This is Forest to Frame, where we explore how restoring forests creates beautiful spaces. A podcast dedicated to conversations with industry leaders shaping the future of the forest industry. And now, here's your host, Russ Vaagen. Hi everybody, Russ here for another episode of Forest to Frame. Today I'm going to talk a little bit, even though we're a little bit about wildfire and firefighting, even though we've kind of moved into the fall season, we've got some cooler temperatures and some rain, but we still have some fires around. We certainly in our area have firefighting camp still going on, lots of activity from firefighting crews from around the West, around the state, around the region, etc. You know, it's a, it's a topic for me that is difficult because I get very angry about things that I see. I get to see more than most do. And I would come from a direction that maybe paints that in a certain way, but you know, when you have weeks on end where your air quality. is at best 190. And I And you're continually inundated with smoke. You get tired of it. And in one particular case this summer, late this summer actually was fire started Labor Day weekend, dry lightning, it wasn't human caused. But we had conditions, which we do every summer. And I think a lot of people don't realize this, but in the Intermountain West where we have fire adapted landscapes, we get dry lightning, accompanied with very little if any rain. And these, you know, thunderstorms have lightning hits the ground. And it's also accompanied by a lot of wind. So you ignite a fire, wind comes pushes it hot temperatures, little to no moisture recipe for wildfire very quickly. And I just like I saw there were some communities and valleys around us here where their air quality was 500. That means that you're indoors and the smell the smoke seeps in and you can't escape it. It's where ash is just falling. You know, ever so lightly, everything's got a coating of ash on it. And this is from 30, 40 miles away sometimes. And so we always think that, okay, the firefighters are out there doing that and taking care of it, fighting the fire, but they're not always fighting the fire. And the leadership that's making decisions, I don't have a whole lot of confidence in. I'll touch on it some more, but I think the US Forest Service has to get completely out of fighting wildfire. The incentive to restore our forests while still maintaining a firefighting force that actually pays more than your job to restore the forest, I think is a perverse incentive. And I don't even think they're good at it. And I'm not saying they don't work hard. I just don't think. it's effective. And we're not spending the money on restoring the forest, we're spending the money putting these camps together and fighting fires. But most of the firefighting isn't actually fighting fire. They're fighting fire from the air. I'm a big supporter of planes and helicopters fighting wildfire. I think we should put more aircraft in more places so we can get on them very quickly. And then work in the rest of the year to thin the forest so when fires do happen, they are something that we can fight. And that some of the benefits of prescribed fire happened through wildfire, where it's a low intensity burn, and it helps things along. There's a couple of things that happened during this wildfire season. One of the fires burnt up some property that my family's had for a long time, Boggum Brothers Lumber, it's a timberland, but we use it for hunting and recreation. And that's culturally something we've done here for a long time. And so it's how we create a lot of rapport with the family, you get to go out and hike around, and you're really intent on identifying and hopefully taking your game, whether it's grouse, here, whitetail deer, elk, etc. And so one of the pieces of property that caught fire was a property that I know very well, I've walked all over it, I've probably been to it over 100 times, and know most of it, like you would anything that you know really well. And I got a call from somebody who saw it start from the lightning. I notified my family members that that are managing that and said, Hey, this is what's going on. And it was in a place where it was really hard to get to. So it was really a condition where It was hard to fight because it was in the back country and it started in the evening. So there wasn't a lot of, there wasn't a lot of access to it. So it got out of control. So I always wanted to go up there, but the fire kept going and went from one that it was about two thirds up on the Ridge where it started and it came up and then burnt over that Ridge down the other side and to these other mountain tops. The majority of the property is down by the road and it's somewhat flat. Years ago, we planted a bunch of trees in the field to create more forest and it's been an actively managed area. Trees are either, I think there is some planting that went on there besides that, but most of it is natural regeneration. There's always trees on the landscape because it's multi-age management of the forest. It's beautiful and it's effective and it's a great, ecosystem that is working for all the plants, trees, wildlife, et cetera. And so I knew that that fire started up on the hill and burned over the hill. So everything from here down to the road was essentially safe from the wildfire because the fire had burned up over it. So it's already burned out all the fuel. So even if the wind pushed back, it would have to start another fire to burn back the other way. So this firefighting force kind of comes together and it's a interagency group. And so I just want you to think about the fact that we've got multiple bureaucratic, excuse me, multiple bureaucratic agencies coming together to manage something. I don't know about you, but to me, that doesn't sound like efficiency. And I am a little jaded on that. However, These people are setting up camps. And what I do, I really love to see is the firefighting forces that go and they set up in someone's driveway to protect their home and around their house. I think that's like, that's one of the greatest things about that where we're protecting people's homes. Other part of it, most people see the forest and they just see this wild landscape, and maybe it's the Forest Service, maybe it's state, who knows whose land it is, but a lot of it's private land. In this particular case, it's private land. And so it's a fenced and gated landscape. place because a lot of people like to go hunt and they would just go on there and they don't want people with four-wheelers and side-by-sides and everything else going on their private property. So, it's very common for people to fence and gate property. So, I went up there a week or so after the fire went on just to kind of get a lay of the landscape. It was still going and smoldering and I get up to the property and I realize they have backburned from the road up. And I was just flabbergasted because I'm not a fire ecologist, but Why did they burn all of that area? They destroyed all those young trees that were just there for future generations. It's a lot of investment. And somebody is, it's a bureaucratic, unaccountable I mean, it is somebody's bored, or they think they know what they're doing, and they just light somebody's private property on fire. And they burn hundreds of acres of that land. It wasn't a prescribed fire. The landowners were never given notice or asked permission to do it. And I think it's time that we had these conversations because it's not good. And I think that we have a lot of the wrong incentives. Do we really think that the groups of people making lots of money contracted to do the work on these fires want them to go out? It's a bit of a gravy train, to be honest. And it's got a lot of support from the community. And I know everybody's all on board with supporting first responders, as am I, but I don't think this belongs in the same category. I think the ones that are protecting those homes, absolutely. I think there's some people that are working really hard, the folks in the helicopters and airplanes and everything that's coordinating that effort, those guys are doing great. You know, I don't know how much of the firefighting crew is out there doing mop up and or, you know, building fire lines that a fire will never get to. There's just a whole bunch of stuff. When I grew up, the loggers would go out and fight the fire and the fires typically went out. There were some fires that got out of control, but there were fewer and further between. And what we've done is we've taken the professionals from the woods and basically excluded them from the woods. Say, hey, there's no we can't have you out there because you might start a wildfire instead of having people out there that can actually go fight a fire in a remote area, I think that's another discussion that we need to have. But I just, these backburns and I was doing a collaborative event years ago in North Central Washington near Mission Ridge Ski Area outside of Wenatchee. And we were given a presentation by some firefighting folks from the Forest Service. And they had some pride in the work they had done. There was a big wildfire. And then we went to this other spot. And you could see that there was some fire activity there and gotten out of control. And I thought it was part of the wildfire. But what they were there to tell us is that this is actually where they started the backburn. They said very proudly, and it went toward the fire. And I said, I asked a question, which I I said, did this backburn ever reach the Oh, well, no, it didn't. I'm like, so you just lit this fire, burned this property, and it didn't have any interaction with the other fire. I mean, hindsight's 20-20, but that's the reality. Yeah. I asked, how long did it take you to get the NEPA work done to be able to light this fire? And he looked at me, he says, well, we don't have to do NEPA. I said, well, isn't that ironic that we're here as a collaborative group of environmentalists, forest industry professionals, and land managers, And we all have to go through sometimes a two year plus process, the National Environmental Policy Act, because we're gonna make a change But if you get to run your torch and start a wildfire, a backburn, and you can burn hundreds of acres, thousands of acres, and there's, I've heard lots of stories, some of it is on the record, some of it's off the record. Some of these backburns started larger wildfires than the ones they were putting out. I just think that we have to have a conversation about this at a high level. It's not right. It's not right for our forests. We need to be working on getting our forests restored so they can handle the wildfire, because it does happen naturally. And we need to quit having these people out on these landscapes making decisions with no accountability and no protocol. I hope I'm wrong. I hope there's a protocol in place and everything was followed and it was the right thing. But when you see it done on property, private property that you know of, you see other people's private property where they've completely replanted their forest and a back burn burned all of that forest down and they have to start over. Might've been 15 or 20 years worth of work, millions of dollars and it's gone. And now they have to start all over again and there was no reason for it. So what do we really want to see with our wildfire fighting force? I think we should take most of the money that we have, and sometimes that we don't have, and we should put it in the aviation and fighting it from the sky, and put way more money into forest restoration and prevention, because then we have a chance at keeping fires that are man-made from going into protected areas like wilderness. And if we manage the front country, natural fires that we should let burn, by the way, can't come out of the wilderness and turn into a megafire that burns property, that burns houses, and puts people's lives at risk. And we haven't even really talked about the serious nature of this smoke pollution. I was looking at it parts of the summer, and it went from here all the way up to Alaska. And it's not like we can snap our fingers and fix this whole thing and have our forests restored. but we're not doing it right. And, you know, we're giving... band-aids to cancer victims. I mean, it's not even close to what we need to be doing. And we talk about how we want to restore our forests and thin our forests, and we collaborate on them. And we get all these impediments that we are able to get over. And it takes all this time. And then a wildfire comes and just burns it out. And we don't have anything in place to go, you know what? We were planning to cut these trees when it was green. So at least we could cut those same trees while it was burnt. But no, we can't get out of our own way because there was a change in condition. We could take the money from that post-fire restoration and put it into replanting and fixing culverts and doing soil stabilization, some of the stuff that happens after a wildfire that you need to fix. I'm really angry about it. I'm like a lot of other people that I talk to. We hate the fact that our summers are now inundated with smoke and fire, and they didn't used to be. We had a long time where we had this under control. We may not have been managing the forest with all of the environmental controls that we have now and that we should have had, but we should change to that middle zone where we're doing it in a restoration-based mentality and a focus. And if we do that at scale, we got 192 million acres of forest service land in this country. We've got 200 plus million acres of Bureau of Land Management lands. If we just focused on 50 to a hundred million of those acres, and we did that over the next two decades, we would see a drastic reduction in smoke. We would see healthier forests. We'd see healthier everything. So that's what I want to see happen. And hopefully, we can get some momentum on that. Because the forests need our help. They don't need us helping burn it down. And unfortunately, that's some of what's going on during our fire seasons now. And I just don't know. It's not right. And as somebody who watches this for a living and sees it their whole life and talked to a lot of people who are out there, there's nobody that says, oh, this is going well. We're doing a good job. There's some good work out there. People are working hard. I'm not berating people for their work. I'm berating the process set up this way and what people are incentivized So with that, I'll let it go for now, but I hope it makes you think and maybe get some momentum on how we should Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review and tell a