There's a chance you've seen Nez Perce wildland firefighter and model Celilo Miles in a recent advertisement for Victoria's Secret—in it, she wears Nomex pants and holds her hard hat, emblazoned with the Nez Perce Tribe's fire management program logo. After seeing the ad making the rounds in the wildland fire community, we tracked Celilo down to chat about her background as both a wildland firefighter and a model and how her appearance in the VS advertisement came about. She spoke about balancing modeling and fire, and what each vocation has taught her about the other. We also spoke about the dynamic of being a woman in fire, during which she provided some suggestions for other woman who are interested in fire or are just getting started.

This episode is the first in our series on women in wildfire, which will run until early May. 

Celilo in Vogue Magazine: https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/victorias-secret-love-cloud-launch-celilo-miles-interview

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The Mt. Adams Resource Stewards in Washington State is an excellent example of a hyper-local solution to community fire resilience. Started in 2004 by this week's guest, Jay McLaughlin, the organization now boasts a community forest, a 10-person stewardship crew, community development programs and fire adaptation resources for nearby communities.
Jay has a deep pool of experience in engaging rural (often former logging) communities in fire resilience and more progressive land management; in today's episode, we speak about the challenges of an organization like this, but also the myriad ways this work has been immensely rewarding for Jay and others in the community. He also offers some suggestions and bits of advice for others who hope to develop similar organizations in their own communities.

More information on the Mt. Adams Resource Stewards: https://mtadamsstewards.org/

Deer Humans Podcast Link: https://player.fm/series/deer-humans

Life with Fire website: www.lifewithfirepodcast.com

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Time stamps:

5:48 — Mt. Adams Resource Stewards background/creation; fuels program development

8:56 — Working forest creation and introduction of stewardship crew

15:00 — Is this type of organization scalable across other Western communities?

17:35 — Earning buy-in from resource-dependent communities; outreach insights in rural communities, hearing out detractors

20:14 — Original inspiration for starting the organization

22:09 — Funding sources.

24:20 — Building connections in resource-dependent areas

25:41 — Suggestions for other organizers interested in creating a community forest

In the second half of their conversation, Michael Wara and Amanda briefly dive into the nitty gritty of liability regimes as they relate to both wildland and prescribed fires, how smoke will continue to impact communities across the West and finally, how the current suppression workforce structure is not a practical means of moving into a more fire-adapted future.
Of course, a suppression workforce will always be important, but Michael considers the abysmal work-life balance of the current wildland fire suppression structure and how that contributes to low retention of skilled employees. Eventually this brings him to consider how women are pushed out of the suppression/operational fire world by way of wanting a family or children, and how this has long-standing implications for the sustainability of the workforce and its objectives.

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Notes:

3:15—Wildfire liability/responsibility regimes

8:45—Air quality impacts on communities

12:30—Prescribed fire liabilities, California's "claims fund"

21:55—Sustainability of suppression workforce; retention and having a family; the engrained misogyny of wildland firefighter work-life balance

23:30—Could community fire stewards be the future of sustainable employment in the wildfire/prescribed fire spaces?

26:55—The desperate need to build a bigger, skilled workforce to meet our management objectives

President Biden recently rolled out a plan to treat 50 million acres of land with fire over the next 10 years. The question is—is 50 million acres actually realistic with the system we have in place right now? We spoke with environmental law and policy expert Michael Wara about the logistics of actually putting that much fire on the ground to reduce risk in vulnerable communities, how we may not be in a place to scale it to that level yet, and what we can do to get to the necessary level of fuels reduction and fire resilience. We also talked a bit about Michael's job as the Director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford, and what he and his students are doing in the environmental and wildland fire spaces to help fire practitioners and build fire resilience into law and policy. This is our episode one of two with Michael, with the next publishing in two weeks.

Timestamps:
7:55 — Wildfire risk to utilities.
15:30 — Biden's plan to burn 50 million acres in 10 years.
21:35 — Limitations of Forest Service resources in achieving those acreage goals.
26:00 — Thinking radically about the future of fire policy.

We covered such a broad range of subjects with guest Phil Higuera in this episode that it was hard to nail down a title. Nonetheless, Phil's expansive research background lended well to a conversation that covered paleoecology, how lake sediment is used to determine events that happened 13,000 years ago, how forests are changing with a warming climate and how we humans can choose to respond to those changes. Our main objective with the conversation was to discuss Phil's research in Western Washington's San Juan Islands (host Amanda's backyard) while getting his Master's degree at the University of Washington; the work he did there is part of a limited pool of research on fire history in Western Washington, and we wanted to see if Phil might have some perspective on the risk of a large, high-severity conflagration in this area, particularly with the 2020 Labor Day Fires as a pertinent reminder of what can happen in these ecosystems.

As always, we appreciate you listening and sharing and engaging with Life with Fire. If you'd like to support us financially you can do so in a variety of ways on our website's "Donate" page: www.lifewithfirepod.com/donate. 

This episode's guest, Sue Husari, went from pounding dirt as the first woman to work for the Lassen Hotshots in 1976 to an eventual role as the Fire Management Officer for the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service, from which she retired in 2012. In between, she saw fundamental changes not only in how fires burn but in how we fight them. She provides some truly invaluable perspective in this episode, which is guest hosted by our friend Zeke Lunder from The Lookout, an online project that aims to contextualize wildfire information through storytelling and digital media. 

For more information about (or donate to) Zeke's project at the Lookout, check out their website: www.the-lookout.org.

To read a little bit about Sue's time on the Lassen Hotshots, check out this story by Life with Fire host Amanda Monthei from summer 2020: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/first-women-hotshots-wildland-firefighters/

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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. 

More information about the Grassroots Wildland Firefighter Coalition as well as how to help can be found on their website.

If you're digging these conversations, you can donate to Life with Fire through our  Patreon. 

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. Their research explores how homes are arranged and built, and how these factors can impact their susceptibility to ignition during wildfires. This is an essential conversation on home resilience, defensible space and what factors contribute to home ignitions in wildfires. Call it "Building in The WUI 101," if you will, but you won't want to miss the invaluable insight, tips and lessons learned from Knapp and Valochovic's extensive research and work in the aftermath of the Camp Fire. 

To hear more from Zeke, check out Life with Fire Episode 14. More of his work with The Lookout can be found here: https://the-lookout.org/

The paper authored by Valochovic and Knapp and referenced throughout this episode can be found here: https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42408-021-00117-0

Knapp and Valochovic are both members of the California Fire Science Consortium. More information on this organization can be found here. 

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