 online. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events, and we're very pleased to welcome you to Saving Paradise and the Ponderosa Way Firebreak with Gray Brecken and Stephen J. Pine. If you're new to the Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're still one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature a General Interest Library, an international chess club, ongoing author and literary programs, and our Cinema with Film series, so please visit our website to get all of our listings. The talk will be followed by a Q&A, so if you have a chat question, please put it in the chat, and we'll be reading off the questions to our speakers. And also, books by the authors can be found at alexanderbook.com. So, this year alone, wildfires have burned over four million acres throughout California, ravaging land, natural habitats, and thousands of homes and communities. Tonight, we have two experts to guide this conversation about past and present policies, practices, and funding that can protect our forests and our lives. Gray Brecken Scholar and Residents at UC Berkeley will talk about the historic importance of the Ponderosa Way, and this massive New Deal infrastructure project spanned 800 miles through California and employed thousands of workers during the Great Depression. It's overgrown and neglected, and we wonder, could it be revitalized today? Also, could it have saved paradise from being raised to the ground? Also, fire historian Stephen J. Pine offers his first-hand experience from years of wildland firefighting in the Grand Canyon with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He's one of the foremost authorities on fire throughout the U.S., and has written many books, which I'll mention later. We look forward to these views on prevention, preservation, and practices as we face climate change and more erratic weather and fire patterns that are happening across the country. A few words about our speakers. Gray Brecken is founder of the Living New Deal, which promotes the history, sites, and projects of the New Deal and its relevance today. Gray regularly lectures around the country and is president of the New Deal, a nonprofit board of directors. He is also the author of Imperial San Francisco, Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, and Farewell Promised Land, Waking from the California Dream. And Stephen J. Pine is a emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He's here with us tonight from Alpine, and he is best known for his research into the history of fire and his publications are vast and include Between Two Fires, a Fire History of Contemporary America, California a Fire Survey, and to the Last Smoke and Anthology, just to name a few. So please welcome Gray Brecken and Stephen Pine. And we're going to start off with Gray. Thank you, Laura. Okay. Well, as Laura said, I want to talk to you about the Ponderosa way. It's a fascinating artifact, but there'll be a lot else as well too. And I just want to start with the Living New Deal, which is my project actually, and it's a national team of associates. And what we're doing is identifying, mapping, and interpreting the total cumulative physical legacy left to us by the various New Deal agencies. You can go to our websites, very simple, livingnewdeal.org. And what we're doing is we're actually discovering a lost civilization, which just happens to be ours. It was built about 85 years ago, but my parents' generation, they forgot to tell us about it. And so we're having to rediscover it. It was essentially buried by its enemies and forgotten. And so nobody's ever done this before. So what we're doing, as I said, is mapping everything that the New Deal agencies left us. And this is our current map. It's just going to get denser and denser. We now have about 16,500 points on it. But as I wrote recently in an article in our newsletter, we're just scratching the surface because we know that there are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of sites to go. And so I know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life, and it makes me very happy to be involved in doing this kind of treasure hunt, along with so many great people that we're involved with. Tonight, I'm going to talk about one of those agencies that left us lots of stuff, the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps. This was Franklin Roosevelt's own idea, his favorite of all of the agencies, and one that he wanted to make permanent. It also was the most popular. In its nine-plus years of existence, it employed over three million young men. And here are just some archival photos of the men playing and working. They did a lot of both. And what they did actually was they did a great deal of forest management. They did soil conservation. They created recreational facilities. They stocked fish. They did so much stuff. And they did this because, as I said, there were so many of them, that it provided an enormous labor force. They were housed in camps, usually way out in the boonies. Each camp would have about 200 men. It would have an infirmary, library, school facilities, mess hall, of course, and then bunk houses for the men. And at its peak, there were over 4,000 of these camps all around the country. It's usually associated with the West, but as you can see, there were a lot of camps in the East, as well, too. And the Adirondacks, the Appalachians, they had a lot of work to do. And contrary to mythology that you hear all the time, the CCC was at least partially racially integrated 15 years before Truman integrated the armed forces. And that is outside of the South, where it was always segregated. They left us a lot of wonderful structures, those kind of rustic structures that we see in our state and our national parks. They left us a great heritage of stonework, magnificent stonework, which they learned from what were known as local experienced men who taught them how to do it. And they left us great amphitheaters, as well, too. This is the Red Rock Amphitheater just west of Denver. And this is the Mountain Theater up on Mount Amalpius, where they did all the trails and the fire lookout, et cetera. We're not seeing your screen, Cher. Oh, no. Oh, yes. Was I talking with that? You've seen that? Yeah, we can't see the screen share. Just hit screen share. Can you see it now? Here we go. You can see it now. What we see is a, we're seeing your something, you should be able to select the, your keynote. Look for your keynote. You have to select your keynote. Can you see it now? Hold on. Hang on. We're getting there. Yeah. We got, here we go. Here we go. Now, click back to the beginning so we can see it. You weren't seeing any of that. No. No, let's start from the beginning. All right. Okay. Here we go again. I'm going to be a bit briefer because you already have the text, but this is the Living New DLR webpage. And I'm not going to go through it all again. As I said, we now have over 16,000 sites. And this is the lost civilization that we're discovering. And it tends, it was ours actually. This is the map on our website. And it looks like a lot. As I said, it's about 16,500 sites. But when we're finished, you'll barely be able to see the United States because there's just so much. As I said in this article, we're just scratching the surface. So the CCC, this is a WPA poster of the CCC. And it lasted over nine years. And these are the men at working at play. The one in the upper right actually is men building an access road into Sequoia National Park. Actually, so is the lower left as well too. So when you go into a national park, you're basically, you're usually riding on CCC roads and seeing CCC construction all over the place. This is one of the camps. It had 200 men. And this is a map showing all of the camps in the United States. As I said, there were over 4,000 of them. And you can see how many of them there are on the East Coast. So it's not just the West. This is a very interesting photograph that shows that the camps were actually at least partially racially segregated outside of the South 15 years before the armed forces were integrated. And these are some of the things that they left us. These are, this is actually the rustic structures up at Sequoia National Park. This is a ranger station in Salem, Oregon, the kind of stonework that they did, Red Rock Amphitheater and the Mountain Theater up on Mount Amalpias. And as I was saying, they planted a lot of trees. The CCC planted over 3 billion trees in its nine plus years of existence. So when you think of what we need to plant now, well, it suggests exactly the kind of labor force that we need to do that kind of work. So it's not just that they fought fires. They actually were creating entire forests. They're actually in the United States. We know that they're entire forests that are now about 85 years old with the CCC planted at the time. Well, it was largely created because of the Great Depression. As you may know, at that time, the unemployment rate was about 25%. But for young people, it was much higher. And for African Americans, it was higher still. This is one of the FSA photographs of a young man in despair. And something that was said at the time, I have moments of real terror when I think we might be losing this generation. We have to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary. That person was Eleanor Roosevelt. And it was a very real fear that we were losing an entire generation. Well, you can see the same sight in full color on any of our city streets now. This is now personalized depression. The economy may be doing good for some are great. But in fact, it's not that there are people all over the place that are suffering personalized depression, or if you like wasted potential. So this is actually Eleanor Roosevelt with young men who whose potential was being realized. They were very fortunate because they were stationed at a camp in Yosemite Valley. So they probably felt that they have died and gone to heaven, especially if they'd come from the haulers of Kentucky or the dust bowl to work in this magnificent place and make it even more so. This is one of the CCC boys. He just passed away. Walter was 98 when he died, and he was a CCC boy. And like so many of the CCCs, he said that it was one of the happiest times of his life. And it set him up for success later on in life. He's standing next to a statue that our sister organization, the National New Deal Preservation Association hopes to have installed in every state in the union. Actually, several states have several of these. And it's a reminder of what we owe these young men from back then. Walter was head of the CCC Alumni Association for a number of years. And most of those men are now gone. You can actually see them in action. You can go to the movies because our website has a section of digitized New Deal movies and there are a number of them that show the CCC in action. So get yourself some popcorn and go and enjoy the movies. All right. The Ponderosa Way is this remarkable fire break or fuel break, which I first learned about probably 15 years ago when visiting my friend Ranger, Jordan Fisher Smith, who was on this call up in Nevada City. He told me about this. I thought that's amazing. I've never heard of it. But it runs very close to Nevada City and Grass Valley. And then I became increasingly interested as I realized the connection with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Unfortunately, nobody else I knew had ever heard of this thing, including people who should have known about it. I wrote an op-ed and could not get it placed. And so, yeah, I wrote the op-ed actually at the time of the campfire three years ago when paradise burned because I found that the Ponderosa Way had gone right through paradise. And if it hadn't been able to stop the fire, it might have at least provided an alternative evacuation route for the people, some of whom didn't make it out. So because nobody knew about it, and I couldn't get my op-ed placed, my friend Carol Denny actually did this cartoon for a local paper of ours in Berkeley about how could we have forgotten something that big and dramatic? Well, the Ponderosa Way was kind of the obverse of the great shelter belts that were built by the CCC and other agencies in the Midwest during the 1930s, which were meant to anchor the soil, conserve the soil, and break the wind out there. So here they added trees and the Ponderosa Way, they subtracted them. And here are some of the boys working on it. Now the question here, and I hope to talk about this with Stephen, it should be called as a firebreak or a fuel break, because we now know with our ember driven fires that great wildfires like we've seen in the last few years can jump wide freeways. And so even the Ponderosa Way could not have done that. But I like to refer to them as fuel breaks, because if it's not wind driven in that way, it will serve to slow down the fire, both for the firefighters themselves and for the people and animals that are in the way who need to get out of the way of the advancing firefront. Well, as I said, I couldn't get anybody to do this story. I'm not in the Chronicle or the New York Times or Los Angeles Times as California was burning last summer. So I just sent it out to some of the reporters who were covering the fire so well at the Chronicle and Matthias Gaffney picked it up and he did what I think is a Pulitzer Prize winning job. It appeared in November 15th on the front page of the Chronicle and then two jump pages on the inside with great graphics. He really did his research. This is one of the graphics from it. And I urge you to actually go to the digital version because it has graphics that they didn't have room for in the print version. So this shows how the Ponderosa Way went from the Kern River in the south near Bakersfield up to the Pit River in the north near Mount Shasta. And it went along the foothills of the Sierra. You can see here on the right how many counties it went through. I think it goes through 16 counties. So there was some archival documents in the digital version of Matthias's article. And this is actually a photograph from Stephen's collection. And it shows something very interesting. You can see how the Ponderosa Way goes through the lower foothills. It goes through grasslands and brush areas. And it's meant to actually serve as a wall to protect the valuable timber at the top of that ridge up there so that it can't get up there. But it's really going through this kind of scrubby land down below. Now it's very difficult to find pictures of the Ponderosa Way when it was young and fresh and you could actually see it. These are some that I called from articles of the time. And wherever possible they tried to run the break along the ridges. But of course that's impossible in the Sierra Nevada foothills. It's deeply dissected by rivers. So in places it plunges in the canyons such as here. And then they would build bridges across those rivers. Here it is up on one of the ridges. And the figures for the Ponderosa Way vary between 650 miles and 800. And I think the reason for that is wherever possible they tried to use pre-existing roads. So I suspect that the CCC built about 650 miles and then linked up with these other roads. Now this is the ideal situation for the fuel break because the land is relatively flat, which it isn't often in the foothills. And here the way could actually expand out to 200 to 250 feet. Whereas in the steeper terrain it would be about 50 feet. And wherever possible they would actually dig it right down to bedrock. This made it easier to maintain it over the long run because you wouldn't have the brushes in the tree growing back at least so quickly. Now after the war something interesting happened because in 42 the CCC was put out of existence. All those men were off fighting. They had been trained in the camps for discipline. And actually they made a great fighting force. They were in terrific shape. But something interesting happened to Ponderosa Way after the war. Nobody wanted it because there wasn't a labor force anymore to maintain it. Cheap labor force I should say. So it started growing back and it became this kind of orphan that nobody really wanted to take responsibility for. This is Doug Laurie who is in Matthias's story. And he's a fascinating guy. He is a former California Conservation Corps supervisor who like me has been acting as a kind of pesky mosquito to try to get his locality. In his case he's up near Chico. In my case I'm in Inverness on Point Reyes. Trying to get the locals to realize the urgency of maintaining a firebreak both as a way of slowing or stopping the fire and as an emergency evacuation route. Unfortunately Doug's documentation of which apparently he had a lot, half of it burned when his apartment did when he was living in paradise. He barely got out with his life. He had a harrowing escape. His lungs were wrecked by the smoke that he breathed at that time. But he's now living in Chico and he's carrying on the good fight to remember and have the Ponderosa Way saved for people who might otherwise be trapped in a little town called Cohasset up there. This was shot by one of our associates down in Mariposa County and you can see how it's nearly impassable in many places. In some places it's disappearing altogether. The bridges that the seas built are in many cases in very bad condition or completely impassable like this one which doesn't even have a deck. Some of them were made out of wood and they've either burned or been swept away in floods. In 2010 Professor Betty Elaine Smith who's on this call actually assigned a 57 mile stretch of the North Ponderosa Way to her cartography class at Eastern Illinois University and they confirmed what Doug has said to me that it's very difficult to even locate the Ponderosa Way let alone to map it. It really is a chore. Now this is a very interesting historical map and it shows something that really caught my interest. You can see that the Ponderosa Way parallels Highway 99 on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley going up the Sierra but yet although it connects the national forest it doesn't often touch them. So what this means is it's going not only through many counties but over a lot of public rather private property. So I still haven't determined how they actually did this. They must have used eminent domain and of course they didn't have to deal with environmental laws. They just built the thing. This might seem like it doesn't have anything with Sierra Nevada but in fact actually it does. This is the Daniel Burnham plan for San Francisco in 1905 and in this plan Daniel Burnham proposed a series of wide radio boulevards that would transect the existing grid of San Francisco and they would not only serve to beautify the city in speed traffic in a modernized San Francisco but also to serve as a firebreak in case a fire ever broke out in this almost entirely wooden city which it did the next year. And this is the aftermath of the great fire after the earthquake and what you can see is what happens to a largely wooden city. It disappears except where there are masonry buildings downtown. Now this might seem like a great opportunity for realizing the Burnham plan with its radio boulevards to act as fire breaks but in fact you're looking at why it couldn't happen and that is the streets define property lines and the property lines make a city very very conservative. So they built back on the existing property lines and streets almost immediately after by three years later it was pretty much rebuilt without any of those fuel breaks that Burnham had proposed. Now I'd like to think of these fuel breaks actually as fire levies and of course what a levy is is an embankment. It should be permanently maintained to protect the valuable property behind the levy because if you don't in fact you can lose a great deal of valuable property as well as lives and that's what we're doing increasingly these days. The American Society of Civil Engineers every four years comes out with a report card of what's happening to American public works so much of which was built 85 years ago during the new deal and they gave the levies in the United States this grade of D minus I think it is I can't see it actually and as it says they're protecting over 1.3 trillion dollars in property values. Actually no no it was D. Actually that's a little bit worse than the cumulative grade of all of our public works which is D plus. I went through all the various categories and they didn't grade the fire breaks in the United States because that's not a category that they grade but if they did it would be down at the bottom perhaps even an F if the ponderosa weighs anything to judge by. Well you might remember last year the guy in the middle actually visited the town of Paradise which he mispronounced. I'm not sure he knew exactly where he was and there he is flanked by two of California's governors lecturing them about their responsibility for the fire that destroyed Paradise. As he said it burned because we don't manage our forest that is we don't rake it like the Finns do in their forest which the Finns actually found quite baffling so there were a lot of these photos of raking or vacuuming their forest of course they have a climate which isn't exactly like California's. Well this is actually one of the reasons we don't manage our forest but of course the 45 wasn't going to mention this it's because we don't have the money to do so because of the tax revolt started by Howard Jarvis in California which is stanched funding for doing exactly that kind of work which we must do. Now I highly recommend this book by our associate Bob Leninger the subtitle is the forgotten legacy of the New Deal and you can't understand the New Deal agencies without reading Bob's book but the actual title is long-range public investment and that's really telling because it's something we've largely forgot about that the government must do public investment that the market won't do to protect the people and of course we're learning about that now with the pandemic. Back to the CCC we desperately need the CCC as I said Roosevelt wanted to make it permanent but it was killed actually just before his death during the Second World War and it's never been revived but we need it now and there have actually been a number of legislators in Congress who have introduced bills to revive the Civilian Conservation Corps in the age of climate change and I was delighted yesterday to hear that Biden has actually proposed a civilian climate corps to do not only what the original CCC did but actually to confront the challenge of climate change that they did not but we don't have to wait that long because actually thanks to Jerry Brown the first we have our own conservation corps in the state which he established in 1976 modeled on the original CCC it's the oldest and largest and they do their work so well and so unobtrusively that many Californians aren't even aware that they exist but they do and they do great work and it needs to be greatly expanded so that we can do the kind of work that we need to do to save ourselves because we're living in a very different age as Stephen is going to tell you about but you don't have to listen to Steve although I want you to because the Chronicle tells you all the time on front page stories and you are experiencing all the time as in the last hellish summer that we went through this was just a couple of days ago in the Chronicle the fire season is now year-round in California not just in California but throughout the entire west because of the droughts and the climate change that we're having so this is a day that I really not like to remember but it's going to be hard to forget and I'm sure we won't probably most of you went through this and the point is that planning and prevention is much cheaper than what we're experiencing now and that is actually the point of long-range public investment we not only have to build and maintain fire breaks or rather fuel breaks like the ponderosa way we need to build a lot more of them in places like point rays for example but all throughout California and the west this is the smoke from the woodward fire which was in the center of the Point Reyes national seashore and again this is something that I hope I never have to see again but on that I give you Stephen Pine thank you very much well thank you Greg and I was asked to speak very briefly about the general historical context for the ponderosa way and other other fire related projects in the 1930s I was also asked to explain how I got interested in fire and it's very simple a few days after I graduated from high school I found myself on a fire crew and stayed with them for 15 seasons 12 as crew boss but I like to begin the story of American fire with the 1880 census which improbably enough included a map of forest fires and the darker the area the the larger the proportion of area burnt each year this is only forest fires it didn't include grasslands and it is in many ways a very different map from what we see today so what kinds of fires are involved well we have nature's fires lots of fires start by lightning we have fires started by people most of it historically has been for agriculture grazing farming land clearing of one kind or another and in the 19th century already by the 1880s we we begin to see the impact of industrialization or in this case an alternative form of burning that will begin to compete and then collude with the other kinds of fires so this is really a map of the united states between three fires and at the time the u.s is much like brazil in recent years with similar kinds of fire issues there were lots of bad burns we're talking about monster fires million acre fires fires we're talking about fire probably an order of magnitude in general from what we've seen recently and this continued well into the 20th century and gave rise to the realization that the state would have to intervene and the progressive era was willing to do that um forests were a primary target both for trees and for watershed began creating reserves 1891 gave it an act uh 97 and then in 1905 gave it an organization to administer at the u.s forest service however unlikely uh their task might seem they had one fire guard for every 670 square miles this was a global project by the way uh practice not only in the northern rakhis but in the central mountains of india uh and this was the u.s was was doing what other uh progressive in western countries were at the time well the foundation story for the american way of fire begins in 1910 august in 1910 the big blow-up uh over five million acres burned on the national forest nobody knows how much generally about three and a quarter million acres were in the northern rakhis this is a map the forest service produced um after the uh seasons fires so it's roughly a little less than what california experiences last year but in a very concentrated form 78 firefighters were killed forest service went in debt to over a million dollars which was real money in 1910 and the whole generation was traumatized they even mapped the smoke so smoke is not something new it's something that uh disappeared and is now coming back that same month in california northern california uh a counter proposal was launched namely light burning this had been simmering for some time it finally went public the same time as the big blow-up and suggested that the entire design of firefighting by the forest service was misguided that we should be emulating the american indian and here we are in the plumes national forest began back in the general area of paradise so we're surveying the boundaries noting that everybody is burning they have picked up the tradition from the indigenous peoples they've come to think of the fire as a part of the forest and beneficial and all classes set hold this view and all set fires and this was something that was considered anathema on many levels by the forest service and here's aldo leopold the prophet of modern environmentalism in 1920 arguing against light burning and in favor of a forest service program of fire protection so many of the controversies we're having today uh have been around for more than a century but partly because of the collage the two opposing these two alternative views coming at exactly the same time i don't think a reasonable debate couldn't evolve and people were forced to choose and the forest service decided to double down uh and eliminate fire as much as possible um all of the future chiefs of the forest service were personally on the fire line they were all young men uh they were all uh branded by the experience uh this was a kind of valley forge or long march experience for the forest service that would continue um until the outbreak of world war two congress i've responded in 1911 with the weeks act and several successor acts since then uh to create a national infrastructure for forestry that would be based on fire protection federal state programs it took about 50 years for all the states to finally come on lots of innovation lots of techniques to get to fires to find fires to invent technology adapt technology any of it from california by the way but there was also the problem what to do with the fires in these remote backcountry you don't have access it could take days just to get to a snack fire in the early 30s uh the dust bull had its counterpart with huge fires in the backcountry here's the tillamook fire 1933 uh in oregon and you can see on the upper right an echo another fight with a whole chain of these going on um about 330 i think 360 000 acres burned this is uh coastal douglas fir and what to do with all of that abandoned backcountry in the sense backcountry in time all that land had been cut over and burned and left well what happened was the new deal and an array of programs as gray has laid out to respond that thought that rehabilitating the social uh crisis of the depression and rehabilitating america's environmental crisis were paired and here's the ccc shortly after being organized being sent out to fight the tillamook fire the ccc provided what the forest service had never had before that is a standing body of people who could be rallied for fires it's estimated that perhaps as much as half of what the ccc did was directly or indirectly involved with fire a lot of building roads trends uh telephone lines lookout towers uh warehouses uh fire caches etc and on where i worked we still used uh the ranger station was an old ccc mess hall we lived in old ccc housing the ccc camp itself was was had become our heliport 1936 they built a fire cache for structural and wildland fire 40 years later we took the photo that building is still in play the buildings left there the roads the lookout tower all of those are still present a lot of resources 1934 big fires break out again in the northern rockies chief forester's gust silcox he had been the number two man during the big blow up uh he doesn't know what should they do with these fires they had the ccc they used them but these big fires seemed to be too much uh so he gathered the best minds of the agency together they met in missoula debated alternatives and in 1935 he announced what became known as the tenning and policy a single universal standard to apply to every fire across the country controlled by 10 o'clock the next morning as a result of that we got specially fire crews uh the smoke jumpers by 1939 and evolving out of the ccc 40 man crews self-styled shock troops the forerunner of the hot shot crews of today and we got massive infrastructure projects as here a fuel break look at the number of people involved in the scale of the operation but in some ways it's also the case that the means became so large that they determined the ends i can't imagine a tenning and policy without the new deal's political trends were as available we would have had to take a different ground roosevelt was personally interested here he is reviewing a new fire prevention poster featuring uncle sam who by the way looks suspiciously like the guy just to the right of the poster who is the artist james mike gunnery flag and then it all goes to war and world war two was in many ways a fire war the u.s. was attacked by jacob and these fire and of course it ends with a new fire weapon the atomic bomb they're a famous photo army photo but that is not the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb that is the pyrocumulus cloud of the burning city so the military thought of that fire was now a question of national defense the next wars would be fire wars and so we begin getting military interest uh and we get a massive transfer war surplus equipment here in southern california and staged photo in northern california replacing the muscle of the ccc with mechanical muscle and suggesting that you could continue the firefight without having quite so many men we are in fact in a kind of cold war on fire and fire well it's the other red menace again on the war examples lots of efforts at large-scale mobilization of science special equipment development centers created first to help convert military equipment and then invent others and then images like these b-17s dropping fire retardant uh battle-hardened crews trudging along um their trenches but of course this can't continue for 50 years the forest service had been a hegemon it did the control interest for all of the institutions involved it had established policy and it had based that policy on a program of fire suppression by the 60s we begin seeing the blowback from that the consequences i remind you this is all well before climate change comes on the horizon and we'll see an institutional breakup and efforts to reorganize and lots and lots of experiments in fire policy all of this of course occurs against a large environmental movement a change in demography the creation of a civil society for fire and a redefinition of our public domain what do we want those lands to be and think of the wilderness act as perhaps the most dramatic version but all of the federal agencies got new charters and then in fact that meant they would have to adapt fire programs accordingly so we began a kind of revolutionary period um bipolar certainly by coastal florida was one center looking at prescribed fire deliberate burning looking at working landscapes looking at private landscaped as well as public california more interested in wild landscapes natural fire public lands we also see the origins of a civil society that will be very important in in the evolving structure and thinking 1962 the nature conservancy conducts its first prescribed fire a tnc now burns as much each year as the national park service and tall timbers research station outside tallah tallahassee florida begins a series of fire conferences that provide an alternative forum for thinking about fire so the gist of the new programs the park service changed 1968 the forest service 1978 was something called prescribed burn was an alternative a middle ground between letting all fires go and trying to put them out we would do the burning ourselves directed by bureaucratic and scientific constraints that was then expanded particularly out west to something called a prescribed natural fire don't try to parse the metaphysics there but was a way of allowing natural fires more room to run their extent so thank you but it's the equivalent of reintroducing wolves and even on wildfires not having to put every fire out by 10 o'clock there are lots of ways you can respond that are all considered control so lots of lots of choices here which is great except that people in the field have to make decisions very quickly and can't be expected to make decisions sort of on the fly well the politics changes has in so many things within the 80s environmentalism is is attacked government funding government programs are set to be privatized and reduced and fire will bear all of this so the progress stalls it isn't eliminated it just doesn't advance in effect we have a lost decade and a bit more during that time something quite unexpected happened that thanks to the character of urban sprawl we begin seeing cities burn again maybe we hadn't seen cities burn since san francisco we fixed that problem walking towns burn again going back to the late 19th century that's like watching polio come back what happened we forgot to do all the things took fire out of cities all the common boring hygiene all of the simple things and so fire returns the era ends with two big sort of explosions extravagances yellowstone burns under nominally under a program of prescribed natural fire in 1988 about 40 percent of the park burns and then uncle burns over three I think about 3,600 houses or something 750 houses in the first hour it's a new metric of fire behavior how many houses per hour is consumed and this was in 91 but this also means that we're seeing the landscape divide it's polarizing like everything else what we don't see here is the middle landscape a middle working landscape the emphasis is going to the two extremes the revolution starts over the Clinton administration especially the interest of Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt who took a personal interest and then in 94 of the South Canyon fire burned over a crew in Colorado and that set into motion efforts to have a common fire policy a federal policy to begin more seriously integrating all of the scatters scattered parts by 98 Babbitt declares we're in the national fire crisis in 2000 we have two major breakdowns wildfire returns to the northern Rockies again 90 years after the big blow-up we can't stop it all those planes all those helicopters all those engines all those crews all those radios all that science we can't stop them the national park service meanwhile set what i regard as an ill-advised prescribed fire outside dandelier national monument that then escaped and burned into Los Alamos national lab causing a crisis so it seems we couldn't light fires or fight fires and that results in the waning hours of the Clinton administration with a national fire plan not too little too late maybe too much more than could be absorbed but certainly too late all the conditions that favor explosive fires are now all the needles pointed in the same direction we're getting larger fires we're getting more communities burning we're still losing firefighters we have mega fires and now we have mega costs over half of the forest service entire budget is spent fighting fires and the agency is simply being hollowed out and crippled by that effort so what happens now i think we're in perhaps inflicting into a new era the revolution the era i think may be fading it's become part of our history and we have to think about fire and our response to it in a somewhat different way maybe use the going term resilience so we now have three strategies first two based on our history call a resistant strategy reassert suppression become an all hazard emergency service model wildland fire on urban fire and if you want an example of cal fire i mean cal fire is a very expensive way to do firefighting in fact the entire california fire service is now under a kind of urban model and that is something that that has to be overcome if you want to change anything from suppression but we have to do something to protect our communities and this is something that's politically very effective and i don't mean political theater snidely you have to be shown to be doing something and calling for more airplanes and more engines and firefighters is a way of responding but out of the fire revolution era we also have a restoration strategy let's change the context of the fires to make it easier for us to set fires that don't blow up and to contain fires that we don't want in other words dampen the bad fires and promote the good fires encourage more robust landscapes now with the added interest of climate change and this can involve more than prescribed fire we also have to harden our our settlements so the firewise program for um dealing with fires that are going to happen because we can control all these fires except the ones that are really large and bad but those are the ones we need in some ways the strategy fails exactly when we must need it and finally this kind of resilient strategy i see a lot among actual people on the ground fire officers we're not going to get ahead of this problem it's too late the last chance we had was in the 70s and 80s since then it's gotten harder and harder they accept the conditions they're going to work with fires they'll provide asset protection around communities municipal watersheds otherwise they're liable to back off a couple of rich tops and burn out we're talking about very large burnout conditions not emergency backfires this is a kind of prescribed fire done under urgent conditions at a large scale and that seems to be we can get some fraction of fire maybe all that burnout maybe 20 percent of 15 20 percent of it was really more severe than we want but we still got 80 percent 75 80 85 percent of it within a range of quote good fire this may be what we have instead of prescribed fire which is just too encumbered and too small scale to operate this is very effective northern rockies is using it southwest is using it very effectively parts of california are back behind the coast range so they're all in play and which one should win well it's a game of rock scissors paper what does the particular circumstance require it's very if you're right along the edge of the L.A. basin or san francisco bay area there's no alternative but all out suppression what you can be effective or not but lots of other things we need a mixture of stuff and finally what about climate change well my sense is that we've got two realms of combustion colliding how many of these fires are set by power lines under absolutely the worst conditions there's another infrastructure project that's needs to be badly upgraded but here we have one set of of energy from burning fossil fuels interacting with a fire prone landscape in very unhealthy ways you add up all of our fire practices and I think we're creating the fire equivalent of an ice age or what I've taken to calling a pyrosane into the future I'm reminded of the old testament prophet Ezekiel who thundered they shall go out from one fire and another fire shall devour them we will always be caught between fires that's the world we live in fire does not have a fix except in clearly built landscapes beyond that we are always going to have to navigate and negotiate so thank you very much for your time thank you so much Stephen for that great presentation thanks to both of you and also I want to do a shout out to Matthias Gaffney who wrote the article in the article thanks for joining us tonight this the article that you that you put together inspired me to put this program together for Mechanics Institute it's and I want to recommend everyone please pick it up or look at it online there was another article I'm going to start with a question to both of you another article in the Chronicle that was also addressing the issue of the private fire companies and I wanted to get your feedback on some of those issues of of private companies coming in into the the whole picture of and if that's positive or negative or if it's the conflict of interest in terms of cal fire and the whole effort to to contain our fires Stephen do you want to start off well I mean it's like many things it's comparable to private security services it's the wealthy providing their own array of services instead of contributing in a sense to public services so it's like having private schools and charter schools that in effect take away from the public where it's a it's another form of privatizing and there was a lot of argument during the 80s that privatization would make fire fire management more economical and more efficient I don't see any evidence for that because what you've done is create a lobby group for fire suppression in fact there's a national association of of wildfire I'm sorry I can't get the exact term but for crews planes equipment and so forth so it's another example we have to choose what's the balance between public and private and for the past few decades it has certainly been on the to the private side yeah um Laura I will say that you know from my own experience what what I've been sort of startled by is in my own town the reluctance to take collective action to save the community because it seems like we're all on our own we you know the the approach being taken in Inverness and other towns as well too is kind of dodged city you're on your own so you know you fire harden your house and you create a defensible perimeter around it but what worries me and for Stephen could talk about this is what happens when you get one of these monster wind driven fires um you know how safe are any of us going to be on our own if I if I could pile in his I mean there there are many ways in which fire is a contagion phenomenon you can model it exactly the same so hardening houses is very much like wearing masks and defensible space around structures is very much like social distancing and if you can get a community response you have the equivalent of herd immunity but if you take action your neighbors don't you're still vulnerable yes we have some questions on the side and Pam Troy our events assistant will read off a few of these questions to you okay the the first one is from Betty Smith Europe has their utilities all underground is there hope for that to be done in the united states um well yeah thanks uh I think there are selectively areas we know areas where wind comes and it's there we have the fire equivalent of floodplains and it would make a lot of sense to put utility lines underground for those areas otherwise having a smart grid where you can reroute the power having locally sourced and stored power means that you can go off grid for a few days the winds don't go on forever we're talking about two or three days there are a lot of things that we've talked about anyway as part of upgrading our energy profile and fixing a very creaky infrastructure and fire could be a part of it that's a good example again of you know what the american society civil engineers are saying that we our public infrastructure is really falling into a room and we've left it up to private companies like PG&E and you know burying the the infrastructure is obviously going to be very expensive and will probably require public investment very much like during the rural electrification agency a government agency brought power to to farms and rural areas at public expense so I think we need to have a program like that the next question is from Andrew Johnson for Dr. Pine where do fuel brakes fit into your framework of resistance and resilience do you think that 800 mile fuel brakes still have a place in our fire management strategies well that's a tough question first of all the difference between fuel brakes and firebreak a firebreak it goes all the way down to mineral soil so it has no fuel within it but these tend to be very small the short roads or or something scraped by him a fuel break is a reduction in fuels the change is the character of burning in the areas but does not eliminate it so and something like the Ponderosa way you would have a fire break or road within the middle of of the fuel break there are places for it I think you I tend to be skeptical partly because it's a it's a question of design and then a question of maintenance and the design is that like all design things it works best if it's built in at the beginning not if it's tried you try to retrofit it on rugged terrain and so forth it works in plantations sugarcane is burned just prior to harvest so there's a whole elaborate system of fuel breaks in sugarcane plantations to do it that works very well it's much harder in a wildland said and then the maintenance issue fire doesn't seem to be enough to maintain it there's got to be something else uh two effective fuel breaks in california the international fuel break along the border with mexico uh that is maintained not just for fire but for border traffic uh so it has dual purpose and has multiple funding camp pendleton uh is I mean it's just a network of fuel breaks inside and out because there's so much live fire training going on that it's constantly burning and it's very successful but that's built in and there are other reasons for maintaining it the problem is that fuel breaks have been elaborate I mean after the 1970 fires they were all over southern california all the mountains had fuel breaks running along them and then they go away uh and environmentalists have began to critique it because they can become an entry point for exotic grasses it's very hard there has to be a high there has to be high value it has to be designed well so that actually works and then there has to be enough reasons for maintaining and in a place like paradise I could imagine not so much a fuel break but a large green belt a recreational area uh maybe we could get the trump organization interested in a golf course or something like that where you provide a large area that could absorb some of the uh a lot of the embers provided but it has to in my experience it has to have another set of reasons or you won't get the funding I mean that's where Agent Orange was apparently developed it was used to help maintain fuel breaks and then based on that it was sent over to vietnam for large-scale defoliation so why would you use something like that because you don't have a hundred camps of ccc boys to clean it out the next question is from um for gray's from Peter Tannen what was the origin of the name ponderosa way firebreak great well well that's because the the dominant timber in the upper levels that the the ponderosa way was supposed to protect were ponderosa pines so it gave its name break even though it doesn't run through the ponderosa pines most of the way it's really kind of it tends to run through chaparral country so another have a question from birdie chode and a rather a kind of a question what's the culpability of land use planning and planners in the approval of subdivisions in high fire risk areas gray you can do this i would say it's pretty high um living in the i used to think it was really stupid for people to move into the what's it called the the wildland interface until i did it myself um so um but i i look around and i see that you know they keep permitting houses on inverness ridge and it's not nearly as bad as some other places in the state um where the subdivisions just running wild but in our case actually we're running out of water because um we don't have any reservoirs we our water supplies just from the springs that we have so we have a problem with water as well as with fire so i think that that is a major problem but again that goes back to proposition 13 because entities are strapped for funding and you get the funding by developing the land um but it's just not a very good formula when you have a fire coming over the hill or the slope i would i would add to that that i would add to that so many of these communities are are not thought of as urban uh the wildland urban interface was defined by the urban excuse me was defined by the wildland fire community which saw their job being complicated by houses but it could as easily and more profitably been defined as an urban fire problem with funding landscaping and if you define it as an urban fire problem it's pretty clear what you have to do in terms of fire code zoning and the rest of it to make to protect these areas from fire if you keep defining it as a as a wildland problem then it's very complicated but americans don't like to be told they can't build where and how they want i mean we do it in floodplains we do it in coastal areas we we've done the special standards for hurricane areas you know for tornado areas california has some standards for earthquakes but it's really pretty tough so the next question is from curt are there effective ways of maintaining forest like brush removal and thinning is that realistic well actually that's what i was going to ask steven because um yeah in the forest where i'm living the there's been fire suppression for so many decades that the fuel load is colossal so you can't possibly have a preventive fire in something like that um what would you recommend another example would be mount tamo pious which looks to me like a nuclear weapon ready to go off at any moment and of course it's just covered the lower parts of it are covered without so how do you recommend that a situation like that be rectified you know i think well different treatments are needed in different areas and they're all going to be site specific but you you can have a cocktail of treatments in fact instead of fuel breaks i would put criz to work over a broad area of thinning and making that land ready to accept fire at whatever it's national natural or suitable regime is and that's the main uh we will always have to do some continual thinning i think which is a kind of weedy woody woody weeding excuse me it's getting late for me um but i think fire will be the the primary way of doing it over much of the landscape we're simply not going to be able to uh rake or do things by the way europeans did rake them for us uh in the 19th and 18th century but they did it to scrape out more fuel to put on their fields so they could burn them the fallow was where the fallow wasn't adequate they would begin thinning tree limbs breaking up pine yields and the rest they were trying to get more fire they just wanted it in a different place so um nathan sayer asks what role could livestock graving grazing play in the fire policy today well i think there's a place for prescribed grazing just as there is for prescribed burning and i can even imagine in very selective areas of prescribed logging around certain communities the problem with all of these projects is that they don't economically pay for themselves they have to be subsidized um which is the problem which is why which is why they were you know cut out and grazed out and then abandoned before uh the market i see little evidence that the market will resolve that uh you have to move the animals around but but we are getting an economic return it's not that it's all just money given out for stuff you you have to subsidize it but hey how much of the midwest agriculture do we subsidize why can't we subsidize some of the western forests in this way i'm very pro goat myself and um as i understand east bay regional park district and you see actually use goats up in the hills to to create a band of low fuel up there and one of the great things about goats is that they love poison oak um and so one of the accounts i ran into about the building the ponderous way is how much the boys suffered because they had to cut this thing through an area of rich poison oak groves and so they suffered terribly from that as well as from sunburn remember that is pre um sunblock at that time and they were they were working with no shirts on at the time probably no well they i think they had hats but that's it this was incredibly hard work that they were doing and they did it magnificently so um the next question is uh jordy lynch are their programs being developed to raise enough money for dealing with fires nationally taxation is unpopular but surely homeowners are concerned about their security and incentives can be created to finance fire maintenance well the system we've had isn't working uh congress as a result of actually there was an act in 1908 that allowed the forest service to overspend its budget in the case of fires because you could never predict how much fire would come for the for the budgetary year and they were spending something like 30 or 40 thousand dollars over budget 1910 they went a million dollars so suddenly this is real money and congress supported that and so set up a system of kind of emergency funding for fires when you're actually on fires which made it possible to engage in large fire campaign fires congress then changed the methods uh in the early aughts and uh the forest service is having to pay for everything uh it's uh appropriated budget which stripped it and now it's it's spending roughly 50 or more of its entire budget that's science trail maintenance campgrounds recreation watershed grazing anything it's all being sucked into fire and this has gone on for a long time congress has tried several several moves but then never came up with the money to make it work uh there is a new one uh i think a year ago and i'm hopeful that maybe with the change of administration as well uh that could stick because we're spending all this money fighting fires not doing thinning not doing prescribed burning not not doing anything else there's a question and there's not i'm sorry and there's not much evidence by the way people are always wondering well shouldn't wouldn't the insurance company come in insurance provide you know incentives no they'll just leave i mean i i don't see an alternative that's what happened in cities i mean you had to have a political solution and then the insurance companies could operate within boundaries i have a question from betty smith these mega fires are occurring around the world australia europe south america for steven is there any international coordination among policy makers and foresters internationally you know there's a lot of discussion and in fact uh we we actually have treaties uh with with mexico and canada to exchange firefighters we also have a treaty with russia which we aren't going to be using anytime soon uh but that was put into place uh in the 90s uh and there are other usa id sends help sends help when asked there's quite a lot the europeans are putting together uh programs uh there are there are assistance but there are many kinds of fires that alarm people and not all of them are wild fires like we see in california for example the fires in brazil are not really wild fires these are land clearing fires the fires in indonesia in p these are land clearing fires to convert for palm oil plantations these are not really wildland fires why why would we send hot shot crews and air tankers there i mean it happens because you want to show yeah we're fighting the fires but this is not about fires that need to be fought and suppressed they it's the political economic circumstances that are driving these fires so they're very different um the the one of the most blasted areas in the world is the southern europe along the mediterranean portugal i mean it's just no place hectare for hectare has been pounded as bad as portugal grease is almost as bad but there it's also a problem of social disorganization a lack of institutions that collapse in the economy uh that they've undergone uh and then interestingly in those areas it's also the reverse of the problem we have in the american west which is to say that it's land abandonment you have people leaving their traditional farming going to the cities the land is over growing and now it's becoming very susceptible to fires so they're talking about how do we re-colonize the rural landscape with a kind of rural form in a way that will allow us to contain the fire so grazing would have a lot to do with that orchards would have a lot to do with that other kinds of things great well we've come to the end of our time folks and i want to thank gray brecken and steven pine for this really informative uh discussion and presentation just to have this view of our the issues of fire containment preservation on both the local level california state level the national level and also international um and i and i know that we'll be looking you know both at our at our news and also to see how that how we can move forward the legislation and perhaps more funding towards this important crisis that we're in especially here in california and um yes we will have this program on our youtube channel uh in in about a week or so so please if you want to review it again you can come back and and see the program again and uh again you can buy books by both authors at your local independent bookstore or online alexanderbook.com and we want to thank you again for a great presentation and join us again soon thank you thank you thank you lord so if everybody thanks to matthias for that great article by the way i know you're still on thank you we can all unmute and say bye if you'd like just it's good good seeing everybody so much this is everyone thank you thank you thank you bye it was incredible thank you okay i'm gonna go ahead close the doors now it's great seeing everybody thank you again gray and