title: Bonus Ep: Wildfire
author: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
contenttype: podcast
publication: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
published: 2021-01-28T11:21:04-05:00
sourceurl: https://pds.cdnstream1.com/p/opb/timber-wars-season-2-sal-760bb5/bonus-ep-wildfire/audio.mp3
word_count: 7042
Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community-funded and your support is more important than ever. Go to KMHD.org and join as a rhythm section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. Hey there, TimberWords listeners. If you've been enjoying this podcast, there's a new show you should also check out. It's about a very weird and wonderful bird. One of my absolute favorites. That is the sound of the greater sage graphs. And it is a mighty challenger to the spotted owl for the illustrious title of most controversial bird in the West. The host of the show, Ashley Aherne, moved to sagebrush country not long ago, and she's trying to figure out world life. One cattle drive at a time. Here we go. Get those cows pistol. And along the way she's developed an obsession with sage graphs that's taken her on the journey across the West. To learn everything she can about this strange controversial bird. The show is called Grouse. It's from Bird Note Presents, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. This past year, while I was working on TimberWords, I made two trips to Colorado from Portland to spend some time in my hometown, Steamboat Springs. And everywhere I went, there was wildfire. In Portland, we sat in a bathtub of smoke for days, as fire licked the edges of the city. Driving through Idaho and Utah, smoke filtered the light into that eerie shade of yellow. In Steamboat, over two visits, there were three different fires, burning on three different horizons. Their pyro-kimilo nimbus clouds grew ominously closer every day. And then a fire broke out down the hill from my childhood home, and engulfed a field on the edge of the neighborhood. We watched it grow with fear. And then we watched firefighters put it out. And we realized we were the lucky ones. So many people lost their homes, their livelihoods, and their entire communities defy. And sadly, this is just the beginning. Fire is the future here in the West. But what we often forget is that fire is also the past. It's what the landscape has evolved with. The tricky question is figuring out how we fit into that. This is TimberWords, I'm Aaron Scott. We wanted to bring you a bonus episode that dives into some of the reporting OPP has done around wildfire. Because frankly, fighting over fire is the new front in the Timber Wars. The battle lines are basically the same. It's just the details of the argument that have changed. Now, instead of jobs versus owls and all-growth, the argument is over whether logging prevents catastrophic wildfires or makes them worse. So let's start with the industry argument. After wildfires and smoke swept across the West in 2020, you heard a lot of blame being placed squarely on our public lands, with calls for more so-called forest management. But as OPP's Jess Burns reports, the way public forests are managed is not our only problem. A full assault on the senses. That's what holiday farm fire spokesperson Marcus Kaufman calls the destruction and the community of Blue River. So this is what it was? Oh, Blue River. He's right. Let me get out if you want. Yeah. High winds blew the holiday farm fire through this forested community east of Eugene. On the ground, the air is still accurate. Yeah, I can feel it on the throne already. Oregon State University wildfire researchers Chris Dunn and Meg Croschup picked her way around the husks of about a half dozen burned out buildings. Even as the holiday farm fire continued to burn, politicians and timber industry supporters renewed their mantra. More public forest management could have helped save communities like Blue River from wildfire. What does management mean and what geography are you talking about and are you talking about queer cut harvesting? Are you talking about finning? Croschup is a fire ecologist. But word just wrapping it up in one word, forest management, it becomes contentious and there's so many ways you can talk about forest management. Some of which are appropriate, ecologically and from a fire perspective in some forest types and some of which are just a complete disconnect in others. Behind this talking point is usually a push to reduce forest fuels through increased logging and selectively thinning, often focusing on larger commercially viable trees. The fire and Blue River burned so hot, car windshield seemingly melted, cooling into rounded waves of blue green sea glass. Chris Dunn, who researches wildfire behavior and risk, points to a hill above the community's devastated commercial district. There's a patchwork of clear cuts. Some recently logged. Yeah, that kind of management clearly didn't provide community protection. I don't know if anything would, but clearly that didn't. Cutting down every standing tree didn't stop the fire, but neither did thinning on federal land nearby. In this wind driven area of the wildfire, management didn't seem to play much of a role at all. But some of Dunn's work has shown that industrial timberland, with intensive clear cutting, can actually burn more severely than forests where the trees are left to grow to maturity. And satellite data analyzed by OPB found that on the holiday farm fire, private lands managed as industrial tree plantations burned hotter than on adjacent federal lands where the forest is more diverse. More research would be needed to determine exactly why this was the case for this specific fire. Still, the laser focus remains on how federal and state lands are being managed. The fuel loads are enormous and completely out of balance. That was Oregon Representative Greg Walden speaking after the Labor Day fires on the podcast hold these truths. It's the kind of rhetoric that ignores private forest management and often deprioritizes the risk reduction measures experts say are actually most effective, creating fire, resist and housing, and intentionally using fire when conditions are safe to reduce excess fuels on the forest floor. There are things the public land managers could be doing to reduce fire risk, but the same holds true for private landowners and communities themselves. Bracock says the blame game can be a distraction. Who's pointing fingers at who and is there a benefit and are you suggesting that if you're the finger pointer that you have no blame and figuring out all that shared blame and how to make a shift across the board. Because fixing the forest management piece of wildfire danger means looking at entire landscapes and in Oregon, that means sharing responsibility. So the term forest management is a catch all. It can mean so many things. But if we want to define it by how the government spends money on it, then it often means selective thinning, where loggers go in and cut some trees but not others. This kind of management is really popular with the timber industry, politicians, and rural communities. But even thinning is a bit of a catch all. This can include both thinning out the small trees that often aren't worth much but are much more likely to burn and thinning out the big trees that are worth more to the mill but are also much more resistant to fire. And then there's the question of what you do after the thinning. A growing body of science is showing that these projects don't actually make us much safer unless you go back in and burn it. This is a story Jess Burns filed in 2018, but it's just as relevant today. Heavy fire resistant clothes feel just right on a cool spring morning when you're getting ready to light the forest on fire. Let's gather up folks. A couple dozen white and yellow hard hats circle around, focused on Bob Sholan with confederated tribes of warm springs. So we're going to burn this thing at 40 to 90 percent in this unit here. We're going to reduce our one hours. We're going to reduce our 10 hours and 100 hour fuels. This intentionally set or prescribed fire is on the DeShoot's National Forest near Sisters. It's designed to clear out the vegetation on the ground, leaving behind a healthy stand upon the rosa pine. Any questions, comments? The crew breaks off and sets to work with drip torches, lighting the burgundy man's Anita and golden pine needles on the ground. It catches easily, begins to spread. While at once, the forest smells like a campfire. Ellison Dean is monitoring their progress, making sure the burn is effective for forest health, and for when the next wildfire burns through. Makes it a lot easier for firefighters to come in here and catch it if there's something blowing off the cascades towards Sisters. So this is part of a big catchers' meant that they're building. Last summer this kind of work was credited with helping crews stave off the millifier that threatened Sisters. 600 miles to the east, the Forest Service Lab in Montana, is looking at the ability of prescribed burns to lower wildfire risk. It's a beautiful day outside. Does anybody notice anything wrong with it? Scientists mark Fannie motions towards the window of a classroom. There's no prescribed burning going on. This is a great burn day and we should be taking advantage of it. Based on the lab's research, Fannie has become a prescribed burn evangelist. She says thinning may be necessary in places, but it's not enough by itself. Think of fuel treatments like a Crembrulee. It just doesn't work without the fire. Without fire, you don't have the same kind of benefit. You're not consuming the fuel, you're not removing the fuels that other wildfires depend on. This is played out in many areas, including the 2015 Canyon Creek Fire near John Day, which destroyed 43 homes. There'd been quite a bit of forest thinning around those houses, but it didn't change fire behavior. In conclusion from scientists, there hadn't been nearly enough prescribed burns. On forest service land in the Pacific Northwest, we're thinning at more than double the rate we're using prescribed fire. Alex and I manage his fuel treatments for the Dishoos National Forest. There's a lot more we could be doing. Of course, there's lots of, you know, things that get in the way of that. And some things that are completely out of our control. Like the weather. About four hours into the prescribed burn near Sisters, a storm rolls in. We are headed your way to the exclusion area. The crew shifts strategy from setting fire to making sure it stays where it's supposed to be. You should be getting towards the tail into this, but obviously winds are still here. As a rule, you can't burn when it's too hot, dry, wet, or windy. There were fewer than 30 suitable burn days on the Dishoots in the past year. Also, smoke from prescribed fires is an issue, says Anna. That's the balance that the public health versus the smoke. And then there's the money. If you're willing to remove some larger trees, then you can pay for itself in the form of logs for local mills. But money for burning comes out of the federal budget. Forest service fire researcher Nicole Bryant says we're treating less than half the acres we should be annually. So every year that passes, we're getting deeper and deeper into the hole in a way by not getting what we need to. And all the while, the risk of wildfire continues to grow. While the forest service has been slow to catch on, intentionally burning the land is nothing new. Just started this last story with a prescribed burn involving the confederated tribes of warm springs. And indigenous people here in the northwest have been managing the forests with fire for centuries. Historically, those burns were an annual occurrence. Old Trip is the deputy director of eco-cultural revitalization for the Kuru tribe. I went down to Orleans in Northern California to talk with them back in 2018 when I was working on a story about how many plants and animals need fire to flourish. Bill Trip said the tribes used yearly ceremonial burns to tend to the forest. It cleared out small trees and undergrowth to prevent bigger fires and make habitat for deer and elk. But regenerated plants important to the tribe, like hawkabaries for food and hazel for basket weaving. It also maintained the health of oak trees by killing pests like weevils. But then the federal government declared those burns are soon. They were outlawed, essentially outlawed in 1911. We as cut out people believe that those are religious freedoms. We still have the ceremonies. We just haven't been able to light the fire that gives our prayer meaning for over 100 years. Before the U.S. went all in on fire suppression, wildfires burned forests across the west every year, especially the drier forests, like here on the California Oregon border. For the most part, we're not talking the huge fires of today, but much lower intensity fires that synched patches here and skipped patches there, creating a shifting mosaic of clearings and mixed forests of different ages. But after a century of fire suppression, combined with clear cutting and replanting, most the forest today are thick homogenous blankets of trees. I've been calling it a genocide forest. Chuk Chuk Hillman is a natural resource technician for the tribe, and he's pointing to the thick dug firs around where we're talking. Because you see most of these fir trees that are in high densities because even during droughts, dug firs continue to suck. And they're big water hogs. And so that's another part of fire. When you're keeping fire, you don't have the densities of dug firs sucking up the water table. The trees are like giant straws. They can affect the flows of streams and rivers, and flat out drain wet meadows, which are like all you can eat buffets for many animals, from deer and moose to beavers and frogs. But it's not just the fires effects on the water table. The Kuruq and their neighbors have long known that one animal in particular depends on the smoke as well. Salmon. The implications of that is that during the summer, no rainfall period, drought, heat wave is at the river temperatures are increasing. The salmon particularly are really at stressful levels that are lethal. And the few degrees of cooling from the smoke can be that life or death situation for many of those fish. Frank Lake is a research ecologist for the Forest Service who has Kuruq heritage. And his studies have backed up the tribe's traditional ecological knowledge that the smoke acts like a giant reflector. It bounces back solar radiation to cool the air and the water beneath it during the hottest part of the summer, when fish need it the most. When we look at the function of smoke, many times you see in the media, it's perceived as being detrimental human health air quality issues, but from a tribal perspective, the smoke is an essential part of the natural process. The tribes have a perspective that fires medicine. It's just Western scientists who are catching up to the idea. This is Bill Tripagand. So there are a lot of connections that are just starting to be researched in depth, but that have been well-founded in ceremonial practice. In the last couple of years, the Kuruq and the Yurak tribes have finally gotten the Forest Service and the state of California to allow them to conduct prescribed burns again. The project has drawn attention from tribes and organizations from around the country who want to conduct their own burns. If you want to learn more about it, as well as the animals other than salmon that need fire, I'll put a link to my video story on this episode's webpage on our site, opb.org slash Timber Wars. There's a couple fantastic animations in there that compare panoramic photos taken today. The panoramas from 1933, they're really brought home for me, the realization of how thick our forests have grown. So thanks to research from scientists like Frank, the Forest Service now knows what the tribes have long known, forests need fire. But is this next story from Tony Shik shows? The agency isn't too good at practicing what it preaches. This was also filed during our year-long wildfire reporting project in 2018. At a warehouse in the Oregon Cascades, firefighters cland in greens and yellows stacked shovels against the pavement. They just finished a day of field training. Across the Northwest, this is how a lot of people geared up for fire season. Rick Stratton prepped a little differently. And this is the risk map I have. Let me show you this closer up. We're at the Forest Service offices in downtown Portland. Stratton is a fire analyst here. We're looking at a brand new map of the Northwest with forests shaded in red, yellow and green. So the red is those areas where we have highest probability of burning intensities. We don't want that affect the values negatively. By values, he means things like homes and drinking water supplies. The areas in green are where there's less dye as it risks. The intensities are such that it would be acceptable and even encouraged to promote. You heard right. Areas where they want to promote wildfire. This map is a potential path toward using fire for our benefit, not just fighting it. Right now, government agencies suppress many wildfires that actually pose a low risk compared to the potential benefit. Putting them out can be counterproductive. The environment needs fire, trying to exclude it builds up fuels, and that leads to fires burning under extreme conditions. That's why, more and more, the Forest Service is saying we instead need to learn to live with fire. But that's not exactly a new concept. Mike Edrington has been in fire for 40 years. He served as an area commander on the Yellowstone fires of 1988. A fire in a natural environment is neither good or bad. It's just part of that whole ecosystem. And what makes fire disruptive is people. Fire became a problem when we built homes in Forest, and we started putting fires out to save timber. Edrington said he and others started to change their thinking in the 1980s. He says agencies have gotten smarter about managing fire and predicting how it will spread. Today it's pretty sophisticated. But even now, nearly all fires are suppressed. Jim Paine has served as Northwest Regional Forester for the Forest Service. He retired this month. We were actively trying to suppress all the fires we had. During summers, Paine told his staff not to ask if they could let a fire burn. Some of those fires may have done some more benefit had we allowed it burn. But he says he can't accept the risk of one burning out of control. He also can't spare crews and engines to monitor a fire when they're needed elsewhere during a busy fire season. I know from this year, very few of the communities that had dealt with a large fire for two months wanted to hear. This was a great fire. Across the country, there were more than 71,000 wildfires last year. An analysis of instant records suggest fire managers tried something other than full suppression on a few hundred of those. All the incentives for fire managers point to aggressive suppression. The public and politicians pressure them to put fires out quickly. And agencies like the Forest Service still measure success based on how many fires they can keep small under 300 acres. Last year, that was 97 percent of them. We're still digging in our heels like we always have when we're just going after it more and more and more and more, rather than backing off and taking a different assessment. And so we're trying to tackle that problem. Only that problem is deep. That's Chris Dunn. He used to fight fire. I ate yours, so I was in the dirt. Not their digging fire line. Dunn now studies fire risk management with Oregon State University. He's part of a Forest Service team pushing the use of data to choose when and how to fight a fire or let it burn. Think money ball, the data analytics revolution in sports, but for wildfire. Let's focus on the decision process, accept our outcomes, and make sure that we're making good decisions based on the best available information. Soon, Dunn will take those maps Stratton was examining earlier and he'll calculate the best response to a fire based on where it happens. It's an unprecedented tool in wildfire response. The question is whether fire managers will actually use it and finally learn to live with fire. So, if we know we have to learn to live with fire, the question that follows is, what's stopping us? That's coming up after the break. Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community funded and your support is more important than ever. Go to KMHD.org and join us over the section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. We've talked before about how the drop in logging on Federal Forest had a big economic impact on many small towns. What we haven't really talked about was that it was also a big economic hit for the Forest Service. The agency had long depended on the revenue from timber sales for all of its other projects. And that dried up revenue stream is one of the things that's making it harder to learn to live with fire. This is Tony again in 2018 and you might recognize someone from our podcast in this one, Debbie Miley from Mill City. Each year, as fire season approaches, you'll find Dylan Sanders prepping a crew of fire fires and tuning up his engines. All those guys in the background there are those who work easier to finish in the last day of their class. Sanders is the owner of Inbound LLC in Oak Ridge, Oregon. He contracts with the government by fire. There's our second engine coming in. With 13 engines and 80 crew members, he's fully invested. We're ready for fires. We're geared up for fire. And so, you know, when it don't come, we're a little disappointed. He's torn about that because he knows suppressing fires is both expensive and bad for the forest. Like many in his line of work, he says he'd rather be lighting prescribed burns. They can improve forest health and reduce the risk of bigger fires. I guess I'm not in it just for the suppression. You know, I'm in it to provide the jobs and I'm in it to provide a healthy forest. And my entry into it is suppression, but that's not the big picture. Over the past few decades, the federal government built an industry to fight fire, not light it. Decades ago, the forest service was about logging. Fire was an afterthought, but in the 1990s, logging declined and it lost its source of revenue. Then Congress gave it a big budget increase, almost a billion dollars, to fight fire. Soon more than half the agency was devoted to fire, and the government began hiring more and more private companies to supply crews, machinery, aircraft, and firecams. Critics complained about the creation of a wildland fire industrial complex. Debbie Miley sees it differently. She's the director of the National Wildfire Suppression Association, an industry group based in Redmond. Because the government only calls these private resources when needed, she says it's a better deal for taxpayers. Contractors say they strive to keep costs low, but the system drives prices higher, and it's right with inefficiencies. Albert Rollins is a timber faller in Madras. He's 42. He worked his first fire at age 18. It's just insane. How much money you can make. He said his typical falling rate might only be $400 per day. On a fire, it's close to $1,200. Whether you start your saw or you don't start yourself, I mean I've been on fires and set there for five days, and that's what almost $6,000 that I made. And I never even put my boots on. Forest Service Research shows fire managers fear public pressure and unexpected fire growth. So, they tend to favor more expensive tactics and often call for more resources than necessary. That includes air tankers to drop retardant at more than $7,000 an hour, often in conditions when it's not likely to help put the fire out. All this money spent on fire suppression has come at the expense of forest programs that could lower fire risk and future costs. Stephen Pine is a professor at Arizona State University in the country's leading wildfire historian. Pine says the creation of a lobby escalated some prices for wildfire equipment. The private sector now begins influencing the public sector. The tail is wagging the dog. He says it also drives the demand to suppress fires. For instance, Lockheed Martin, which benefits from the government's use of air tankers, has spent more than $600,000 on lobbying for fire equipment and suppression. They have a vested interest. You've created a group that does not want to see policy reform have spend less money. You were a cruise, fewer air tankers, fewer fire camps that need catering because that's their livelihood. Which brings us back to Dylan Sanders, the contractor. His livelihood is fire. He says he wants to be a good value for the government, but on wildfires, he knows sometimes it isn't. If the government spent more on fuels reductions and forest restoration, he'd have steadier business, and his rates would be cheaper. And it would reduce the need for suppression in the future. Would it take away my work in the long run? It must be a long, long run, because we're so far behind on our... Come on. This year, Sanders cruise worked 31 days on prescribed burns. That's the most he's ever done. They spent about 130 days suppressing fires. So yes, money is a big hurdle in learning to live with fire. But there's also the fundamental fact that fire is scary. And when it grows beyond our control, it can be devastating. Which is why you won't find many politicians or government leaders pushing to let fires burn. Or even to light more of them ourselves. In this next story, you'll be hearing from two reporters, Cassandra Proffeta and Jeff Maps. You'll also be hearing from someone else you might recognize. Rich Fairbanks. The former Forest Service Fire Expert involved in the Warner Creek sale that led to the year-long blockade. Yeah. Some beautiful hardwoods in here. Retired Forest Service worker Rich Fairbanks is walking a stretch of the Rogue River Siski National Forest in Southern Oregon. It's burned twice in the last six years. Yet most of the trees are still alive. Look at these canyon live oaks. They're really nice. And they all made it. Last summer, the forest on the right side of the trail was on fire. But the flames died out soon after crossing the trail, when they reached an area that had already burned years earlier. What they had was a very gentle kind of fire. Fairbanks says letting that kind of fire burn can actually prevent future wildfires from spreading out of control. This is well understood by scientists. But it doesn't get much political support, particularly as dangerous wildfires threaten communities across the West. We're afraid of fire and we're afraid of the impacts of smoke. We see it and we have a very visceral primal reaction to it to put it out. That's Dylan Cruz at the Environmental Group Sustainable North West. It's very challenging for people to take a step back and to say, I'm going to let this happen. This group promotes forest restoration projects to thin, dense stands, clear out underbrush, and whenever possible, set controlled burns to reduce the risk of those large wildfires. Here's another expert say we need to dramatically increase the pace of controlled burns. Experts also say the forest service should be more determined to let some wildfires burn. That's particularly controversial. But they say it's the only way to make big reductions in the catastrophic fuel buildup. Top forest service officials acknowledge the need to use fire as a tool, if gingerly. Here's Vicki Christensen, the agency's acting director. We have to use every tool in the toolbox for treating these hazardous fuels. That is mechanical treatments, but is also using fire when we are in control of fire. But she's not getting much encouragement from politicians who represent fire-prone regions of the West. Republican Congressman Greg Walden represents Eastern and Southern Oregon, and he's well-versed on the use of prescribed fire. I see it as a management tool when appropriately applied. But he adds. We're a long way from being ready to just say, oh, we can do prescribed burns without the forest letter burn. I don't think that makes a lot of sense. Washington Senator Maria Cantwell is the top Democrat in the Senate Natural Resources Committee. She's introduced legislation that includes a bigger role for prescribed fire. But in an interview, she was quick to raise concerns about the practice. I think there probably are some examples where people thought they could do prescribed burn. And what they found is it got out of hand very quickly because of those weather conditions. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is outspoken about preventing catastrophic wildfires. But the normally-locuacious Senator declined to talk with us about using fire as a tool. Ironically, Wyden played a big role in passing legislation to protect the forest service budget from skyrocketing costs of fighting catastrophic wildfires. And that could lead to a big increase in forest restoration work that includes prescribed fire. In Oregon alone, more than a million acres and restoration projects have passed environmental review but gone unfunded. About half those projects would include prescribed fire. Even if members of Congress are hesitant to push forward on using fire as a tool, there are some signs of a cultural shift. For example, forestry and air quality regulators are working to ease Oregon's stringent smoke management rules. They want to make it easier to permit more controlled burns. State Forester Peter Dorety explains. Politicians and government leaders don't like to ask folks to live with fire and smoke. There's another thing they don't like to ask that experts say is necessary. For folks not to move to fire prone areas to begin with. And if they do, to change the way they build their homes and manage their land. This comes back to the idea we started with. A lot of people blame the fires on how the government manages public forests. But the government only controls so many of the acres that burn. Families, companies, and individuals own the rest. This is Ashley Aher in 2018. Sound, the chain saws in the background? You'll hear that a lot in Pine Forest. This is a neighborhood in the Met How Valley, not far from where the Carlton Complex Fire burned more than 250,000 acres in 2014. It was the largest wildfire in state history. People here understand the risks of living in a dry forested area. And they're trying to work together to thin the trees and widen roads for emergency vehicles. But it hasn't been an easy process. First house I've built in Pine Forest. I met up with Chris Hopkins to go look at a house he built here in the 90s and lived in for more than a decade. A lot of people before we had the wake up call. We all wanted to live in the trees. We weren't that concerned about fire moving through here. The wake up call for many people in the Met How Valley was the Carlton Complex Fire. Chris's brother lost his home in the fire, as did more than 350 other people. The Pine Forest neighborhood was spared. But now Chris sees the trees here as dangerous fuel instead of shade and privacy. We look over it as neighbors property. Look at all these little small trees in here. They could do even more. Everybody could do more in here, I think. And who should pay for it from your perspective? I think the individual landowners should pay for their own properties. But what if you don't have the money? Yeah, I don't know the answer to that one. That's the rub here. Who should pay? Too many trees and lots of underbrush make for bigger fire risk. But removing trees is expensive. Fire scientists warn that even if you do everything right on your property, then your trees put a metal roof on your house, clear away the brush, but your neighbor doesn't, a fire can still spread through your community and maybe even burn your house down. So will it work to just go it alone, every landowner for him or herself? I think as a whole, we will get farthest. If we pool our resources and apply them to reduce the biggest cause of our risk, Amy Snowver owns a cabin up the hill from Chris Hopkins property. Last year at Sheenter Family walked their land and picked out trees to be thinned and every cut was a tough decision. We used to have trees growing through the deck. So we would sit out there under the tree canopy and sometimes we'd sleep on the deck and watch the birds zooming in and out of the trees. But Amy Snowver knows that there are warmer, drier summers ahead and wildfire risk here will only increase. And she knows this because she's not just a resident. She's also the director of the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington. I spend all day, every day thinking about what climate change means for this region and that we have some amount of inevitable change in impacts. Almost two thirds of the property owners in Pine Forest have thinned their trees and their home owners' association dues have been used to thin the forest in the common areas and along the roads. It's been a communal effort, but that isn't a philosophy everyone in this county shares. Andy Hover is a commissioner in Okanagan County. He believes that if you buy a piece of property, it's your responsibility to keep it safe. And he's not alone on that. You know, Okanagan County is a really interesting county. You have a lot of people that feel very strongly about their property rights, rules and regulations are kind of, well, is that really what we want? Doesn't seem to be so far. The county updated its comprehensive plan after the Carlton Complex fire and there was no mention of wildfire. A more recent draft acknowledges the risk but no building regulations specific to wildfire have been put in place. Rural county leaders want to promote development in their counties, sometimes in spite of risk to citizens, says Ray Rasker. He's the executive director of Headwater's Economics. When they see a proposal for a new subdivision, it's understandable for county governments to say let's eagerly approve this new subdivision because we get more tax revenues from that. So you have more homes being built in places where wildfire has been suppressed for decades, like in Pine Forest. And that means more fuel for bigger fires in the future. And more tough decisions for communities about how to protect themselves. People in the Metau Valley know it's not if but when the next fire will come through. And they'll be ready to pull together and respond just like they've done before. But figuring out how to prepare together in the meantime is a bit more complicated. Now is Ashley a her. She has a new podcast out that involves her move to the Metau Valley and her journey to understand the Western sage graphs, a bird that has its own fire story. The show is called Grouse and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. So fire. It's complex and it's even harder to agree on because of the rift storm by the timber wars, which politicized our forests. But we're going to have to figure it out because it's not going away. It's part of this landscape, which of course doesn't make it any less heartbreaking to watch your house or your town or a forest you love burn. But at least in terms of the forest, I try to remind myself that while it might not be the same in my lifetime, if we think about it in the lifespan of the forest itself, each fire, even the enormous ones, can be an act of rejuvenation. So let's close out with a story brought to us just this week by KLCC's Karen Richards. A drive up highway 126 from Springfield can be disheartening. After September's holiday, farm fire, familiar landmarks are gone. Wild trees and hill sides and shades of brown and black dominate the view. But says Jim Rivers, a researcher in OSU's College of Forestry. Very shortly after that tree that occurs, the ecological community starts to rebound and whether their plants or birds or the DC life in those areas. Lauren Penicio is in the biology department at U of O. She says many species use fire as an opportunity to move in. You look at these forests, particularly if you look around Oregon. They tend to be really homogeneous, right? They just look insane tree all about the same age. And there isn't a lot of light hitting the forest for. Penicio says varying severities of fire can open up areas to wildflowers, shrubs, and different kinds of trees, along with the insects and animals that depend on them. She says the so-called pyro diversity has been shown to lead to broader biodiversity. Michelle Denihim with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife says their winter surveys showed deer were absent from heavily burned areas of the holiday farm fire. But where we had moderate to lightly burned areas, we did see green up and we're seeing deer out of the small mammals and mid-sized mammals. Jim Rivers says woodpeckers are some of the first post-fire residents. In fact, in some cases, researchers have observed the birds moving into the previously burned stand when they're still smoldering. And part of that is because there are food resources in the form of different types of wood-borne beetles. She says woodpeckers follow their food and they're a keystone species. They make nests every time they breed and their nest cavities are later used by bluebirds and small owls. Lauren Penicio focuses on pollinators. She says researchers know which bees move in a few years after a burn, but she wonders. If you totally derit of all of the trees and not only that, you don't really have any patches of living trees nearby because these patches of high-faird are getting so large. Where do the wildlife come from to come back into those areas? Penicio says they hope to go to the middle of a severe burn and see how long it takes before they start seeing bees. Bees need flowers, of course. Penicio says forest soil contains seed banks of plants waiting for the chance to grow. Both she and Rivers are writing proposals to secure funding for research. The BLM announced this month that thousands of acres of trees burned in the Labor Day fires will be salvaged logged. Rivers says logging would negatively affect wildlife, but... I think the key question isn't whether it impacts, but it's to what degree can you balance having habitat for live-peckers, but also trying to recover the cost of some of those trees. Rivers says ongoing research in eastern Oregon is looking at how different levels of logging affect wildlife in burnt forests. He says the cascade range fires offer a valuable data source. And that there are plants that go forward to out of the swanning. I think that it holds us some really nice opportunities to do experiments that will be useful. Rivers says it's important to assess and learn how to best manage production forestry, especially since fires are predicted to be a large part of our future. Oregon's blackened forests won't stay that color for long. By opening up the forest floor to light, there will be blankets of colorful wildflowers and new life in the coming seasons. We'll also have the chance to learn how to better live with fire and logging while maintaining biodiversity. Huge thanks to all the reporters who shared their stories with us today. Jess Burns, Tony Schick, Cassandra Proffeta, Jeff Maps, Ashley Aherne, and Karen Richards. I have links to all their stories on this episode's webpage. You can find it on our site, opb.org slash Timberwords. While you're there, sign up for our Timberwords newsletter. It weaves together a lot of the reporting opb has done on forests and the ongoing fights over them. This episode was produced by me, Aaron Scott, with editing by David Steve's, Eddie On, and Tony Schick. Eddie On is our executive producer, and our music is by Laura Gibson. We say it at the end of every episode, so you know it's true. Our words is only possible with the support of opb members. So if you want us to do more podcasts like this, if you want to support our investigations, heck, if you're just here for Laura's beautiful music, then become a sustaining member today. Or if you already are one, consider upping your contribution. You can do it at opb.org slash pod. And thank you for listening.