thanks everybody for being here and for those of you who haven't been in these webinars before I'm John Fink at Portland State University and University of British Columbia and this is a series of webinars that we've had for the last two and a half years on wildfire and urban smoke geographically focused in the Pacific Northwest but we've had speakers from quite a few from California others as far away as Australia and Maryland and one of the themes that's come out of many of these talks is the the risk in the urban areas of the Pacific Northwest to really large wildfires coming into the urban areas we haven't experienced that at the scale that has happened historically based on tree ring data but it's become clear from these presentations and many others that this is a risk that planners and City officials and and urban residents need to be thinking more about so we're really fortunate today to have Emily and Brett talking with us about a whole series of examples from around the world that they've been working on and let them introduce themselves and and present and then um hopefully we'll have time for some discussions so get your questions ready for them so Emily over to you sure great thank you John and thank you for the invitation it's really wonderful to to connect up with all of you um so I'm my name is Emily schlichmann I am an assistant professor uh landscape architecture and environmental design at the University of California Davis um I've been at Davis for about three years now right before the pandemic hit is when I went back into Academia which is an interesting time to jump back in but since then I've really focused my research on climate change adaptation um and and wildfire and prior to that I worked at a professional design firm primarily focused on fire prone Landscapes and communities in California so I'll hand it over to Brett and then I think he'll share his screen and get get started hi everyone likewise thanks for the invitation uh so yeah Brett Milligan I'm at UC Davis same Department as Emily uh we're colleagues and I've been there for a decade surprisingly um I actually was living in Portland before that I was working for a landscape Architecture Firm in Portland did all kinds of things dam removal a lot of fun stuff up there um really like the Northwest but yeah I've been here in Davis for a decade I would say most of what I do falls under sort of multi-benefit multi-stakeholder climate change adaptation kinds of projects um a lot of them in the bay Delta and I've sort of been moving more into fire over the last two or three years so this is sort of a new area for me um to go into but always been really into different forms of Land Management um so let me share and see if I can share my screen people hear me okay sound okay okay yes thank you see my screen okay yes yep yep move some things out of the way so I can see what I'm doing here okay so again thanks for having us and Emily and I are going to be talking about uh research that we're compiling into a book and um should be out this summer so what we're showing you is I guess a preview of of what we've been up to for the last while and it's called design by fire resistance co-creation and retreat in the pirate scene and I think one of the the most fundamental questions we're asking in this book is what is our relationship with fire what is the nature of that relationship and um I think even before we can talk about what our relationship with fire is there's a question of what fire is I mean depending on who you talk to you get very definite very different definitions of what fire is um and we know that fire as a phenomenon is changing as well so at the beginning of the book we sort of lay out how we how we're defining fire which is a as a contextual landscape event to go into that a little bit fire is entirely dependent on landscape conditions to become what it may while also being transformative of the conditions from which it emerges thus we can speak of wildfire as a reciprocal or co-evolutionary phenomena within the dynamic landscapes in which it occurs spanning physical biological and cultural domains so for us fire is this very Dynamic phenomena totally dependent on its situation and we're really stressing this co-evolutionary relationship we have with it it affects us and we affect it no matter what we do and so from that one of our key questions in the book too is how do our past relationship with the fires affect our current ones uh you know what are the legacies that we're coming into that are conditioning where we are now um and specific to the U.S um I grew up with Smokey the Bear I'm sure others did too telling me that we should not have forest fires that we could prevent them and it was our responsibility to do so and I'm sure many here know that that has turned out to be um kind of a very problematic way of going about fire or thinking of fire as bad versus something that is needed in our landscapes and in the book we spend some time looking at Yosemite in particular in California and how that is kind of emblematic of sort of our changing relationships with fire across time and this is a historical image um and kind of a modified a bit but you can see the type of landscape down there in the valley and the openness and the degree of trees and this is just after the start of the colonial era where it still had um the the the overall structure from indigenous Land Management which regularly burned these lands as part of their stewardship where fire was considered good um versus how that has evolved over time into these very dense strands stands of forest changes in fire regimen uh largely as a as a product of fire suppression and how within Yosemite we're really changing now and trying to undo some of this so there's I think multiple Dimensions to our past that and form are present and another big one is Land Development and in particular the Wildland Urban interface um or where development meets you know wild lands in ways that are combustible and this is a diagram showing kind of how you know the we as short for that um develops over time where you have your you know your your pre-development landscape you build the buildings and then typically that vegetation densifies that whole thing becomes extremely flammable we have many areas of this in the state this is a map of California and the light gray is showing you the extent of the wild Urban interface as of 1990. and then if we project forward to 2010 you can see how much that's expanded along with showing the urbanized areas and that was 2010 and this the wui has continued to expand quite dramatically since that time um and now we have about one-third of California lives in the wui these are showing the overlay of the wildlife or sorry Wildfire perimeters over top of that and so we're getting these collisions with development with fires that are becoming you know ever less controllable from climate change from fire suppression and sort of this cluster of um impacts of change and you know these again are the some of the fastest growing communities we have large parts of our in particularly in California but also elsewhere this is where a lot of people live problematic vulnerable area and so one of our bigger questions then is okay what will our future relationships with fire be like we have these past legacies we have what we are doing now and you know where might that go in the future and so this is sort of a large part of what we're trying to get at in the book and you'll see the subtitle there is resistance co-creation and retreat in the piracy and one one of the things we want to focus in our presentation today is um three of the chapters really go into these different approaches that we currently see uh in Fire and again this is from 27 different case studies from around the world and we divide these into three categories which which I'll go through um the first is resist to exert force in opposition to to withstand the force or effect of to fight combat oppose to strive against so for us these are techniques that resist the creative and transformative power of fire and forces of landscape change so you're kind of working against sort of landscape process if you will and we see fire suppression as kind of probably the most emblematic of this and that that actually really doesn't work and ends up doing the opposite of what you you know might think it would do but again those types of strategies that work in that way and some resistant strategies are are necessary it's not that they're all bad but it's a type of strategy or approach co-create to create something by working with one or more others to create something jointly engaging in an intentional relationship in order to make something together so for us these are strategies with fire that really recognize fire as its own agent as its own Force as something that is you know needed in these Landscapes that can be positive and generative and working with it once we acknowledge that you know what are the ways that we sort of collaborate with fire in an overt way and then lastly Retreat which we might sort of think of as the opposite of resist an act of moving back or withdrawing often from something dangerous difficult or unsustainable the process of receding from a position or state attained so um whether this is managed Retreat or a retreat that happens through disaster but really thinking about you know those techniques where we're kind of um falling away whether that is in terms of where development happens or where people live or in the domain of how Landscapes are managed or are not managed and all of this is really challenging as well uh because we have changed landscapes in so many ways you know and it's very anthropogenic World we've had an influence on on all of them and it's uh that creates all kinds of questions of what is a landscape without human intervention at this point so those are the way we've kind of organized this across these different case studies and I'm going to now give this over to Emily to sort of take you through each of these in some of the specific techniques that we cover within that great thank you Brent so let me share my screen here let me do full screen can you all see this yep okay awesome so as Brett mentioned we've collected at this point 27 case studies um and and we on purpose decided to expand Beyond just California um we've focused on kind of five different Mediterranean type climates around the world just to to see what what is happening what are what are folks doing how are they dealing with with these issues and so we've gathered a few case studies from the coastal range of California on the western side of California um from the the Eastern side of California and the Sierra Nevada and I just want to note when I first saw this picture I thought that was snow um but that's a couple inches of of Ash after a really really severe burn um in the Sierra Nevada so we've gathered a couple of quesadies from the Sierra Nevada um we've also looked to the Mediterranean Basin so we've looked to countries like Italy and Spain and France to understand what kind of initiatives are are happening there foreign we've also looked at South Africa primarily kind of the South Southwestern um part of the country uh what's known as the cape we've looked at Central Chile and which also has a Mediterranean type climate as well as Southern and Southwestern Australia and so as as Brett mentioned we what we did is we did kind of a review of a number of different types of techniques and came up with this overall framework to to look at different ways in which um we might adapt or mitigate uh to this you know compounding risk of wildfire um and so as he mentioned we have kind of three large approaches so resistance um co-creation and Retreat within those we have 13 General strategies um from suppressing all the way to yielding um and then we have 27 techniques and so today I I want to we don't have time to go through all of them uh but I'm going to go through about eight or nine just to give you a sense for um what they're what they're about and what what kind of initiatives are happening and I'm going to start we kind of view these techniques along a spectrum here um and so I'm going to start on the left hand side with fire fighting um and move kind of along this this spectrum and so first I want to show a couple of techniques from our resistance chapter um this first one you know I think Brett um mentioned and alluded to is is the idea of firefighting and obviously this is a technique that we're all very familiar with um and our case study for this particular technique is Yosemite National Park which as he mentioned yeah for thousands of years was managed by indigenous people who used fire as a tool to tend to the landscape and and cultivate certain plants and and certain habitat and then obviously following euro-american settlement and those fires essentially stopped um and there is a policy which I'm sure you're all familiar with called the 10 a.m Rule and that basically stipulated that any fires that emerged needed to be put out by 10 a.m the next the next day and so that really kind of transformed the landscape so today fire suppression as you know is still a large part of how we manage Wildfire um and you know wildfires are just too severe and and too frequent um and as Brett also mentioned you know nearly a third of California at least lives in this fire prone area in the Wildland Urban interface um and so there's a really big effort to to protect property um and lives in this Zone and the same can be said for wildlands like Yosemite um so while parts of the park are allowed to to burn now they're they're obviously shifting their management protocols and have been since about the late 1960s there's still a large um portion of the park where fire suppression is still very common and this happens a number of ways with hand Crews and heavy machinery but also obviously through aircraft for areas that are difficult to get to okay so another another technique that I wanted to go over is um which is also in the resistance category it's called foil wrapping and our case study site here is Sequoia Kings Canyon a little further south in California and this technique involves wrapping structures as well as most recently trees and kind of these aluminized blankets and it's a technique that kind of emerged by accident there's a really interesting story behind that that I won't go into but it's become a really popular way to shield from fire and to kind of maintain the status quo put this kind of techno fix around things that we value and allow the fire to pass through so here you can see a historical cabin that was wrapped in a series of aluminized blankets ahead of a fire front and this really allowed fire Personnel to focus on other areas instead of staying on site and defending by hand foreign and so these blankets are stapled onto building facades and the purpose of them it's kind of threefold um one is to deflect Embers from entering into a structure or entering into a vulnerable part of a tree um it blocks direct flame contact and it also reflects radiant heat um and as I've mentioned they've also been used to protect Heritage trees so most recently I think this last year you've probably saw images of them being wrapped around large sequoia trees and so this this technology is is being implemented more and more in order to Shield um you know these really important historical elements from from fire okay so moving um away from North America this is a technique that we're called home bunkering um and the the site here is a community called whittlesea in um Southern Australia and so this area was devastated by a series of bushfires in 2009 they're called the the black Black Saturday bushfires um and it really decimated this community and so when the community decided when community members decided to rebuild many residents decided to think differently about home construction and so there's been a rise in creating Wildfire safe homes that are less combustible and less vulnerable and so here you can see an image of one of these um what we're calling home bunkers um they're sheltered by the surrounding ground the Earth actually acts as an insulator they have minimal openings and they can be fully sealed so they have these fire curtains that that come down when a firefront is is passing through and so as you can see here in this kind of before and after diagram these structures basically function like like bunkers and they allow for folks although it's not super well advised but they allow for votes to actually ride out the fire um inside of the structure okay so hopefully that gives you kind of a taste for the resistance um category and that chapter and I want to move on now to co-creation um and again you know by co-creation we're talking about techniques that really Embrace and and utilize landscape forces while also trying to co-create with them and and I want to say that this is the part of the book the part of our research that probably has the most case studies and we think that this is an area that has a lot of potential um and there are just a number of initiatives that are that are happening in in this realm so on kind of the far end of the spectrum for co-create is um what we're calling donut extracting and this is kind of again on one end of the spectrum and our case study site here is in Chile in a community called Los Angeles it's a growing city um and it's actually surrounded by a number of pine plantations and I do want to say here that human ignitions um in this in this area is is kind of the primary concern um so with this this case study the the city this is not a picture from there um but it's it's emblematic of it but the city is undertaking a really bold approach um so they're basically creating a donut fire break around the entire city so what they want to do is create a buffer between the highly dense plantations and that can easily go up in Flames with the community that's right next door so here on the left with this kind of simplified diagram you can see how development used to directly abut the plantation but here with kind of the part of the donut extraction you can see how there's now a buffer that helps to protect the town and I do want to say with with this technique and one of the reasons why it's obviously on the one end of the Spectrum in terms of co-creation is that it's really devoid of any vegetation basically what they've done here is they've scraped the landscape down to to Mineral soil um and at this point the the plan is to create a buffer around the entire city but they're they're not quite there yet but that is the the overall goal okay um here's a case study called uh what we're calling infrastructure shadowing um and this is drawn from Southern France it's a primarily mountainous and an agricultural area but it's also crisscrossed by these um high voltage power lines um and so with this uh with this site the city is working directly with electrical companies to reduce vulnerabilities and that are directly below these these high voltage lines um obviously if there's ever an issue um you know this can be a source of ignition and so they're trying to reduce the ignition potential so what they're doing here is along these electrical corridors instead of kind of clearing down to Mineral soil they're instead creating a different kind of landscape in this in this linear corridor so on the left you can kind of see a before condition and on the right you can see how they've removed a lot of the higher vegetation but they've also created new Wetland habitat and new grazing habitat in this in this Corridor while also reducing Wildfire risk foreign we're kind of moving along the Spectrum here so this is fire lighting um this is a case study one of my favorites actually um that's drawn from the Iraq territory in Northwestern um California and and in this area they have a hybrid burning program um where they involve a range of stakeholders and at the heart of this program um is an indigenous group the Iraq folks uh and then there's also Cal Fire there's a nature conservancy and a number of firefighting professionals who are engaged um and so with this with this technique all of these stakeholders come together um through an event called Trex and they put good fire back on the landscape um and and it's a it's an experience where tribal leaders can share their ecological and cultural knowledge and it's really uh a space for cross-pollination between these these various folks who work with fire in different ways so with this technique fire is used to not only um reduce fuel but it's also used to reinvigorate the landscape um so by consuming low plant material with litter um that actually promotes the growth of culturally sensitive species uh for the tribe itself and we had a really unique opportunity to chat with one of the tribal leaders Margo Robbins who who shared this Insight with us and what I thought was really compelling about this interview that we we had with her is is there was kind of a moment where she she said that the community realized that by putting fire back on the land by restoring the land they were actually restoring their people um and so it's it's a movement that I think is gaining a lot of a lot of traction um in California and elsewhere foreign okay so the last case study for the co-creation section is what we call a fire flocking this is a case study from Catalonia Spain um it involves grazing animals in overgrown forests um while also creating kind of this new bio-based economy so with this technique shepherds are hired to use their sheep their goats and their cows to remove fuel and in very strategic parts of excuse me the landscape and what's interesting about this technique is that they can then sell their meat and cheese products under um this brand that's called the fire flock brand and it adds value to their products um so and it also simultaneously educates people about Wildfire risk reduction strategies in the region so here you can see a typical forest in this region and how the act of grazing can really minimize minimize fuel while also generating kind of a new or regenerate an economy um and this is a quote from one of the Shepherds that that we interviewed um and and she kind of really emphasized that as a result of this program and and others there's kind of this shift in thinking about fire um and thinking about how we can work with the landscape and think about fire prevention rather than you know really attacking the the fire and thinking about um firefighting and more of like a militaristic way okay sorry I'm going through these kind of quickly but I just want to to give you kind of a general sense for for what we're focusing on here so in the last category again this is kind of on the other end of the the Spectrum so with this category we're really thinking about techniques that that step back right from kind of these vulnerable areas um and this is the the category of retreat um and with Retreat I think oftentimes people only think about managed Retreat kind of the wholesale moving of of communities away from a vulnerable space right whether that's a space along the coast whether that's the wui ETC but we think that there is actually much more to this um this category and and this this this grouping of techniques and so on one end um we just see this technique which we're calling development limiting um and this really involves creating stricter development standards for new construction so it allows new construction but it says basically you can build new homes new structures here but let's build them in a smarter way and so this case study was drawn from outside of San Diego in the county of San Diego and Southern California so in many parts of California um San Diego included and as you saw from Brett's maps that he showed development is encroaching more and more into the wui um and so one thing that's being done in San Diego is to create guidelines for where new homes could be built and where they can be placed in the landscape so they have a steep Hillside guideline and that basically prevents new construction from happening mid-slope um and one reason behind that is fire tends to move faster um when going up slope and so by putting a house either at the top of the ridge or low in the valley and creating a buffer you're actually reducing the vulnerability of of that home going up in flames okay so further along is um what we're calling incentivized relocating and this is this is the last technique that they'll show um for today and it's actually the the closest thing that we found to to manage Retreat um that we've seen actually happen in in fire prone areas so this case study comes from Paradise California and I'm sure you're all familiar with paradise and and what happened after the the 2018 campfire but basically following the fire um many people were were on the fence um about whether to rebuild or to come back and and what that might look like so many Lots in Paradise still are vacant um especially the lots that are kind of on the outskirts of of town so they're kind of in this limbo state so the city decided to to become kind of proactive um and they decided to start purchasing Parcels from residents who weren't planning on returning um and their goal they're only about 300 acres in but their goal is to start banking these vacant Parcels especially ones that are at the edge of town and to create kind of this city-wide buffer um that could serve as a shaded fuel break but it could also serve as a recreational amenity for the community at Large foreign 's gonna wrap up with a few a few slides but I wanted to end kind of the case study overview um by just saying that we we don't consider this research and this book to be kind of neatly packaged Solutions right to this to this issue but instead we we hope it really um continues the conversation about how we can evaluate and test these ideas in fireprint areas okay so let me stop my share yeah y'all back to my screen hopefully yep thanks Emily um so to sort of close this out in the way we we close the book out is to think towards the future you know what what are the Pyro Futures we might come to inhabit um there are so many factors involved in so many different ways that things could play out within this context of accelerated change uh you know climate change in one this is showing images of all the uh trees that are dying in the Sierra Nevadas uh based on drought and changing conditions is also you know overcrowded forests uh where we get these kind of clusters of uh impacts of change as we've talked a lot about you know how what is the future of of land use and in our cities these are pictures from Auburn which is a very high risk Zone in the state of California of you know how how will we um continue to develop land will we restrict things in the in the wui what we keep doing as we have there's lots of questions here as the state um where how it'll House people or what kind of development will happen um and I think a really large question is is what type of of management and stewardship will we do for Landscapes you know particularly in California there's a real need to scale up fire management efforts and this is an image showing on the left side that was not really cared for and aside on the right where you can see a big difference in the fact that fire had but there's just such a big question of what types of management we will pursue and at what scale so in the Final Chapter we sort of look at we divide things up into these six areas of drivers of change they'll just kind of go through them quickly global warming and accelerated climate change I mean these impact on all of the ones below we don't know what kind of rates we're going to have from global warming we don't know exactly how those impacts are going to play out across Landscapes but you know it's going to be more volatile weather um you know increasing drought and kinds of things like that that are going to lead to a lot of shifts in Landscapes as well as the already novel ecological conditions we have in many places due to introduced plants and things like that so there's a wide set of factors there um property and land use um you know what type of there's a huge differences in terms of how Landscapes are managed or what can happen on them based on the type of ownership they have there's major differences between public and private land and sort of the scale of those Landscapes and how they will be managed management and stewardship again to what type of strategies might we do particularly in some of those co-creation ones you saw um you know in terms of what is the scale of prescribed Burns that might happen across you know Landscapes that need to burn um how much of that will we do what types of strategies are we going to use eco-cultural restoration and Indigenous sovereignty as as Emily was mentioning you know there's there's a way that some of this fire stewardship can be approached and Technical and purely ecological ways but there is a much you know wider expanse of ways that fire can be considered in terms of um restoring cultures and sort of fire dependent cultures that used to exist in these areas that were suppressed uh culturally or through Colonial means and to what degree will eco-cultural restoration happen in what ways can indigenous sovereignty be reasserted um there's many different degrees in which that could happen but one of them particular the fire and Indigenous rights to burning um and how much that will be allowed and we are seeing in many places a much a a lot of interest in going back to some traditional forms of management and there's lots of questions of how that can happen and if that's going to be Equitable and how Partnerships with tribes might evolve insurance and liability uh two main types of insurance I would touch on here one is if you are a cultural burner or if you are a prescribed burner um you have to have insurance to cover you in case one of your fires jumps loose and you know you're liable or if your fire tends to produce a lot of smoke someone might try to sue you for that and so insurance for burning which we know like for beneficial Burns is something we really need but it's getting harder and harder to come by because of you know the perceived risk through these other factors like climate change introduced species fire severity so that is harder for us to for burners to get and then there's also the side of property insurance where in places like the wui where you know more and more places are becoming more and more vulnerable either insurance is getting more expensive or it's not available um for good reasons right because we're just rebuilding and rebuilding and that can be you know a positive check on that but that can also be inequitable in how that happens um so insurance and liability are are really key and then lastly Investments policy and governance um across wherever we are in the world you know where our investments going to be made or not made um and all of the above factors what kinds of policy and governance are in place again speaking to our California experience we have seen a lot of changes in policy and governance and investment to really try to incentivize burning we've seen a lot of increased rights for uh cultural burners that have come across in the last year last two years so to what degree are these are our old policies going to change I mean we've been trying to reverse suppression policies for about 50 years some of that's actually happening now but um these will also have a big influence so as we see at all of these interact with one another and there's all kinds of potential Futures we could have based on how these play out you know individually and in relation with one another and in the last chapter of the book we sort of go through some different possible scenarios of you know whether we keep doing the status quo you know that we have in the past and we can find those to California just because it's something we know more about versus if we do more proactive fire stewardship or different things and to try to think about that um because we see a real need to be looking to the Future and to try to be thinking about that rather than potentially being blindsided by it so with that that's I think pretty much the end of our content and I guess maybe we could open it up for questions if there are any excellent thank you both that's uh I I love having this Continuum from one end to the other uh and I it's one sort of selfish reaction is that we should go back through the 100 or so webinars that we've had and lay them out on your time on your um Continuum there in terms of different approaches that have been described we had a really nice example from British Columbia the donut case you talked about uh and several other examples so I'll start it off and anybody else you can raise your hand or just uh just talk up uh and ask your questions um so we're most of us are north of you in in Washington Oregon British Columbia and um when we want to look at the future we look South uh and California you kind of have a similar situation in California that Southern California is different from Northern California but in terms of um advice that you might offer to those of us who are living in places that aren't as fire prone now as much of California is you know what's your sense of how to start moving in the direction that you you finish up your book and there's a hear all the things that need to be done that's easy um I mean I would just say I think that just being aware of the range of options but um maybe a a more concise question would be uh what would your advice be for uh City officials and and we're particularly interested in Portland Seattle and Vancouver which are large metros that have a lot of trees in them and I think most of us like I grew up in New York and when I would look out to the Northwest I'd say okay well that's some place that rains all the time fire is the last thing they would ever have to worry about but um as we've learned from many of these talks uh in fact every few hundred years there are these Basin clearing fires that have gone through not in the last few hundred years but it's going to be more and more likely so how do we get City officials to just be aware of all the things you're talking about and what could be suggested out of your whole catalog as things that would work in a city as opposed to out in the further out in the wooing yeah it's it's a really good it's a good question and I I feel like Portland is is actually kind of ahead of the curve in terms of a lot of the the land use planning you know activities that are that are happening there um especially the idea of limiting sprawl right into into these wildlands um and I feel like in terms of advice to City officials just thinking about new development just seems like such low hanging fruit right how to be really smart about where we build I'm a big proponent of of infill um and I think that there's a lot of opportunity there um obviously people want to live on the edge for so many reasons um but again I think Portland's kind of you know ahead of the curve on that and then you know I think recently in the past couple of years we've realized that even places that aren't designated on a map right as being a wooy which is problematic because the wooy is ever changing and can't be delineated with a line but there's kind of this false sense of security if you're outside of that zone right if you're outside of a high severity Zone but in the case of coffee Park and Santa Rosa I don't think anyone who was living in that I don't want to say urbanized but more of like a Suburban development right kind of protected by the freeway and all of that ever thought that they would be impacted you know by um by wildfire and they were I just took one Ember that flew miles ahead of the firefront and got into a event and that caused almost like an urban fire and once you get to an urban fire it's really hard to stop um so I guess in terms of you know thinking about these issues in more urbanized areas I I think kind of the distinction between urban and Wilds is often thought of as being clear-cut and I don't think it is and I think climate change is is blending them together more and more especially with these unpredictable wind wind and and weather events and so I think that would kind of be my biggest piece of advice is even if you don't think you know you'll be impacted it it can happen and we've seen that over the past couple of years and so taking these these strategies um obviously you know there probably wouldn't be thinning being done in in the middle of the city but even one of our our case studies that I didn't mention is just how do you harden your home which is one of the best ways right that that you can prevent a structure a structure fire from happening um Brett I don't know if you have anything if you have anything to add on to that sorry that was a little bit of a winding path there no no not at all I think I'll just take a totally different swing at it and come at it from the time perspective and you know I mentioned fire is a contextual event and I mean we had these really like huge damaging deadly fires a couple years ago and it's after those things happen it's unfortunate but seems to be human nature is a disaster is amazingly effective at leading to policy change and to things like that seems to be how we work right um and it's the same I mean you can in California it's the same with drought when we run out of water there's major changes in how we go about thinking about you know our water infrastructure but it's when it breaks that we realize it's not working and you know and and when we have wetter Years everybody forgets about it so I think back to your question is like when to approach it's kind of I don't know you have more leverage I think in those moments like after things happen and it's in everybody's mind it's like okay act and you you get I mean that's where a lot of our current policies that are quite Progressive have come from of like wow this is a big problem um you know we didn't have huge fires this summer but you know we had some and we got lucky with this weird rain that happened in you know this this past month but um yeah I think the time and when things like that happen have a lot to do with when you can strategically try to create change great yeah no thank you both uh uh Brett that that last Point um The New York Times Daily podcast this week had won about about Florida and insurance and uh the fact that the reinsurance companies from Europe may decide that they can't support the insurance companies that are insuring homes in Florida and that can shut down the entire economy of Florida all from Hurricane Ian I mean it's been gradually coming so I really really good point so um Harry and then Chris all right thanks um you guys I think I've got a sort of a question I have generally for you but for the broader audience was I'm up in Vancouver I'd seen a story about I think um they had released a wildfire risk map for the state of Oregon which created from just reading the stories enormous consternation about being able to get insurance we're going to go back and redraw the map which sort of leads into what you were just talking about right which is sort of this and John this kind of um stories about the ability that comes and goes it seems to get Wildfire Insurance in the states or in California but that's sort of a narrower question to me kind of but I was trying to squeeze in two questions the other question aside from your observations about the potential for insurance to be a tool or a driver of change I would be curious about the other one when you guys were doing your spectrum of strategies across those different landscapes when you're looking at for example France or Chile was there something in there that made you think okay you know the difference here in Chile is X versus y again leads me back to the California example it seems like the elephant in the room is always private land and the challenge is of doing something about private land in the states I wonder whether you felt you saw that same Dynamic at play or in your other kind of when you stepped outside of California or maybe some of the other case studies within California sorry I put in three questions um I can speak a little bit to the insurance question because I think I don't know if you saw me I was nodding vigorously when you were like Insurance can actually be a tool to help us adapt and I I totally agree um here in California the state you know for numerous reasons right after there's a big fire they want to protect folks who are vulnerable and who have lost their homes and who are struggling and so they they've done this in three different ways one um the insurance commissioner in 2018 basically put out a moratorium on insurance companies dropping coverage in fire prone areas and typically these are only seen as temporary measures but it's been extended for four or five years now um and so in in places that have been recently affected by fires insurance companies still have to provide insurance and then most recently I think it was last month um he uh basically promoted this idea of incentives um for for uh homeowners if they reduce fuel around their homes if they Harden their homes if they work on a community scale fuel reduction project they can actually get lower rates and I think the core of that is is great um and I think there are many ways that we can reduce risk in in those using those methods but I think it's also kind of promoting potentially the idea of this idea of fireproofing and that we can kind of stop stop fires and then the third is is kind of this safety net fire insurance plan the fair plan that's here in California um and essentially if you can't get insurance through the private Insurance Market California will provide you with it um and so I think these three elements at least here in California in a way are kind of preventing us from moving forward and preventing us from or preventing insurance from being used as you said as a tool um and then in terms of your question about private land we actually lessen Chile I had a hard time um and it was it was a little bit difficult to kind of unpack a lot of the case studies that we found in Chile but definitely in the Mediterranean Basin private land was a huge issue a scalability and and how do you you know for instance the infrastructure shadowing project they started with the pilot project that was maybe 10 hectares right and that's not going to do much if a power line Falls a mile away right because then that that whole area has not been treated and it's because there are so many different land owners around those areas around that Corridor that have to be in the discussion and have to approve of this this technique so I would say I can't speak to the Chilean examples but definitely in the Mediterranean region the cape um and Australia private land um and just getting consensus from so many stakeholders was definitely a challenge that that we encountered [Music] yeah I think a couple things there too just to um Emily covered a lot but um I mean what we've read too is I mean a lot of people who want to burn you know whether it's landowners or some of the cultural burners or people are doing prescribed Burns it's like if you're a small entity it's really hard to do and all of our public agencies that are charged with fire management firefighting are you know don't have anywhere near the resources they need to do it so there is a gap and they're trying to look at ways to incentivize that or to allow that to happen more um it's not there yet but um I think more like as a more speculative thing again in the last chapter of our book we really just play out some possible scenarios um you know one of them is eventually you know our public agencies can't can't defend all these these these uh rural communities they keeps keep going and we're already seeing uh where they have to triage and go to this one they can't go then a bad fire year you're going to be left um high and dry the potential for that keeps growing and you know what if uh we did change it where your community is you're in charge of your own community and you have to manage it and you have to come up with ways and then we have what's called you know fire adapted communities and things like that but I think at this point that's still really flimsy but you know it might come to that where if you want to live out there you know you might not be able to get some of the insurance and you actually have to care for the land yourself you have to Steward it and um I think there's all kinds of interesting questions of you know what are the limits of how much we can protect such a vast uh area of you know increasingly vulnerable communities great um Chris you want to introduce yourself and then ask your question sure hi uh my name is Chris icamp I'm uh someone active in measuring air quality uh in urban areas locally in Portland um and my question was really just a a rather narrow one which was how does how like in on a practical level do the practices of cultural Burning uh differ from those of other types of prescribed burning that um we see around us good question um I think it varies obviously from one indigenous group to the next and when I spoke with Margo Robbins it was such an amazing conversation um and she's been covered in National Geographic and and on a number of documentaries it's definitely definitely look her up but she um from that conversation she made it seem like it was very very different um with prescribed Burns you have to develop a fire plan that is often um you know months in the making you have to wait until there's a perfect fire window you have to have water tanks on the site you have to have all of the protective gear you have to have a burn boss you have to have uh an ignition crew you have to have all of these safeguards in place and and it just prescribed Burns themselves not the Trex Burns where it's more hybrid but the prescribed Burns it's really focused right on on reducing fuel loads right and and making sure that that burn really doesn't escape the the perimeter and when she talked about the cultural Burns that that happen at least um in her community she talks about bringing her grandchildren out there into the forest in their pajamas um and they decide when the best time is um they go out there and they observe the plants and the animals and they have to do it um when it's not obviously High Fire season but they don't need a permit um and they go out there they I think she said that they often do have a tank of water just in case um but she said it's it they they put fire on the ground it's just single ignition and they just kind of walk with the Flames um and so at least from that one perspective I talked with a couple of cultural burners in in Australia too who have kind of a similar experience but it's it's um yeah I think the two practices are are very different um and at least from you know the work that we've done I think that there is there is quite that divide between prescribed burning controlled burning and cultural Burns and obviously there are hybrid forms like the trexburns that kind of combine the two um Brett I don't know if you have anything to add to that yeah I had a couple things I'd add to that I mean I think I think there's a usually there's a much wider range of functions that are integrated into cultural burning you know there is um it's not I mean fuel management I think that is very uh you know it's a very small thing of what you know indigenous practices are where you're burning at certain times or you might burn around a particular plant to affect how its growth pattern is you're doing it to be able to harvest multiple things whether that's uh you know basketry which is important to many tribes in California of subsistence different plants and you know there's ways that fire can be prac you know applied and very very specific ways specific times that influences how those plants grow and how they grow back and the types of materials you get from it um it's also tends to be much more smaller scale you know you go out and you burn a little bit and I think we have you know for prescribed Burns we're really trying to burn really wide areas um and I think as Emily said usually it's a little more heavy-handed as well you know and uh as light of a burn or so there's there's does differences and I think you know there's um there is this sort of mechanical way that the cultural or that sorry no that prescribed burns happen you know it's a it's often very masculine too it's you know it's there's been talk about that versus like cultural Burns where it is it's like this multi-generational festive they're not all wearing gear they kind of feel very comfortable with the fire and it's just a completely different thing there's a ceremonial aspect there's a sacredness to it so they they are very different and I think a really interesting question going forward in the future is you know uh is there going to be any hybriding hybridization there you know so that our prescribed Burns come around to different ways of doing things um but yeah I'd say that to me they feel they're quite different in effects and how they're done and things like that so um you described you know fairly a fairly easy to describe a fairly heavy approach to um to prescribe Burns how is it that the cultural Burns keep the fire from from escaping and becoming a much bigger thing than uh than they might want because if there's a way to do that without all the heavy-handedness then I think that's something that you know maybe we could all learn from yeah there's a couple things there I mean one of them I guess is the frequency right if you're regularly burning then you know you're not in this place and I think we're really challenged by places where fire suppression has been a thing and even the urok that you know has had to deal with that where you know some of that you have to really you know prep it and do more of that um I think a lot of it too is really timing um and this goes into policy right like these a lot of this stuff is we're trying to revisit is you know you get your burn plan you get you know you have to be here on this day and do this and then you go out there and it's windy you're like I can't do this so stay and you know your whole plan Falls away whereas I think with most indigenous burning they can operate within different windows and they they wait until conditions are right and then you know it's where it's not gonna you know things are a little damper you know but you can still burn and you can test that and you know so you're not trying to do it during summer or a time you know when your your burn risk or your the chances of something get away from you or to really intensely go up higher one thing to just add on to that when speaking about time is a in looking at um it's called fire stick farming in in um Australia which is kind of the equivalent of cultural it's a type of cultural burning there but in looking at at that case study which I didn't go into um there's not kind of a push for efficiency there's not like oh this prescribed burn needs to happen and we just have this amount of time and so I think there was one burn um that's that's highlighted in the book where it took two weeks for it to go out and during that time people just followed it and kept a close eye on it um and would you know ignite kind of single single points here and there but they they just they were kind of on the fires terms um and not not as controlling so I think that's kind of another piece to throw into it we've talked in here about uh there's a series that the national academies have had called wrong answers only and it's uh they get an expert together with four Comedians and uh so the last one was a an indigenous woman who was talking exactly about what you were talking about going out with her kids as they would set the culturally appropriate fires and uh there were some good questions from the comedians as well other other questions yeah just just posted a very simple question in the chat and yeah again thank you for a great presentation I really like the structure in which you summarize this all when will the book be available we're hoping uh summer next summer so June July 2023. sorry yeah okay yeah and did you did you also prepare like a scientific publication that's already out on the topic or or is the book the main communication tool not not a comprehensive one at this point um we have compared to case studies uh in a journal article and our continuing to publish there are some tricky things with publishing book material in academic journals but we're hoping to like publish the the intro on the conclusion but um yeah I can send around um the the 1K study comparison that we did that that's been published that'd be great thank you I gotta run to the next call sorry about that so thank you for coming cheers bye so uh for those of you who have to go it's two o'clock feel free to go um Brad and Emily if you have another couple minutes you can stick around I I had one other question which uh Emily I think when we were on a call before I brought up but this has to do with who your audience is and who you who you were able to talk about some of these issues with I've been on an Advisory board for a number of years with KB Home in Los Angeles which has developments in many of the areas that you're talking about particularly San Diego but also Sacramento and they tend to be pretty receptive to new ideas even though they're really large and so um I don't know on our board we haven't heard about anything presented in the kind of organized way that you have but I think that would be really valuable for them to hear and the question I guess is to what and if you had developers or or home builders kind of on your side and and acknowledging that we need to take a different view because of what's happened to a lot of developments that have caught fire yeah I would say I mean Brett I don't think we I don't think the research is quite at that point where we've we've been able to to reach kind of the developer audience but I think it's a really important group of people to be having these discussions with um and could make a really big impact I think um right Brett have you been in touch with any any Builders or not really developers I mean I think we've looked at it from it's a really good question I think we've largely approached it from like you know government planning and policy kind of you know what are the regulations being put on developers um but yeah like what I mean what is the role of developers and what is the responsibility there or should you know I mean but then it goes back to Apollo is there a sort of what obligations are there but um and I think yeah I imagine it really varies by developer if you know how much different times for sure yeah no we haven't really we haven't really be nice to chat with more of them and you know especially yeah we should follow up on that um because KB has um pushed really hard for water conservation in homes uh before the drought got really bad it was about 10 years ago um they they put solar on all their homes in the Sun Belt before anybody else did talked a lot about indoor air quality and how to build in ways that don't have emissions and doors so I think this would be right up their Ally I did organize a call with Salo Sciences which is uh San francisco-based startup that has this California Forest Observatory app that shows where all the trees are in the state and what the fire risks are and I got uh their president together with one of the KB people to look at a development around Sacramento and they could look at in pretty high resolution and say well out of these 75 plots that you've got these are the ones that are going to have the biggest risk and these are the ones that are more secure similar to some of the things you're talking about it's not something they were going to advertise you know we'll we'll give you a discount on this house because it's more likely to burn down but uh they were interested in in having more of that kind of knowledge so again I think your way of organizing all this information is really powerful and uh be great to see more people appreciate it thank you