Leland Buck
[Introduction]
I spoke with author Gary Ferguson about his newest book, “Land On Fire.” Ferguson is a prolific non-fiction writer with over 20 published books about nature and the American West, including “Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone,” the first nonfiction title to win both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award for Nonfiction. Other works include “Decade of the Wolf: Returning The Wild To Yellowstone,” written with Douglas Smith, which won the 2005 Montana Book Award; “The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind,” and “The Carry Home,” a very personal memoir which deals with his grief following the death of his wife Jane in a 2005 canoeing accident in Canada.
Ferguson joins me today via Skype from Oregon. Welcome Gary.
[Interview]
Tell me about this book, and working with Timber Press. This book is a little different from the other books that you’ve written in the last few years.
Gary Ferguson
It really is, Leland. My last book was “The Carry Home,” which was a memoir about 25 years with my first wife, who died in a canoeing accident in 2005, and about this quarter of a century we spent together in the wilderness and of the power of the wilderness, not just in our lives but in the lives of the culture. It was long on the poetic, I would say. I love doing that sort of literary non-fiction.
But Timber Press came to me a couple years ago wanting to do primarily a science-driven book, that I wouldn’t call a reference book, but one to start conversations about where we are with the megafires issue, how climate change is playing in, and … so, it became a project which was a bit no-nonsense, but hopefully will be intriguing enough to launch people into some conversations about where we go from here. Because this is only going to increase as the decades roll by here … these issues with wildfire.
Leland Buck
A lot of your writing in the past has dealt with an interface between people and nature, how did that approach work into the book? Did it help having the ability to think about fire and people as a point of interface between man and nature?
Gary Ferguson
Well, it really did, that’s a great question, and, it did on the most fundamental platforms in that it was really because of decisions we thought we were making with the best intentions in mind to suppress every fire that broke out back in the early 20th century, that led to the kind of fuel load problems we have now affecting some 300 million acres. But more to the point of what’s going on right now, I was able to spend an awful lot of time with the firefighters who are on the lines with these kinds of battles, and I envision a book in the future that will have more of those stories of those people. Because this really is a very dramatic, human-centered topic. Not just the firefighters and how they risk their lives every day to battle these things, but also increasingly the number of people who are living in that so-called “Wildland Urban Interface” — a billion acres almost, close to 40 percent of the total landmass of the United States in that interface, and 200 million acres of it is now deemed high risk [for] fire. That’s increasingly for me and other people who live in the West, that’s a big deal. I know that in Red Lodge, we go out and look at the sky and smell the wind for smoke and see which way the flags are blowing. It’s changing our reference points to a very big degree.
Leland Buck
How do the firefighters – and spending time with them – how do they give you a better understanding of some of the other factors in this? Not just fire suppression which is obviously their main job, but …
Gary Ferguson
Well, it’s interesting… they’re fighting fire at a time when technology – just as it is everywhere else – is really emerging in a magnificent way and at incredible speed. They’ve got apps now on their cell phones to check wind and every other aspect of weather. They can tap into these so-called RAWS – Remote Area Weather Stations – two thousand of which are in the wildlands of the United States, and get instant feedback on what’s going on as far as weather conditions. But at the same time, I get the very strong sense that the best thing they’ve got going for them is their own instinct and gut feeling from having been out on the line over and over and over again. And it really is a matter of getting people who have – yes access to technology is great but it’s really a wonderful glimpse into the fact that when you do something, facing a task as complicated and as quick to change, with fire whirls and wind shifts and humidity drops and temperature increases… these people are juggling in their heads – and those who have been doing it for ten or twenty years probably couldn’t even chronicle the way that they think about it – but they’re able to make calls more often than not that are spectacularly effective, that go well beyond what technology can process at this point. I think they’re very concerned about their own welfare and the welfare of their fellow firefighters because climate change is really starting to roll and making these megafires much hotter, much worse.
A number of them told me, gosh, back in 1988 when the Yellowstone fires went through, that was a big deal to have that many acres burn. And now that’s fairly routine. Those kinds of fires are so big, that they know when they go [transmission interference] that there’s a greater risk then there has been. So they’ll spend maybe more time just, essentially, herding, if you will, certain sides or flanks of the fire to avoid having subdivisions burned up than they will to actually going in to fully contain it. Which sometimes is impossible. I mean, that’s still the goal, but increasingly that’s not only impossible but the kinds of flare-ups and wind-driven danger events are so much more profound… We see events now like the Hot Shots from Granite Mountain in Prescott, Arizona were nineteen Hot Shot members died a few years back, and that’s an unprecedented event. And people are very concerned that those kinds of events are going to happen again. Not for lack of training, but just because that’s how unpredictable these fires are.
Leland Buck
We’ve seen a lot of loss, both of firefighters’ lives in Arizona and of property in places like Colorado Springs in recent years.
Gary Ferguson
Yes. You’re absolutely right. I mean, not only is it four, four and a half billion dollars just to suppress the fire from state and federal agencies, but, you’re right, hundreds of millions of dollars are being lost in structural fires. I think back, if I’m remembering correctly, back in the 80’s we averaged about, I don’t know, two to three hundered structures lost a year and now we’re averaging somewhere much closer to 2200 a year. So it’s increased by a factor of ten. And the other interesting thing is, out of all that wildland urban interface land, only twenty percent of it has been developed. And so there’s much more development to come.
Leland Buck
One of the little facts that I pulled out of the book was that between 2000 and 2015 there were 10 seasons with megafires, which you state is a term loosely defined as fires over 100,000 acres. Talk about megafires a bit. How does this concept fit in with some of the policy and people’s approaches to fighting fire.
Gary Ferguson
Well, certainly, with megafires being more of a possibility … and the reason it’s more of a possibility, a couple of things: we are, again, inheriting that legacy of having suppressed all the fires for 80 years, so we’ve got tremendous fuel load in the forest. That’s coming smack up against climate change issues. We’ve had three major, major drought periods since 2000. The first one, from 2000 to 2004, actually those conditions hadn’t been seen since the middle ages. So we’re really amping up the level of drought. That combined with an increase in temperatures and stress on trees. Trees that are stressed are much more vulnerable to pathogens and insect invasions like pine bark beetles. That’s created … Just to put this in perspective, last year, 2016, California lost 60 million trees in that one year alone, from primarily beetle infestation. Well those are standing now but in eight or ten years they’ll fall over and that will become a lot more fuel load.
Megafires are a result of the fuel load from the past but also because more fuel load is being created all the time, plus we have, thanks to climate change, 75 days more in the fire season than we had back in the 70’s. Snow packs are melting off earlier, so that exposes the land to drying out, the Falls are warmer and windier. So, when a fire breaks out, megafires have become so common that the people who are on the ground first, are doing what they call “ordering the world” and that’s getting every resource in that they can. Normally they would have had maybe a Hot Shot crew, maybe some Smokejumpers, a few local or regional teams in there. Now, they’re trying to get every aircraft they can, every tanker truck. And also keep in mind that a lot of the structural fire fighting is still being done, primarily by local fire departments. So these local fire departments, like where I live in Red Lodge, they may not only keep busy fighting structural fires in a high-fire season in Red Lodge, but routinely, they might go to North Carolina, or Florida or Texas or somewhere else to try to get those tankers in there. That “ordering the world” is a great idea, but the problem is if it’s a really bad fire season, as we’ve had so many times since 2000, there just aren’t enough resources to go around. And so you’ve got an incident command structure where somebody’s taking a look at what the emerging demands are and trying to shuffle the equipment and the personnel to the right place at the right time. And it’s becoming a real, real challenge to do that.
Leland Buck
From reading the book, it’s clear there are many factors which come together to create the situation for fire. Climate, the history of suppression and the build up of fuel loads. You spend a lot of time in the book talking about these different factors and trying to help people understand them because they are so complicated. How do some of the politics perhaps fit in with our understanding of climate change? Our understanding of these things sometimes doesn’t reflect our political views on some of the controversial topics like climate change.
Gary Ferguson
Well, there really needs to be an acceptance of the fact that climate change is real, it’s with us. Anthropogenic, human-caused climate change I’m talking about. Yes. climate changes all the time from natural factors. Circulation patterns in the Pacific Ocean. All kinds of things. But, those things can fairly reliably be taken out of the modeling programs and we’re left seeing what humans… what kind of an effect we’re having. It’s big. It’s already with us. The Pentagon, of all organizations, five years out of the last seven has said, the biggest security risk to the United States is climate change. That’s because they, too, believe the science, which is pretty much 97 percent of the climate scientists out there, agree. And they’re seeing this as a potential disrupter of all kinds of populations around the world creating migrant societies, upheaval, destabilization as we’ve seen actually, in part in Syria and other parts of the African continent.
So, we first need to get over ourselves and just accept this. We don’t have to be ashamed, we don’t have to feel guilty, we don’t have to say, “I’m not willing to give up my lifestyle.” But we do have to accept, first of all, that this is happening, and then we can make these other decisions. It’s very disheartening to be this far in the midsts of the effects of climate change and still be debating. The debate is over and it’s been over for a long time.
Beyond that, the Forest Service routinely spends way more than it’s allotted to fight fires, leaving it no money at all to go do prescribed burns and thinning operations, which could reduce the megafire potential, especially around wildland urban interface. They can’t do that because they continue to be funded only out of their own funds, unlike FEMA-style funding for tornadoes and hurricanes and things like that. There’s a bill, called HR-167, that’s been sitting in the House of Representatives for more than two years now. It would allow the Forest Service to fight the most extreme, dangerous fires by tapping into these emergency funds, thereby keeping some of their own budget which is really important for treatment programs, they’re called, with the thinning and the prescribed burning. We need to just get off the dime on that and give that kind of care, not just to suppression, but to prevention. Because prevention really, really can have a big effect, especially when it comes to structural loss.
So those are some starts. And then, what we can do individually, I love to recommend a new book out from Paul Hawken called “Drawdown,” which gives a very, very strong hierarchical structure of, “This is what we need to do first, second, third, fourth” as far as affecting the carbon emissions that humans are responsible for. Everything from agriculture shifts and how we raise our food to various kinds of energy production. That’s a wonderful primer for people to get a better sense of what they and their communities can do.
Leland Buck
You’ve spent years walking, hiking, observing and writing about the natural world and much of what you’ve written has dealt with human involvement in some natural process. A good example is your writing on the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. Fire, wildfire as a subject, seems well-positioned as one of the major environmental stories of the 21st century — not to say it hasn’t been major in previous centuries, or that it is the only major environmental issue of our time … but why is fire, right now the issue that occupies your thoughts?
Gary Ferguson
Well, thank you Leland, I did start walking some of what became close to 30,000 miles now through the wilderness primarily of the West. Some other places in the world as well. But, it was by good fortune I had teachers who could teach me to look at the landscape and understand why it looks the way it does. One of my greatest teachers who worked for the Forest Service at the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, a man named Chuck Ebersole, was really good at helping you see that almost everything we look at when we are out walking in the woods is somehow the result of having evolved with fire as part of the ecosystem. The shapes of trees, the fact that say ponderosa pines don’t have any lower branches on them, they drop those branches so fires can’t climb up essentially the ladder of those lower branches and kill the tree by burning the crown, the spacing of the trees, the kind of grasses, the serotinous cones of the lodgepole that only open in the presence of fire, the flickers that come and use burned areas for nesting, on and on and on it goes. Everything we see is the result of fire. It’s been very compelling to me though as I walked in the last fifteen or twenty years to see changes, due to climate change, but also due to the intensity of fires that have burned through certain landscapes that I’ve hiked through.
Fire is getting hot enough to potentially sterilize the soil for a long period so it doesn’t recover necessarily — this isn’t happening everywhere but it does happen with increasing frequency. Fire is burning so hot that the vegetation vapor rises and creates hydrophobic or water resistant soils so we’ve got more slides, more debris slides going on — a lot of them in the back country but, of course as Californians have found over and over again sometimes right into neighborhoods, destroying dozens if not hundreds of houses and killing people in the process.
So those sorts of landscape shifts and movements, minor and major catastrophes if you will, have increased. I’ve noticed a difference in what I’m seeing. In the southwest, some of these what were forests in New Mexico and Arizona have burned with such intensity and the climate change is withholding the typical moisture that used to be there, so that those forests aren’t going to come back in some places at all. They’re going to be shrublands and grasslands — permanent shrublands and grasslands. That concerns me not just because I love forests for aesthetic reasons, but the forests are storing in the world about twenty-five percent of the carbon that humans generate. As we lose those forests, we’re going to lose that carbon storage.
Forests are also a big part of watershed protection. I read one study where the estimated the value of the 85,000 communities that draw their primary drinking water from forests, the value to be about $4 trillion. Well, those water storage and filtering capacities could be threatened as well.
So this is how I see the land, not all doom and gloom, but it’s absolutely a sense of urgency and a rapidity of changes on the land that I’ve never seen in the almost forty years that I’ve been traipsing though the back country.
Leland Buck
So you might say that wildfire is making the climate change situation worse by removing our carbon storage systems and damaging our water systems…
Gary Ferguson
Yeah, I think that’s right. Typically, forest fires of course always put carbon into the atmosphere, but it has been significantly less than the amount of new vegetation on the planet storing. So there has been a net gain in carbon storage versus carbon release. That’s shifting now.
Leland Buck
You write about how as fires burn with more intensity many trees are unable to withstand, to survive the damage, and that the period of recovery after a fire is one that increasingly sees something take hold that is unlike the original forest – either a monoculture forest with a single dominant species, or in the case of some burn areas in the southwest, not really a forest at all. If supressing fire isn’t the answer, should we now just let these fires burn?
Gary Ferguson
So it’s a very tricky balancing act. Plus, increasingly as population gets higher and higher in the West sometimes people don’t like prescribed burns because they don’t want smoke in the atmosphere. They don’t really like breathing smoke, and so that’s increasingly a challenge for land managers, too, to pick just the right day when you can burn a fire and it doesn’t drift down wind to the communities nearby. So, it’s an amazingly complicated issue, but we could all start by acknowledging that it is an issue, and acknowledging that we need to make these intelligent decisions as far as how to treat forests – thinning and burning. We also need to make intelligent decisions about how we can contine to back sustainable energy development, not just for the environment but for the economic opportunities those industries provide.
We need to make this shift and we’ve got the technical ability to do it, we just need the heart.
Leland Buck
This is obviously not a topic you’ve exhausted in this one book. Are you going to continue to write about fire?
Gary Ferguson
I think so, and I would really like to tell the stories that we mentioned earlier, the firefighters, the people who have come close or even actually lost their home to fire. To put that human face on the science is what I’m most interested in doing right now. I do, as you suggested, really love the connection between humans and the natural world and that’s one of our problems, I would argue. That given the way we started our scientific investigation five hundred years ago, we separated human beings from the natural world. We were the objective observers and everything else was the “other” to be dissected and parsed, and I’m very interested in exploring this notion of breaking down the walls between the human psyche and the natural world. That’s what we need to do if we’re going to have the will and the enthusiasm to go forward and make the right decisions in the days and years to come.
Leland Buck
The book is called “Land on Fire,” subtitled, “A New Reality of Wildfire in the West,” by Gary Ferguson, published by the Timber Press. The book is being released is it this month?
Gary Ferguson
It’s this month. It’s on the shelf. I just did my first reading at Powell’s in Portland and I’ll be hitting the road next week for about three or four weeks throughout the West to give more readings and shows. It’s a great topic and audiences come with lots and lots of questions. So it’s a lot of fun.
Leland Buck
I’d like to thank Gary for taking a few minutes out of his busy day to talk to us. You can read my review of the book on Treesource.org where you will also find a written transcript of this interview. Thanks to you, Gary.
Gary Ferguson
It’s a pleasure Leland. Thanks so much for your interest. Take good care.
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