Introduction Voiceover: You are listening to Season Six of Future Ecologies.
I, as a four year old, got caught playing with matches by my grandfather, my Karuk grandfather, and he decided that I needed to learn my responsibilities to the mother if I thought I could play with fire. And so here started my journey. I have always burned with my family, pretty much rogue or illegally, you would say, just because that was how we were able to maintain our gathering grounds and our hunting grounds and our food sources and materials that our
women needed. And so I learned that fire was a tool, not a toy, and that fire gives us our foods and our medicines, and it purifies our water. You know, it helps all living beings in the forest and in the rivers. You know, out there, you're taught to fear everything. Here we're taught to live with everything.
Hi Mendel.
Hey, Adam. Who was that?
That was Elizabeth. I was interviewing her in her fire engine. But we'll get to all that. Mendel, I am so freaking excited to tell you about what I've been up to.
What have you been up to?
Oh, ever since you and I first started this podcast, we have been, I think it's fair to say, a little bit obsessed with fire.
A little bit?! We've done, like five episodes
That's right, the very first pilot episode that we on fire... so far. made together was all about fire. Since then, we have interviewed Indigenous Fire Keepers, permaculturalists, researchers, firefighters...
Rogue landowners who refuse to evacuate.
And we've visited areas that have been burned intentionally. We've visited areas that have been burned unintentionally in catastrophic wildfires. I feel like we've done just about everything except actually participate in lighting some of those fires ourselves.
Today's the day! Enough talk, more walk.
Exactly.
So how are we going to make that happen?
So to be honest with you, even after having all these conversations, I was thinking about fire in a pretty theoretical way. And then this opportunity came up. I was invited to apply for this brand new experimental artist in residency program that was offered from a place called the Confluence Lab at the University of Idaho, Mendel.
Okay?
I applied, and surprisingly, was accepted.
Hey, you're an artist!
Yeah, podcasters are artists, right?
We are.
So I became one of the 10 inaugural Artists in Fire.
Congratulations.
Thank you. Appreciate that. That meant that I had to get myself on the fire line, and quick. So I took a handful of online courses with strange acronyms and bought myself a very expensive new pair of leather boots, did a field day and pack test. and that's how I found myself standing in the middle of a narrow, one lane road at the top of a seemingly vertical slope covered in dense brush, and wondering to myself just how in the hell we were gonna pull this burn off.
What's your burn experience like?
None.
Cool.
I am amazed at how like steep this site is, and how much like material there is still on the ground.
You're like, Whoa, there's a lot of fuels on the ground, and it's steep.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my impression.
Yup. Welcome to the Klamath.
The Klamath! We passed through there back in season one. It is... steep.
It's very hilly, yes. When I lived there for a year, way back when, I was up river in Karuk territory. But this time, I went down river — for the very first time, actually — to Yurok territory, which is near the mouth of the Klamath River, where it lets out into the Pacific Ocean. It's about as rural and rugged as it gets, twisting, unpaved roads, scattered settlements and mountainous terrain. The hillsides are steep but green. They're covered in Douglas fir
trees. The river is beautiful and wild because, very recently, the last remaining dams were removed. That's a story for another day, but an incredible one. And so what you're gonna hear in this episode is sort of a medley of voices of all of the different people I spoke to while I was there, the crew members who are bringing good fire back to the land in this part of the world. That's pretty steep, man... Rick O'Rourke: Yeah. We're gonna burn this? Rick O'Rourke: Yeah, this is the black.
Holy smoke. And you know what? Mendel, we burned that slope.Aand then we burned 30 acres over the next three days.
Hell yeah.
From Future Ecologies, the sixth entry in our seemingly never ending series On Fire. This is Out of the Green, Into the Black Introduction Voiceover: Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape of our world through ecology, design, and sound.
Okay, so a little bit of background. The Cultural Fire Management Council, or the CFMC, is a Yurok-led, community-based nonprofit organization with a stated mission to facilitate the practice of cultural burning on the Yurok reservation and ancestral lands, which will lead to a healthier ecosystem for all plants and animals, long term fire protection for residents, and provide a platform that will in turn support the traditional hunting and gathering activities of Yurok.
The objective is just to restore fire to this place, right? This is the home of Rick's people and many others of the Morek village here, just right up this way. Right, Rick? Rick O'Rourke: Yeah.
this is Rick O'Rourke. He was around since the very beginning of the CFMC. He's an old hand, and we were burning on his family's land. What'd you call it? Morek? Rick O'Rourke: Morek, yeah. And that was the village site? Rick O'Rourke: Yes. Bones of my ancestors from the beginning of time are there.
It means a lot to me to be able to burn the place where I live.
You said we're gonna burn around your place?
Yeah, tomorrow, I guess.
Yeah. Is that right? Like, just your neighborhood, or, like, literally, like, where your house is?
Robert said in my backyard.
There's no other crew like the one that we have here and that we're building here with cultural Fire Management Council.
I've grown up in fire here. Now that I've gone out on wildfires and like burned with other prescribed burn crews, I realize like, how freaking special this is, and also how vastly different, like burning objectives can be.
Yurok territory is like everywhere else in North America, in that Indigenous stewardship of landscapes was criminalized for generations. California banned Indigenous cultural burning in 1850
I was raised to learn that the red and green trucks probably wouldn't shoot a child,
The red and green trucks being those of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention and of the National Forest Service, respectively.
But they would shoot or arrest adults for using fire.
And it wasn't until well into the last century that burning became a practice that would not potentially get you killed, and I think that's just something that's really important to recognize. People put their lives on the line to keep this knowledge alive so that their descendants would be able to steward their territory as intended.
We're just here to take care of the land, take care of the people.
Restoring our land how it used to be before we weren't allowed to burn.
One thing that they've been able to learn from comparing historical aerial photographs with what things look like now is that they have lost something like 96% of their open prairie ecosystems. Rick O'Rourke: Well, with no fire for 130 years, the encroachment of the conifers onto our prairies, it just happens fast. As well as the Forest Service and agencies like that having them planted with trees and the subsequent removal of the porcupines, which one of their main staples is the little firs.
Oh, so the porcupines help keep the firs down. Rick O'Rourke: Yeah, that help with the encroachment. Really? Rick O'Rourke: Yeah. They eat them? Rick O'Rourke: Yes, that's one of their main parts of their diet. And what do you mean by the removal of the porcupines? Rick O'Rourke: I think they poisoned them or something like that. Yeah, this hit me way out of left field. I had no idea that we are in the middle of a complete collapse of the
porcupine population. And that is from up here in Canada all the way down the coast. It turns out porcupines helped regulate the in growth of trees like Douglas fir, because they like to munch on them like any good rodent does. The sad reality is that they were treated like many rodents. They were singled out as a threat to the forestry industry, and so for generations, these creatures were poisoned. They were shot. And killing porcupines was encouraged by both government and industry.
Several decades ago, we stopped killing porcupines on purpose, generally, as a society, but their populations have not really recovered. So in many ways, the work of the CFMC is to undo the damage from the policies put in place by the Forest Service. When I was talking with folks on the crew who were older, they were telling me that when they were young, you could look across the river and look down slope and see all the way through because the forest was open. It was full of deciduous
trees. It wasn't packed densely with conifers. Is this starting to sound familiar now? And so there's just no question that the lower Klamath used to be a mosaic of ecosystems which included some coniferous forest, but also included these large areas of oak woodland and Prairie and grassland, and that the Yurok people stewarded these areas with fire to have the full range of foods and medicines and materials for their cultural practices.
Well, a lot of people just burn for what they call hazardous fuel reduction, but we're burning to restore the land.
It's step one of an intergenerational, iterative restoration process. Yep, day one — coming!
Day one for me too. And this is something that, many folks told me, sets the CFMC apart from other burn crews. Their goals are as much about cultural resources as they are about consuming the fuel.
You sometimes could get an agency person that's just like, oh, let's just burn, burn, burn. We'll slow down. You know, things need to be done a certain way.
That's Elizabeth again, Elizabeth Azzuz. She's a founding board member of the CFMC, and she drives the fire engine known as 111.
We're in someone else's home right now, you know, and so we try to be respectful when we do that, we ask permission from the land and the animals and the trees to come into their home and do this. Government agencies don't do that. You know, it's all about the acres. Get it done. Get it done fast.
You know, the thing about prescribed fire, about cultural fire, is that you can only do it under very specific weather and environmental conditions. And so when there is a good burn window, the CFMC is on it, and they are taking advantage of every last minute that they have during that burn window to get as much good fire on the ground as possible.
We don't want to impact the values down here, which is the water system.
And before a fire, there's always a briefing. When the CFMC was first getting started, they had to rely on non-Indigenous burn bosses, because they didn't have anyone locally who had that designation, who had those skills. But now they have Robert, Robert McConnell,
so we're not getting any of those petroleum products near their drinking water, which is right there.
And at the end of every briefing, Robert would say,
Go forth. Have fun. Be safe. Look out for each other, learn something,
have fun, be safe, learn something. And that was exactly what we did. So to kick off the real work of day one, we had to prep the site. I helped clear gutters and move brush away from a nearby home that we were gonna burn — not the home, like, burn to the home.
I should hope!
Yeah, other squads were blowing leaves around with a leaf blower, checking and charging the water lines, getting all the gear lined up, you know, weed whacking the grass on the side of the road, like all this activity. And then everybody comes together. We're back at the top of the slope, and folks are goofing around...
By our powers combined... wind, water, fire,
Do you know what we're waiting for? earth, heart!
Test fire.
Test fire. And when everyone is present and accounted for, it was Rick who stepped forward to light the test fire on his family's land. He took a lighter to this beautiful, long, silver bundle of Wormwood that they used to start the fire, and he murmured a prayer while lighting up a patch of ground. Rick O'Rourke: Creator, look after all of our People who are here do your service, helping heal our land, heal our people, bring back our animals, create balance. It's an honor.
Can I ask you a question about the test fire?
Yeah.
Every time you guys do the test firing, everybody gathers around. There's a prayer, there's song. What's the like, what's the importance of that moment?
What's the importance of prayer? [Laughs]
Yeah, like, what, you know, it's not how, like, a typical, you know, prescribed burn starts. This is Margo Robbins. She runs the show at the CFMC. She's the executive director.
Fire is medicine on the land, and when you smell that Wormwood, it makes it even more real. It takes it from a mind-knowing thing to a deep down heart-felt thing, and it helps us connect to that spiritual part of who we are and to connect to the things around us.
Yeah, it's really helpful. I've been on other burns where that practice isn't held and it's just immediately a cortisol level spike, then go... into this really like dangerous experience with a bunch of different people. Some you've known, have worked with for a long time, some you're maybe just meeting, and that collective pause is really potent.
I totally felt that. Just taking a moment for everyone to align their intentions and spirits and also just to get our heads on straight, it was so valuable, especially to me as someone about to do something I'd never done before with people I did not know. Rick O'Rourke: To me, putting fire down on the ground is like putting prayer on the ground. Really like seeing the land for
what it is and how important it is. I mean, this land needs us as much as we need it, and we believe what we are doing is the right thing to help heal this spot, as well as sending out knowledge to help other spots start the same thing, you know, so we can all do our part.
The purpose of a test fire is to make sure that what we're seeing on our instruments, and what we're seeing in the weather report, and what we're seeing on the ground is actually conducive to the kind of fire that the burn plan calls for. Rick O'Rourke: It's receptive! Meaning that it burned really readily. Still within the parameters of the burn plan... Rick O'Rourke: Think just dots will do it. But all it took were the tiniest dots of fuel from the drip torch to get the fire going.
And with that, the whole crew kicked into gear, and I had to find my squad. Fire is running on the ground, and suddenly everything starts moving really, really fast. And oh man, did we get right into it. That fire started pretty hot, and so within minutes, I had a hose in my hand and was standing in thick smoke, putting water on some trees to prevent the fire from getting off the ground. And I was getting a total crash course in fireline lingo. Are you ready for this?
I think so?
All right, so on a fire line, you don't breathe smoke in, you eat it. And boy, I was eating smoke on day one. I was putting water on some logs on the ground to keep them from burning, because they just burn forever. Those are called heavies. and the whole crew took special care to inspect the bases of trees that they wanted to protect, like Oaks and Arbutus.
Take extra care to look for cat faces.
Will do.
They look for these injuries called cat faces, that if fire gets on them, it can burn the tree internally and cause issues. By the way, firefighters don't go anywhere. They bump.
You want to go bump below the smoke and work with Amanaka for a bit?
I'm happy to.
Alright — yeah go for it.
And you don't just bump your body around. You can bump things around too, like Jerries.
Jerry!
Which are... cans of gas.
Oh yeah, bumping Jerry.
Or... piss pumps, which are backpacks full of water that you can use to make a nice stream. So you're walking on the slope and something gets dislodged and goes tumbling down, you're gonna yell really loud... ROCK!
Yeah, no matter what it is, if it's rolling down the hill — rock.
So there are different roles on a fire crew.
Rock! Little rock.
Rock! The first role that I was assigned to was Holding, and holding has the responsibility of making sure that the fire does not escape. And so when you're on holding, you got to be looking out for spotting. Which is when little embers jump your line and get started. And jackpots, which are unburned patches of dense fuel that could explode. Fire can do so many things. It can crown, it can creep, it can back, and it can torch, which is when the fire starts climbing up into the tree
canopy. And when that happens, if you're on holding, you've got in what shape. Too much, and the fire can burn too hot and harm to get some water on the fire and knock it down. And folks who are on holding are often on the sides and up along the top of the burn right. They're coming down as the burn is moving down the hill, keeping it contained. the things you're trying to protect, like a valuable old oak tree. But not enough, and the fire won't really move how you
want. It'll kind of stay static. The experienced hands on the crew just sort of knew how to fire in each circumstance to get the effects that they wanted. Finally, you've got the Green and you've got the Black. The green is the unburned area outside of your containment lines, and you want to prevent that from catching fire. The black is the burned area inside your lines.
I'm seeing a little bit of wind coming up towards us with these embers. So while we're talking, maybe
You want to have an eye on the green over there.
We'll glance over our shoulder every now and then
You know you can keep an eye on the black. I'll keep an eye on the green.
Fantastic. Thank you.
Temperature, 81, down 4. RH, 43 up 4.
That is the hourly weather report delivered by the FEMO, another acronym. Let's take a quick break from the smoke and check in with them, eh?
Smoke break!
So FEMO stands for Fire Effects Monitoring, which is like a task, and also usually a person on this burn that was Claire Brown.
Everybody gets to hear the trends through the day and build that picture in their own minds of like how they can expect things to be changing as the weather changes.
It's kind of like monitoring a patient during a procedure.
It's like taking vitals exactly, PIG shaded 30, down 10. Our probability of ignition in the shade is 30.
30%?
Yeah, 30% so if 10 embers landed on this fuel bed, we could expect three of them to catch. How do you copy?
Burn Boss copies, thank you.
Firing copies.
Holding copies.
One of the roles that FEMO has is the documentation that supports the burn boss legally, because we have a prescription in our burn plan and we have to have fire behavior that's inside of that prescription parameter. Like the burn boss needs to have a record of the weather for the day.
Every burn plan has these parameters, so the burn plan can only be executed if the conditions are correct. That's why there's constant monitoring. Is the temperature still appropriate? Is the moisture content of the fuel still appropriate? What is the wind doing? Is the wind going to start to create problems? And I want to say yes, we were wearing the traditional outfits of firefighters. We had on our Nomex, we had fire engines, we
had our tools. We looked for all the world like firefighters, but the context, to me, felt profoundly cultural. And this is something that many folks told me sets the CFMC apart from other burn crews. It's right there in the name, it's the Cultural Fire Management Council, and so cultural goals, cultural practices are front and center in this model of
prescribed fire. This is first and foremost about community empowerment, and it's driven by cultural values related to the responsibility to the landscape and the relationship with the Creator. Cultural values related to what is a healthy landscape, what is a healthy forest, what is a healthy watershed? It encompasses everything from the movements of animals and how they will interact with the landscape down to the flow of water through the entire environment.
Rick O'Rourke: What we're doing is essentially creating a landscape wide water filter.
This time of year, right now, when we're burning, we know that the rain is coming, and so that's going to put everything to sleep. It's going to take this charcoal and ash filter clean water back into the water table, down into the creeks, into the river and into the ocean.
And cultural values for significant foods, medicines and materials... like beaked hazelnut. Rick O'Rourke: With the canopy how it is now, those Hazels grow good — because, you know, they got that canopy. They're stretching long, straight sticks. That's what we're after. That's what the ladies are after.
All of those small bushes. That's Hazel. That's what we use for our baskets. So once the fire goes through, they'll send up new shoots.
Our name for Hazel is Holihl.
This is Annalia Norris, and when she's not lighting fires. She makes baskets.
Yeah, I'm a weaver. I've been making a lot of baby baskets because there's a high demand for thosoe.
Like a tiny little basket for your baby to carry.
No, no! You put you put the baby in the basket!
Yeah, they're the safest way for our babies to sleep. You know, it kind of mimics the womb and that feeling so that babies feel secure, you know.
The Yurok are widely known for their baskets, for their variety, and their artistry, and their quality.
I've done some burden baskets, and I really enjoy that. That's like an open weave. We call them a kewoy — gathering basket, packing basket. But I also do some closed weave work, which is like your watertight baskets. And in this region, we're known for our watertight baskets. That's what we cook our acorns in. You know you have dipping baskets for
your water, cooking baskets. And then we also have our really fine weaving, like our ceremonial caps and our, you know, tobacco baskets, trinket baskets, those kinds of things.
How... the material, like, why does it need to be burned to be good?
Well, it makes it stronger and more pliable. You know, when you burn the tops of these larger Hazels, and then new shoots can grow up. And then they grow nice and straight without, like, little stems coming off. So the burning helps to bring new shoots up, because that's what you're using, is the new shoots, right?
So, like, there's a hazel right behind you, and like, maybe you wouldn't use that so much because it's all kinky.
Yeah, because you don't want a crooked basket, you want a nice, straight stick. Rick O'Rourke: You know, putting these sticks on the ground for our basket weavers is my way of giving back, like, to the dances, because these sticks are, like, so important. We keep our food in them, our babies, our medicine, we send up prayer with them. You know, without it, we wouldn't have been able to live here and thrive like we had.
The Hazel is just one element of Yurok basketry, but there's so much more to it.
We use the Blue Willow. We call that pergern. We also use spruce root, Sitka spruce. Spruce root is called 'wohpeg — that's what we use for our watertight baskets, because it expands when it gets wet. We use bear grasses, haamoh, we call it. We use the re' go', which is the maidenhair fern. The woodwardia fern, or pa'app'. We take out the insides of that and we dye it with Alder bark, and that makes the red in our
baskets. We have yellow in some of our medicine baskets, and the yellow is porcupine quill that's called tegee'n, and we dye that with that yellow wolf moss.
Maybe you get the sense, Mendel, that it takes a whole healthy cultural landscape to make a single basket. They're burning for basketry materials, and they're burning for medicines, and they're burning for game. They're also burning to release oak trees so that oaks can be productive and produce acorns again. And then they're burning under those oak trees to prevent those acorns from getting infested with
weevils. And by taking part in this cultural burning, Annelia is helping to restore that landscape.
It feels like the right thing to do, and I feel like I'm fulfilling my purpose as far as like taking care of the land where I'm living at and that's what we all should be doing wherever we live. It's like... caring for that landscape. We've normalized the cultural burning, like we've really taken leadership in asserting ourselves and our culture and our land management. You know, it just started catching, catching fire. No pun intended.
Oh, pun always intended over here. I'm sorry. Because cultural values are driving everything that happens, because they're not just trying to burn off fuel, the burns look really different from what can sometimes happen on other prescribed fire crews, right? If your objective is just to burn off as much fuel as you can without lighting a wildfire on a piece of land, then you can burn through it really quickly,
right? But for the Cultural Fire Management Council, they have so many values that they're trying to protect on the lands that they burn — that they're trying to protect and enhance, right? And so they need just the right fire intensity to where it's going to move through the ecosystem slowly, to where it's not going to kill the oak trees. It's going to provide blistering, but not completely kill off the Hazels.
Rick O'Rourke: It looks really good. The cambium blisters down at the bottom when you hit a certain heat point with this low intensity fire. It's a longer duration and lower intensity, and it blisters the cambium so that there's a top kill, and the new shoots for our baskets come up in the spring. So you can tell that you're going to get good shoots absolutely just from the blisters. Rick O'Rourke: Yes. So I'm lying on my back in the tent first burn
today. I am so tired. Today was little over two acres took something like seven hours. I'm told that tomorrow gonna take the same number of people and we're gonna burn 11 acres. Who knows how long that's gonna take? Anyway, Adam, day one of burning on the Klamath with the Cultural Fire Management Council... signing off.
When we come back, day two, where we turn up the heat. That's after the break. Welcome back. I'm Mendel.
I'm Adam.
This is Future Ecologies, and today, Adam is bringing us all along on his trip to Yurok territory on the Klamath River, so we can get a sense of what it's like to be on a cultural fire crew,
That's right. And on this particular crew, it was a really great mix of professional structure and then also flexibility. People were shifting roles, and it seemed like the leadership viewed every burn as an opportunity to give different people at different stages in their fire journey new experiences.
Simply, I love it. I love how it pushes me. I love how I learn something new every day.
That's Isabel Guerra, the firing crew lead.
One of the things I see in creating a learning environment is, yeah, you want to challenge people, but you also need to let them know that it's okay to fail, and it's not actually failure because you have your whole team holding on to you, creating that safety net. Rick O'Rourke: I tell the people I'm training, I'll put you out of your comfort zone, but I won't put you in danger. Learning is such a sacred process.
Fire is such a team effort. It's like a sports team. You know? It's like football. We like make our plan. We modify the plan as we go
Max Brotman — holding boss and drone operator.
And I'm not a sports person, but I imagine it's like playing football.
We're gonna do it rose, bud, and thorns. So Rose is something that you think went really well. Thorn is something that you think could have gone better, and then the Bud is how you would grow that into a better way of doing it.
Every year, in the spring, we do fire effects walks, where the whole crew goes out to the units that we had burned in the last year. We look over our notes from the FEMO report —
because we can relate, like, oh yeah, our weather that day was like this. And so we ended up trying this strategy out, and we got this result. And like, now we're seeing how it's regrowing, or what died, or what have you.
We talk to all the people who worked the fire about what they remember about that day — what happened here? Did you light this? Who was lighting here? Oh, yeah. What did you do? Where'd you get hung up? Was there a jackpot? How did we impact the canopy? How did we impact the sub canopy? Is there more light? Did we kill some trees? Why did we kill those trees? Is that a good thing or not? You know, if we're trying
to thin out a thicket of young Doug firs. Like, could we have modified what we did to do that better? There's just so much learning that happens after the fire, and so by doing that, all as a whole crew, and not just the leadership, everybody gets to learn about the impacts of like, looking at how their firing patterns worked, how did that affect how we move through the unit, and then what effect did that have on the forest?
The reality is that Yurok territory is big, and there has been over a century of fire suppression. And so there is just a lot of area that needs good fire. Even on the areas that have been burned, they often need to be burned on two or three or five or eight year intervals, right? And so when you think about bringing all of those lands back into good fire stewardship and then also going into the areas that haven't been burned, it's a huge job. It's just enormous.
This is, like, pretty representative of, like, what the ground looks like in places that haven't had fire in a long time, where you see the black oaks stretched out with the crown super high, tied in with like a much younger age class of fir trees — big firs that are probably still younger than our eldest people here on site today, who will love to tell you how they used to see clear across everywhere when they were with kids.
You know, we should be able to just walk across the land. And we should be able to see from, you know, down near the bottom of the hill all the way up to the ridge.
It's real thick in here. Got patches of Himalayan Blackberry. We got patches with English ivy.
It's a process, but there's areas upriver here that have been worked repeatedly, that were just walls of broom and blackberry, and they're not anymore. Rick O'Rourke: You know, we prayed to have people come up here to help us, and in that prayer, it's like we weren't like gender specific or religious specific or race specific, whoever would come to help us, we'll accept it gratefully and try to feed you good and sit around and burn together and eat together and we become family.
Yeah, you know, people often ask us, you know, why we have non Indigenous staff? Well, everybody cares for the planet. Everybody loves the Mother Earth, you know, whoever wants to take care of whatever, and if we can provide that, we will.
I love all the people involved. I love the land. I love watching the land respond to fire.
Will Bruce, GIS specialist and my crew lead.
I love being in here, lending a direct hand to Native people exercising their rights to manage this land. Yeah, it just feels like a great place to be. And I feel very I feel very appreciated. You know, everybody that's part of this work is appreciated.
When we started out, it was just a handful of us, you know, Margo and I worked in our cars or any office space we could bum, basically. Or our kitchen tables, you know. And then eventually it was like it was too much for her and I to do. And we needed equipment. We needed vehicles and things, you know. So the grant writing process has happened, and the elders that sit on our board were like, you guys, got your Hazel now? What about our acorns? What about our berries?
What about our medicine, you know, what about all these things? I was like, Oh, shoot. And so it just kept growing, you know, evolving. Rick O'Rourke: A lot of these guys and gals, I trained them up on their first day of lighting, and look at them now. We try to hire community members, locals. We do cooperative burns, where we train other government agencies to do what we do. Aspiring fire lighter burns, that train people
who've never worked with fire. One of my favorite things about these training exchanges is seeing their aha moment when they realized that this is actually what they were meant to do, that they were meant to care for the land, that they were meant to evolve into the people I watched them become. We have one kid. I use them as my example for everything. When people are like, well, you know, why do you do what you do? Well, this young man really, really wanted to work for us, bad but
he had some bad habits. You know, he wasn't living well. Margo and I sat with him and said, Well, you have to do this, this and this, and then we'll give you a job. Well, he did it. He went and got himself cleaned up and brought us certificates, and sat down and said, I did what you said. Now, where's my job? He's been with us ever since. Loyal is the day is long. He tells people he'll never leave us. We didn't do it for that. We did it for him. So when you get about 15 or 20 of those
guys running around, it's worth it all. It's worth the two o'clock mornings, you know, all the late shifts we do, but you know, look what they're doing. They're caring for their land, and they're making their elders happy and providing for their families. And that's the whole goal, for me, is to make sure the younger generation can move into the future safely and happy. It's nice to evolve into what we are and why we do what we do.
I started off wildland fire, and after seven years of wildland just transitioning to prescribed fire.
that's Jordan Spannaus. He's a firing boss.
Little bit better as far as things like being able to go home at the end of every night, not not missing birthdays and stuff like that.
Like, good for the family, too.
Good for the family, good for the land. But yeah, fires, fire is just one of those things that I love.
One of the coolest things that I witnessed while I was down there was seeing them do drone ignitions for the first time.
We're ready to launch the drone.
Copy. Tell me precisely where you want it.
So if your drops are slightly below the contour that would be perfect.
Okay, launching.
They've been using drones for years to map fire intensity, because you can use heat sensors on the drone to see where the fire is burning and how intensely. But this was the very first time they had used this absolutely enormous drone to drop these little incendiary dragon eggs into the middle of the burn.
Flying it is kind of like steering a boat, whereas the other drone is like a hummingbird.
So that was pretty cool.
Go for firing.
It was big deal.
Oh my gosh, there's the freaking dots, guys.
The drone is going to help them access areas that are hard for people to get into, in the middle of those burn blocks, and hopefully make the process more efficient, right? Speed it along a little bit.
When I spoke with many of the crew members, they told me this moment that we're in right now where we're using Nomex clothing and fire engines and all this technology, the drones, the hierarchical structure of a fire crew, the certifications — all of this is this moment that we're passing through because of
over a century of fire suppression. The Yurok need to adopt these tools to achieve what they want to achieve in this colonial system, but also because the condition of the forest requires that level of technology, of safety equipment, of planning and of organization. It is so extreme compared to
what it was historically. And so the vision that they expressed to me was that this is a transition from a time of fire suppression to a future where community members will just be able to go out into their backyards, into the places where they gather, and light fires themselves, with their family members, and yeah, maybe they call in one of the local engine
operators for support. Or maybe that's not even necessary anymore, because the ecosystem is safe to burn, and people have become comfortable enough and knowledgeable enough again that they can just do it when they're ready, when it's time.
Absolutely we have to get it back to where it's safe for people to just light their little Hazel patch or their acorn grove, or whatever it is, you know. What, maybe three years from now, I'll I'll come light this up myself, and then just say hey, I'm gonna light up my Hazel patch So FYI. You guys could be on standby.
We do cultural burns and family burns, where we do bring out families and even children sometimes to come and watch or get involved in our burns. All the children and stuff that burn with us get really into it. All talk about wanting to do this when they get older. So I think everything that we're doing out here is pretty good for our community, for all the people around here, I think.
That's a really beautiful vision, not just for fire, but for this time that we're moving through right now, that there is so much to do. We have to work within sometimes, and use the tools that the colonial system has to offer. And then at the same time, we have to be moving towards a place where maybe we don't need them anymore. Like, people have
been doing this for 1000s and 1000s of years. When you experience it for yourself, you realize, not only can it be done safely, it's a thing that we can do proactively in a world full of forces beyond our control. Rick O'Rourke: She's like, Oh, I wasn't expecting that. You were expecting that monster coming at you, like you see in the news, right? She's like, Yeah. No, it's not like that. There's ways to mitigate all those dangers and then be able to put some fire on the ground.
Doesn't have to be rocket science. Doesn't have to be scary. Rick O'Rourke: It doesn't have to be scary. They could be just like peaceful and calming and just a good burn. End of the second day of burning. It is 2am. We burned until midnight, and I have nothing left. I'm conking out. By the third day, I had a drip torch in my hand, and I was standing in the middle of a burn block that went as far in each direction as I could see. Thick patch of poison oak... and Himalayan Blackberry. and it's
on fire! But it's burning really good. Standing in the middle of an inferno... wild. What a feeling! We don't talk about it, but wildfires do not only consume whole landscapes. They they consume living beings. They consume animals. And in a cultural fire, in a prescribed fire, the fire is so much less intense, and it's moving so much more slowly, and it gives many creatures the opportunity to escape and then to return to habitat that is still intact.
There are, however, some slow moving creatures that might have gotten out of bed a little bit late that day and need a helping hand. Hey, Lloyd, I got a little salamander right here that I'm gonna take across the road, alright? Oh, my God, it's freaking adorable, by the way. All right, little buddy, go free. Stay cool. Oh my God, look at you go! Ah... I love salamanders.
All of the plants and animals, they all have a spirit just like us. And people from this place, our spirit is connected to all of these things. And so when, you know, when they're healthy and feel good, that reflects on us, and it's a link to our health too.
You know the deer are going to come rolling here tonight. Get rid of their fleas and ticks. They love ash for that. You know, we've seen all these things.
Like what you see, Robert?
This backing fire is beautiful. It's gonna take time, though, because it's so steep in here.
Good copy. Yeah, we're getting great backing on this downriver area. Things are looking beautiful.
There's beauty you have never seen before that exists in a burn.
So for the people who don't have eyes and are in the future, what are we looking at here?
Coming down to the last piece of this burn coming into a nice steep section with fire gently backing through fir trees, Hazel, Bay trees. Kind of like everybody's just in this meditative state, just helping it walk down the hill. You know, you can see, it's just like bringing itself down so nicely.
What do you think be here till midnight putting things out?
Yeah, that seems like a fair guess to me.
When a fire has burned its way through a given burn block, it's time to put it out.
We're gonna just touch on our mop up plan, Mech Ney-kem kue po-o.
Because fire suppression has in many ways, been a very militaristic practice. The term that is often used for that is mopping up. But mopping up is a term that was basically used for when soldiers go across the battlefield, look for anybody who's still alive, and kill them. So the CFMC calls the penultimate stage in the burn...
Kem kue po-o. We were saying Mech Ney-kem kue po-o, which is put the water on the hot stuff.
Amanaka Yancey, she was my squad lead.
Then they shortened it to Kem kue po-o, which is... put water on it.
And it is the unglamorous job of trudging through the ashy landscape with shovels and piss pumps, and putting a little bit of water and a little bit of elbow grease into making sure that every last part of that fire is out. It definitely feels like something you don't want to do at 1am after you've been burning for 10 hours straight, but it is a very important part of the job. Imagine you end up spending a lot of evenings this way.
Mmm... guess so.
I love my job.
That night, I didn't record anything before bed, I just hit the ground and was gone. The day that I left, I woke up so tired and so sore, and all I could think was... where are we going to burn next??
This episode of Future Ecologies was recorded and reported by my co-host, Adam Huggins. It was edited and produced by me. Mendel Skulski. It featured the voices of Elizabeth Azzuz
Just me and my big mouth. You know, I don't know what possesses me to open the damn thing.
Dylan Stevens
When we were prepping, I was like, I think these roots are gonna catch on fire. They did.
Rick O'Rourke Rick O'Rourke: But I'm compelled to share my knowledge with people, because it was shared with me from people who forgot more than I'll ever know.
Margo Robbins
[Scream]
[Screams respond in the distance]
Look what you started. I gotta work on my scream a little bit so that it doesn't sound like I'm in trouble, you know.
It's gotta come from deep in your belly.
Robert McConnell
Let's have fun. Be safe, learn something.
Annelia Norris
I can still scale these freaking hillsides, so I'm not that old.
Isabel Guerra You put, you put, you put your time in! Amanaka Yancey
Prescribed fire so hot right now.
Jordan Spannaus
Gonna take a long time, but this is a good start.
Claire Brown
Like a classic FEMO role is to make a report that nobody reads.
Max Brotman
We don't say breathing smoke, we say eating smoke.
And Will Bruce
I know you wanna burn it all, gotta wait 'til fall!
and music by C Diab, Thumbug, Adrian Avendaño G̱a̱mksimoon, and Sunfish Moon Light, plus cover art by the wonderful Ale Silva.
Huge gratitude to the CFMC for making this episode possible. I talked to lots of other folks and just couldn't include everything. So thank you to everyone who spoke with me, and special thanks to Margo Robbins, Fern Purdy, Max Brotman, Claire Brown, Will Bruce, and Amanaka Yancey for corresponding with me, helping me put this piece together, hosting me, helping me get my qualifications and keeping me
out of trouble on the line. Big thanks to the Confluence Lab at the University of Idaho, and especially Sasha White, who supported me through this process. Thanks also to Anita and Micah Williams.
You can find the CFMC at culturalfire.org. You can find us and all of our episodes at futureecologies.net, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We make this podcast and keep it ad free with the support of our incredible patrons, who we literally cannot thank enough. To join them, head to patreon.com/futureecologies, and help us make the show for as little as $1 a month. We've got a back catalog of exclusive bonus episodes, 50% discounts on all merch, a Discord server, a
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