I’ve been working on some interviews with old-timers and thought this thread could be a good place to share these kinds of conversations. I also wanted to shout-out to Bethany Hannah at The Smokey Generation. Bethany has done many many interviews with our wildland elders.
Here are the first two we have published so far on The Lookout: Sue Husari - First female Hotshot, and pioneering woman leader in American wildland fire (Region FMO for Pacific West Region of NPS, and also, Region 5 of USFS) with a fire career spanning 5 decades.
Jim Klump - veteran wildland firefighter, old-school Redding Smokejumper, and District Fire Management Officer on the Plumas National Forest for 25 years. We talked about the intersection of fire and forestry, land management, people, leadership, and history.
New interview on The Lookout with Dr. Malcom North.
Dr. Malcom North is US Forest Service scientist and professor at UC Davis. He has been studying wildfire, forests, and wildlife for the past 30 years, and is one of our best brains when is comes to putting together all the different pieces of how wildlands function at the landscape scale. We talked about the scale of our wildfire problems, potential ways to change the ways we reforest after fires, and the very real obstacles to getting forest restoration work done at the landscape scale.
Today’s Lookout Livestream is an extended/freewheeling tour of the topic of wildfire severity, told as a bunch of stories about fires I have worked on or studied in Northern California over the past 3 decades.
This broadcast came about, in part, due to an extended back and forth I had on Facebook with veteran NorCal Cal Fire firefighter, Darin Quigley, about fire severity on public vs private timberlands. Darin is a retired Operations Section Chief from SKU who now represents large industrial timberland companies, acting as a liason between the Incident Management Teams and the land managers, during major fires.
In my FB convo with Darin, I quoted a 2022 paper that found that in the past two decades in Northern California, industrial timberlands were almost 2x more likely than public lands to burn with high severity. Darin said these findings seemed counter to his professional experience. He asked me if I could dig deeper into the methods, so I reached out to the authors of the paper and they sent me their satellite data. This broadcast is my exploration of their datasets. It’s not intended to be un-biased or scientific - I am not an academic. This is just me looking at their data and sharing stories as I interpret it.
So many factors drive how a fire behaves. Science is so limited in its ability to tease apart all of the different factors which drive a specific outcome. I’ll take storytelling over statistics, any day of the week.
Hi Zeke, really enjoy your content. Juan Brown (Blancolirio on Youtube) shouted you out in a recent video (1:27).. would be cool if you could do an aerial flight with him over recent burn scars showing the severity / beneficial fire, would take the public engagement and education a step further. Content “W” for both channels?
