(fire sizzling, wind whirring) - [Charles] A wild land firefighter once told me about this survival tactic.

When the wind shifts unexpectedly, and you get trapped between an advancing wall of fire and the impenetrable thicket behind you.

(dramatic music) Sometimes, there's only one way out.

Into the black, the burnt ground where the flames have already passed, but to get there, you have to run towards the fire.

It goes against every instinct, but it's the only way to survive.

(footsteps) I wonder if there's a lesson in that, because the fire is coming for our home now.

Home is more than a physical structure, it's a feeling, a sense of safety, and of connection.

Out of the available ecology, we carve meaning into our lives.

A home is shelter with a story.

California's story of home is being rewritten by an ecosystem in crisis.

My name's Charles Loi.

I'm a filmmaker who began to see that the California we grew up in is disappearing.

Climate change demands new solutions and new stories.

My friends and I set out to find those narratives, because on the other side of fire is safety, and on the other side of fear is a better story.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Climate California" is brought to you in part by Crankstart, a San Francisco based family foundation that works with others on critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment, and medical science and innovation.

And by the Community Foundation of Sonoma County.

Additional support provided by donors to The Center for Environmental Reporting at NorCal Public Media, a complete list is available, and by the following.

(upbeat music continues) "Climate California" is made possible by contributions to your public television station from viewers like you, thank you.

(light music) - [Charles] Rising seas, wildfires, (fire sizzling) extreme heat, all consequences of a warming planet that threaten our story of home.

All three demanding that we face our problems head on, no matter how scary.

So what happens when we confront our future?

On the Sonoma Coast, that future has already happened.

- There was about 10 homes that used to be here, all facing the ocean, all with so much more room before there was no room left.

Every single homeowner along this stretch had to make the decision on their own on when it was time to finally let go.

- We met with Rosanna Shaw, an LA Times reporter, and author of "California Against the Sea".

It's a beautiful, lyrical book, describing contentious visions for the future.

Like the push and pull between two major solutions for erosion, sea walls or managed retreat.

- The gut instinct that most people have when you know the ocean's moving in, starting to flood, let's build a wall to hold back the ocean.

But by hardening a line in the sand, you are immediately disrupting the natural processes of the shoreline.

What ends up happening is everything in front of that wall gets ground out?

And the question there is how much are we willing to pay and for how long?

A managed retreat is the other fraught option.

But ultimately it's just acknowledging that the ocean is moving inland, and how do you proactively think about moving people safely out of the way, moving infrastructure out of the way, before it costs too much to continue to try to hold that line?

How does that affect property values?

How does that affect the way we continue to invest or not invest in public infrastructure?

There are no easy choices, each of them comes with sacrifices and costs.

- But we're not just trying to hold the line, we're also pushing it.

(light music) Many Californians live at the line between human development and the wild, in something called the WUI, the Wildland Urban Interface.

A third of homes across the US are located in the WUI, and we keep expanding it.

But many parts of the WUI are particularly fire prone.

(upbeat music) And, as we would learn, we've neglected our true relationship with fire.

The last time we were up by the Klamath River, we were with our friend Oshun.

- [Oshun] Our rotary screw trap catches juvenile out-migrating salmon.

- [Charles] This time we met her cousin Blaine McKinnon, the Yurok Tribe's Fire Division Chief, and a certified federal burn boss, a bridge between two worlds.

- Can you bump it up Andy?

- [Andy] More pressure!

(light music) - [Baine] In our program in the fire department, 95% of us are native.

I probably have gone through 40 trainings in my career in fire.

Think we got a hot mix, Tez.

A lot of those skills and knowhow for fire is already kind of taught to us at a young age.

- So you just unscrew it, make sure this part here is unscrewed.

And then, right here you want twist this open so it gives it like, - Air.

- Air, yeah.

And, that's about it.

- [Charles] Fire thins the forest and releases nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.

This means more fire resistant trees and resilient forests.

- We have 70,000 acres that's considered the reservation, but our traditional ancestral territory's 500,000 acres.

We're here to take care of the land.

When the land's sick, so are the people.

The land's overstocked with fuel, and we have all these devastating wildfires.

Everywhere you look around here, there are invasive species, and to me it's because of lack of burning.

- So the cultural burns are not only about controlling fire but about bringing back the ecosystem?

- Yep, absolutely.

We as a people rely on these materials, rely on these medicines, rely on this food, and in order to get that we have to use fire in order to produce those things for our people.

And right now with the laws and regulations that govern burning, we're just not able to do that.

- [Charles] Cultural burns are rooted in, culture.

For example, we went looking for hazel, which the Yurok used to weave baskets.

- You see any hazel down right there Andrew?

- I know down in this corner there's some.

Oh, right here.

- Yeah, see this is right here is probably a good example of some hazel that's been unburned 'cause it's up here on the flat.

This right here is the new growth, you could tell by the color and it's a lot straighter.

So my great great grandmother Nettie McKinnon, she was a well-known basket maker.

And she probably made hundreds of baskets her lifetime.

One of the things like with Hazel's Hazel's fire dependent, and when you burn it, it helps create a long thick stalk.

That was kind of my first introduction to fire, was just burning at a as a young boy with my family.

We'd just get together as a family, we would go out and burn.

- [Charles] Our landscape was hand shaped by Indigenous Californians using fire, but settlers killed and drove them off their land, and they outlawed cultural burns, ignorant of the devastation they were planting.

(light music continues) Lack of fire meant our forests became denser.

Trees and plants that would normally be cleared by fire every few decades just stayed.

And we kept building houses closer and closer to forests that became denser and denser as it became drier and windier, and then.

(fire crackling) (light music) - I think a lot of times when you start putting smoke up in the air and burn, people automatically think it's a thing because they're seeing pain, they lost somebody, they lost their home, they lost their land.

It's the 100 years of fire suppression that caused that, it's not the fire itself.

For a lot of people around here, we want to be a part of it.

If I see smoke in there, I want to be part of it, I want to go there, I want to go burn.

The overstock, the fuel loading right now is catastrophic, but if we could go out and burn, we could go out and take care of the land and be in balanced with the land like we're meant to be, we wouldn't see those catastrophic effects.

Climate change, we're kind of going into the unknown, and that's scary for a lot of people I think.

(light music continues) - To prepare for the unknown, we need to make difficult choices, but how?

- You know, how do you tell someone that change needs to happen at some point between now and 30, 40, 50 years from now, but also that none of these changes need to happen immediately?

So kind of helping people move from the short-term into the long-term, and to start navigating this middle period, has been where a lot of people are stuck.

- The way that you talk about adjusting to change, it sounded a little bit like exposure therapy.

- Yeah, that's a really interesting and profound kind of connection to make with exposure therapy, I love that.

Adapting to sea level rise is a process, right?

An ongoing step-by-step process where not every single decision has to be made today, not every single sacrifice made in one go.

And but ultimately it's a visioning process where the community has to kind of align on what direction they want to go.

So in that sense like yeah, it is kind of a slow exposure to this other potentially more sustainable, and more resilient, and more beautiful future that we can be moving towards as long as we are not afraid to take that first smaller step.

- We were curious about what these first steps could look like, and so we drove down to the Eastern Coachella Valley.

(upbeat music) This place is known for its music festival and playgrounds for the rich, (tires screeching) but it's also one of America's biggest agricultural hubs, one that's attracting a lot of new residents because, well, it's affordable.

There's just one problem, the heat.

It was over 110 degrees Fahrenheit when we met up with community members.

(people talking indistinctly) They're trying to figure out, what can they do about the heat?

(woman speaking Spanish) (man speaking Spanish) (Christian speaking Spanish) Two of their advisors are Christian Rodriguez Ceja, a community organizer, and Kelly Turner, a UCLA professor and heat expert.

- The goal here is to make this area a little bit more heat resilient.

And you probably already know this stuff from your experience.

(man speaking Spanish) (woman speaking Spanish) Every year is the hottest year on record again, and there are places in the world where we're already seeing what a climate change future looks like, and that's here in Eastern Coachella Valley.

(light music) You notice that these homes, they all have erected shade structures, but, that's not a protected right.

So it is completely possible that a landlord could come out and say, "No, you can't do this, this is against rules."

- So what you're seeing there off on the side, those little coolers, that's as good as it gets a lot of the times for these types of mobile homes.

It scares me that we're not prepared now, and it's not that it's going to start in the next five to 10 years, it's happening as we speak.

We're seeing heat waves are just getting longer and more out of control.

- Right now it's 105 degrees, that's really, really hot, it could get literally to the threshold of human survival.

- [Charles] Here's why heat is so dangerous.

At high temperatures, blood vessels near the skin widen to dissipate heat, while sweating helps cool our bodies down, but it means the body loses water.

This lowers blood pressure, so the heart has to pump faster and faster to continue distributing oxygen and nutrients.

At the same time, heat unravels the structure of proteins and cells.

Cells start to die, blood starts to acidify, and organs start to fail.

In other words, you're literally being cooked.

- I mean if you look around like how many spaces just like this one are available, right?

So if you're this gentleman who's walking in the street like and you're looking for refuge, there's not a lot.

I mean it's not just like pedestrians.

- Most of the people work in agriculture, so all day long they're exposed to heat.

They're not being able to take a cold shower because their hot water heaters are made of metal and roasting in the sun.

They never have a chance for their core temperature to really go down, and that has complications for exacerbating other health conditions.

Their children have trouble learning at school because they can't sleep because it's too hot, and they're too hot at school.

So it's just an all day long chronic condition that this community has to deal with, and is hidden because of a lot of wealthier places, we don't have to deal it in the same way.

(light music continues) The primary way people feel heat is when sun hits their body.

Shade can reduce how you feel in these kind of conditions by 30 degrees Celsius.

We've been advocating for shade infrastructure, which we define broadly to mean all the built features in environment that are vertical that can cast shadow, and the policies and institutions that either support or constrain your ability to do that.

- Yeah, we're working on a shade master plan for the unincorporated communities of Riverside County, (light music continues) and we worked with the community to design something that would be adequate for them.

- We got a grant to come do some kind of state-of-the-art measurements here in the mobile home communities.

- Our role was to help create a prototype for a bus shelter, and we worked with the community to design something that would be adequate for them.

But in the conversations about what a, you know, community design shade structured look like, they started asking us questions about, what about shade everywhere else?

What about shade in my workplace?

What about shade where I live and where I buy my groceries?

And then we realized, we need to do more, the community is ready for us to look at the issue of the lack of shade in their community, deeper.

- [Charles] What the heat is exposing to us here and in other parts of California is a history of ignoring communities that have less political power.

- 20 minute drive from here, you have lush green, you know, golf courses, and lots of nice AC cooling areas.

That's not the reality for this community.

- You know, I have talked to so many communities now where normal and the status quo has not been working for them.

Our gut instincts when the ocean is moving in and challenging our built environment is to hold the line, and to maintain the status quo, and to keep things normal.

But, these are all opportunities to reexamine the system's, social, economic, political, that got us into the situation in the first place.

And I think there is a lot of strength and resilience to be learned from the communities who have thrived, and continue to sing and love and take care of each other despite all that has been dealt, you know.

Rather than further index on our differences, and to allow people to talk in their silos, being able to help people realize that they actually have a lot more in common than they think has been super healing.

- [Charles] So to break out of our own silos, Kelly and Christian met Blaine.

- Hi guys.

- Hey.

- Hi.

- Hey, how's it going?

- [Charles] Is there a way to turn your phone sideways or is that, we can also keep it that way.

- Yeah, no I could.

- Nice.

- Hi, nice to meet you.

I don't get to speak with someone who's a firefighter every day.

So, I'm in LA and we just had the catastrophe that we had.

- We sent our fire resources down there to help out with.

We sent two of our engines down, and I've been in those extreme, you know, extreme cases, you know, 40, 50 mile an hour staying winds and 70 mile an hour gusts.

And there's nothing you could do at that point, other than like react, trying to do some type of point protection.

I think it's probably a lot different, you know, up here.

'Cause our belief as Yurok people, is that it is balance.

You know, it's just something that we just kind of live with with wildfires, and then try to stay really proactive as far as burning.

Just trying to get people trained, and qualified, and aware of these issues.

And how do we do that?

- I think it's really inspiring what you just said.

And you know, part of what we're trying to do is really build capacity at the community level, because we are very few voices, and together we're more powerful.

It might be scary for you as an individual, but when you build of the power of the community, it feels a little bit more doable and and achievable.

- You know, we go into these communities, and we hear about this, and one of the first things they say is, "Okay, lots of people have come into our community "and said, 'You have a problem, we want to measure it.'"

But you know, measuring doesn't get them a new shade structure, right?

It doesn't get them more trees.

Even if it's just small wins, seeing those wins in your community, or in legislation, delivering wins.

I think that makes people feel like it's worth their time.

(people speaking Spanish) (people speaking indistinctly) (Christian speaking Spanish) - It starts from a place of trust, but it also holds us accountable.

Because if they are our partners in this project, then they have an equal voice.

(women laughing) The partnership with Kelly is instrumental.

Being able to offer some recommendations from the data and the research, and that are being informed by the community is really important.

- Our science is so much better because we're working together, and oftentimes I think our solutions were being framed from literally the atmosphere down, and it should be framed as a public health issue from the bottom up.

We can only really regulate what we can see.

And, for the longest time we were looking at heat from satellites, and satellites can't see the way people experience heat.

And the more I started working with communities, and architects, they kept saying, "Yeah, but it's on the ground."

We actually have a lot of the solutions that we need, and we can have fun with them.

Shade, for instance, can be beautiful, it can be artistic, and if we just prioritize it, it's something that can make a community more lively and be an expression of culture.

- I get to have fun with the community of dreaming what is possible in the future, and however dire the current conditions are, it's a very hopeful place to be.

Because we're embedded in this community, we're seeing how folks we started working with eight years ago, and were bringing their kids to our meetings, those kids are now, they're like the young adults that are leading the conversation, and it's just a magical thing.

(people speaking Spanish) - [Charles] So what can results look like?

This highway bridge might look pretty ordinary, but it's a demonstration of real progress.

- I haven't been here since the bridge was built and I haven't been here since they moved the highway.

Where the bridge starts, it used to dip down towards sea level and then it came back up.

This is a really remarkable example of how all of these different government agencies and community groups can come together to think about what it means to reconfigure the shoreline.

Because that bridge, you drove over it, right?

- [Charles] Yeah.

- [Rosanna] It's pretty big.

(Rosanna laughs) - [Charles] Yeah.

- There was so many years of discussion on what the bridge should look like, how big or how small it could be, you know what color it should be.

So there was a section of the highway that is now elevated that allows the wetland to recover underneath the bridge, which is also really cool.

And so, I'm really excited to see how the landscape will ultimately heal a little bit.

A solution like this didn't come without controversy, or without conflict, and just a lot of kind of really tough conversations that were also emotional about what it does mean to change.

- It's a compromise that allows for the flow of traffic, the flow of water, and the flow of people to the beach.

And yes, it requires the sacrifice of cherished but unsustainable stories so that new stories can flourish.

There's a line in there I think that was something like, "Think of land as a tide that rises and falls," I think that was really beautiful.

- That, thank you, that's actually my favorite line in the book, if I had to pick a favorite line, so I'm very touched.

All of this used to be underwater, all of this also used to be way above water.

The way we think about timescales, it really can shift the way we think about these issues.

- All of our ancestors walked these same hills, burned these same patches, and that knowledge is passed down from generation to generation.

When we come out here and conduct these cultural burns, it's almost like a prayer, and building our relationships together as a people.

(light music continues) - If you took a time machine back and met me 15 years ago, you would've met a very different person who had a clear path for everything.

And I then found myself a single parent during COVID in a new city where I knew nobody, trying to build a research program from scratch.

Control sometimes is something that you have to give up, and you have to be nimble.

I think no matter what happens, we know that we still have the same goal, and that's what keeps us going.

- There is an inherent poetry to just how the shoreline works.

(light music continues) Every time the waves crash ashore, that tide line is different.

The coast is never the same twice.

Change is the only expected thing along the California coast.

- [Charles] Even though change can be scary, we can't outrun it.

But we can use our fear as a guide.

to write a new dream of home, to make right old broken connections...with the sea, with the land, and with each other.

(upbeat music continues) To save our home, we have to run towards the fire.

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music builds) - [Announcer] You can visit our website for more information, related educational materials, and additional resources.

It's all at ClimateCalifornia.org.

"Climate California" is brought to you in part by Crankstart, a San Francisco based family foundation that works with others on critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment, and medical science and innovation.

And by the Community Foundation of Sonoma County.

Additional support provided by donors to the Center for Environmental Reporting at NorCal Public Media.

A complete list is available.

And by the following.

"Climate California" is made possible by contributions to your public television station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(light music)