Ep. 696: Wildfire and the Future of Public Lands with Sen. Tim Sheehy

from Montana. We're going to talk about background, we're gonna talk about wildfires, we're gonna talk about public lands, and we'll talk about a couple of other things that come up along the way. But uh, for starters, you from Minnesota. One of our colleagues, Maggie said, you're from her hometown of Minnesota. Yeah, yeah, I.

around in there. Well we weren't supposed to, but of course, you know, of course you do.

thirty years and they had toilet paper rolls. I mean they literally shut the gates and walked away. And for you know, of course that thing's like asbesos everywhere and there's like you know, holes in the ceiling. So it was not a safe OCEHA approved environment for kids to be playing. But that's what we did.

and no one says anything to them. You know, he's like, yeah, I don't know. There was the age when they're gonna do something dumb.

of abandoned buildings and I'm leaving. That's great.

this and then that and that. I said, listen, you know if you'd asked me when I was sixteen, twenty four, twenty eight, thirty six where I was going to be in five years, I would have been wrong every single time, like every single time. So you know, I knew I wanted to be in the military. I just did. I have no idea why. My Mom's like, yeah, from the time you could like run, you had a stick in your hand and run around the woods, you know, shooting things pretending you were you know, whatever.

we didn't have much relationship there. There was some you know, just old school familial strife. So he kind of became my grandfather figure. And he is Harry Tebow's name, and his son Steve Tebow and their whole family great folks. So he I knew I was interested in the military, and he took me up flying in his cub when I was like eight or nine years old, and right away I was like, I love aviation, Like this is amazing.

And as soon as I could reach the rudder pedals my feet when I was like eleven, he started teaching me how to fly.

a fire pile. And so I was flying planes for as drabbing cars, got my soul at the plane before I had my driver's license, got my pile's license in high school, no kid, and then yeah, I went to the academy to be be a fighter pile. So yeah, and then got there and you know, I was in high school on nine to eleven. Happened as probably all we were seeming all rough of the same age, so you know, it was was was that that was a defining factor of all of our young lives. And then

I got a huge jump on you. I was in graduate school. Yeah really, well your age, well you look great, you know, fine one, you know, but yes, but I was, uh so got to the academy. This is fall of four, summer of four, and you know, I I you know, there's always perception of organization from the outside. You perceive something from the outside, and when you're inside, you know, your perceptions normally clash with the reality and things changed.

So I knew I wanted to be a fighter pilot and going in and when I got there, you know, I was immersed in the military for the first time really, and you know, we had Iraq was going full swing, Afghanistan was going full swinging for the first time, and you know, forty years America was seeing couch that these come home. And we were you know that we had our first academy grad killed in action in a long time. So being at the Naval Academy was very you know,

it was a wartime feel. And I think something's unique about the Gwatt Glo War and terror, of course, was people in the military, like the two percent of people in America that served, like we were all at war for twenty years. You know. Yeah, like my wife, she was a marine. We met the academy, like her brother served like everyone we knew, all of our best friends, all of our families were living the war. Yet most of America wasn't. They just went on with life as normal.

It wasn't like World War Two, where everybody was pitching in and rationing food and rationing rubber, and everyone had a brother or a son deployed for us. It was like a super small sector of America deployed again and again and again and again and again, felt the pain and carried the load. So anyways, where I'm going with that is I get to the Academy and pretty quickly

realized that, you know, this is a ground war. I wanted to fly planes, but you know the war is being fought door to door, you know, in Solder City and you know, rock the rock in the valleys of Afghanistan and flying up above ahead. I mean, you were a supporting act, like the real action was on the ground. So I actually quit the academy. My my fall my freshman year. I was like, hey, I got to go fight the war, Like I've got to go typical eighteen

nae gienal Kid Filipiss and Vigor. I'm like, I've got to go fight because the war will be over by the time I graduated, I got to do my part. So I went to resign from the academy, and you know, I was I was at the top of my class at that point, very highly ranked that that that at that point in time, and they were like, hey, why are you like the top guy? What are you leaving? I'm like, well, I got to go fight, you know, like I can't sit here and take calculus while there's

guys on the ground fighting. So I got to do my part. And my commanding officer from my company was like, all right, well, you know, bind you do what you want to do, but you got to talk to guy before you leave. Here's a name. He's going to meet you down at the at the kind of restaurant on campus tonight, which we weren't allowed in as pleeb So it's kind of like, well, I'm not allowed to go, and there's like, no, you can go tonight. I'll give you permission.

plebes at the service academy. So anyways, I go down to meet with this guy and it's a full bird Army colonel special Forces guy, which for a pleave is basically like, you know, get any higher than that. So I'm like, oh wow, Like I sir, He's like, oh, you must be timp I'm like yeah, So I hear you're gonna quit and leave the academy. I said, yeah, you know, I gotta go fight the war. I can't sit here and go to school while the war's going on.

And he said, well, I just got back from my third deployment during the war, and I can tell you you're not going to miss it. We're going to be fighting this war for another twenty years. And what I need is smart young leaders and officers.

stay and finish my education of the process. You know, he long other stories for the front of the time, but I got to go in this exchange program where starting that next year, I went through Army Range of Training, Range of Regiment Exchange, Special Forces Group, Airborne Recoon School, so kind of the I went to the Army Commando Special Ops Training Pipeline, which was a great experience, met some amazing folks, learned a ton and because really our

Special Operations Command jay sox so com, it's really an Army organization. I mean, the vast majority of our special ops organization in America is Army, like eighty five percent of it. And you know then you got basically Air Force, Marines and Navy makeup very small percentages. So the Seals are a very small part of our of our global special operations footprint. So it's important to understand how the

Army works and that that was the reasoning there. So kind of by accident ended up going to the seal teams. And you know, once you're at the academy, you know, you start to figure out what culturally you fit best in and pilot naval aviation is is the best avay screen in the military. But at the same time, my personality fit pretty quickly I realized, you know, was with the with the seal teams, and you.

assembling weapons, jumping on the planes. What gets guys just the suck, just the continued suck of like not just that it sucks, but then the knowledge that it's going to continue to suck for a very long time.

it was like during the war years. At the time, you just feel like you're doing your job and then kind of years later you look back, like, oh my god, like that was a crazy time. How much we were doing so, like I mean during my time and my wife, she had just commissioned into a Marine Corps officer, so we were a married couple that was doing you know, we were both deploying to the war zone separately. You don't like deploy together.

When are we actually going to be physically co located.

at all. It's vastly improved today. Our service members today as they should have a far better you know, you can connect to a Wi Fi connection and still see your family.

We notarize a form and mail it in and basically they take it to the courthouse and Calispell and two people we have I still have no idea who they are stand in and you pay them the proxy fee and they get married for you. And then you know, a couple of weeks later, we get our forums mailed back to us like, oh we were married. We were married on February eleventh. Cool, happy anniversary. Yeah. So so so that's how we did it. It's cool law, though,

you know, because it's got to be for the military. No, no, actually, well I mean it is now now their whole business models they target military couples, say exactly the situation my wife and I dealing with it. But where the law came from is the homestead days. So you know, only like half a homestead claims were actually awarded. You know, the whole perception, you know, from what was that stupid Tom Cruise movie where terrible Irish accent, you know where they're front there.

build a ranch, harvest crops. So homestead claims one of the first criteria that they would award them was based on if you were married with a family and living on the land. And during those territory days before states were states, they were kind of competing for people because the sooner you had more people and land homesteaded, the

sooner you're going to get statehood. I mean that wasn't like a technical threshold, but that was basically once you had more people and more constituency of state, you had a better chance of being or in your territory, you had better chance of being a state. So anyways, want male to female threshold that was set up, so it was like ninety six.

every time I was ever sent. I mean basically mine, I really did four deployments, you know, but ultimately, you know, I was I was sent overseas, you know, several times, you know, more than that, but ultimately in Iraq, Afghanistan, a couple of times, UH to South America for counter narcotics and and host nation partnership there, and then a couple other trips around you know, different type of different

types of missions. So yeah, I had a great, you know, great experience all over the world, and you know, loved leading, leading, leading our teams everywhere. It's a huge honor when when you look at the responsibility. Again, you look back at the responsibility you're given. I mean a twenty five, twenty

six year old guy. You know, one point between the Afghan Army troops, I had my seals, my army assignment that i'd get get an army platoon assigned to me, and you know, I had like two hundred people under my command and daily combat operations, you know, you know, gunfights, every day, air strikes, and it's like I was the commander, like I was in charge. You think about that in the business world, you know, that amount of responsibilit given to a twenty five, twenty six year old, and now

that's true across the military. I mean, you take twenty five year old pilot in the Air Force. He's flying one hundred million dollars aircraft. I mean, so the responsibility and then he goes home and his dad won't let them use that's run exactly. It's a total it's where you come home. And that's that's part of the reason the veteran transition. You know, I've spoke at a veteran's banquet last night here in town, and I actually worked out with our Air Force with our RTC kids. So

I got this patch of my jacket here. You know, we worked out with their art see kids yesterday at MSU and kind of impart of that upon them. Like you know, you get home, it's a totally different. You'll work at a small business while you know you can't you can't drive the forklift yet you don't have the OSHA approval. It's like, dude, I just I used to, like, you know, drive helicopters. You know, I used to drive tanks.

You know, twenty a nineteen year old kid'll be at the helm of a of a three billion dollar summer and you know driving those things.

Like why don't I do push paper? And basically like, yeah, but that's okay, you push paper for a while, and I was like, listen that that's not like if I can't leave my guys on missions and you're gonna send me in a headquarters for two or three years, like you know, all move on with life.

So basically, you know, if you ever watched these Special Ops Seal CIA movies, you'll always see, you know, the aircraft overhead with an INFRED sensor, with an electro optics sensor, whatever it is, basically watching the whole mission take place and providing a really critical array of situational awareness for us on the ground. You know, we could see where enemy fire was coming from, we could locate enemy positions,

We could know where our own people were. So if we're calling in an air strike, we make sure we knew where all the friendly forces were before we started dropping bombs, which has been a any You guys know what the largest killer of US troops in the First Golf War was not aviation, friendly fire. Yeah, our own people. Now, if we had good data, which we don't, but I promise you, if you had good data, you'd see the same in Vietnam, Korea, probably World War two. You think

so absolutely. I mean, it's just a reality of conflict. Is friendly fire is sometimes just as if not more dangerous than any fire. I mean, the fog of war is real. I mean, you watch these movies and you know, every time you see a gunfight, it's like, you know, the one guy's looking the other guy in the eye and like the cun comes out and he's like you know they all you know, this isn't mel Gibson a leath of weapon. As much as you know, like bolts are flying a lot of you know, you don't know

where the hell they're coming from. You don't even know who's shooting at you, especially in places like Afghanistan and an urban warfare in Iraq. It's like sometimes the biggest challenge is figure out where you getting shot at from. And then once you figure that out, all right, now we can deal with it. But a lot of times, you know you're taking fire inbound, you don't know where it's coming from. Uh, And that's something the movies never

really capture. It's like, you know, someone gets shot all of a sudden that like they see the guy in the bell tower a mile away. There it is, you know, blow it up. It's like it could be minutes, hours while you're taking fire before you figure out what's going on.

And about the time so I'd seen that technology, said, man, if we could take that, give them my pilot background, if they could take that and apply it to public safety tasks in America, law enforcement, border security, fire like, you know, we could probably save a lot of lives and do a lot of good here. And right about the time I was getting out that the debris for a terrible tragedy kind of became public as they finished

the investigation. I was the Arnel Mountain fire down on Arizona, and if you're not familiar with that, that was they made a movie about it called Only the Brave. Happened to twenty thirteen and the ground I remember, Yeah, So the Grand Mountain hotshots were heading up on this fire and it was one of those dangerous, real dangerous desert sage brush fires because when those you know, zephyr winds, when those winds hit down there and the high deserts

in the southwest like that, those fires rip. I mean they'll move eighty ninety miles an hour, and I mean they could be deadly like. And it's not the timber fires up here in northwest Montana, which are their own set of challenges, which is a really thick, heavy fuel. It's hard to put out, but they don't move as fast as these ones. So as the team got up there on the ridge line pretty quickly realized this thing's ripping. We can't fight this thing. We got it. We got

to break contact. Let's get out of here. And the team leader made the right decision to take his team out of the way. Unfortunately, he made the right decision with the wrong information, and you know, the fire he didn't understand the fire had shifted directions and burned his whole team alive, killed online. He didn't right there on the side of the mountain.

go down exactly what you said. It's like, we're all in that age range where I mean one of my seal potones. We had nine seals, all have babies within on the same team within two months, you know, all the wives were like breaking at the same time. And so to your point, it's like, man, I'm like that hit home for me. I felt that like that, that that was an event that definitely I was like wow. And what I realized was I felt myself in that

guy's boots. You know, I'd been there. I've been on the side of a desert mountain, one hundred plus degree heat, full gear, sweating, chaos happening, worried about bringing my guys home alive. And I realized if he'd had the same tools I'd had in Afghanistan, his team probably would have been alive. So that led to me starting Bridge Aerospace and we ended up you know, several other companies spun

out of that as well along the way. But the point was to bring that airborne intelligence capability that's that supported ground guys to industry and to public safety tasks. Other than the military.

raality is in Afghanistan you're never shooting level. You're always shooting down and most of the time you're shooting up, you know, and those people are shooting down. Yeah, I mean, you know the peaks over there are twenty two, twenty three thousand feet high. You know, these aren't eight thousand foot peaks. I mean, you're you're fighting in the foothills of the Himalayas. The Hindu kush is the most rugged basically training in the world. So you're not just shooting

up a few hundred feet, you're shooting up. So, you know, horseback riding, packing in high angele rope rescue health through medicine. Basically, we go out there and he assembled these fantastic training modules for us, and we bring seals out here and train.

So during a couple of those trips, Carmen to come out and visited, and we kind of decided, hey, this is this is a great spot, and you think, well, if we ever get out of the military, if that ever, you know, maybe we'll come here and raise our family. And you know, Lord works in mysterious ways. You know, things happened. I got hurt, you know, timing lined up,

so we decided to start a company here. So me and my co founder, who was also a military officer, started our company, and you know, we hoped maybe one day we'd have like eight or ten employees, but had no idea. You know, we scaled through Ascent Vision Technology was spun out of Bridge, which is another great success story, and a couple of other companies. You know, about five hundred jobs worldwide we created. We had bases in Australia

and Spain and Italy and elsewhere. So we kind of created an international company and all based right here.

been winning the battle. You know, we've just lost America's biggest city just got you know, burned over by this. You know, Lahaina a couple of years ago, you know, in almost every Western stake in point to just a massive disaster that's happened, and it's like, you know, we can do better than we're doing.

come from a private company. So basically, the government decided in the nineteen sixties, we're not going to operate firefighting planes for a while, the government did it themselves kind of in the actually wrote a book about this called Mudslingers, about the history of aero firefighting, and all the profits go to benefit fall and wildline firefighters, but it was more of a history you wrote the book, Yeah, okay, so it was something I was interesting because as I

was learning about aero firefighting because I got into thedustry really by accident, knew nothing about it. And then as I'm sitting at firebases as a pilot, because I flew all our planes, I'd be sitting at the firebase. It's like being a fireman, except your fire engine flies instead

of drive. So you're hanging out the firebase shooting the shit, talking to folks all day, and you start talking to somebody's old timers and they're telling you old stories from the sixties and seventies, and you start to figure out, Man, the history of this is amazing, flying in, flying through smoke, dropping slowry, dropping water on wild Like a lot of

these guys were like World War two heroes Vietnam. I mean, they'd already flowing the toughest stuff in the world and the toughest conditions and they can basically needed that adrenaline fixed still and now they start flying wildfire as you start to see the history of that. But basically most almost every single aircraft that flies a wildfire is contract owned and to operated because the government pretty much decided in the sixties, you know what, We're not going to

own an operator on aircraft. It's too expensive as too technically complex for us to just manage the way our budget cycle works. We're going to just hire contractors to fight fire from the air. We'll do it on the ground.

fire to go to? Basically go to this fire today, and sometimes mid area gets sent to a different fire. So you could take off. I've taken off sometimes, you know, late morning, and I'll fight three or four different fires, you know, go water bomb one, boom, shift to this one, shift to that one, and you'll fight multiple fires on the same tank of fuel in the air and then come back and recharge.

insurance premiums. Because when the insurance agency and I'm sorry of the insurance industry absorbs the impacts of the LA wildfires on a comprehensive manner, like when all these underwriters and the reinsurance because insurance all flows down to a pool of very consolidated reinsurance companies, I don't care whether you're talking about iPhone insurance, whether you're talking about car insurance,

but especially homeowners insurance or airplane insurance. All that flows back down to a handful of reinsurers and the amount of which insurance affects people's lives. I don't think they really appreciate, Like, for instance, you know, I don't want to go on too much of a tangent, but this is just a good example of how insurance can affect something that appears to be totally unaffiliated. So Ukraine was

the biggest impact in the history of aviation insurance. The war in Ukraine, there massive amounts of aircraft destroyed on the ground, like whole airlines repossessed. Like that shook the aviation insurance industry to its core. And then when Israel, the attack on Israel happened, you know, there's still isn't like common, There still isn't full airline service back in Israel now, like basically Hamas has been obliterated, like the

active daily threat. Yes, so we'll always be there, but like, but very few airlines have resumed service into Israel because insurance and a lot of airlines, a lot of airlines getting attacked at LG know, why aren't you flying your You're discriminating against the Jews, and they're like no, Like our insurance companies will not underwrite an aircraft flying into a war zone because that changes.

get it. I mean they've seen nine hundred one thousand, two thousand percent increases in wildfire premiums for people's homeowns insurance if they can get insurance. A lot of people can't get insurance at all. And it's not even a wildfare prone areas. It's sometimes it's flood prone or hurricane prone. Because this fire specifically really was like the straw that broke the camel's back. For home WOS insurance. Now, if you can't get insurance on your home, what else can't you get for that home?

to live? I mean most most Americas have at moorage. And then that home becomes liquid. You can't sell it because then the buyer pool goes from anybody who needs a mortgage. If they find out they can't ensure the home, they can't get a mortage for it. Your home is unsellable. So you think about that when that starts to affect, which it will now here it's only been three months. Is that is digested into the homeowner's market and everyone

comes up for renewals. I mean, it could be a bigger impact on the homeowner's market than like the Owait financial crisis. So like this wildfire thing is not just a boutique Western issue. It's not a boutique forest management thing. Don't log this log that it really is like an existential economic one, because I mean, how do you put

it value on human life? But like the impact directly of LA is a quarter of a trillion dollars, So printing a quarter of a trillion dollars right now is inflationary like that that's just on its own, But that doesn't even talk about the impact it's going to have when that whole episode is absorbed by the insurance market.

La in January, terrible tragedy. Obviously, that almost exact same fire happened in nineteen sixty one called the Ballet Bell Air Fire, and it was bad. But you know, it's not talked about much because we didn't have the massive sprawl in La yet.

probably nobody would have noticed. I mean maybe the local paper would have written a aricle about it, but honestly, it would have been Okay, Mountain Valley burns, a couple of cabins, a couple of ranches, and.

you guys know better than not. I mean, you know, I'll be up on our Force Service ly cav right now at the ranch. I'll be up there today. But it's like, you know, you walk off the trail and Forest Service land basically you've got dead beetle killed dead falls six feet high like you basically have a very hard time getting off a trail now. And you know, forest treatment logging projects have basically been injuncted to the

point where they almost don't happen anymore. So I think a combination of factors of are a change in mindset of forestry are wildland airban interface has grown massively. I mean tens of millions of people have moved into wildfire prone areas that didn't used to live there. Sure, therefore, people cause fires, tire chains, cigarette butts, fireworks, gender reveal parties, whatever the hell you want to know. People cause fires, and then when fires happen near people, the the the

impetus to fight them and put it out. As far more, when you have a thousand homes instead of just one thousand acres of sage brush and cheat grass.

cool Alex Padia from California's CoA chair. And we are moving at breakneck pace because this woke people up, people that typically wouldn't have cared about wildfire. Andy came from New Jersey, great example, he's a New Jersey senator. Our first like two weeks after we did our orientation, New Jersey's burning and he calls me because he knows my Background's like, Tim, like, how come there's nobody. There's no helicop, there's no planes putting this fire out, Like what's going on?

Like all right, well, let's let me give you a quick lesson how this works. Like, not only is it nobody fighting your fire from the air, but there's nobody going to be coming to fight your fire from the air. He's like, how is that the case? Like if I doll a lam on one, a fire engine shows up in my house right away. I had to explain to him that wildfire and structure fire are treated completely differently in America. They just are structure fire red fire engines.

I mean, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days year. That fire in that firehouse just over there is manned, and there's bright red fire trucks and trained firefighters in there ready to go all the time, and every American knows that accepts that and expects that we deal on one right now and say there's a fire going on, within five minutes and twenty seconds, a big red fire engine will show

up here and they'll start fighting that fire. And that's national code, the NFPA four nine seventy ten, National Fire Protection Association.

were all built out of wood. There was no zoning, there was no building codes, and basically a fire would start, they had no way to fight it because there was no fire department. They didn't have fire hydrants, so they'd run out with buckets of sand and basically what they would do is they would they would fight fire with fire. They'd like start a backfire to burn down a line of buildings to stop the fire from spreading to the

whole city. And it was pretty common. Actually they'd use beer to fight fires because they didn't have pressurized water. But they go to a brewery and get a keg of beer and it would foam just like firefighting foam like fire, and they spread on the fires. So in the wake of all these fires, finally, in like eighteen ninety six, a lot of folks came to us said, this is crazy, like our cities literally keep burning to

the ground, Like this is ridiculous. We need to figure out how to make And actually, at the time it was the electrical contracting companies gene Electric, Edison Westinghouse came together and said, we're the only organizations that really are cross cutting across America, like we're in every city running electricity to the communities. Let's figure out a way to

stop these fires. So they formed the National Fire Protection Association, and they started creating standards that said, listen, every block, there'll be a fire hydrant, and every city will have a fire brigade. And they would standardize and of course these lessons weren't all learned right away, then happened one

at a time. So then they standardized fire brigades, and then the fire brigades realized, well, our hoses have to match because if Manhattan calls a Brooklyn fire department over and they show up to help and they have different size hoses, which this happened many times, our hoses don't plug into your hoses. Your fire horns don't fit our hoses.

We're basically useless now. So they started, Okay, we'll standardize fire hoses, these sprinklers inside, you know, fire sprinklers, how we put our eclectrical outlets sixteen inches off the ground, et cetera, et cetera. These standards became embedded across our country. And one of those standards of standards of cover in response time where every city, the way especially Dan Serbans lay it out, is every address is covered by at

least two, sometimes three different fire stations. That way, when you down nine one one, dispatch immediately dispatches assets from three of those stations. That way, if there's a traffic jam, or a bridge is out, or a tree gets blown over by a storm blocks the road, someone's going to get to your house time in just a few minutes. And the whole idea is get a fire while it's small.

You know, when the fire starts in your kitchen. You know, when you call a fire department say I got a house fire, they don't say, okay, where is in your house? In the kitchen? Okay, Well, you know, call us back when it's in the living room and then maybe we'll come or could sometimes even worse. All right, well cool, we just get out of your house, and just if it spreads to your neighbor's house, then call us and maybe will come help out. You're like really like, yeah,

we're just not going to fight that one, okay. And or imagine, you know, if the mayor said, you know what, our current policy for this city block is to let it burn. We're just going to let this block burn, and if it spreads to the next block, then maybe

we'll fight it. And I think you know, that mindset has largely been you know, bifurcated between structure fire and wildland fire for good reason, because fire is a part of our natural landscape, no question, like we want fires to burn, we need fire is extremely healthy for the landscape. It has to happen. But we also have to recognize that we now have a lot of people values infrastructure interspersed with our forest, with our urban wildland interface.

fire quick enough. And that fire, when it was spreading at peak speed, was burning two football fields a second I think how fast that is. I mean just in the binklemin and I and uh, you know about a month ago the Hampton's Long Island was burning a wildfire starta there and was burning. You know. Actually in the worst was about a month ago, about three weeks ago. The same communities in Appalachia that got wiped out by that,

they were burning in a wildfire. So you know, it's the point is not just a national forest western lands issue. I mean, it really is a fifty state issue. You know, Lahina, Hawaii. Let's not forget about that. The deadliest fire in recent history was in Hawaii, you know, Lahina. That fire started on the mountain side. When pushed it through it literally wiped that city off the map, killed one hundred people, and it happened.

our first and primary obligation is public safety. So yes, nature management, Yes, there's a time for the force to burn, prescribe burns, all that, but like our first party needs to be protecting the lives and homes of people like number one. And I think that's why the LA fire really cracked open a lot of frustration bipartisan and again all add every single bill. I was the first Senator excuse me, a freshman to pass a bill this this Congress, and it was around wildfire. And again it was all

by Parson. I mean, every single wildfire bill is not one party the other. We're all saying we owe the American people better, like we just owe them a better solution than they're getting. What's the theme, Like, what's the theme of what you're driving towards for wildfires? So the challenge is the reason why there's so many different bills.

And you hit the nail on the head when you said, I've been hearing about this forestry crap for years, nothing's changing, and you're out exactly right, it's largely you have such a complicated interconnection of issues, organizations, and interests. So you guys know better than I do about our public lands and how many different organizations have a hand in that pot. You know, you got the Forest Service, which you know, we can talk about USDA, which owns the Forest Service.

A lot of people assume the Forest Services and Department of Materier and it's not. That's just or they think it's its own agency. The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture. That's very important. We can talk about that later. But the policies of USDA and how they operate dictate the Forest Service. Then you have a

Department of Materior. Within that, of course, you have National Park Service, you got Bureau of Land Management, You've got Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is also a massive landowner. Then you've got Fish Wildlife Service. Then you've got state organizations. Of course state land, which as we know, especially in Montana, checker boarded in you'll have state land shoved in there. Then you might have county land or city land of course, private land, and then not so much in our city.

Go out of the states, you can have a lot of land that's Department of Energy or DoD.

of course that's the agency. Then you get to the local level. You know, the state forester in one state may have a completely different outlook on logging the state forester in the next state, or the director of the BAA in that state or BLM may have a completely different outlook than the neighboring state. And then when you put especially when you go depending on who's in charge in the presidency at the time, if it's a red or blue white house compared to a red or blue state,

those policies. When you have state land, which is you know, is very common, butted up against BLM or Forest Service land, now you have different policies, you know, around that. So the reason it's so hard to solve this problem is because you have so many different stakeholders with completely different policies and sometimes different world views coming at the issue.

And that's just talking about landowners. That doesn't even begin to scratch the service of environmental advocacy groups, legal advacy groups who are quite frankly, there are a lot of people that make a living off of suing the government over land issues. I mean, that's just that's how they make their money. So they want lawsuits to happen.

Navy believed battleships were the capital ship. Battleships were big ships with big, giant guns on them, and the concept of a capital ship was We're going to line up ships and they're going to shoot at each other with

cannons till they sink. That's how navies thought, and a number of guys in the thirties said, hey, you know what these things called airplanes, Actually you are pretty effective, and an airplane can sink a ship, So why don't we invest in these things called aircraft carriers where we basically cut the top off the ship, put a piece of pavement down, and we fly planes and we killed

the other ship before their guns can hit us. The Navy said, that's a stupid idea, that's idiotic, and the guy that thought of it, they had him kicked out of the military, had him kicked out, literally discharge gone. And guess what happened Pearl Pearl Harbor. All the battleships got sunk. I used to live when I was stationed

in Hawaii. I looked out my front window and for me, I could throw a baseball and hit the wreck of the USS Utah that was still sunk, the hulls still sitting there in Pearl Harbor, and all the battleships basically were wiped out. So the Navy had no choice. And guess what did all that damage? Airplanes? The Navy quickly all right, not only are our battleship's gone, we need aircraft carriers. But also we just saw what a bunch of cheap airplanes can do to a bunch of expensive ships.

So you know, I hate to say it, but I think LA may be our Pearl Harbor moment for fire where we realize it's time for a fundamental reset of how we're dealing with this, and it's giving us the momentum bipartisan to go across these agencies and say, listen, for service, you want to have a forest treatment plan that's X and partner here, you want to do that. Great, But guess what if we can identify an area as a critical fire shed, all that other crap goes away.

We are going to cut through the bureaucracy, the red tape, and all the litigation, and we're going to prioritize public safety and we're going to identify critical fire sheds all throughout the US and say if you're within a fire shed. We're going to cut through all these different environmental impact of views, all these different lawsuits, all these different acts, and we're something going to say the priority for this

valley is we're going to do force treatment. We're going to build roads where we have to to get firefighters there, and we're going to we're going to bolster the fire fighting capability here in an inner agency cross cutting manner.

And you know, part of the problem too is here of course, you know, we're in a very political, polarized political environment, and everyone wants to grab every issue and just you know, crank up the volume and get everyone pissed at each other. And unfortunately that makes it hard to have a common sense conversation. Sometimes nobody's talking about clear cutting forests like we did in the late eighteen hours. No one's talking about going in and like you know,

lorax here and just like wiping off the whole. What we're talking about is forest thinning and prescribe burns. And you know, no one seems to have a problem. Some of these environmental letting the forest burn to the ground. Yet they don't want us to use that timber to create jobs and economic activity in towns that Franklin. You know, they could go to Libby, go to Columbia Falls, some of these towns. You know, pelt grants payment lieu of

taxes have replaced timber revenue. And the Force Service used to be the most profitable agency in the United States government. It made money every single year, literally contributed to the National Treasury. And now like every other agency, it's a cost center because they no longer the East harvest in the eighties thirteen million board fitt a year. Now it's they struggle to hit three. So we've got to figure out how to bring that common sense in a narraor

when we had it. We've had a housing boom and houding shortage. You'd think we'd want more timber. Instead, we're buying timber from Canada when we should be getting it from here in America. So that that critical fire shed will be basically a negotiating processing around say all right, this area that this this as you know, a fireshed normally follows a drainage. It's like, all right, this drainage

here is a critical fire shed for this town. You know, we're going to identify this as a fire critical area.

But then it's the the public lands belong to the public though, and what's happened a lot is the public lands now belong to the government. That's different. You know, the public lands belong to the people, and I think there is a separate and distinct definition between the government owning the land and the people owning the land.

conserve massive tracts of land. To say you can't graze us anymore, it's sage gross habitat. It's like, oh wow, well, like, our family depends on that land has for one hundred years. Now you're just going to take it away and we can't use it anymore. So I think that there's been a big disconnect, especially you know in the Western States between mean how locals feel about how the federal governments managing land and also saying, well we want to say in that okay, like we want to say and what's

going to happen here? Because you know, I share a fence line with this forest service and I see the fuel load in that forest and if a fire comes through there, like it's going to barrow through like a freight train. And they're like, yeah, well, you know, we're on a ten year forest management plan and currently you know it's being injuncted by a judge who says we can't cut a tree down, so you know, we'll get

back to it in a few years. Like okay, well if here is great, but what happens when the fire comes through next fall?

of government property. And you know, obviously we've seen a lot of these Western lands issues come to heads, you know, between a ranch between local Like there's that sheriff that arrested the fire manager from the Forest Service a couple years ago out in Washington State who they were doing a prescribe burned that got out of control and was burning private property. And the sheriff showed up and said, listen,

like you had a prescribe it. You can burn your federal and all you want, but now you're burning private land. And there had been years of tensions building here, and the sheriff arrested them, said you're a force of employe. I don't care that it does not give you the right to burn down private property, you know, and put

them out of rest. Obviously that that case is still working its way through the system, but so you know, and then you look in California and obviously the impacts of that were folks said, you know, decades of public lands management decisions impact the fire resilience of a community, and the folks saying, well, you know, if I had known that what you were doing was going to create my was going to create a less safe fire environment for my community, I never would have let you do it.

So I think, I think what we're seeing is a recon de pendulum always swings. You know, we had a huge conservation push in the back half of the twenty century, especially his last forty, which is obviously a good thing in many respects. But as you know, in any movement,

you know, sometimes we make mistakes on the way. And you know, I would I would submit that the Endangered Species Act has been has been greatly abused, and the Clean Waters Act Waters the United States Act, has been taken by a lot of advocacy groups and they've said, you know what, this is a way to shut down development here. This is a way to shut down ranchers

using this irrigation water because it connects. I mean that case in Idaho where the irrigation ditch was fourteen miles from Priest Lake, yet they called it a navigable body

of water. Yeah, I understand, right, So I think, you know, both sides have to come to the table and say, listen, the land belongs to the people, not to the government, and we need to make sure that people who live I mean, you know, you talk to folks in Libby, they come out like, we have been desperate to get these timber projects going for ten, fifteen, twenty years, and all we get is lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit, and we want our town back, We want our timber industry

back in our town. And you know, we have lawyers from five states away, parachute in and well healed lawyers with millions of dollars of funding from who knows where it comes from, and they pop in and every time we're about to get our timb release, boom, it's no they judge shop, they sue it. They stop in the town's like, this is our forest, we live here. How do these people come in from where they're coming from and tell us we can't have an economy in our town.

You know, go to Blackbeart Copper Company and White Sulfur. That town wants that mine. It's on private land, and yet you know they get they get, you know, and junked it. Every time they're about to stick a shovel on the ground, the mine gets shut down. So I think you know that there's some common sense application that needs to happen, and I think this fire in LA is wagging people up to the fact that we have

an obligation to be good stewards of our land. We have an obligation to be good stewards for clean air, clean water, and to take care of whether the species are endangered or not. We have an obligation there. But at the same time, we also have an obligation to protect our communities. And two things can be true. We can care about the environment and want clean water and healthy for us, and we can also say we can do that and protect our communities in a common sense way from wildfire.

see some funding to do that type of management? You know, like the not dimensional board foot lumber side of things.

of it's more of a symbiotic relationship between industry, the forest products industry, and the public landowner. To say again whether and there are examples of this working very well. Go to Washington State, not exactly a bastion of conservatism, but Washington State really undertook their public lands commissioner, lady named Hillary France, who's a great lady, super sharp thought

leader in this regard many many years ago. I think starting twenty sixteen, she started taking a pretty aggressive approach to active forest management of the state and really leveraged the very vibrant forest products industry in the Pacific Northwest to say, listen, I want to fireproof for our communities and I also want to reinvigorate especially a lot of these tribal communities that are on Colville, who you know, are always struggling for good economic growth, and they used

kind of this forestry model around both traditional timber products but also non standard uh forestry products. And you know, the free mark is a beautiful thing. The free market will adapt, you know, with amazing speed. And if you give them an economic outlet for any product, whether even if it's just slash, they'll find a way to use it and they'll find a way to make it processable into something useful. And if not, then they'll bake into

their proposal to do a broader forest treatment project. You know what it's going to take to get that out of So so I think the paradigm of worgun the government's going to write a check and say you here, boom, here's cash. We're going to pay you to go clean up that forest. H That's that's not the way we're generally going to try to approach.

public lands. What kind of position does that put you in?

that's inside those are your personal playground. Yeah, a semi urban area, you know, El Tora Airbase in La Is a great example like el as La grew Eltro air bases in like the middle of the growth of La yep. That was public land, right and the decision was, we're going to transfer that to the city of La and

they will do with it what they deem best. Because this no longer makes sense based the entire San Francisco base, same thing, bunch of military bases, publicly owned lands that were transferred in a common sense way to say, mainly pushed by Democrats that hey, we want these to be pushed in the private market. You will get no resistance from me on these issues. True. So, but where I'm

going is, unfortunately it's the same legal framework. And I think, you know, politics of politics, everyone's got to you know, run their game. I get it. But you know, in Montana specifically, there's been this effective narrative created that you know, the Republican Party wants to sell off Yelosto a national

park and I want to you know, turn Glacier. And I heard that, but I mean I could picture someone saying that, Oh, I literally that people in my office like I heard you're going to sell a Yellowstone, Like I'm like, what are you talking about? But that same framework, though extends. So take Nevada, and it's interesting how public the mindseter on public lands changes on where you're at. Like, there are people in Nevada that view the federal government

owning land. It's almost the inverse of heory. It's like occupation. Ninety seven percent of Nevada's owned by the federal government, and a lot of Nevadas resent that deeply. They're like, because the government owns our whole state, we can't develop it. We can't you know, have economic A lot of the Native tribes in Hawaii hate the fact that the US federal government owns so much land in Hawaii. They view

that it's foreign occupation. So in Alaska, people in Alaska are very supportive of saying we want energy development on our public lands. In some cases that may mean leasing or selling chunks, because we want jobs, we want economic growth. So it's it's not selling national parks, not selling BLM, not selling forest service, of course, but it is to say, if we have a military base in the middle of a city thousands of acres, is that just going to

stay fenced off and empty forever? And I think when you hear Doug Bergham talking about we need to use our public lands more efficiently, and he starts talking about we're going to consider affordable housing projects on public lands. He's not going to build an apartment building, you know

next to you, old Faithful. What he's saying is there's a lot of Department of Interior own land, or Department of Energy own land or DoD owned land that is owned by the public that most people would say this could be used better than it is.

And then when you look at the full document, oh, that makes total sense. But when you pull out of context, it doesn't. So you know, some folks are using this to attack. You're probably Gonann saying, oh, they're talking about

selling government owned land. Yeah, like military bases that haven't been used in fifty years, you know, Or you know there's an old warehouse in downtown Gary, Indiana, Like, okay, why does the federal government still own that piece of land for the Defense Logistics Agency DLA doesn't need that land anymore. The factory that used to make those ships there has been shut down for seventy years. Why don't we sell that and pay down the debt? So to your point, I think, you know, we have to, and

that's on us too. We got a message better, but also the opposition messaging. You know, I never once in my life said anything closest. Let's sell our public lands yet that became an issue in my campaign because you know, it was an issue that could easily be be created by my political opposition, and both sides do it.

But like, we're the only country in the world really to ever have the concept of the people will own massive tracts of land, and that's just so special. We can never you know, we can't chip away at that, and if we do, it's a dangerous precedent. We start so and especially here in Montana, in our western states, and we know what a magical thing it is to have that, and you know, we just have to fight to protect it. That's a red line for all of us.

I know our whole Montane delegation is aligned on that. That you know, that's just that's a non starter.

But man, when you're paying attention to this, it's like that is the example that's being used over and wait wait wait, wait wait. I always be represented.

I think that you know doing what you did with such a high risk of injury cost your family like earns you a seat at the table, right, deserves respect. We got that out of the way. I would love it to come back and talk more about fires and more about public lands.

taking place. So i'd love to come back as sp been two hours of summer, and especially in the fire season when probably a lot of people are going to be what's going on, we can talk through it and just talk through some of the tactics and what's going on. Why.