As I’m recording this in mid-April, we are coming out of the one of the warmest and driest winters on record in the Pacific northwest, and snowpack is at catastrophically low levels.

Add in the Trump administration’s intentional sabotage and decimation of FEMA, the Forest Service, NOAA, and other federal agencies, and it is hard not to think that we are in for an unprecedented fire season.

Aside from the threat of homes and communities burning, and smoke potentially blanketing vast swaths of the country for months, we in the conservation and climate communities need to prepare for all out propaganda blitz from the timber industry and their allied politicians as they use people’s fear to open up public lands for industrial extraction.

Wildfire is a fact of nature, and we do have to learn again to coexist with it.  But far too often environmentalists focus only on the science, ignoring or downplaying the lived experience and real fears the general public has.

It’s not enough to be right.  We need to be more strategic about the stories we tell and what we focus on.  And that is what today’s show is all about.

The Pacific Northwest Forest Climate Alliance has just released a new wildfire messaging guide designed to cut through the confusion and misinformation about fire, offering simple and effective messaging to reframe the wildfire narrative in a way that centers forest health and community safety over backcountry logging interventions.

Alex Budd is an organizer with the forest climate alliance and one of the main authors of the new guide, and he joined me to talk through it. 

Links:

https://forestclimatealliance.squarespace.com/wildfire-guide

Roads increase risks of wildfires:

Home Hardening Tips: https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/hardening-your-home/

https://www.instagram.com/coastrangeradio/