Episode 12.5: Using prescribed fire to help Idaho forests

Heather: I want to grow fire professionals that are three things, and all together three things. I want them to be safe, I want them to be effective, and I want them to be happy. When our people that are working in these jobs are uncertain about their job standing, when they are unsure of how to do their work, and they're asked to be doing things that they don't know how to do, that's not fair. It's not going to make them happy. And we lose a lot of people in our profession because they are unhappy or because they're unsafe or because they see that they're ineffective. And if we provide people better opportunities to learn how to do their trade and do it well and feel confident and powerful, unstoppable, we have a real opportunity to not just grow and improve our wildlands, but also grow and improve some really fantastic people that are dedicated and love the land and want to do good for it. They just might need to have a little support in giving them the resources to do so.

Leigh: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Vandal Theory, a podcast about science and research at University of Idaho. My name is Leigh Cooper, and I am a science writer and editor here at University of Idaho. And I am joined by my co-host, Danae. Hello, Danae.

Danae: Hi, Leigh. I'm Danae Lenz, the external communications coordinator at U of I.

Leigh: So today we are going to be talking all about controlled and uncontrolled wildland fires. And to start us off, Danae, have you ever seen a prescribed fire before?

Danae: I have. So my family had a farm in the middle of Montana when I was growing up. It was not uncommon, let's say, to see people burning their fields. I definitely remember looking off in the distance a few times as a kid and being like, "Something's on fire." And then realizing like, yes, something is on fire, but it's on purpose.

Leigh: I have seen them mostly driving around hiking and stuff. I was actually hiking close to Moscow where they had just done burns. You know, you could actually see the smoke still coming from the piles and everything. And I've actually participated in one as well as part of my undergraduate education, and that was really interesting to be a part of. So fire is a natural part of Idaho's landscapes, but decades of fire suppression have changed forests and grasslands. Prescribed burns can help restore landscape health and reduce the risk of high intensity wildfires. And yet using it safely takes training, planning and cooperation. Today, we're talking to Heather Heward, a research assistant faculty in the Department of Forest, Rangelands and Fire Sciences. We'll explore the challenges Idaho landowners face, potential policy changes and how better training can support the people who manage wildland fire. Ready to go, Danae?

Danae: Let's light it up.

Leigh: Heather, thank you so much for coming on The Vandal Theory today.

Heather: Thanks for having me.

Leigh: Can you tell us a bit about what you do?

Heather: Absolutely. I am a newly appointed research faculty member at the University of Idaho, but just because I have a new position does not mean I'm new here. I have actually been at the University of Idaho since I started my undergraduate career in 2002, where I received my bachelor's degree in natural resources, ecology and conservation biology. And then I went on to do a master's degree in fire ecology and management, studying the way that satellites view fires using active fire observations from firefighters. And then I got a job here a few years later as an instructor, moved to senior instructor, and then started a journey to finish my Ph.D., which I completed this last fall in adult organizational learning and leadership. I guess the new name is leadership and organizational development in the College of Education, where I studied how private landowners in Northern Idaho view and use prescribed fire and smoke management techniques. And here I am today.

Leigh: Congratulations. Now you get the extra funny hat.

Heather: That's right.

Leigh: So we're going to be talking a lot about wildfire, but more specifically, we're even going to be talking about prescribed burns.

Heather: And what I'll do even to correct you, not to -

Leigh: Okay. No, go.

Heather: But what we're going to talk about is wildland fire. And just a little bit of terminology here. Wildland fire is any fire that's in our areas that are not built up with human infrastructure. And structure fires are those fires that are within human infrastructure. And within the space of wildland fire, we have unplanned fires, which are wildfires and planned fires, which are prescribed fires. And of course then there's arson and those might be planned, but we don't sanction those.

Leigh: We'll not put them in the same category.

Heather: That's right.

Leigh: Before we get into all of this, what is a prescribed fire?

Heather: So a prescribed fire is best described by tying you to a connection of something you already understand. So I'll give you an analogy here, which is in the world of medicine. When you are not feeling well or if you'd like to feel better, you go to a doctor and the doctor has specific training and they have specific tools and they look at the condition that you have in your body and they say, "These are the things that you need to do." Maybe you need to exercise this way or eat this food or have this medicine. And they give you a prescription. And that prescription, if you follow that, it should lead you to better health. Our wildlands are in bad shape and they have been receiving, historically, they received medicine from the people that lived here and from nature itself through lightning. And that fire that they received was their medicine and that maintained them. The fire that we had in our landscapes, now centuries ago, was something that perpetuated the types of forests and the types of grasslands that were there. Today, with the removal of fire over the last 150, 200 years, we have changed the landscape and the landscape then becomes ill. And there's many things that create an ill landscape, lots of people moving in and making it harder to do management across larger areas, invasive species and many different things. And fire is one of the types of medicine that we have an opportunity to apply. And just like you wouldn't go to, hopefully, some wackadoo doctor and get some random voodoo medicine, you also don't want to use fire in a way that it's not prescribed by someone who has experience and can be very careful with how they use that fire, where they put it, when they put it, looking at the weather very carefully before, during, and after that planned burn. So these burns, these prescribed fires, they are what we'll say fire doctors are trying to apply to our landscape to help improve its health. And again, back to the medicine analogy, there are sometimes side effects to the medicines that doctors provide you. If you exercise, for example, you're going to get sore. If you take medications and you take them more than you're posed to take or less than you' supposed to take, you're not going to have the positive outcomes that's intended from those medicines. And prescribed fire is not without consequences either. There's smoke that comes from prescribed fire. There's some negative impacts to trees that come from prescribed fire. And what we recognize through studying the impacts of prescribed fire is that by and large, across multiple different landscapes, there are more benefits than negatives to prescribed fire, but it must be done carefully.

Leigh: All right. So we use these in Idaho, yes?

Heather: Yes, we do.

Leigh: So what is kind of the status of how prescribed fires are used in Idaho?

Heather: Prescribed fire is primarily a tool used by our agencies that manage our public and private land. And we'll put them into two categories of prescribed fire. We'll describe them as broadcast burning, which is fire that moves across the landscape, under trees, through grass. That's a moving fire. And so you need to have conditions that allow that fire to spread. And then the second type of prescribed fire is pile burning. And sometimes people don't consider pile burning to be prescribed fire. I personally do because you're doing a pile burn and you're paying attention to the conditions, hopefully, that you're burning under. Pile burning is much more used in Idaho from the private land side. Broadcast burning is something that's pretty much centered around those larger landowner, land managers, on those public lands. Our state doesn't use prescribed fire that regularly. Historically, the timber industry had more use of prescribed fire as a way to treat slash after harvest, and that's been a decreasing practice. But prescribed fire is still used by some private landowners, but primarily through our larger federal agencies.

Leigh: So let's focus on private lands for the moment. What are some of the issues that Idaho struggles with in terms of prescribed fires on private lands? What are some places that maybe we need to evolve?

Heather: So thankfully we have a pretty good body of literature nationally, and then just some of the work that I've been doing in Idaho specifically to understand some of these barriers to the use of prescribed fire. And maybe just to step in here, why in the world would we want to have people that own private land to be using fire as a tool?

Leigh: It is a little scary.

Heather: It is a little scary, right? And it's scary because we think about the power that fire can have and we think about the uncertainty of who might be using them. It might be "them", you know?

Leigh: Yeah.

Heather: Like those people that, that we really don't trust. They might use fire and their fire might have an impact on my property and that's a scary thing. The smoke that their fire produces could affect my health and that's a scary thing too. And so when we think about fire on private land, why would we encourage that? As a piece of my introduction that I missed is that I'm also the founder and chair of the Idaho Prescribed Fire Council. And our mission is to promote the safe and effective use of prescribed fire in Idaho. And for goodness sakes, why not just let it go and allow our landscapes to be as they are? And the reason that we hold to this as an important mission is that we know that the use of prescribed fire reduces the likelihood of high intensity wildfires. It is not going to prevent them because there are definitely extreme circumstances that we see in wildfires that can overcome even reduced fuels, but we know that by and large, using prescribed fire as a tool is more effective than thinning alone and mastication and variety of things. So we know that prescribed fire is going to benefit our landscapes, not just preventing wildfires, but also improving habitat, recycling nutrients. There's many, many benefits of prescribed fire because our landscapes evolved with fire. Fire is a part of them. So when we talk about fire on private land and the use of that, it is one way to just continually maintain your property. Broadcast burning is not going to be for every place in every fuel type. Pile burning is pretty accessible. There are also other ways to dispose of your material. It just is often more expensive and it might not be as effective. When we're talking about fire on private land, one of the challenges to that is just uncertainty, not knowing what space they have to work in legally within the state, what are the regulations for getting a permit and having a burn plan, if that's a requirement for what you're doing. There's also a belief of a lack of resources. Maybe they would be willing to use prescribed fire, pile or broadcast, but they are not thinking that they have enough tools at their disposal. They don't, it's just them. Maybe they're alone, maybe they just have a partner. And these are challenges that are reflected across the country. And the way that other states are approaching this, specifically states that have robust burn programs in the Southeast, is a great example. In the Southeast, the fuels there are made of chemical content that just allows them to burn very readily. And if those areas are not burned regularly, they'll have extreme problems. And then spreading across the country through the central United States and even getting in toward the West now are developing systems that can support private landowners and their resources where they have something called prescribed burn associations where they can group together and get a little support for each other to help have the tools necessary and the collective thinking necessary to make good decisions when you're choosing when and where to burn. Another uncertainty is how they will be treated legally if something goes wrong. I would love to live in a world where we're just not living in fear of litigation at all times because to be honest, when we live in a space like that, we will, we should really do nothing. And if we are constantly afraid of being sued, the best way to avoid doing that is to just say, "Well, I will choose no action," but no action in the case of land management leads to worse consequences. When we have no action on any land and wildfire is able to move through an area, we consider that to be an act of God and unpreventable almost, when in reality we have many, many choices. We've had many choices for years to do something. Our lands are getting increasingly fragmented by private land ownership and fire does not care who owns what property. It will walk happily across any property line. And so we need more people that are working together and together is the really important word here because the land management actions of one five acre parcel surrounded by acres of public or private land that are not being treated is not going to make a marketable impact on our wildfires. Now I say that and we did have a fantastic experience here in Moscow in 2021 where my students had been working on two separate private landowners properties and they accomplished really only about four acres of treatment where they thinned and they piled and they burned and they thinned and they piled and they burned some pretty thick stands and a wildfire in 2021 came and it hit those field treatments and that fire behavior reduced. It didn't stop the fire, it just made it more manageable. So I do believe that we need to work collectively to treat our landscapes, but even little bits of work can be very helpful. So circling back to your question, these barriers and things that make it possible for people to use that fire, it is something that we recognize that people are just unsure of their ability to have the resources to manage it, but also if there is some negative outcome, if they, if the fire moves outside of their property and, and damages a tree or, you know, burns something or, or heaven forbid, kills somebody or hurts somebody, how will they cover that financially? And those are real fears. The likelihood of that, we know from looking at all the different burns that are happening is excessively low, but it's still a possibility. Again, back to my medical analogy, the likelihood of you having a negative reaction from a medication, it's low because they've been tested, but it is a possibility. And so we have to decide if we are willing to accept some of that risk that comes with using that tool for the many benefits that come with it. And as a state, we get to decide whether we have an opportunity to adjust our policies so that they improve people's comfort in using fire and protects them so that the public benefit that they are putting their efforts toward by using fire even on their land, whether we provide them an opportunity to have some protection for that.

Leigh: Is there any things in the near forecast that will help Idaho landowners tackle these issues?

Heather: Absolutely. I have been working with, well, I should say we. It's been a very much a collective effort with the Idaho Prescribed Fire Council and our partners with the state and with other different interest groups to identify proposals for policy that will do potentially three things. So the first in this policy that we're going to be hoping to work toward in the near future is to establish what's called a certified burner program. And the certified burner program is something that other states have adopted, again, starting from that Southeastern area. These are very active in the Southeast and in Oklahoma and Kansas and lots of places that identify that fire is a critical part of their management. And this is not just ecological management, this is timber management, this is agriculture management, this is livestock management, improving forage quality. There's many reasons that these states use prescribed fire. And they've identified that in order to encourage people to do that, they need to know what they're doing because going back to the beginning, we don't want people that are willy-nilly just throwing fire out on the ground. We want them to be intelligent. I say regularly that the failure of one prescribed fire is the failure of all. Nobody can distinguish the difference between somebody who wasn't careful in their burning and someone who is. So we all have to be very, very careful. And how do we do that is we develop good training. So my passion in my work is to teach people effectively so that they have confidence in what they do and they do it well. Again, we'll never eliminate all issues, but we can do our best to reduce that. When we are thinking about a certified burner program that can take many different forms, and what I would really like to impress upon people as I'm talking about this is that what we're proposing here is go through many different cycles of feedback, but the certified burner programs that exist in other states, they provide training to people. And this isn't someone who has no experience in the field, has never done any of this work. These are people that typically come having already done a lot of this work themselves and would like to know more. So when they have this training in Washington, for example, it's a three-day training, in other places it's shorter or could be more. There's a variety of different lengths that this training can take and that's decided by the state. So a certified burner program established by a collective of people that have interest and passion in teaching, prescribed fire, will be able to deliver training to people and a system, maybe that's training plus an evaluation burn or some type of combination. Maybe you come to the certified burner program with extensive experience in field burning, for example, but you'd like additional information or support. There's maybe ways to honor past experience that will allow you to move through this program. And we have a way for people to become a certified burner. Now, why would you do such a thing? Like there's, it's great to like just know something for knowing something's sake and hopefully people will come to the training for just that purpose, but there must be more to it than that. So if someone becomes a certified burner, there's an opportunity that other states have taken and we're seeing if we can follow, to provide those certified burners with a decreased negligence. And that just means that when you are a certified burner acting within that scope of your operations, that if something does occur, an unexpected wind shift or damage to a property or someone is getting hurt. Specifically, let's talk about a fire moving outside of your property boundaries because the costs that can come from prescribed fire can land in a few different categories. One of the costs that can come from prescribed fire is suppression costs. If that fire moves into an area where you didn't want it to go and you need to call resources to help put it out, and suppression costs can be very expensive.

Leigh: I would imagine.

Heather: Yes, especially if you have aircraft involved. And as someone who has a burn that moves out of that intended area, don't have control over which resources get called. That's decided by the people that are responding to the fire. And so those suppression resources can be very expensive. And so one possibility that we get to explore is would we be able to offer a certified burners gross negligence for suppression costs. So if they do have that fire moving into that area, firefighting resources are called and that bill does not go to them. And gosh, who pays that bill for those firefighters? Well, here's the thing. If a private landowner is using prescribed fire on their land responsibly, they are providing a public good because they're reducing wildfire across the landscape. And so there's a trade where over time, we know that these prescribed burners are very, very rarely losing burns. And so by and large, the majority of their activities are going to be benefiting the landscape. And so if a fire is lost, that will be a small comparison to the many benefits that are shown across those areas. So then you have damages that are related to third party damages, whether it's somebody else's property. So there's an opportunity to explore ways to reduce people's personal liability if you're burning as a certified burner for those damages as well. And then the question comes, well, who would pay for that? They must pay. If someone hurts me or destroys my property, they must pay. And I don't disagree. We need, need to make sure that people that are affected by prescribed burns are fairly compensated if something does happen. And there are a variety of ways to do that. One is that when you are a certified burner, we are seeing that insurance companies are more likely to offer people insurance, and then that would cover some of those damages when they're working within the scope of their practice. Additionally, this is the third piece of this potential discussion, is something called an indemnity fund. And that fund can be, in other states it's been funded by the state. In our state, that feels less likely to happen because of the way our political arena lies, but there are also other ways to consider that. And an indemnity fund, the intent of it is to have a pool of funds that certified burners can access if items are damaged from their burn. Again, this is all working responsibly. We're not going to cover people for being irresponsible. Just like if you're in a car accident and you are being negligent, your insurance is less likely to cover your accident. But when you're not negligent and something happens and you hit a curb or whatever, rock falls off the thing, like those things happen and your insurance company covers them. That's what we're talking about here is that working responsibly. And how do we work responsibly? Well, we teach people how to do it responsibly so that they can work within that space.

Leigh: Excellent. So let's switch gears a little bit. We've been talking about private lands. Let's go to the public lands. Who is fighting wildfires there? Sorry, wildland fires.

Heather: Well, no, in this case, you're right because they're fighting the wildfires. Those are the unplanned one. Very good. So our wildland fire professionals, this is what I prefer to call them, firefighters I feel like is a narrow view on the people that we have doing this work because firefighting is a very small portion of the efforts that we take part in, in managing of our wildlands. And our fire professionals, they have a minimal requirement for training and for continuing education, and it is quite minimal. So in the world of wildland fire, you have one week of basic training where you go through and you have this basics of general tactics, weather, fire behavior, different things that make you make sure that you're aware when you're new to fire, the basics that you need to know. And then a lot of what you know as a fire professional is taught on the job. As you progress in your career, you take other week-long trainings or several days trainings, but once you've completed a training and once you've completed a qualification, there's not very much expected of you to maintain and to continue to grow that knowledge. This is a considered a blue collar job in many instances, and I would stretch that this job is better served by those that might class better into a green collar, which if you've not heard that before, it's relatively new to me as well, but these are people that can work physically and that work outside and that love that outdoors, but also have a mind toward the impacts of actions on the ground. So it is a mixture of that, I suppose, white collar and blue collar, but in this case, that we can do all this physically hard work, but we can also be considerate of the impacts that those have. And wildland fire versus, again, structure fire, in structure fire, your only purpose is to put out that fire, that is it. And there's no question that it must go out because it is not going to do anything any good if that fire continues.

Leigh: Now the neighbor really, really wants that one out.

Heather: They really do. They really do. And wildland fire is not so black and white. Wildland fire also affects many different types of resources. It affects wildlife, it affects air, it affects water, it affects everything. And so when we are managing our fires, when we are fighting our fires, we are not only just trying to put the wet stuff on the hot stuff. It is an opportunity to think, "What are we going for here?" And we are always managing our fires. We are always doing something for them. Monitoring them is a strategy where we are saying, "What is the best place here?" "How do we keep our firefighters safe as they're approaching this fire?" And this nuance in ways that we approach fire as an event, it must be trained well. And that's a space that personally I feel like we have a lot of opportunity for growth in. I want to grow fire professionals that are three things and all together three things. I want them to be safe, I want them to be effective and I want them to be happy. When our people that are working in these jobs are uncertain about their job standing, when they are unsure of how to do their work and they're asked to be doing things that they don't know how to do, that's not fair. It's not going to make them happy. And we lose a lot of people in our profession because they are unhappy or because they're unsafe or because they see that they're ineffective. And if we provide people better opportunities to learn how to do their trade and do it well and feel confident and powerful -- unstoppable. We have a real opportunity to not just grow and improve our wildlands, but also grow and improve some really fantastic people that are dedicated and love the land and want to do good for it. They just might need to have a little support in giving them the resources to do so.

Leigh: Can you give an example of one of the things you'd like to do?

Heather: Absolutely. Clearly, I work at an institution, right? So I have a little bit of bias on some education. I see the power that education has in growing some really amazing people, but I know that education, especially coming to a four-year institution and moving to a place is not for everybody. And so what I would like to see is more access from employers, so employers supporting their employees to seek out further training in a variety of ways. Maybe that's education, maybe that's some of these training programs that are being put together. We put together through our Student of Fire Initiative a growing list of trainings, and these trainings that we put together are trainings that are part of their progression as fire professionals. But more importantly, we add our own little spice and resources and trying to connect them as much as possible. There's a fuels community of practice, for example, that's meeting once a month on Friday to give people resources. There are options out there to connect, and we need to grow our ability to mentor people and to connect them with people that have answers. We have lost a lot of really skilled professionals in the last few years as things have shifted and people have decided that they don't want to work through some of the challenges that are being put upon them. It's essentially you lose your parents and your grandparents and you don't have anyone to teach you how to make applesauce anymore. And in, in this case, we've lost our, the knowledge of people and we don't know how to help them do our NEPA planning or a burn plan writing and we, and we don't have that decades of experience to teach us what was done in those places. And so we're constantly reinventing the wheel and it is such a waste of time and it's so frustrating. And so we need to keep people and make sure that they are connected to people that can teach them so that not everybody feels like they have to start from scratch every time.

Leigh: Well, we're coming up on it here. Any last thoughts you want to leave with the audience?

Heather: The last though I'd like to leave is that going back to the Student of Fire Initiative, this is a term that was coined by Paul Gleason back in the '90s. And I would love to encourage anyone listening out there, anybody from all levels, no experience to lots of experience, is just constantly being a student of fire. This is as small as looking at your campfire and wondering how it's going to maybe running a large thousand acre burn and just trying to be a student to see what are the conditions that lead to the outcomes. We are working with objectives here. We're trying to reach certain things with the fire that we use on the ground, and we have an opportunity to be stewards of our land and fire is one of the tools that we have to do that if we can be curious and open to it.

Leigh: Heather, thank you so much for coming on today.

Heather: Thank you for having me.

Leigh: All right, Danae, how was that?

Danae: That was really good. This is one example. It's a very good example of people being afraid because something is legitimately scary. Fire can get out of hand, and so, you know, people are kind of stuck not doing anything. But she had this line that was like, "No action is still a choice." And I think that applies to a lot of things in life, but I think it really works here and it really got my brain going and just thinking about you do have to make a choice, and if you don't make a choice, it still has profound effects on the things around you.

Leigh: I really loved the idea of, as she said, other states have these kind of like preventative fire co-ops where, you know, the landowners can work together to make sure that, you know, they all agree that this is a safe time to burn, they can help each other out, you know, physically, and then share the costs as well between all the gear and things that you would need. And I just thought that was such a wonderful idea of all of the local community members working together to preserve their local forests and, hopefully reduce some wildfire risk or at least intensity in their area. It's such a good idea that I hope they're able to be able to get that into place with all of the kind of extra helping hands, including help with insurance and things that they'll do.

Danae: Yeah. I really thought this idea of certified burners was quite brilliant because it makes people smarter, more educated, and it also reduces their risk in case an act of God happens, as it sometimes does.

Leigh: All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to The Vandal Theory. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to help others discover conversations about science, research and innovation at University of Idaho. Email us with research topics, questions or issues you'd like explored in a future episode at vandaltheory@uidaho.edu. And to learn more about research at the university and listen to past episodes of The Vandal Theory, visit go.uidaho.edu/vandaltheory. I'm Leigh Cooper.

Danae: And I'm Danae Lenz.

Leigh: Thank you for listening.