It's really important to understand that fire is in our future.

How we deal with that reality.

That's an emotional process, but it's also an educational process.

And, you know, with th broadcast burning, we're doing.

It can also be an experience or process.

I think that one of the benefits of doing community led broadcast burns, prescribe burns is the ability to reclaim what fire means for people.

You know, now, with the wa that the fire crisis is going, a lot of people are looking for answers and trying to figure out how they can make their communitie safer, make the land healthier.

This is about community empowerment.

It's about a community making decisions for itself, for the kind of future that it wants.

Living with fire.

We're in southern Orego for us here on the road Valley.

When we think of fire, often the first thing we think about is how many homes we lost in 2020.

It had been a red flag day all over the state.

There was a lot of loss that day.

There were over 2500 homes burned.

The majority of the affordable housing in our valley were wiped out in a single day.

My family was evacuated.

I was off duty but went down to help, as did virtually everybody in my department.

I ended u working that night on my road.

So the fire line was my road where my house is.

It's challenging even now you know, to, work through the the social impacts, you know on the schools, the community.

So it was a huge impact here, and really reshaped and redefined how we deal with the entire community since.

I think both personall and professionally, the silver lining with the Almeda fire is that it raised awareness of the risks in our area, in our state.

I think for a lot of people, that was a really traumatizing event, of course.

And it's led to a lot of thinking about what can we do to avoid that.

How can we move forward, and have a different relationship with fire, one that's not based on fear and waiting for the inevitable smoke plumes that are going to come in in July and August and Septembe and waiting for fires to happen.

But instead we can re-envision our relationship with fire so that it looks something more like this.

Yeah, it would be hard to, with a straight face advocate for certain approaches to wildfire mitigatio if we didn't have it, experience it ourselves.

I'm a rural landowner, and I figure I should go through it firs so I know what I'm talking about when I recommend this kind of practice to another person myself.

This has been about a 12 year process, asking question about what the land might want, what the land might benefit from, and then asking with the new lens of okay, how do I, manage a forest?

How do I steward a forest?

And hopefully I'll be able to take that experience, and that education that I've gleaned and, you know pay it forward to my neighbors.

We've gone through and mechanically thinned, probably at 50 acres at this point.

Bringing Back Fire is sort of one of the the final steps.

And, we're going to be doin a community led broadcast burn.

When I brought the Rogue Valley, prescribed Burn Association, when I brought Aaron up here.

He was like, well, this is ready to go.

And I was just really excited.

So you see, the mechanical fuel reduction didn't remove all the fine fuel that generally carry wildfire.

And so if a wildfire came through here now, it still could rage at a high intensity.

So using controlled burning to come through and consume the fine fuels helped make this stand safer in the future.

For long time, it's been difficult for people to do prescribed fire on private land.

You know, that's just the way it was.

Was fire belong to professionals only, and you neede to have expert qualifications.

And it made it seem like there was no role for the ordinary landowner community member to access this kind of knowledge, this kind of tool.

And so obviously, a landowner can't just do this by themselves.

It takes a village.

It takes a whole community to make this happen.

So now we're helping to pu that back in the hands of people with the right skill, the right equipment, and following all the appropriate permitting processes and so on.

So who is here?

This is your first prescribed burn.

Oh look around nine.

Welcome.

Exciting.

One of the things that's really valuable about the prescribed burn association, and the way that we facilitate prescribed burns with bringing such a wide range of experience, is just actual, genuine skill sharing where it's like, okay, you you live here, you live in this area.

Fire is part of where we live.

You've got to learn how it works.

Who's here to learn?

You?

Who's here to teach?

There's a trick question.

You should raise your hand both times.

All of you.

We all have something to share, and we all have something to learn.

Generally, when we see flames, we're thinking about how best to stop them.

You know, where do we put people, vehicles, water to put them out as quickly as possible?

In this case, it was a shift where I'm helping folks put fire on the ground to create a safer, more resilient, healthier environment.

And so for me, it was it was a shift, for sure.

But once we got underwa and, work through the process, it felt comfortable.

You know, prescribed burn is essentially the opposite of a wildfire.

So when a wildfire starts, it's usually pushed by the wind or it's going upslope and it runs really fast.

And so what we're doing with a prescribed fire is we're doing the opposite.

We start it at the top of the hill, and then we're making it come down the slope.

Bit by bi we're taking little chunks here.

One after another, little strips until we get all the way to the bottom.

This was my first day on a prescribed burn, and coming from the suppression world, it was, an interesting shift in my thinking.

People are very cautious because there's a long term vision for this.

It's not worth taking any kind of risks.

There were moments when, you know, this suppression side of me wanted to do something about, you know, the heat of the fire.

And I had to learn techniques on how to use the fire, you know, the drip torches to kind of control the amount of heat and where fire was actually going.

Somebody who it's their first day on a fire line.

Any kind of fire line are encouraged if they want to pick up a drip torch and guided by somebody who knows what they're doing.

Walk through a seven acre unit and, you know, strategicall lay a good fire on the ground.

And that's an very rare opportunity, which is something that's really specia and unique about this project.

This isn't the first time personally have used the torch.

I grew up on a reservatio and just using fire in this way.

I call it good fire.

I think a lot of my other Co crew leaves and other members being able to use the torch for the very first time in their whole life.

Just put a smile to my face and they were happy.

And that makes me happy.

When you see fir and you look at the landscape, you see what it is naturally consumed and it translates really well to structure, defense and making your home defensible, because then you're abl to see what fire would consume and you're able to cut that yourself.

It kind of demystifies the like, oh, for fire safety, we have to clear cut just straight up outright.

All the trees are the proble when it's like, no, it's because we've delved into such a culture of repression for 100 years or so.

Being able to use all of this knowledge that we only had is knowledge we now have as experience.

This learning experience for them and me is beyond invaluable.

That was probably our biggest takeaway for the day.

Tucker was fortunate enough to get a large grant to get the mechanical fue reduction done on his property, so he didn't have to pay for all of it.

But moving forward, all of this brush is going to grow back.

But thankfully, because he had the prescribed burn association come out and do this burn, he can now maintain it much more economically than if you were to try and d mechanical fuel reduction again in the future, because it's unlikely that he would get a grant again in the future.

This whole area around us, the West Bear Project, has had millions of dollars of fuel reduction work done just recently, in the past few years, and so if prescribed burning is not used to maintain that work, the fuels are all going to grow back and all that money is going to have been wasted.

If you'r going to hire a contract crew, a mechanical fuel work is something in the 1600 to $2300 an acre range and control burning.

If you're hiring a contractor who would probably b in the $800,000 an acre range.

And the work we did today was in the, buy some soda and sandwiches for everybody who volunteer range and pay for the drip torches.

So it's a much more cost effective way to do this work as well.

This isn't a simple one step process.

People who were here first the people who came before us, have been using fire to their benefit for really ever for for time immemorial, right?

But I do want to make sur that we acknowledge and respect the fact that we are relearning what those people have been practicing.

We need to reevaluate our relationship to fire and learn ho we can actually do good with it.

A lot of people came ou here to see fire on the ground.

They wanted to take part.

What I sai is, I'm here to see community.

I'm here to see what the future coul look like when we work together as communities, as neighbors, agencies, fire departments, everybody working together to make this happen.

This isn't easy.

It took a lot of planning.

It took a lot of people agreeing that the vision of this communit is a realistic and responsible one, and I see happy people working together, getting to know each other, feeling a sense of accomplishment that they're going to go home tonight knowing that their community's a little bit safer and the landscape around them is a little bit healthier.

But everybody coming together behind this vision.

So that's the thin that really is inspiring to me.

The collaborative nature of controlled burning with a prescribed burn association is absolutely critical that we have partners that are involved.

Landowners can't do this on their own.

Community members can't do it on their own.

Us providing water to us, it's no big deal.

But to them it meant a lot.

So that's where coming together, you know, different groups, different agencies, different people, can really have huge benefits.

People should kind of work together to do it themselves and build this community cohesiveness.

That's really the goal of this.

And the prescribed bur association can actually spread to many prescriber associations.

We shouldn't have a rogue Valley prescriber an association.

We should have an Anderson Creek prescriber, an association, a Wagner Creek prescriber, an association.

Each neighborhood should work togethe to protect their own community.

So that's kind of this democratization of prescribed burning so that we don't have to have big groups coming down to donate lots of money to do fuel reduction work for us every 15 years or 20 years because that's not sustainable.

We need to kind of take responsibility for it and have communities actually work towards this goal of community resilience on their own.

My hope is that in the future, what this landowne has done here and what the Fire Burn Associatio has done, we'll expand or people will do what we did here today.

Know I always think you should leave it better than you found it.

It took us years and years and decades and decades to get into where we are now, with the wildfire risk in the Pacific Northwest.

And it's going to take us years and years and decades and decades to get out of it.

I think that doing this kind of work is just one step in that really long process.

I'm hoping that when my kid comes of age and he's the steward of this land, that I'll have left in a better place for him.

You know, he can move forward and build off what I built.

If you're actively managing land and you're actively managing a forest, that work never stops.

It's not a one and done thing.

You have to continuously come back and ask and question to make the right choices for the land.