Jackson County works toward wildfire resilience

In 2020, the Almeda Fire ripped through Jackson County. The catastrophic blaze destroyed more than 2,600 homes in Phoenix, Talent, Ashland and Medford.

The “Think Out Loud” team traveled to Southern Oregon recently and talked to residents about how they’re thinking about fire in their communities now.

In Ashland, the city and the forest are tied together. The watershed, which provides the source of Ashland’s drinking water, is more than 15,000 acres of potentially combustible forestland. Chris Chambers is the city’s forestry officer. He’s been a member of Ashland Fire And Rescue since 2002 and has worked on the city’s wildfire planning efforts.

Along with city, federal and tribal partners, the Ashland-based Lomakatsi Restoration Project focuses on ecological resilience in Oregon and Northern California. Its restoration projects are spread throughout the region. Marko Bey is the executive director and founder of the organization. Belinda Brown is the tribal partnerships director.

We hear how Chambers, Bey and Brown are thinking about wildfire resilience and how they approach their work in their communities.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller [narrating]: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to spend the hour today in Ashland. Earlier this spring, we went to Jackson County, the site of the devastating 2020 Almeda Fire, to talk about a variety of efforts to make the region less susceptible to massive blazes going forward. In the second half of the show, we’ll hear from an organization working with tribal, federal, state and regional partners on ecological restoration efforts.

We start in the heart of Ashland’s urban forest. Chris Chambers has worked at Ashland Fire and Rescue since 2002. He’s now the city’s forestry officer and he led the process to rewrite the city’s community wildfire protection plan. One of the biggest challenges in the area is that the city is butted up against 15,000 acres of potentially combustible forest land. It’s called the Ashland Watershed, and it makes up Ashland’s western slope.

Chris took us up into the watershed to give us a sense for the scale of the challenge. We followed him up a winding forest road and eventually he pulled off to the side and we started talking. I asked him where we were.

Chris Chambers: We are in the Lower Ashland Creek Watershed. The Ashland Watershed is the source of the city of Ashland’s drinking water. We’re staring down right now at the water treatment plant. There’s a reservoir upstream from us that feeds water into a pipe system that comes down, gets treated within the plant there, and then it gets piped down into the city and goes into people’s taps, showers and all that.

Miller: Maybe like a quarter mile down a relatively steep slope.

Chambers: A very steep slope. And the city just went through a long, protracted discussion over many, many years about relocating this plant that has been there since the ‘40s or ‘50s, I believe. It’s in a really landslide-prone area. It’s been taken out by landslides and floods. It’s in a very flood prone spot.

Miller: It’s not the best place for critical infrastructure.

Chambers: Not the best place. And you can imagine – it’s hard maybe for people who aren’t looking at it – in such a narrow spot, completely surrounded by trees, if there were a fire, one, we have the safety of the employees who are working there to think about. Where would they go if there were a fire? There’s no way out if you go up from here, so that’s a big concern. And of course, the buildings themselves being in a fire. Would they even be there after a fire?

So, in part, doing the forest management that we’re doing above here, we’re trying to build a moat around this castle in order to better protect it. There’s no eliminating the risk 100%. But at the same time, we can try to minimize it by, in this case, our tool in the toolbox: using prescribed fire.

Miller: We followed you up here to this little lookout, and as soon as we opened the door, I could smell the evidence of a recent burn. What would we have seen if we’d come here … was it just over the weekend?

Chambers: A week ago, on Monday and Tuesday, we had training days for our internal staff, our own Ashland Fire and Rescue firefighters. As we get ready for the wildfire season, we decided, hey, why don’t we get our people out here and use our own city of Ashland-owned forest lands for our training? We need to get these burns done anyway, so why don’t we help coach our people to learn how to do it, because it’s also a tactic that’s used during fire season. When we hear about firefighters doing burnouts on fires, they’re using fire to fight fire.

Miller: How much planning and preparation happens before a burn like this?

Chambers: A lot. We were discussing earlier and showing off burn plans … I’ve got one right here that we had developed for city forest lands. Burn plans are many, many dozens of pages of parameters that you set for your burn conditions. It’s things like wind speeds, temperatures, humidity, how much fuel is out there. What are your targets, how are you trying to use fire, what are you going to contain it with, how are you gonna talk to people who are working on the prescribed fire – which is the communications plan – what happens if the fire escapes? There’s a contingency plan for that.

So it really spans a really wide gamut, all within the narrow confines of prescribed fire. But it’s not just one page that you’re looking at a couple of things and following that plan. It is a multi-page document that has a whole bunch of points that you have to stop, check yourself, go through some check boxes and say, “are we meeting this plan?” Everybody can probably think of some cases where fires escaped and caused lots of damage. That’s a big challenge to the broader community of prescribed fire, just because we need this fire on the landscape so badly. When things escape, it’s really unfortunate because it’s a black eye on all prescribed burning across the country.

We try to be very careful when we’re doing these burns and having everything in place. We had one of those plans last week for this training burn. Everything went well.

Miller: How often does it happen that everything’s in place, you’ve gone through all of that preparation, and then right before you’re gonna start, you decide conditions have changed?

Chambers: We’ve been burning here on city forest land since 2012. It’s happened to me three times since then, where everybody has had all their gear on, we’ve done the initial briefing, we’re all standing around waiting to go and then we just pull the plug. That’s happened for different reasons. One, actually, we had just started burning and a rain cloud came over. It was like one isolated dark cloud. You could see it coming. It came right over the fire and just rained on it.

Miller: That sounds like “Peanuts,” like a Charlie Brown … over one sad person.

Chambers: It was kind of like a Charlie Brown … That one was really interesting.

But two other times, we’ve started. You do a test fire at the beginning, that’s in just a small corner of your burn unit, and then you evaluate if that test fire accomplished your objectives. So, an area that’s maybe 20 feet by 20 feet. I’ve seen it a couple of times where the test fire just didn’t accomplish the objective. It can be that it didn’t burn hot enough and it’s just really not doing much, or I’ve also seen it burn way too hot, and we evaluate it and say, “today’s not the day.”

So there’s a lot of reasons. Smoke management is a big part of prescribed burning. I’m sure people across the state have seen smoke from prescribed burns across Oregon. It’s not uncommon to see smoke or see signs that say, “Prescribed Burn Ahead,” something like that. It is a big challenge in burning, to keep smoke away from communities as much as possible. We have to tolerate some smoke, but we can do a much better job in the prescribed burn setting of managing smoke than what we get during the summer wildfires when we really have no choice. We just get whatever is happening on the fire and everybody in Oregon knows that there can be some really thick smoke days that are really intolerable.

Miller: Have you noticed a change in the way the general public views prescribed burns since you’ve been doing them?

Chambers: I have certainly noticed that, at least here in Ashland. It used to be exceedingly difficult to get any kind of burning done, even just the burn piles. Over time, I think through education and experience, we’ve actually got the state to relax the burn rules a little bit so that we can have a wider range of conditions to burn under.

And I think, in part, it has helped, though tragically so, that we’ve had these really horrible fire seasons. And people see like, oh, we really need to manage our forests and be good stewards because we see what happens when we don’t. So we need to tolerate some of this for now in order to have a better future down the road, where we can manage fire in the landscape, keep fires smaller, but still allow enough fire so that it fulfills its natural role in the ecosystem.

Locally here, through studies, we’ve been able to recreate that fire return interval of what fire did over thousands and thousands of years, primarily used by Indigenous tribes here in the Rogue Basin and specifically here in Ashland, where fire was really a common visitor. Every seven to 10 years, there was a fire through just about every acre in the lower watershed here. And in some places, there were fires every couple of years as you got closer and closer to where people lived.

Miller: The last time we talked – that was via Zoom, so I’m very happy to be able to stand here with you now and actually see where you do your work – it was about a really immense fir die-off. That was a while ago, though. So can you just remind us what happened?

Chambers: Yeah, that was quite an episode, with all the drought that we experienced over the last, especially the last 10 years, and even the last five or six years. I just heard the other day that ODF had reported that this was the driest 20 years in the last thousand years.

Miller: That really puts it in perspective.

Chambers: Significant drought here, throughout the whole state. It was pretty bad in Southern Oregon. And now that there’s been some research on it … Douglas fir is very common in Oregon, but it’s also a tree that has benefited significantly from the lack of natural fire. Douglas fir, when it’s a small tree, is really susceptible to fire and consistent fire would have kept a lot of Doug fir from growing. Because they’re baby trees, they get burned, they don’t grow up to be big trees.

Trees like ponderosa pine and oaks do a lot better with fire than Douglas fir does. There are places where there were Douglas fir on this landscape for sure, but the last 150 years of fire suppression and logging has created a lot of low elevation Douglas fir that really didn’t belong here. But it did well in a period when the climate was relatively moist.

The climate is changing, and we saw that during the drought over the last decade. The Douglas fir trees really, really got hammered by a combination of really dry years, and especially dry springs, as well as the hot temperatures. So, we saw a massive die-off a couple of springs ago and realized we had to do something about it. We just couldn’t live with this dying forest, literally right in people’s backyards and as the backdrop to the city. So we mobilized and actually removed many, many thousands of dead and dying Douglas fir.

Miller: What has that meant in terms of your people power and your budget?

Chambers: This year the budget was pretty slim because we spent a lot of money on that tree removal project. Right now, we would be doing a lot of burning and we’ve got burn plans on the shelf ready to go. We would have already done probably two to three burn units – it’s anywhere from 50-100 acres of burning. We were able to do this training burn, which is only maybe an acre to an acre-and-a-half. So, having to respond to that tree die off meant that our budget money went there. We don’t get new money until July 1, so we’re kind of sitting on our hands right now, at least on the city forest land side.

We abut U.S. Forest Service, the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. They do have plans to do some burning just above where we are right now. They’re waiting to get the conditions right for that, but that could be as soon as the next couple of weeks.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of land that should have fire put on it right now around here? Because you’re talking about a one-acre training burn or a 30- to 50-acre unit for an average city run burn, but how many zeros do we need to add to that acreage to start to understand the problem?

Chambers: I wish I had the data at my fingertips, but it’s significant. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of acres that have missed multiple fire cycles, that are behind. And it is an enormous task to think about it. But at the same time, you really have to start working on it or fire is going to be the correction factor during the summertime. And when we’re close to communities and we’re in key areas like a municipal watershed, there’s a lot at risk.

We’ve gone through this exercise for the whole Rogue River Basin. How do you consider all the different assets, including the communities themselves and the habitat for creatures? You put that all into a big model and you come up with priorities. You can actually start to break it down to, OK, well, if we got several thousand acres done here, in this spot, we could protect something pretty significant. So there’s a method to that madness, and it actually starts to make sense, and you can start to assign budget numbers and feel like, OK, if we bite off this section, we can finish it.

We actually did that same thing when we started the Ashland Forest Resiliency Project, which the origins go back to 2004. We started doing the work in 2010. It was just one demonstration unit, which we passed on the way up the road, that was like five acres, and now we’ve done over 14,000 acres. So it’s possible, it does happen and you can do it strategically in places where it’s going to make the biggest difference.

Miller: How much do you think that the 2020 Almeda Fire, in particular, changed the way people in Ashland think about fire?

Chambers: I think the Almeda Fire changed people’s perspective in that we always looked to the forest as being the source of the big fire that was going to do the bad thing. And it’s always been that discussion of, how do we manage our forests to better protect ourselves from fire? And meanwhile, we’ve been passing codes, and trying to encourage fire-wise communities and better construction. There’s even a picture of me – when we had a newspaper back in the day – in 2014, just a stone’s throw from where the Almeda Fire started, saying that we needed to address fuels management across the whole landscape, not just in our forests.

And it turns out that the Bear Creek corridor ended up being the fuse that lit the Almeda Fire into Phoenix and Talent. I don’t think many people thought that it was going to be in that place and that kind of fire that burned right through the middle of our communities, destroyed so many homes and businesses, and tore lives apart. It just wasn’t part of our consciousness that it was going to be that kind of fire – and yet it was. So, now we have to think a lot more holistically about how our community was built, how it’s laid out, how we can mitigate those hazards within that built environment and where’s the fire gonna come from next time? If that fire had started at Emigrant Lake, just east of Ashland, that would have been Ashland, and not Talent and Phoenix burning, or maybe it would have been all three. So, we’ve had a lot of discussions about that.

As we’re rolling out a new community wildfire protection plan this Sunday at an open house, that’s a big focus of this new vision of wildfire for the city of Ashland – let’s focus on the buildings in our community and make them as fireproof as we possibly can. Let’s think about evacuations, which we have already done a lot of work on. But also, let’s look all around us at grasslands, at forest lands, and think about where we can do really important work like prescribed fire in all different settings, so that we can develop opportunities to protect ourselves before a fast-moving fire hits the side of Ashland and starts eating away into our buildings, our businesses and institutions.

Miller: What does everything we’re talking about mean for the watershed?

Chambers: That’s a good question. The Ashland Watershed has been unique throughout modern history. It received early protection, lobbied for by the city in the 1890s. It was also a stronghold for northern spotted owls. It may or may not still be that. It received special status as a Late Successional Reserve in the Northwest Forest Plan in the ‘90s. Now, we’re seeing the same trend in the Ashland Watershed that a lot of the Pacific Northwest forests have seen with spotted owls, in that we have barred owls that now have moved in, and we’re trying to figure out what that means for the habitat and the owls.

But beyond that, it’s been a source of recreation, really a source of pride for the community, that we have this beautiful backdrop to our community. It brings the ski areas at the top in Mount Ashland, brings folks here for mountain biking, for road running, trail running. It’s become a significant part of our community, our identity, but also of our economy, as people come here, spend money in town. They come to enjoy the forest as well as go to Shakespeare.

Miller: We’re in the middle of an immense complicated checkerboard of jurisdictions and ownership: state land, city land, private land, federal land. What’s your relationship like right now with your federal partners?

Chambers: It is still good. We’ve built a really strong relationship, as the city and the Forest Service were in this Master Stewardship Agreement for 15 years, with other partners as well. But essentially, we’re tied together because we have this watershed in common. We share borders. There aren’t a lot of cities that have the U.S. Forest Service share their city limits, but we do and that’s a big responsibility. So it really necessitates working together as partners.

Actually, on our training, we had one of my colleagues come from the Forest Service to do some of the instruction of our firefighters, knowing that they have an expertise that we don’t have. They were able to come down, teach the class, help our folks understand how the ignition patterns change the fire behavior and show off some other ignition devices that we don’t see normally … because folks from the Forest Service travel all over the country, doing that kind of work.

It’s really beneficial that we have those relationships. So when we do have a fire, it’s not the first time we’ve ever met each other and we’re across the hood from each other staring at a map saying, “what are we gonna do about this fire?” It’s like, OK, we already know where we’re gonna go because we did this work in that place, and we managed that prescribed fire and now we have an opportunity to corral this summer wildfire.

It has already happened a few times that we have had lightning strikes happen inside prescribed burn units. And so it’s kind of the story of the fire that wasn’t. There’s not much to report on it. It’s clearly a tree that got hit by lightning and you can’t say, “well, there was a big fire that started.” But you can say, “if this prescribed burn hadn’t been there, there may have been a big fire that started as a result of that.” I mean, we can’t say for sure, but at the same time, that’s success. It’s not very sexy and there’s not a lot to point out, but at the same time, that’s the whole point of it. It’s just business as usual. Lightning hit on the hillside and didn’t start a fire or started a really small fire that we corralled with two people and a small fire engine.

So, redefining what that means is really, I think, an important part of the story as we get into this new generation, bringing more and more people into the fold on this, and expecting that, yeah, we’re gonna change the way we do business. Hopefully, firefighting becomes less hazardous in the future, and more people are tempted to get into wildland firefighting and stay with it. Right now, it’s kind of a scary profession.

Miller: So that it might be harder to actually get final approval and get a plan together in the coming years because some of those people who are behind the scenes have been let go.

Chambers: Yes, that is definitely a big worry. As we’re rolling out our new community wildfire protection plan, we have several initiatives that involve working with the Forest Service for planning. One of them is coming up with a more comprehensive plan for climate change and how that’s going to impact the Ashland Watershed. We have a lot of data, we have a lot of research, but of course, now, “climate change” is a bad word with the federal government. I don’t know how a local community, who is looking at very real impacts that are happening in front of us, right now, that we can see, and now we’re being told by the federal government that …

Miller: You can’t use that word.

Chambers: … we can’t address it. We can’t address that? It’s happening. Look, there it is, right there. And that extends to decreasing snowpack and other issues that we know are part and parcel of climate change. But how do you plan for it with a federal partner that no longer recognizes that that is happening?

Miller: Chris, thanks very much.

Chambers: Oh, of course, it’s my pleasure. I really believe in this and one of my goals is getting back involved with the Oregon Prescribed Fire Council. I’ve been to the last few meetings and look forward to helping move this forward more into the public consciousness of how important it is.

Miller [narrating]: Chris Chambers is Ashland’s forestry officer. We talked to him in the Lower Ashland Creek Watershed.

We went [to Ashland] almost five years after the Almeda Fire to talk about wildfire resilience and restoration. One of the mornings we were there, we met up with Belinda Brown and Marko Bey from the Lomakatsi Restoration Project. Lomakatsi is a nonprofit focused on developing and implementing forest and watershed restoration initiatives throughout the west. Marko is Lomakatsi’s executive director and founder. Belinda is the tribal partnerships director.

They took us to Ashland Ponds, the park on the north side of the city, right near where the Almeda Fire started. As we were just getting started with our interview, Belinda found something in the grass, and I asked her what it was.

Belinda Brown: This is a tool. It’s a pestle, and it’s still here as the evidence of the Shasta Athabascan people that lived here.

Miller: I wouldn’t have known that was a tool. I would have just seen that as a rock.So that’d be to grind grain.

Brown: Right. And their acorns. The acorns were one of their first foods here for subsistence.

Miller: When you find that here … We just parked, you parked your truck here and we had barely even started our walk [when] you found this. Are you just gonna put it back?

Brown: Yes, absolutely. We try to bury it or keep it in a place where it’s not gonna get broken. Out in the east side, a lot of cows walk over these types of objects and break them, especially the arrowheads. These survive because people don’t know what they are. It looks like a common rock if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

Miller: What is Lomakatsi?

Marko Bey: Lomakatsi – we’re a nonprofit organization, based here in Ashland, Oregon. We just celebrated our 30th anniversary in January. We focus on forest and watershed restoration. We’re tribally-affiliated. Wildfire management and tribal workforce development is a key anchor of our work. We work throughout four states: Oregon, California, Nevada and Idaho. We work with a lot of federal and state partners – federally recognized and non-federally recognized tribes – to increase the pace and scale of ecosystem restoration, and in this context, forest resiliency and forest restoration. Lomakatsi means “life in balance” in Hopi.

But all through here, this is where the Almeda Fire came through and it looks a lot different. We have some resprouting, regrowth, but you could see all the standing dead hardwoods in here and the cottonwoods that got burned up. But this particular area, right in here, where there’s different pine trees, we planted those. They were this big. And we’ve been managing this in partnership with the city of Ashland, Parks and Rec., and we’ve been using controlled burning periodically to maintain this area. When the fire came through, this is the area that survived.

Miller: The part that you had all been working on is the part that survived.?

Bey: Yeah. We’ve been managing the vegetation, the city has been managing it. You know, there were some spot burns that happened. You could see the dead standing trees. This looked a lot different after the Almeda Fire, it was just charred. But the green area is the area that we’ve been maintaining, not just with fire but also vegetation management, like annual maintenance.

And this has been a non-chemical application because the community is here, young students are here, and it’s an adopt-a-site. This eco-cultural restoration project really demonstrates ecological restoration, but also tribal cultural management for plants, for different cultural resources, living resources. The city adopted this, Lomakatsi proposed it – our organization – and the city Parks and Rec. accepted this model project, and so did the city of Ashland’s Forest Lands Commission. So we got approval, and you’ll see on the sign over here, this is the Ashland Pond Restoration Project. And this is really restoring habitats. People often think about fuels reduction and prescribed burning in the context of community wildfire safety, which is really important. That’s a big part of our work as an organization, we want to protect the community, but we also want to protect important habitats and maintain those habitats.

This shows the partnership we have with Ashland Parks and Rec. You could read the sign – thousands of students, teachers, parents have been helping to restore this piece of ground since we started here in 2006. So it’s been a while. This was overgrown, impenetrable. You couldn’t even see from where we’re standing, impenetrable blackberries and brambles. We put crews in here with chainsaws. The city put some light impact equipment and we then restored the Ponderosa Pine component that’s part of this gallery woodland, so you’ve got big oak trees in here. You’ve got cottonwoods, you’ve got large oaks.

Miller: It’s still relatively open.

Bey: We’ve created that open valley bottom habitat. These trees were tiny. Now they’re towering, which is awesome.

Miller: Maybe this is impossible for anyone to say definitively, but if you had been able to do this kind of work on this entire area, do you think the Almeda Fire would have burned Talent and Phoenix?

Bey: I think it would have been a lot less severe. And that was the issue. It was an anomaly event, wind driven, in September, burning through a riparian area of predominantly blackberry brambles with some other fuel litter under the blackberries – decades of blackberry canes. So, I think you would have a lot less severe fire. Not to say fire wouldn’t have jumped around, but having that contiguous fuel all the way up the riparian corridor with the wind driven event, it set the stage for what happened.

Miller: Can I ask, what do you see when you look here right now?

Brown: What I see is that active management does work, that people are meant to be on the land. The land needs us. For our people, this was our grocery store, this was our Home Depot, our church, our pharmacy. So it’s very important that we are out here and tending this land. It wasn’t a wilderness landscape.

Miller: This is such an important point that I feel like we’ve talked about on the show over the years, but it bears repeating. There’s this Western idea, progressive-liberal idea of the last, I don’t know, 100-plus years, that the best version of nature is a peopleless nature. Keep people away in every form, and that’s the highest version of nature. What you’re saying is people need to be on this land.

Brown: We are nature. We’re still biological creatures. The elders will tell you that if you live in the natural rhythms of the earth, sea and heavens, and eat … There’s rose hips right over there, that you can see. If you eat the foods that you grow, that you gather in the environment where you live, you’re gonna be happier and healthier. That connection has been interrupted, of people and the earth. The earth misses us, we miss the earth. This is our mother, so that separation is making us discordant in our physical, our mental and our spiritual beings.

Miller [narrating]: We continued our tour, and once again, Belinda found another artifact near the side of the path. I asked her what she’d found.

Brown: This is like our kitchen tools. These are tools that our women used. You could use it to soften a hide, to grind your acorns.

Miller: Can you describe what it looks like?

Brown: It is a grinding stone, and it is oval in shape.

Miller: It looks like a large bar of soap, except pockmarked.

Brown: It does. And if you feel that in your hand, you can feel how it was rubbed and ground materials. It’s a beautiful one, a beautiful stone. I’m sure that took many, many years to grind down in that shape.

Miller: How old might that be?

Brown: It could be thousands of years old, because these are our kitchen tools that were probably handed down from generation to generation. So however long it took to make it into that shape and then handed down through the generations of women who used it for a kitchen tool. It’s like our Fred Meyer, here.

Miller: And you’re just gonna put it back.

Brown: I am gonna just put it back. Those are what we call our grandmother stones, that, again, not very many people recognize because they just look like common rocks to the normal person.

Miller: To the non-Native person.

Bey: OK, if I ask her a few questions that might help?

Miller: Yes, please.

Bey: As that ties to fire, when you think about these large oak trees, and a good acorn mast means you’re gonna be putting fire on the ground. So that demonstrates the processing of that fire-generated first food, so that rock tells a story about putting fire on the ground.

Brown: Absolutely. And fire was even used to roast the acorns, because 300 to 400 pounds of acorns they had to gather for the winter. When you’re gathering right now, the first foods that are coming out right now, you’re gathering for the winter. You’re already thinking about, how much food do we need to get through the next winter? Moving from place to place and doing that type of gathering in those areas where they know that there’s food. So the fire is put on the ground the spring before, the fall before, they’re gonna have the new shoots come back. For a lot of the basketry materials like willows, they can get really decadent too, so they need fire because that’s how we made our baskets. Our people are renowned for their baskets.

Bey: Farming the landscape with fire in a patchy mosaic.

Brown: And it is the Aboriginal anthropogenic fire, that Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, marrying now with Western science. Fire ecology came around in the early ‘60s that both sides are recognizing, again, bipartisan, coming to realize that the first best stewards of the land actually had it right. So for time immemorial this is how the land was kept and now fire ecology is catching up with the “why.”

Miller: And getting rid of the “10 a.m. rule,” [fire suppression policy] or the idea that all fire is bad.

We’re approaching the oak tree that you were so excited to see has survived.

Bey: Yeah, this older California black oak, it’s a place we’ve come as an organization for the last couple decades, taking students down here, tribal representatives, to show them this reference ecosystem, right here. We have some large oak trees, and this is the epicormic sprouting. It took a couple of years. But the fire, the heat, this tree had no foliage for about two years. Now, it’s sprouting, which is great to see. Hopefully in its recovery, they’ll have a good acorn mast. It also shows the resilience of these large old trees, the ability to withstand an event like the Almeda Fire. This had no foliage two years ago. Epicormic sprouting – I’m really happy to see that.

Miller: What does epicormic mean?

Bey: It’s sprouting at the branches. Typically, advantageous shoots would be stuff coming from the base. Basal sprouting would be at the base of the tree. If a tree dies and the main stem of that tree is gone, it’ll resprout at the base. Epicormic sprouting is throughout the branches.

Miller: So, am I right that it seems like a sign of overall health? If you can sprout all over all the branches of a tree, it means it’s taking up water from the bottom …

Bey: Its roots are still accessing good water resources. And this right here was charred. You could see what they did for safety. They topped all these ponderosa pine … and there was some really large ponderosa pine down here that they had to fall. The fellers came in because fire was burning, they put a bulldozer through here. A couple of years ago, this was just black, charred, freshly scorched, and now you’re starting to see that regeneration come back. This is how we learn about fire responses, through observation.

And as Belinda talked about, you think about how you engineer prescribed burning. It’s based on application, observation and then adjusting your prescription. It’s the same with pre-colonial contact, when lightning was moving across the landscape and lightning that generated fire was burning at different intensities. So if you had a fire that burned at a more moderate intensity, say you had 300 acres of hardwoods that got top-killed, you would know how to create that condition through your application because that’s your firewood resource. You’re gonna be able to come back in two years and just break those trunks off. So, in your mind, you’re inventorying, this is where our fire resources are, this is where we can manage for basket plants, where we can manage for certain foods. So we’re gonna engineer fire to get that response.

It’s really similar to the modern day. These great practitioners, who are either dotting, or they’re strip burning, or they’re creating a fire intensity to get a result. And if you’re just managing for fuels, you wanna burn at a certain intensity. If you’re managing for habitat, you wanna retain some patches of unburned, you wanna burn some areas a little more intensely, so that’s the whole engineering, the art. And then there’s a science behind it. When you think about traditional ecological knowledge, Western science, fire ecology, it applies the same on the ground – what are our objectives? And you can learn that just through seeing this high intensity burn here. What’s the response? How’s it coming back? It’s regenerating. So, a lot to learn through observation.

Miller [narrating]: At one point I asked Marko to give us a sense of the scale of the landscape in the West that needs attention.

Bey: In these fire-adapted landscapes, capacity is an issue. To strategically treat hazardous fuels from over 100-150 years of fire exclusion, previous mismanagement, heavy-handed industrial forestry has definitely had an influence. Tree plantations burning hot. How do we scale this work up? And how do we increase that treatment on the ground and incubate a culture of caretaking and ecosystem restoration work? The best way that we found in our organization, the longest standing way to invest is with tribal communities.

We see agency people, great friends and allies from our agencies, move around. We’ve been through maybe six forest supervisors on one forest we work on. We see a lot of movement, but with the tribal communities we work with, they’re still there, they’re place-based. We want to scale that capacity. We do that through a program called Indian Youth Service Corps and Tribal Conservation Corps.

But in doing that, we’re tying into landscape-scale planning for forest resiliency, whether it’s mixed conifer forests, pinyon pine, juniper, to sagebrush habitats. We’re taking this model, and it could be replicated in different ecosystems, different communities, different landscapes. That’s what we’ve been doing over the last decade, is scaling that model to create community capacity, both on the technical end, the science end and the traditional ecological knowledge – which isn’t only tribal people. It could be place-based ranchers who know the landscape and have used fire, so that’s the scaling that needs to occur. That’s the model across Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and California, and a lot of the tribal communities are leading the way to make that happen.

We’re bringing that information to the Rogue Basin, bringing Native people from all over the region to look at this landscape with ecologists, to give that input. This is a challenging place to create a culture of fire, because of the population, because of I-5, because of the way the valley is structured, and the ability to get fire on the ground – it’s challenging. On Fremont-Winema [National Forest], where our crews are burning today and will be burning all week, it’s a lot more remote. We can get a lot more accomplished with fire, but we’re also protecting the wild/urban interface.

The 242 Fire, the Bootleg Fire, nearly burned the community of Chiloquin down. Those tribal members have been training over here in the Rogue Basin for years with Lomakatsi, and they go back to their homelands, and they bring that skill set and knowledge to apply to their landscape. So this is a regional movement to create eco-stewards, essentially, and fire practitioners.

Miller: You mentioned working with a lot of different partners, including federal partners. What’s it been like in the last 100 or so days working with federal partners?

Bey: It’s changed. We just got back from Washington, D.C. Our team was back there with seven other organizations, tribal organizations, and some elected tribal leaders. We always maintain a good relationship at the national, regional and local levels, with our federal partners. So from both USDA and Department of Interior agencies ...

Miller: Forest Service and BLM.

Bey: Forest Service, BLM, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ...

Miller: The entire alphabet soup.

Bey: Yeah, we work with all of them. And the reason we have to work with all of them, in the context of this modern universe – and I’ll get back to your question – is the landscape jurisdiction changes. We have these “All-lands” projects, like the Ashland Forest All-Lands Restoration Project was a 52,000-acre project – you were up there with Chris Chambers yesterday. And just adjacent to it is the West Bear All-lands Project. These are projects we developed. We made the names, we proposed the projects and we have to go after funding for each of the agencies that serve the land allocation.

So if it’s BLM, we’re working through BLM programs, we’re going to the BLM, we’re proposing projects. And they might join private lands, which are then managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service partners for Fish and Wildlife Private Lands Program, or the Natural Resource Conservation Service – the USDA sister or brother of the Forest Service that works with private owners – and then a whole variety of other programs to piece together the funding. Then we strategically define where we’re gonna do these treatments. So our federal partners have been key to that work and we have different Memorandums of Understanding [MOU] cooperative agreements.

We’re not contractors, we don’t go bid on work. We propose projects, develop them with our team and then we go after the funding to make those projects happen. We geospatially arrange them. But currently, there’s been a lot of loss of the workforce. Our federal funding was impacted around February, $10 million frozen, to do good prescribed firework, to do good ecological thinning …

Miller: Work that was already planned?

Bey: Planned and funds obligated in these agreements. These agreements span two to 10 years. They’re master agreements that we establish. Then when the funds become available, we obligate those through these different supplemental agreements. We had one program through the Department of Fish and Wildlife. It came from the Office of Wildland Fire, Department of Interior, down to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge System to their Private Lands Program, and we received $2 million. Lomakatsi was shovel-ready. All these private lands. We had 950 acres in hand piles.

You can’t just go out and put fire on the ground. You gotta do all the pre-work, the thinning, the hand pile burning. We had those funds frozen. And then we were able to work with our allies in the federal government at the national and regional level, and get those funds unfrozen. So, slowly, the funds are becoming unfrozen, but we’ve lost a lot of our agency capacity. We were talking about this today on a National Park Service project. We have a million dollars sitting there, it’s not in Oregon, it’s with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in Idaho, and we lost all of our National Park Service ecology leads ...

Miller: The people who you’re working with to get this done?

Bey: The people who we were working with took a fork in the road, early retirement, because of the whole downsizing of the federal government. Another thing we do at Lomakatsi, we do the NEPA work. We are the third-party NGO partner that writes NEPA projects – National Environmental Policy Act. Belinda helps to lead National Historic Preservation Act work. So all of this work, if it’s federal money, we have to go through a NEPA process. That’s an analysis of impacts.

Miller: So you still have to go through this because of federal law, but is there anybody who can actually review what you’re writing?

Bey: It’s challenged right now. We do have some people, but we have not made complete sense of what it looks like just yet. It’s still fresh and new. We’ve lost 20-30% of our colleagues in the agency. Everywhere from senior ecologists to grants and agreement staff that help to administer the funds that eventually become ecosystem resilience work, prescribed firework. So we’re continuing to work on it slowly, but we were very proactive. We didn’t just sit and wait to be told that “your funds are frozen.” We worked with our elected officials, both Republican and Democrat. We went to D.C. We made some cases, we got some national media and we joined with other organizations to say, Fire and Fuels funding is frozen, that is going to protect communities and protect ecosystem services. So we’re happy to see, little by little, that funding is getting unfrozen.

Miller: How partisan have you found that the work you’re doing is?

Bey: I think it’s a nonpartisan issue that has a lot of bipartisan support. I think there’s some nuances in language. If you’re talking about climate change or certain buzzwords that may not be perceived as neutral, that’s where the issues come from. But I think in general, it’s supported by both sides of the aisle.

Miller: So if you’re gonna be trying to put together a new project now, even if it’s affected by climate change, might you figure out a way to not use those words, but instead to talk about fuel reduction, drought or something?

Bey: Exactly. And when we started out, Lomakatsi, it was the Clinton administration, then Bush Jr., then two terms of Obama, then Trump, then Biden and Trump again. We’re doing the same work. We’re changing the terminology at the end of the day.

One thing that’s important is we have to reduce fuels, we have to remove commercially viable trees in an ecological way. We do it through an ecological forestry approach and the current administration wants to increase timber production. We think that makes sense in certain places from an ecological standpoint, so I think we can align with some of the current administration’s perspectives. But at the end of the day, it’s no different from what we’ve been doing. It’s still the same, but what might be different is rules and regulations around NEPA or Endangered Species Act.

We don’t know what the future looks like, but what we heard in D.C. from Republicans and Democrats is we need to do this resiliency work.

Miller: Thank you very much.

Bey: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Brown: Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Miller [narrating]: Belinda Brown is a tribal partnerships director at Lomakatsi Restoration Project. Marko Bey is Lomakatsi’s founder and executive director. We spoke to them at Ashland Ponds, near the starting point of the Almeda Fire.

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