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>> Four million acres have already been scorched by wildfires this year in the United States, on pace to break last year's 10 million-acre record.

Climate change has certainly aggravated the drought conditions that only serve to make bad conditions in the nation's wildlands even worse, as the bill for years of fuel buildup finally comes due.

The new normal is awful, and it's going to take some revised thinking to try to fix it.

That's the discussion next on Northwest Now.

[ Music ] From Siberia to Greece to British Columbia, fires are destroying tens of millions of acres but also feeding massive doses of CO2 into the atmosphere, which only serves to exacerbate the situation in a vicious self-sustaining cycle of drought and fire.

That cycle only helps push the globe toward what may be a fateful tipping point of no return.

Here in western Washington, we still enjoy mostly west winds and wetter than typical conditions.

But drought and higher temperatures may well become a new normal here as well.

Along with that, of course, comes wildfire and the massive damage it can do especially as development pushes further out into wooded areas.

Last year, we brought you the story of a new film and learning series called The Era of Mega Fires, produced by Jeff Ostenson at North 40 Productions, and featuring Dr. Paul Hessburg, who was given a TEDx Talk on wildfire and spent a lifetime researching it.

This year, a new film is out called Living with Wildfire, which builds on the era of mega fires call to action and adds a lot of advice for property owners in fire-prone areas, including in western Washington.

>> Western Washington is the wet side of the state, and the common perception I think that it's easy to fall into is that wildfire is mostly an eastern Washington issue and not so much a western Washington issue.

But what we know from the evidence is that fire is very much a western Washington issue, it just behaves very differently.

They're very rare, but when they happen, they're big.

It's a three-part recipe for western Washington wildfires.

You have to have an ignition source, of course.

It's usually an exceptionally dry summer, and then you get that dry east wind event.

When that east wind event starts pushing those fires, it's a big monster of a fire.

Which is actually what happened in 2020.

>> Right now, Governor Inslee is visiting the Bonney Lake Sammamish area, where four more Pierce County homes were destroyed by historic wildfires.

Veteran firefighters say they've never seen fire so destructive on the west side of the Cascades.

>> Over the last 24 hours, Oregon has experienced unprecedented fire, with significant damage and devastating consequences across the entire state.

>> It looks really devastating to the human eye, but the west side has seen this before, for millennia.

And these forests have burned in huge patches like this and regenerated.

And all the forests that we know on the landscape today all originated in fire.

The most famous ones in the historical record are the Tillamook Burn, which burned in the Oregon Coast Range in 1933.

That was driven by an east wind event.

And then also before that, there was the 1902 Yacolt Burn in southwest Washington.

Various estimates of that range from a quarter million to a million acres, 80 or 90% of it happened in like a single 24-hour period.

And a lot of that burn footprint would have been high severity or just completely stand-replacing.

It kills all the trees over a large area.

I also want to convey that there are multiple types of fire on the west side.

For the moderate-condition events, we could apply a lot of what we know from the east side, actually, fire-wise principles.

We could thin and reduce forest biomass around critical infrastructure and communities and homes.

It's just that we also have to recognize that there's that second flavor that is a force of nature that will probably overrun just about everything on landscape.

We are encouraging folks to take more of a disaster preparedness approach.

That we need to treat those events as a force of nature.

When they're going to hit, they're going to hit.

If there's an ignition or ignitions on a landscape and a wind even kicks up, the west side has always got enough biomass to carry a fire under those conditions.

And so what we need to have instead for those is that disaster preparedness mindset of hardening our infrastructure to the extent we can and being prepared to have evacuation plans to get out of the way right then.

Really, if you want to manage the risk, it's a matter of catching it while it's small, before an east wind event kicks up.

And be ready to suppress them quickly.

I would argue that we're perhaps not prepared for either type of west side fire.

A lot of us like to live in the forest and there's communities that have sprouted up in places where fire could happen.

Also, 90-plus percent of ignitions of wildfires on the west side are human caused.

And so there's just a lot more ignitions on the landscape now than there were historically.

Climate change is lengthening the fire season and also deepening the drought associated with the fire season.

We're kind of loading the dice.

The stage is set for a pretty big stand-replacing or high severity, high impact fire.

I kind of view it as part of living on the west side.

The things that make the west side beautiful are also the things that have a lurking danger underneath them.

And it's part of our lifestyle here to try and figure out how to live with those.

>> Joining us now are Dr. Paul Hessburg, a research landscape ecologist out of Wenatchee, and Jeff Ostenson, executive producer of North 40 Films, also based in Wenatchee.

First of all, maybe both of you -- and we'll start with you, Paul -- can give me a comment.

How does this relate to the last film that we featured, The Era of Mega Fires, Living with Wildfire, how do those relate?

>> So the story we tell in the Era of Mega Fires is about how the forest changed over the last century or two and what were the causes behind it and then what it means for current forest fires and insect outbreaks, things like that, and what we can do about it.

We told that story to help people get into the conversation.

Living with Wildfire is a different twist.

It picks up where Mega Fires ends off and it basically says, how can human communities, how can homeowners, neighborhoods get ready for the coming fires, what does it take, and is it really a tractable problem, can they get prepared.

And we basically show ways that they can get fully prepared.

>> Talk a little bit about where people can gather this material, see this material.

And it's a little bit of a different model for you this time, right?

Yeah, for sure.

Era of Mega Fires was something that we built and we really wanted to cultivate community gatherings.

And so we kind of held the license back and offered it up to communities who really wanted to address this problem, to come to us, get a license to it, and then screen it.

And now in the era of COVID and other things, we decided just to make all that media accessible to anybody.

And it's all available at eraofmegafires.com.

Every single piece that we've ever created, as part of the Era of Mega Fires and Living with Wildfire.

Which includes two feature length films and about 15 vignettes and animations, is all available at eraofmegafires.com.

>> And who do you guys see accessing this?

If communities -- you know, if Cashmere wants to have a community meeting about being prepared for fire, it's a nice resource to have.

It's not just the guys saying this is how it should be, they can show these things and say, listen, it's not just us telling you this, this is a real thing.

So that's got to be helpful I would think.

>> Well, it really is.

I mean, in our experience with Era of Mega Fires is that in almost every community that is affected by fire, there is somebody, there is some group, there is some group of people out there trying to push the message.

And it's different in every community, and that's fine.

I mean, every community is going to respond to this threat in a different way.

So what we're trying to do is give those people -- whoever it might be.

It could be the forest service.

It could be the DNR in Washington State.

It could be just a group of community members.

We're trying to give them the tools to educate their audience.

>> Back in the day, in the '90s, we thought those fires were exceptional.

But mega fires are something else, Paul.

What defines a mega fire?

And are we actually probably now even seeing mega-mega fires?

Where does this end?

>> The term "giga fires" was coined recently for a very large fire.

Mega fires are fires that are essentially larger than 100,000 acres, burning in Western North America these days.

But the thing that's interesting about modern mega fires, it's not that fires are large.

The historical record shows us many fires on the order of one, two, three million acres in the Continental US.

What's extraordinary about these fires is that the size and severity, that coupling is what's uncharacteristic for the forest types that are being affected.

So we think of mega fires as those that escape suppression, because they're burning on hot, dry, windy days.

And fire suppression is unable to constrain the growth of that fire, and they get away.

>> I was going to say, fire behavior is so radically -- talk a little bit about -- let's pretend we were pioneers, we were Lewis and Clark, and we came to the Olympic Peninsula or we came somewhere and saw a fire burning.

What was that fire like for Lewis and Clark, who were Native Americans?

And how does that differ from the crazy behaviors that we're seeing today and what the destructive nature of the fire we're seeing today?

>> Go back in the way back machine 200 years ago and what we would've seen is 40 to 80 million acres were burning in the Continental US on the average year.

So a lot of area burned.

But an awful lot of it was maintenance fire -- low, moderate intensity sorts of stuff -- that was essentially thinning out the forests, burning up deadwood, that kind of thing.

So large area burned wasn't particularly extraordinary.

It happened before, it's happening again.

It's the severity that we associate that's problematic right now.

We're the first generations who have tried to put out fires.

When, for more than 10 millennia, people who lived on this landscape and cultivated it were intentionally burning the landscape.

And what they were doing is reducing the likelihood that big, bad, ugly fires could could really take them down.

So we're sort of the first generations to stop burning the woods and burning the grasslands in order to live safely on the landscape.

And I think keeping fire out of the woods for 100, 150 years has really made a difference in how these landscapes burn.

>> In ancient times, fire would crawl along, open pine cones, scorched trunks.

I mean, it had a part -- it was part of the lifecycle of the flora in these forests.

>> Absolutely.

The forests that we're talking about in western US and North America, they depend upon a life history with fire.

And the communities that emerged over thousands of years are those that are adapted to relatively frequent occurrence of fire.

So the plants, the animals, how those communities are structured, they all depend on this ongoing relationship with it.

And when you take fire out of the woods, the landscape changes quite a bit.

And so there's a lack of adjustment to the kinds of rapidly-changing landscapes that are going on right now under the modern wildfires.

So this maintenance burning, this influence of regular fire to block fire flow, is a key characteristic of these landscapes that were sort of quenched for a couple hundred years.

>> So talk to me a little bit about what you've learned through all this, that all fires are not created equal, and that fire can be a good thing.

>> I think one of the really interesting things about the mega fire question that you asked and as Paul explained, you know, it's really the severity and the destructiveness of these fires.

And I think that, to me, one of the most important pieces of the puzzle is the frequency.

Is that, yes, historically, there were big, big fires, they happened.

But they didn't happen that often.

But now they're happening more and more often.

And the severity is going up.

The frequency is going up.

It's not a case of having a fire like this once every couple years, we're going to have a couple of these fires every year now.

And that's the big difference to me.

>> There's no explaining how my brain works, so I'm not even going to try.

But I'm going to use a COVID analogy a little bit when it comes to forest management and land management.

Is there a possible herd immunity solution to this in the sense that if all the land burns over -- nobody wants this, but if we have a mega fire everywhere, that's going to reduce the fuel load.

That's going to pretty much end the era of mega fires maybe in the short term as we rethink forest management if we get through this big burn.

Is that reality, or no, I have a pipe dream about something that's not going to apply?

>> There is a kind of herd immunity that can be acquired when the right kind of fire and the right extent of the fire are allowed back in the woods.

But that can also go sideways.

Some examples are, again, going back in that way back machine and you're looking at how many fires were small, medium, and large.

Let's say it's on the west side.

Well, fire is a player on the west side.

And severe fire was a player.

And the landscape was pockmarked with small and medium-size fires and occasionally incredibly large fires would occur.

And then smaller fires would recomplexify that landscape over time, right.

So fire on the landscape, creating patterns of age, class, and meadows, and things like that, that changed the way fire flowed on the landscape.

So in that sense, an awful lot of fire gives the landscape herd immunity.

>> Diversity.

>> The right kind of fire.

>> Yeah.

>> But if you have monstrous big, always severe -- fires that are basically burning away large areas of fire -- these areas are also exposed to re-burning within a fairly short time cycle, because the fuels are flashy.

And if you get some ignition on that landscape and it's ready to go, it can continue to re-burn.

So what's more doubtful in that second scenario is that forests will re-obtain on those same places.

So there's a sweet spot for the herd immunity thing that we might want to.

>> I just came to my own conclusion.

And if that happens, we're right back into the old even age stand thing.

There is no diversity.

There is none of this patchwork.

It's all an even age stand again, because I'll grew back from the fire plus landslides.

So it's probably not the solution I was thinking.

>> Well, but, Tom, I think there's a price to pay for that herd immunity.

And if we do have severe fires over a short period of time that destroy most of the forests, the price we pay is too high.

With the loss of wildlife.

The loss of water quality.

The landslides, as you mentioned.

The destruction of homes.

I mean, we're going to see -- if nothing is done and we have giant mega fires across the state like we've had in California, we could lose 5-10,000 houses in a year.

I don't think we can pay that price.

>> Yeah.

Now you're going to get the cynic in me.

I'm going to characterize a lot of the arguments that I've heard over a lot of years speaking to different communities about this.

Well, here comes now the prescription for ending wildfire.

And lo and behold, coincidentally, it happens to coincide with everything that we want to do to get the timber industry back in the forests.

Roadbuilding, those are fire breaks.

Salvage cuts, that's preventing wildfire.

How about a little more thinning in certain areas?

Well, that's preventing wildfire too.

There is a certain overlay here with wildfire prevention.

And you've heard this phrase, I know it, getting the cut out that tends to overlay.

Is that serendipity?

Is there anything behind that?

Does wildfire present an opportunity for the pro-forest products people to get back into the forests and start cutting again?

Or no, this has to happen one way or the other?

And I ask that because I've heard those arguments for so long over so many years.

>> The arguments are out there, for sure.

And if you look back at the history of harvesting throughout the Middle West and the Northwest -- actually, all of the Western US -- there was a time when the cut was being gotten out.

There were large trees were being harvested.

Old growth was being harvested in the interior and in the coast ranges and the west slope of the Cascades.

And it created a tremendous amount of mistrust among people when they started hearing now the complexities of, well, timber harvest helped us build the West, but now we're concerned about the old growth going away right now.

And now we're understanding these large trees are critical parts of habitats, and they're also aesthetically important to humans and so forth.

What we're finding out right now is that when you focus on adapting the forests to climate change and adapting the forests so they can handle fire again, not suppress fires but allow fires to continue to do work, then a restoration ecology and an adaptation ecology becomes the focus.

And in that light, timber is a byproduct of doing the right thing in the woods, to create the conditions that can stand up to the climate as it's changing and fires that are inevitable.

So what you see is emergence of those tools in a brand new context.

Is there mistrust about that?

It's widespread.

But the point is, those tools can be used for good or for not so good.

And the question becomes, if people get involved in these projects and they really want to see those adaptations, you can literally work for good using thinning and burning kinds of tools, where timber's a byproduct of good operations to get the job done.

>> I thought that was a great answer.

Because that is such a complex -- and like I said, I've been covering that for 25 years.

And that meeting of the minds there, those two concepts coming together for good, is.

>> It's a social problem that has an ecological explanation.

And in order to really go forward, human communities are going to have to enter the conversation, be involved at sort of all levels.

Which is something Jeff has really taught me.

Is basically saying, we need to create tools that help people enter the conversation.

>> Jeff, I want to talk to you a little bit about the news you can use part of this.

Because I'm sure as a storyteller, you're always saying, yeah, but that's interesting research, yeah but.

But I want the story piece of this and I want some news people can use.

Talk a little bit -- because I'm sure this piece I think -- we're both laymen in this.

The laymen can understand, what are some of the proactive steps people even here in western Washington can and should be taking to live in the era of mega fires?

>> Right.

Well, I think that there's kind of two parts to that.

One is sort of the public lands question.

And we have a lot of public lands.

Fortunate to have that in Washington State.

And it's really about how you vote.

It's about how you support the government to take care of those lands.

And so we do need to support more treatment on the landscape, and we do that by voting.

And we do that by calling.

And we do that by not complaining when there's a little prescribed burn smoke in the air.

But more importantly, you know, owning land comes with responsibility.

And I think that we all have a responsibility to take care of our own property.

And that means going out and looking around and understanding how fire travels across your landscape into your house, and take care of that.

And get rid of that extra fuel around your yard or the trees that are touching your house.

What's really interesting -- to kind of answer your question, we're always looking for the aha moment, the thing that really sort of resonates or captures somebody or hooks them into this idea.

And to me, one of the biggest hooks in this topic was the fact that you're very likely, if you're not taking care of your property and you experience a wildfire, to burn your neighbor out.

It's your fault.

And they may have done everything they needed to do to protect their home.

But because you're next door to them and you didn't do a thing, you burn them out.

And then people start thinking about it, it's like, oh, yeah, we're kind of in this together.

And I've got to take care of my neighbors because they're taking care of me.

And when you start thinking of it that way, people go, yeah, maybe I should do a little bit more around my house.

>> Yeah.

And a lot of those resources and a lot of that explanation is in these films.

And I want to point that out to folks, that it's very step-by-step, a real how-to.

We don't have to get into in this show necessarily because it's very nuts and bolts.

But there are some how-tos in there for landowners and for people to take advantage of that.

Paul, I wanted to ask you a couple questions about some terms we throw around.

Fire season and fire suppression -- ie, putting the fire out.

Are those terms out the window now?

There is no such thing as a fire season and the idea of putting one of these mega fires out because of its insane behavior?

Is that just of a fallacy now?

>> Let's do fire season first.

Fire seasons are changing right in front of our noses right now throughout western North America.

The time that we knew a fire season when we were children is rapidly expanding on both ends -- spring, summer, fall.

It's getting longer.

It's getting hotter and drier.

Winters are getting warmer.

There's less snowpack.

Spring's coming on faster.

Moisture's coming out of the hills faster, that sort of thing.

So that's all really changing.

Is there a fire season?

In some parts of the US, it's a year-round fire season.

California might be a great example for that.

Here, our fire season is 40 to 80 days longer in some years.

So it's really influencing Oregon, Washington as well.

In terms of fire suppression, fire suppression is always going to be with us.

And I would argue it has to stay with us.

Because we have more and more people living in dangerous environments -- which is a subject unto itself.

But we have a profound need to take care of human infrastructure, people, those kinds of things.

And we also have an ongoing need to protect municipal watersheds where fresh water supplies come from.

70% of the fresh water in the United States comes off of public lands.

So it's these forests.

>> So steering a fire and suppressing in strategic ways will always be a part of management.

>> It's always a part of management, because humans and human-related infrastructure is always of great consequence.

And it's not getting smaller, it will get larger.

However, it's not the only thing in the mix.

There's proactive work that we can scale up so that there's less of a need to rely profoundly on fire suppression as the primary thing.

And I think an awful lot of what we're talking about in both of the films really is moving us in the direction of saying, what are the proactive things that we can do to essentially buy down the problem.

>> I think a real important piece of that puzzle is that, if you do what you need to do on your property -- whether that's your house or some forest that you own -- you've created an opportunity for the fighters to come in and actually save homes, and not have to spend as much time worried about your house.

They can go off and fight the fire at its front.

So it's a teamwork thing.

If you are able to create a defensible space around your house, they're going to come defend it.

If you can alleviate the fire risk of your home, they're out doing something more important.

>> Right.

>> We'll always have the need to suppress fire, because we have put ourselves in the fire's way.

But we need to give them an opportunity to be successful at that.

>> And you both gestured at this -- Paul, you can give us 60 seconds on the wildland-urban interface.

I experienced that in the Oakland Hills fire back in the day.

It was unbelievable.

But we've only moved deeper into the forest.

Talk a little bit about how we're developing and the risk that poses.

>> It's a risky business.

The low-hanging fruit's been picked in terms of areas to develop, and so we're moving more and more into canyons and up drainages, where there's just one road in and out.

And it's difficult for firefighters, wildland folks, to actually protect that space, because they put their own lives at risk and the equipment, everything else.

So there's a big conversation that Western society needs to take on to basically say, are we going to continue building out?

And is it ever possible to protect all that space?

Or is another plan a bigger idea than that?

And that's a human community solution that's required.

And science can inform that, but it's basically negotiating the future you want to live in.

>> Yeah.

>> So development in high-fire danger environments continues to be the rub right now in Chaparral, as you're well aware, in California, right.

Dry oak, woodland forests that have gotten congested with trees and so forth.

>> Jeff, one last time.

The URL people can learn more?

>> Eraofmegafires.com.

>> Perfect.

Guys, thanks so much for coming to Northwest Now.

Great conversation.

>> Thanks for having us.

>> The thought of spending long winters in heavy rain and gloom only to get scorching summers with smoke-filled skies from now on is enough to depress anybody.

The bottom line: it only gets more depressing if you lose your home and your property.

So get to work on making your place fire safe even if you think you're just fine here in western Washington.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

To watch this program again or to share it with others, Northwest Now can be found on the web at kbtc.org.

And be sure to follow us on Twitter at Northwest Now.

Thanks for taking a closer look on this edition of Northwest Now.

Until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.

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