas that we thought we would never be able to burn around here.” It was too steep. We wouldn't be able to send people reasonably down to that crazy canyon, but maybe we could if we had that Ignes set up. It opens up ideas and possibilities.

Being in that nonprofit space myself and with my other nonprofit partners from other NGOs across Northern California and the US, we have the flexibility to go to Sacramento, be on a cadre, and talk about what is needed to affect meaningful change in the state. We work together with policymakers on those problems. That has been fulfilling work.

It's frustrating work, but it's fulfilling because there are other people in the room who are living and breathing this same dream. I get to go. It's never me in the room with those policy policymakers and policy change opportunities. It's me and a whole bunch of my friends I've known for the past decade who have dedicated their lives to this and have mentored me for many years. That creates inspiration even in moments of frustration.

We keep running into each other at all these events. We ran into each other at Red Sky and the Climate and Wildfire Institute annual meetings. It's cool because both of us were passionate about trying to get ahead of the curve, do what's right for the ecosystems, and try and get ahead of this problem with catastrophic wildfire.

It goes to prove that even though we are wildly different in background, we're still coming together for the same common goal. That's important because all these people at Red Sky, CWI, or anybody who's involved with the wildfire NGO or private industry have a mutual goal. All of us coming together is important to share this knowledge and get it out there into the world.

That comes back to that community piece. It's going to take everyone working together for us to see an effect change. I'm happy to see that connectivity is being emphasized more across all of us. We can continue to make progress, be aligned, and keep identifying who is not in the room and how we get them into the room. We're not leaving anyone behind along the way.

Networking in the fire industry is important for the longevity of your career because you never know where those people are going to end up. It's even beyond that because what I've come to find out, and you were actively building this, is it’s not necessarily networking. It's micro. You're talking about macro. That's the community-building part.

We're not connected, but you know my name, and I know your name. Someday, we might be able to help each other, whereas that community building piece is we know each other and we care about each other's wellbeing. We're all in this together to see what we can do to make a better future as collaborators and partners.

Even if people are at different places in their careers or come from very different backgrounds, everyone has something to contribute. It's not one-directional like I'm networking with you because someday you might be able to help me. We are all bringing something to the table. Every person has a meaningful voice to bring to the table to help us affect change as a community, and as a whole, all of us together get to a better future. It’s such a cool way to be. I see it happening more all the time. We're headed in a good direction.

Changing the narrative behind fire and reconnecting our relationship because humanity is inexorably connected with fire. We wouldn't have grown into the species and the human race as we are now without the harnessing of fire.

The connectivity thing is well rooted in this suppression community. All those people are your brothers and sisters on the fire line. You're in it together. This is taking that same concept to a more macro scale. We are all brothers, sisters, and family. Everyone has something to contribute. We're going to get there together.

The storytelling process is going to be one of those pivotal things. You were a highlight of Mystery Ranch. They did the Fire Poppy short story. That was cool. Let's talk about that because I watched it. How did that whole thing come about because that was cool?

One of our community members here in Sonoma. I call him my fire twin because Sashwa and Sasha are similar names. Somehow, we have the same nickname, squish. I don't know how that happened. He's been burning with us for years now. He lives on a property in rural Sonoma County, where we've been burning redwood in the winter with the community in the mellow times of the year. He's a professional videographer and photographer. He called me one day. He was like, “It'd be cool to pitch to Mystery Ranch that we do a mini docuseries on you.” I was like, “It sounds cool. All of your photos and videos are beautiful. There would be no one else I would want to trust with that than you.” Mystery Ranch liked and supported it.

The main thing to me was having the opportunity to capture the community and the work that we do and how rich and beautiful that experience of doing this work in the community together is. You did a great job of capturing that, especially at the end of the last video, where you flashed through different people's smiling faces.

Those are family to me. Every time I get to see their smiling faces on the camera, I get stoked. If a few people watch that and decide they want to come out and meet my family and get to know this work a little bit, try out holding a drip torch, even though they might not have seen themselves as someone who would ever touch a tool or steward land outdoors out, that would be amazing to me. Even the capturing of some of that community made me happy.

I hope that a lot more people see that. That way, they can hit you up. You can continue to democratize fire use and stewardship.

Thanks. It was cool that that happened. I'm grateful to Mystery Ranch for supporting the film's making. It's neat.

It goes to show you that community thing. Luke is the Fire Program Manager of Mystery Ranch. He's also the President of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. For those who are reading this, I hope they know what Grassroots Wildland Firefighters are. It goes to show you that community building and the interconnectedness of all the fire practitioners, whether it's on the suppression side, the prescribed fire, vegetation management, or stewardship side, we all have that mutual common goal. It's amazing how small that world is.

It's a small world. It is well-connected. What I hope is that it keeps growing, getting bigger, and staying as connected as it is. That's where the juice is. Finding that middle ground of bringing in as many of the folks as possible but keeping that same level of connectivity and closeness. That is going to be a fun adventure as we move forward.

Another cool thing is, with that community, I don't see hardly any division. Have you seen that? Have you noticed that?

It's tight. What's cool is that it brings in folks from many different backgrounds. You might have never expected people to get along if you read about who they are on paper. We could all get along well in that environment. There's a lot of acceptance across boundaries. That gives me a lot of hope for the future in a bigger way, where we're living in this world that feels divisive. We see the community transacting that in this space.

What do you see as one of the biggest potential issues that we're going to be seeing with this use of fire and workforce? What are some issues you see, and how do we redirect our attention and efforts to get around these or plow through the red tape to make this more effective? Do land stewardship at scale?

The insurance piece is going to continue to be a big challenge. That's insurance on multiple fronts. Ensuring people to do prescribed burning is a huge challenge.

It's a risky business.

We need to flip that whole thing on its head. The liability structure around it and the insurance needs to be flipped around. You're liable for not getting this good work done. It's easy to get insurance to do the work because that's doing the right thing in terms of managing your liability. It's about making sure you're following some of the best management practices relative to the work that you're doing. It's hard to get any insurance at all.

Operating safely within the boundaries of what your professional scope is.

If you're a private landowner and you're putting a little bit of fire on the ground in the middle of the rainy season in redwoods, you shouldn't need some massive amount of insurance. The risk there is low. You're operating within your scope of training, knowledge, and practice. The insurance thing needs to be completely flipped and made way more accessible for people who are trying to get this good work done. The number of dollars you put towards suppression is incredible. I would love to see a lot of that going toward managing wildfires.

I'm not advocating that we spend less on that, but maybe we should shift the way we're using that money on wildfires toward managing where we can and suppressing where we can't manage. We're also going to need to put a lot of money toward the prescribed fire stewardship piece and build the infrastructure so that it works at scale.

The nonprofit space is always going to be an important part of it because the community is important in stewardship. The set of skills is somewhat different from the skills involved in suppression if you're talking about stewardship and tending land and community. We're also going to need to see some agency shift in the way that we're allocating funds.

Community is so important in stewardship.

It's always baffled me that there's always an infinity symbol next to suppression costs, like suppression budget. Why are we spending that much money on suppression costs when we could save all that money if we were to try and use fire, manage the land, or do stewardship and try and get ahead of the curve?

This is a huge scale problem because there are 640 million acres of federal land with a direct fire protection authority from the Federal government. That does not include state, private, and county. It's going to take all hands, all lands, but we also have to invest in the future because what's the true cost of catastrophic wildfire?

It's not suppression costs or aviation assets dumping retardant on stuff. It's insurance rates going up. It's the mudslides, landslides, and burned area restoration teams. It's all of that stuff combined. That's the true cost. If we put a fifth of that infinity symbol into prescribed fire in land management, we save money in the future. It's the pass-on benefit and the add-on value for Joe Public, the taxpayer, and the communities that are the most at risk, which is going to be astronomical in savings.

We're going to need to see some shift there. There's the whole challenge of maintaining or reaching needed staffing in suppression. I don't know the agency side of all of this. I mostly work in the private and local agency space. On the federal side of this, what does it take to build the workforce to do prescribed fire in a meaningful way without taxing the same workforce that's already maxed out on suppression and/or overtaxing that group?

There's going to have to be some creativity and opportunity there in the all-hands-all-lands work, like the other NGOs that are focused on this or do. We can bring the community-trained folks that we have, the resources, personnel, and equipment that we have to support burning on federal lands to help fill that gap. These are folks who are not dedicating their entire summers to suppression assignments and have a lot of heart attachment to the federally held land that needs some stewardship. That can be a lot of people's back doors that they care about stewarding.

I'm going to say this for as long as I have breath in my lungs. Our spending priorities are not in the right areas. If I can go back and do my career all over again, for every dollar of prevention, which fuel management burning, that's still prevention at the end of the day. I can't even imagine how much money that's going to save you in the long run.

The federal side of things is working to shift this. It's a big vote to turn around. It's going to take time. The NGOs can be more nimble, jump on it in the meantime, and do some modeling and demonstration of what that may look like. It's going to take a little more time on the federal side, but it's happening. That's amazing.

Slowly but surely, bureaucracies don't turn on a dime. We need everybody like, “Force your eyes open to watch the writing on the wall.

Let's keep moving, getting some good things done, and building that community, infrastructure, and model while that boat slowly turns itself.

We can have parallel efforts. It's not rocket science. If we look at our ancestral past, they've been doing it for how many years.

It’s since the last ice age on the West Coast.

Let's get back to our roots and start making a meaningful difference. As far as you and the future and what that holds, what are we looking at? Where do you want to take Fire Forward? Where do you want to take Audubon Canyon Ranch? Where do you want to take Sasha Berleman? Where do you want to go? What does the future look like for you?

I've never been ambitious for my career other than where I see I can serve this need. I'm going to continue to watch what the needs are and try to serve those needs. For now, I am stoked to have that twelve-person, or the prescribed fire module, standing up and providing this demonstration of what those career tracks look like on the ground.

The people that are filling these positions are cool. I have the most amazing team and community here. I’m continuing to dive in on all of that. With that all hands, all lands sharing of resources across regions, that's a whole new level unlocked. We're creating a community building that shares culture and resources across these different landscapes, NGOs, and cultures. I'm excited to see where all of that goes.

There's even some conversation about trying to start building out an equivalent of almost like a P-code, like a shared resource pool of funding for these resources to go from area to area to support each other's prescribed burns year round. It's a dream come true. We're seeing meaningful change. We're seeing it being done in this heart-led, bold, beautiful way. I'm focusing on watching all that and seeing where we can continue to grow and shift to make that more beautiful.

It's a recipe for success because look at how much success you've had so far. It's an effective program.

It's working out, and it's been fun.

As for getting involved with Audubon Canyon Ranch and Fire Forward in the fellowship program, how do we go about contacting you and trying to get into that program for everybody who's reading?

Folks can follow us @Fire.Forward on Instagram. We have a webpage. FireForward.org is the shortest URL I can say out loud for how to get to our webpage. They can also follow Audubon Canyon Ranch. That's the org that we sit within. If they want some bigger news about what Audubon Canyon Ranch is doing, the organization put out a beautiful five-year strategic plan for the way that we operate, and Fire is forward and central to that, which is cool.

We work with the local prescriber and association called the Good Fire Alliance. Folks live in the Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino area, and anywhere in this general region, and they want to come out and burn with us in the community. That's a great way to find out whenever things are happening. They can join the Good Fire Alliance listers, which they can find through our website.

If folks have fire experience and backgrounds and want to bring their qualifications and skills to prescribe burns and help diversify the backgrounds that this community has access to, we love getting folks who have fire backgrounds out on our prescribed burns and integrated with the community. They should email me or reach out to me directly. They can follow me at @TheFirePoppy on Instagram and reach out to me with a direct message.

I hope everybody who's reading this has some good, tasty tidbits on how to perpetuate actual stewardship because we desperately need it. If you're interested, hit up Sasha here for the Fire Forward or the Fellowship or Audubon Canyon Ranch because you're going to be growing, especially if everything goes the way it's been going. It's only going to expand that program.

People should follow us if they're interested. We get a lot of folks who have done suppression, and they're like, “I'm ready to settle down and be around more, but I don't want to lose everything that I've done in fire.” That's awesome. We love having that in the community. We'll continue growing. We've grown fast. I'm hoping we chill for a minute. I'm sure we'll keep growing.

It comes with the territory. If it's effective, it's going to keep growing.

It's how it goes.

Coming to the end of the show, I always give you the opportunity to give some shout-outs to some homies, heroes, and mentors. Who do you get for us?

Emily Homan was the first real mentor on the fire line that I had and she was amazing. She made me feel included and welcome. Jeremy Bailey from the Nature Conservancy has mentored me from day one all the way through in my prescribed fire community building endeavors. Dan Mallia, the Superintendent of the Redding Interagency Hotshot Crew, is a great mentor. Frank Lake is in the Klamath, and Will Harling is up there. Margo Robbins from the Cultural Fire Management Council is incredible. The list continues. I've had many incredible mentors. What drives me in my career is trying to pass that forward because it's the way that this works.

You have to pay it forward and continue. It's our job as fire practitioners and fire suppression folks. Our job is to build upon the foundation that was laid before us and keep building that structure. Keep passing on those lessons and making them better for the future. Sasha, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing about Fire Forward and Audubon Canyon Ranch and the personal and professional developments that you have going on. I appreciate you being on the show. I'll see you again here at some of these conferences.

Our job at the end of the day is to build upon the foundation that was laid for us and keep building that structure, passing on those lessons, and making it better for the future.

Thanks so much for having me, Brandon. It's good to see you.

Everybody, thank you so much for reading, and Sasha, we'll get you on the show again.

Talk to you soon.

---

Another episode of the show is in the books with my good friend Dr. Sasha Berleman. Sasha, thank you so much for coming to the show and sharing your story and professional insight. Keep doing what you're doing. It's a cool gig that you have going on over there, over at Egret, at the Audubon Canyon Ranch.

If you want to find out more or follow Sasha there, go and follow her on the old IG, @TheFirePoppy. Check out her stories on Mystery Ranch. She's done a bunch of stuff. They've even highlighted her as one of her stories. If you want to check out the Audubon Canyon Ranch, go over to www.Egret.org to find out more. Sasha, thank you so much for coming on the show. Keep preaching the good word of the Good Fire Movement. I appreciate it.

As for the rest of you, I hope everybody's doing well. Go to the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters page and the NFFI pages on socials or their websites and help support the cause. It's only going to be better for you. For private contractors out there, don't worry. You're making a lot more money than the GS4s and 5s on the ground. However, a rising tide raises all ships. I'm sure you'll get some benefit out of it.

Special shout-out to our sponsors. We've got Mystery Ranch purveyors of the finest dam packs in the fire game. Go to www.MysteryRanch.com and check out their Backbone Series Scholarships. We've got Hotshit Brewing. It’s a kickass coffee for a kickass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. Go over there and check it out for all of your good morning needs.

Last but not least, we have Bethany Hannah over there at the America Wildfire Experience. Go over to www.WildFire-Experience.org to check it out. While you're at it, check out the Smokey Generation, where you have another opportunity to pursue your passions and get some grant dollars on the table. For as the rescue you, you all know the drill. Stay safe, stay savage. Peace.

Important Links

• Mystery Ranch

• Hotshot Brewing

• The American Wildfire Experience

• We Move Mountains with Spoons

• www.GrassrootsWildlandFirefighters.com

• www.NFFE.org

• Dr. Sasha Berleman

• Fire Forward

• @Fire.Forward

• Good Fire Alliance

• @TheFirePoppy

• www.Egret.org

• www.Facebook.com/TheFirePoppy

• www.MysteryRanch.com/ambassadors/Sasha-Berleman

About Dr. Sasha Berleman

Fire Forward Director Sasha Berleman is working to lead a change in the way we live with fire in the Bay Area. With her team, Sasha plans and leads cooperative, controlled burns and trains emerging leaders in prescribed fire management. Sasha earned her doctorate in wildland fire science from University of California at Berkeley focusing on prescribed fire use for restoration of ecosystem health. She is a Prescribed Fire Burn Boss and a Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) coach and leader. Sasha is a board member of American Wildfire Experience.