Greg Aplet: Forests, Fire, and What is Wild

TWI_003_Greg Fri, Mar 07, 2025 4:11PM • 46:20 SUMMARY KEYWORDS forest ecology, wildfire mitigation, Fix Our Forests Act, climate change, naturalness, wilderness management, public lands, indigenous stewardship, old growth forests, fire ecology, landscape restoration, ecosystem management, wilderness character, fuel reduction, community safety SPEAKERS Bill Hodge, Voiceover, Anders Reynolds, Greg Aplet Voiceover 00:00 The following is a production of wild idea media, and Bill Hodge 00:06 welcome to the wild idea podcast, where we are exploring the intersection of wild nature and our own human nature. Happy to be joined again today by my co host, Anders. Good afternoon. Oh, hi. How are you? I'm doing great. I'm excited about today. We are going to talk forest ecology. We're going to talk wildfire, we're going to plumb the depths of the term naturalness with Greg applet from The Wilderness Society. So this should be an exciting conversation. Anders Reynolds 00:33 I agree. I've really benefited from Greg's writing over the years. It's really clever and thorough, and Greg's the right guest at the right time, on this very day that we're recording Senate Ag Committee is hearing the fix our Forest Act, or FOFA, as they call it, around the hill. Fauci is framed as a wildfire mitigation bill, but there's, you know, some doubt as to whether or not it would actually do that. Instead, it looks like it completely ignores our current wildfire funding and staffing crisis, while undermining important existing protections for forest. It's, you know, clear to me that climate change is brought with it increased wildfire risk for people, and this bill does provide some steps towards programs that protect communities, but the management issues with this bill are abundant, you know, and there's a lot of people out there that oppose it. Bill Hodge 01:23 Yeah, I think it is really good timing to have this conversation. And honestly, this conversation, ever since we started talking about this idea of having this podcast, it's kind of been built around this idea, how do we tackle really deep issues with a long enough conversation, probably still not long enough, but a long enough conversation to try to pull apart all of the things that our public lands, our wild lands in general, are facing. And you're there in DC, you're literally on Capitol Hill almost every day. Anderson, you're this is also the week in which the President spoke to a joint session of Congress, which looks, just say, maybe went off the rails, got a little tense. I'm curious in the hallways in the days after that, what's like, what's the vibe in the congressional offices in the days after that, Anders Reynolds 02:07 the mood is tense, and it's really hard to get a handle on any sort of intelligence the second you talk to somebody, you talk to another person, and the Intel they have is different, but more alarming than how tense it is is how chaotic it is. I don't think anyone really knows what's happening next, and it's so alarming to be in that environment where there doesn't seem to be any plan other than creating more chaos. And I think it's taking some time for folks who may feel a little punch drunk to get up off the mat and start to fight this thing. So it's it's pretty gloomy today. It's especially gloomy. It's a cloudy day. But do you know what's bright bill your smile, that smile yours always Bill Hodge 02:55 try to light up a room you know, regale with stories of joy and happiness, and even at a time when it's hard to feel that way. And as we've been having these conversations, you and I've already gone down that that road with a couple of our other guests, just about people feel sort of paralyzed by the time. And yet we also know we've been here before in our history, like maybe, maybe this time a little bit different, but we've also faced the same challenges, the same threats before. So without further ado, let's, you know, let's bring in our guest here for for our conversation today. And you know, for full disclosure, I've known Greg for I think it's got to be going on 15 years now, and we actually overlap twice during my two tours at The Wilderness Society. Greg applet is a senior forest ecologist at The Wilderness Society. He has received his bachelor's of science and forestry and an MS in Wildland Resources science from the University of California at Berkeley. His PhD from Colorado State. He's the author of over 100 and Anders and I tried to read as many of them as we could, over 100 publications on forest vegetation dynamics, the ecology of biological invasions, the conservation of biological diversity, wildland fire and wilderness management, collaborative, conservation and climate change adaptation. Greg, it is just our pleasure to have you join us today. It's great Greg Aplet 04:10 to be here. It's great to see your smiling face and to see Andrews as well. So Bill Hodge 04:15 Greg, one place I think I'd love to start with a question, is to hear a little bit more about your journey and how you wound up where you are today. You know, long tenured employee at the wilderness holiday. I'd love to hear that part of the story. Greg Aplet 04:27 So I grew up, oddly enough, in Pacific Palisades, which has now been burned to the ground. But my father was a an aerospace physicist. He worked for Hughes Aircraft, and so very steeped in science. And then I had my my mother had gone to school in English, but right about the time when she thought she could, mistakenly thought she could leave me unattended, went back to school and got a master's degree in environmental planning at UCLA, and went on to be the director of planning for. South Coast Air Quality Management District in charge of air pollution in the LA basin. And so I kind of grew up with this, both this sort of environmental planning and science background, and they also dragged me all over the West, every national park west of the Rockies. And by the time I was a senior in high school, it just appealed to me to be a forest ranger. And so I looked for a place where I could could get a forestry degree, and I looked at Washington and Oregon State and Cal. And Cal was the cheapest alternative as an in state student. And so I enrolled there, but it turned out to be a great choice. I was so transformed in my forestry education that though I may have started, despite started out to save the world from clear cutting by the by the time I was finished, I I could walk out into a clear cut and look around and say, pretty nice clear cut. But I I, and I was then going to go on to work for the Forest Service, but that was the year the bottom dropped out of the timber market and in the West in 1981 and no one in my graduating class got a ended up with a job with in forestry who didn't already have a co op job with the Forest Service. So I did what the only thing that could salvage my career in forestry, and went back to graduate school. And that led me into, you know, to recognize my passion for forest ecology, which then led me to Colorado, state to work under a couple of silviculturists and a Fire Ecologist there and and I was, you know, headed in an academic direction, but this position popped up at the Wilderness Society, you know, it happened to be at a time when I was working on a research project. I was still, you know, as a postdoc, and I was working on a research project that wasn't very, very well managed, and my best friend at the time was a PhD student who wasn't happy with his position either, and he was sitting in my office, and I said, you know, it's too bad an outfit like The Wilderness Society doesn't hire guys like us. And six months later, we were both working for The Wilderness Society. So Anders Reynolds 07:19 Greg, I was thinking, you've written much, and all of it interesting, on the persistent need for conservationists, historians, ecologists, land managers, to define naturalness. And you've offered, to my mind, some very cogent criticisms of the diverse meanings of naturalness. I guess the question I would ask you is, why is it important to define naturalness at all? Greg Aplet 07:45 Well, that's a great question. What you're referring to is some work that was that a, really a group of us did back in 15 to 20 years ago, faced with the fact that so much of our guiding legislation and policy in the Natural Resources world makes kind of easy reference to naturalness, but as we've learned more about the land, learned more about the people who've occupied the land for 1000s of years and our own desires for the condition of the land, it's become clear that that term natural or naturalness, has can be interpreted in a number of different ways And and each of those ways leaves you with different, different decision point when managing natural resources. And just a little bit of probing that we did into the way people had been interpreting the term natural or naturalness, left us with the realization that you could, you could think of natural as really absent, the the evidence of humans, sort of the the ultimate other, the non human part of the universe. Or you could think of it in terms of including people, but kind of letting nature run on its own without the influence of people. Or you could think of it in terms of the wholeness of ecosystems under historical human influence, in other words, under the kinds of influences that Indigenous peoples have brought to the land for for 1000s of years, so much of the world, North America, for sure, what we see as nature or natural has been shaped by humans over over the millennia. Yeah. And when you remove humans from the equation, you end up with a very different ecosystem, very different elements to those ecosystems. Then, then you have with people in that in the mix. And so if you want to sustain the ecosystems that we've inherited from the past. We really need to replicate the influence that people have brought to those systems to shape those systems over time. Or you can make the decision to kind of take people out of the system and see where it goes. Or in the third sort of approach, you can just try to kind of minimize the evidence that people have had their their fingers on on the system, and in the case of national parks and wilderness management, that might lead you to three very different ways of approaching how you manage the land. Bill Hodge 10:58 I'm curious how that overlaps, having worked with the land management agency, folks, the folks inside the government who have to sort of follow statute. And for those of you wonder why we're going to dissect the word naturalness, like it shows up in statute, you know, it shows up in the wilderness axis, preserving wilderness character, or natural conditions, you know, as part of wilderness character. And I've been hearing this sort of approach lately, called the RAD approach, resist, accept or direct. And how does that? Does that sort of fit neatly with the sort of the three buckets you just described? I think there's self evident resist, as you resist changes that are going on in the system, except as you just sort of accept it. Maybe the ultimate untrammeled, right? Like the Wilderness Act also talks about leaving lands untrammeled, which means unmanipulated by man, and then, and of course, direct is like, okay, we're actually going to intervene to get this system pointed in a direction, whether it's back to a system, but does that fit with sort of the buckets you all wrote about, and you know, beyond naturalness 15 years ago, Greg Aplet 12:00 the key phrases, as you alluded to in in the Wilderness Act, are untrammeled. The term, which means essentially leaving alone to its own devices. A Trammel is a is a device that's applied to livestock, to horses, to keep them from running away, and and so when you think of something that's untrammeled, it's it's free to run and, and that's kind of what we think we want for wilderness. But there are a couple of other phrases in the Wilderness Act that are also really important that you alluded to, that are primeval character and influence. And when I interpret primeval character, it's the what is the ancient character of the ecosystem, and what are the influences that brought that character to bear? And so both of those are also things that we want to see in wilderness. So that led us to thinking about the world in terms of the degree to which the ecosystem that we're dealing with retains that primeval character and influence, versus the degree to which we let it run untrammeled, free from our from our control. And there had been some work done by David Cole at the Aldo Leopold wilderness Research Institute back in the 90s that sort of made the case that wilderness management was a real challenge because it sat in the middle of this tension zone between those two goals of untrammeled and primeval character and influence. And it occurred to me, in sort of reading David's work and reading other sort of historical takes on wild and natural, they're really the two, the two directions that David felt was wilderness management was being pulled in were really orthogonal. They were, they were, they weren't really attention on each other. They were just directions of their on their own, unrelated to each other. And so you could, you could place those two vectors in sort of Cartesian space. And think of any piece of land is existing, anywhere in this space determined by an X axis, from sort of artificial to historically whole, you know, like it like the the world that we inherited from the past, and on the y axis, from highly controlled to free from human influence, human control. And then you could think about any piece of land as existing in that space. And historically the development. Element of you know, the influence of people has been to bring the land under greater control for the purpose of changing it from its historical condition into something new. In wilderness management, we've always thought of letting the letting the place go, making it untrammeled, and then expecting it to grow in its primeval character. But it also, I think, that the other dimensions, or the other directions that are determined by that space, I think, are also equally interesting to consider. One is that you we can also bring an area under greater control for the purpose of creating greater historical condition. That's what we've typically called ecological restoration, typified by, say, the Arboretum on the University of Wisconsin campus, where they took a beat up old piece of farmland, and they restored it to to a tall grass prairie ecosystem, but it's one that's under tight human control and not you know where, where the all of the fires are set by humans, and seed dispersal and pollination takes place by scientists trying to increase native species. The fourth remaining dimension, you can think of as sort of drift, or the the what happens when you let a place go and it goes in a direction other than historical, sort of the degradation of, say, a vacant lot in a in a developed area where, you know, it just trends away from the historical but it's still not heavily influenced by people. And so for a long time, I thought about those four dimensions. I thought about the one that's increased, where land is left untrammeled and in improves into the historical condition as sort of the ideal of wilderness management as climate change, invasive species, other land use effects have made themselves apparent. It's more and more clear to us that that ideal of leaving a place alone in it, remaining in its historical condition or or trending in a historical condition is less and less likely, more elusive, and that really only leaves us with those three alternatives, investing in a place to In improve its historical condition, or restoration letting it go into and accepting the change that we get, or intentionally intervening and driving the system into a novel condition, but one that we hope is more resilient to future conditions. And that's where it's sort of the basis of the RAD idea came from was that, you know, those, there are really only three reasonable alternatives for the future, and we need to be thinking about our management systems in those ways. And because of the uncertainty of the future, we need to be intentionally engaging the land in, in thinking about all three of those simultaneously, and kind of spreading the risk of future climate change and the risk that derives from our own incomplete knowledge of the system, trying to do what we can, to hold on to nature, driving it in, in can in the direction that we hope will be better, but also leaving places alone and letting them change on their own, without our intent to hopefully, you know, just in case we are we are wrong, and if we're successful, all three we'll have, we'll have some systems that we value for their content, but other systems that we value, because we've simply left them alone to change on their own. This Anders Reynolds 19:05 is really humbling, Greg, because I'm from Arkansas, the natural state as it calls itself, and I'm always telling people that wilderness is the most appropriate protection for the national forest there as wilderness is the most natural state of things. So this is a good reminder that that that might be a good talking point, but it may not have much basis in reality. We shouldn't Greg Aplet 19:31 discount the fact that that wilderness that you know, wilderness natural areas, places that have been protected as natural areas, really have a great track record of sustaining nature. And you know, just because we can't expect a place to increase in its in its historical naturalness without our intervention, doesn't mean that the places that are currently in. Shape can't be and shouldn't be left alone. Anders Reynolds 20:02 As a matter of fact, I often quote you on that point, Wilderness is neither simply an idea or a place. It is a place where an idea is clearly expressed. And I think that's really, really wonderful. I want to ask you about climate change. Climate change has caught a lot of people out. It's exposed some hypocrisies inherent in capitalism and our own personal choices, or I should say, my own personal choices, maybe. But as you've pointed out in your writing, it's exposed the limitations of some of our concepts of naturalness as well. Could you talk a little bit about how that's changed decision making around retaining the historical character of certain landscapes. Yeah, Greg Aplet 20:44 well, I think, I think our whole approach to land management, including, you know, the way we evaluate environmental impacts, is based on a belief, an understanding that we've had, it's not an unreasonable understanding, from historical experience, that if we leave a place alone, its naturalness will return, and therefore, if we are impacting a place negatively, then just stopping what we're doing is the right choice to make to improve the condition of the land. And that's kind of what our whole, like, the whole National Environmental Policy Act analysis, is based on this idea that not doing things is the best choice for the condition of the land and and we really just need to be evaluating, you know, what we do as a negative impact. But all of that is based on the, you know, if you want to to sustain the ecosystem that exists, that is based on an assumption that the factors that gave rise to that system will continue to exist. And you can think of, think of a pretty short list of things that that affect the nature of an ecosystem. And one of those big things is climate. And so as the climate changes, we can expect the nature of ecosystems to change. In some cases, when that happens, we're going to lose some of the things that we care about, and if we want to hold on to those things, we're going to have to kind of make up for it with our own human energy. Yeah, I think Bill Hodge 22:36 about a panel that you were on years ago. We were an event. You and I were together, and I think it was in Gunnison, Colorado, and you know, Roger Kay, who's somebody that you and I both know, and that some someday I'd love to have him on he's, you know, he's a biologist, I think in Alaska, works for Fish and Wildlife Service. He's saying that places in Alaska that have been designated Wilderness, or maybe they've been designated as the natural area, are losing their character. And I think many of us know that Alaska sort of has become the tip of the spear in the climate change world, if you will. But, like, it was a real challenging conversation, yet, I think it's one of the beautiful things about those of us who think about large intact ecosystems, is we have to think hard about it. And he really challenged I think I'll just call my own orthodoxy, maybe a little bit about, like, maybe we needed a little more manipulation. And since that conversation, which is now only, like, six years ago, or something like, you know, ecological intervention for a white bark pine here, where I am in the Northern Rockies, or moving bull trout further up in the watershed, all of these sort of things that are clearly a manipulation that some in the wildland protection community will be vehemently opposed to if they're more grounded in the idea of untrammeled and that we're not going to manipulate. And I I get, it's like, I can get both of those things. I can get the idea of, let's not manipulate, because one of the factors behind the idea of having wilderness was to have, like, a baseline of what happens when we don't intervene. Because when we've intervened in the past, sometimes we have been dreadfully wrong, right? Fires, depression, which we'll get to fire in a minute. But like, I think it's interesting that it requires us to think, and I don't think we'll ever have to, ever be able to sit back and go, Okay, we've solved it all. We've figured out what's the best way forward, right? Because every different prescription, whether it's wilderness or roadless area or an area that's in the suitable timber base, all is going to have to be thought through in different ways. And certainly climate change is influencing that. Am I? Am I thinking about that, right? Greg Aplet 24:28 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that where we get in, in, in the biggest conflict, is when we start thinking about wilderness in isolation, as the place for nature, as Bill Cronin said in his essay back in 1995 when we when we think about wilderness as the epitome of conservation and the only place that we care about that's where we get in trouble. But if we think about wilderness as as a component. Component of the broader landscape that includes places that are highly manipulated, and places in between. It start, you start to imagine a landscape in which that we where we make allocations to different choices, as we just described. And and there, you know, maybe wilderness is the place that we let go. You know, that we where we accept change and in general and on there, where there can be exceptions, we're capable of thinking through these, these kinds of exceptions. But in the, you know, more heavily manipulated part of the landscape, maybe we start thinking about those places, of places where we want to intentionally sustain elements of the ecosystem that are under threat from climate change, instead of just thinking of them, thinking of them as you know, production lands maximizing revenue, you're Anders Reynolds 25:51 reminding me of a contradiction I've seen in some of Gary Snyder's writing, and it's like a really like comfortable contradiction that I sort of like living with. But he he wrote that wilderness may temporarily dwindle, but wildness won't go away. But he's also written that wilderness is a place where wild potential is fully expressed. And it's interesting to think about, can something be fully expressed while it has the potential to dwindle like it sort of almost contradicts itself, but I'm hearing you sort of describe it in a different way that it really does make sense to me. It's in the letting go that it fully expresses itself. Yeah, Greg Aplet 26:28 I think that's a really important part of it, you know. But I do think that the part of what people expect when they when they think of a place as wild, is they think of of a whole ecosystem, a place is more wild when it has wolves and grizzly bears in it than a place that we've eliminated them from. And so you can extend that. That seems that's pretty obvious. We all think of, think of those kinds of wilderness species as associated with wild places. But I think the, I think it extends to, you know, the to things that we don't typically think about as important to wildness, like, you know, plants and club mosses. And what Gary Snyder is saying there is the places that we have typically designated as wilderness, that we, that we recognize as wilderness. Put it that way, our places, that for the most part, are the most whole and the most untrammeled. But they're dynamic, and they're gonna, they're gonna change over time. And you know, maybe sometimes, though, that wholeness will be eroded, but other times, it can sway back. I'm Bill Hodge 27:41 gonna shift gears on us a little bit. You know, when I read your bio, of course, it's, you know, forest ecology, forest ecology, forest ecology. But I tend to have really thought about particularly my last couple years of having worked with you, I always think of you as, like, I probably introduce you as, like, a forest fire ecologist, like you've spent a lot of time, professionally, thinking about studying, collecting data on what that means. And I've thought about it for some time, because it feels like we're at this moment here in North America with a rise, what feels like a rise in large scale and catastrophic wildfires that's happening during an era that I'm going to loosely define as the sort short attention span era of at least Americans. That's a puzzle that feels really hard to put together to capture the nuance of how we might live within an adjacent ecosystem that have evolved to burn like they're going to burn, and how difficult it is to present enough of the population to garner the political will to do the right thing, whatever that is, and I'm not trying to define it, but when we tend to want our information a two minute sound bites, like I've always had, this just like frustration I want to fight my way out of is you can't capture why we maybe why we're having these catastrophic wildfires At what seems to be an ever growing scale to somebody in two minutes, but that's how they want their information. Sum it up for me, in two minutes. So I can form my opinion that has to be hard for you as a scientist to think about how to translate that data. Oh, Greg Aplet 29:12 yeah, it's it's a challenge made all the harder by, you know, a century of Smokey Bear messaging that fire is bad and so so trying to convey the nuance that fire is essential to the nature that you love. At the same time that people have had this note, this message pounded into their head, is it's it makes for a really difficult challenge, but it's getting through. When we've done focus group work with with people in the wildland urban interface, for instance, it's clear, been clear to us that the people get it, you know, they they understand you. It's the it's we have broken through to people. The real challenge has become, how do you create a system? How do you create a landscape that allows people to feel safe in their homes at the same time that we're promoting the benefits of fire out in the ecosystems that depend on it. It's been difficult to to get people to feel that safety when the woods are on fire. But, for instance, the Forest Service has has in a couple of different places now, taken the through, through the forest planning process, allocated lands on national forests to different zones depending on the threat that fire would present to communities in each of those zones, starting with, you know, the the area immediately around homes that we just don't want fire to burn in, We can take steps there to reduce the threat of of while of that fire gets into homes, it's going to result in a very different ecosystem, a very different community there than we're used to, and so people who love their their fuel bed next to their home are going to be disappointed, but it's a step we're going to have to take. But beyond that, we can start to, you know, make changes to the forests that are consistent with its history of of fire ecology, to allow fire to burn under conditions of our choosing, without producing a threat to communities. And then, you know, at an even greater distance, there's a there's a zone where we don't really even need to worry about fire as a threat to communities, and we can allow it to burn Under its terms. The problem that we face today in this country anyway, is that we've become so successful at eliminating fire when it starts, we end up with these fuels built up as a result of the lack of fire we put out every fire that we can put out. So the only fires we get are the ones we can't put out. And so every fire we get looks like, you know, a total horrendous conflagration, because we're so good at putting out the the easy ones, the big transition that we need to facilitate is one where we we don't put out the all the fires that we can put out, and we light some on our own terms, so that we get the kinds of results that we want, instead of just leaving it to chance under conditions that we can't control. Yeah, Bill Hodge 32:43 I think about just this week. Yeah, I lived in Southeast Tennessee for 18 years, not a forest that burns a lot or burns often, but is still a forest that's going to burn, and it has burned. It burned this week and took two houses. So we often think about fire as a thing in the West, but it almost burned historic telco ranger station to the ground just this week. I mean, it's, it's a little bit of everywhere there. You know, I now live to a place that is big enough, and that example you gave of the Bob Marshall wilderness complex, is big enough that it's a place that we let fires. I say we, as a public we've allowed our land managers to let fires kind of do their thing, and it's maybe returning a certain balance. And the fires anymore and the Bob aren't that big because the fuel loads aren't what they were, but, but, you know, I was, I was at a fire workshop about the Bob, and had a conversation with the Washington office employee for the Forest Service. And actually, her role was working with insurance companies, and she had a great point, we can't tell people where and where not to live. People want to live in the WUI, the wilderness, urban interface, as it's referred to, that maybe instead of telling them that they shouldn't live there, we should tell them how to build there and make, you know, have best practices out there, it seems like, but those are the things that take time, and then suddenly somebody tells you you gave example of somebody wanting that, you know, all that mulch right up next to their house, and they're, you know, you know, there are things that we I've had to think about living here in Montana, about making sure that I've fire wise my property, you know, it's just something that it takes conversation, since I think we don't have the time for, yeah, Greg Aplet 34:15 it takes conversation. It also takes resources, you know, especially as we've allowed things to change and those fuel loads to build up. You know, it's a simple and straightforward problem to solve. It's easy to keep a house from burning. There's work done right there in Montana years ago by a really important fire scientist named Jack Cohen that showed that there are really only three ways in which houses burn. One is when flames burn in the fuel bed right up to the house and catch the house on fire. That's pretty obvious. One probably most people realize that. Um, not everybody does anything about it, but it is one way in which house catches on fire. Another way is is through radiant heat from, you know, trees catching on fire outside of a home and and catching something inside the house on fire through a window, which, this is surprisingly common. I understand that that was one of the real drivers of the of the recent conflagrations in Los Angeles was just the houses were so close together, they caught each other on fire through their windows. And then the third is convection. You know, convective heat, if it's hot enough, hot air can catch something on fire. But the more common way in which houses are catch on fire is through blowing embers that land in, you know, gutters full of pine needles and things like that. And or, you know, in a in a pile of firewood next to next to a house. And so these are all really straightforward things to address, and it's one of the things that Jack did was showed it's actually really hard to catch a even a wood panel on fire just from heat from, you know, a reasonable distance of a few meters, but addressing each of those so that you you have a cleared space around your home. You don't have anything that can catch fire, that that can can drive radiant heat through your window or protecting yourself from blowing embers. It requires work, and in some cases it requires, you know, expensive fuel treatment around your home. We had cases here in Colorado where, you know, people like me were well aware of what it what drives homes, home ignition did the work around their home and then didn't have enough money to haul the slash away, and ended up sort of with just piles around their home, and realized afterwards they were in worse shape than they were before. Greg, Anders Reynolds 37:09 as I understand it, you've been involved in efforts to define inventory and map mature and old growth forests in the United States. To me, making a map is a fundamentally hopeful action. Do you see it that way? Greg Aplet 37:27 I you know, I think, I've never thought about it that way, as a hopeful action, but I think that it's important to understand spatial relationships in our in our environment, but it's not always easy to do. You know, I think you're referring to an effort that we went through to try to take an unmapped inventory, and so called the forests inventory and Analysis Program of the Forest Service, and derive from that unmapped inventory a definition of old growth forests, and then turn around and try to figure out where on the ground met those criteria, and could to see if we could, if we could map old growth from that inventory. And it turned out, it's not easy to do. People have been trying to figure out how to how to turn unmapped inventories. By that, I mean collections of plots, data collected in plots that are obviously located somewhere on the ground, but their locations are unknown to people outside of the conducting the inventory, even if those plot locations were were known, they're at such a low density that they don't tell you very much about the condition of the forest in between those plots, and so figuring out How to fill in the holes between the different plots is, is, is a an active field of research, one that that, until we master it, is going to leave us with the the inability to produce maps that show, actually, in any with any accuracy, How resources of concern, like old growth are distributed. Bill Hodge 39:22 Yeoman's work that you guys do in the science shop there at the Wilderness Society to collect data to help inform policy that hopefully, hopefully somebody can inform federal policy, can inform federal legislation as needed. You've been at it a while. We were talking about this before we hit the record button. But how many years did you say you've been there now, 33 Greg Aplet 39:43 as of December last year, Bill Hodge 39:46 you've, you've seen a lot. I mean, how do you, how do you sort of map our current state of, I'm just gonna say pressure on public lands as it's evolved over your 33 years? Like, where do you see where we're sitting? Day versus, you know, where we've been before. I'm kind of curious that long range perspective, what you think about where we sit with with wild places? You know, specifically, maybe we're talking about public lands here. What's your thought about the status of today versus the status of yesterday? Greg Aplet 40:14 That's an interesting thing to reflect on. You know, obviously, we've, we've made some progress in terms of designation of places that we care about and improve their their stewardship. We have a bigger wilderness system than we did when I started. We have more national monuments. We we have a roadless rule protecting unroaded lands from from entry. All those things have happened in my career that that I consider advances. When I first came in to the Wilderness Society was 1990 December of 1991 was the height of the spotted owl wars in the Pacific Northwest. And we were everyone was concerned about the future of old growth because, because old growth was being targeted for logging, and there wasn't very much of it left, and there was still being targeted. And so work was done, resulting in the Northwest forest plan that essentially ended old growth logging in on the national forests and in the United States, and that's that's been a huge advance. In the meantime, other threats have grown like wildfire, as we were just talking about now, wildfires a bigger threat to to old growth and logging is and we need to figure out what we're going to do about that. It's not, it's not logging the old growth, but it can be reducing fuels in in restoring a fire tolerant structure to those forests where that's likely to result in improved resilience. But in some ways, things are really very similar to the way they were when I came in. You know, the the Northwest Forest Plan was the very first region wide ecosystem management plan that had ever been developed. And the whole idea was to try to figure out, what do we need to do? How do we need to change our practices and our land allocations to sustain an ecosystem that has species in it whose populations are only viable when considered at a at a regional scale, that same challenge exists today. I would say that the biggest difference that we're experiencing today from when we started, 33 years ago, is that we now know that the climate is changing. We you know, under the ecosystem management plan for the Northwest forest, there was an assumption of a stable climate, basically, and we now know that's not the case. So we have to think about what we're going to do about that. And the other big change I think that's happened in the last decade or so is is an appreciation for the role of indigenous stewards in sustaining those landscapes. And we now know that that these aren't just ecological systems. They're socio ecological systems, they're influenced by people, and people need to be part of them, and we need to bring indigenous voices back in to help us appreciate what did they do in their 1000s of years of occupancy that that helps sustain those systems in and to try to bring those influences back in. Anders Reynolds 43:43 I couldn't agree with you more on that last point. I think that's so so important. So thank you for making it. I will point out you forgot one data point, and that's the increase in podcasts focused on the plan. And to me, that's an indication that the citizen led roadless inventories of yesteryear were probably what Bill and I would have been up to instead of doing this ill fated project. Greg Aplet 44:09 Well, glad you're doing what you're doing. We're Bill Hodge 44:12 good at giving each other a hard time, if nothing else, and but we're also good at, I guess, spending a lot of time thinking about these issues and bringing in the people who can help make us smarter, make us smarter, make all of us smarter. Hopefully, I I do. I want to echo that. That commitment to traditional indigenous knowledge is something we want to voices that we want to bring into this endeavor here at the wild idea, I think it's maybe the thing that helps us bridge that dichotomy of man as separate from nature and man as a part of nature, because was never really a thought process in those cultures and those communities, that somehow, that, you know, that they were separate, that was never really part of the equation. And I think that's a way for us to lean into that idea. That means we have to accept some of the things that maybe our forefathers in the wilderness movement maybe missed a little bit or skipped when crafting language. And so I. I appreciate all the work that TWS and so many others are doing on that front. We really thank you for coming. I hope this isn't the last time we can have you on the podcast. I think obviously today probably demonstrated we could talk about wildfire in much deeper ways, and probably with other guests that you could recommend. I know you and I have a shared deep appreciation for Bob Marshall. So I think someday there's going to be an episode about Mr. Marshall that help us educate the public a little bit more about who that man is. But really, really want to thank you for coming on today, Greg and helping us out. Look forward to having you back real Greg Aplet 45:32 soon. Well, thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure, Anders Reynolds 45:36 Greg. This has been great. Thank you so much. Voiceover 45:40 The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds. Production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital support by Holly wilkuszewski at Digital day pack. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John ski hand, our executive producer and ringleader as Laura Hodge, you can find the wild idea wherever you listen or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai