So you want to put good fire on the ground, but how?? We're taking you to Yurok territory (at the mouth of the Klamath River) to join the Cultural Fire Management Council for 3 days of burning — not just for fuel management, but for all sorts of cultural and ecological values: food, wildlife, materials, and more. We're finally moving from theory to practice, as we learn what it really means to be on the fire line.

This is our 6th return to the subject of fire. Call us obsessed, but we can't think of a better symbol for what this podcast is all about: demonstrating how people can (and need to) be active stewards of their ecologies, rather than passive victims of collapse. In fire-evolved ecosystems all over the world, prescribed fire has been an ecological management tool since time immemorial.

— — —

🔥 Learn more about the CFMC at culturalfire.org

📸 Find photos, citations, and a transcript of this episode at futureecologies.net

🌱 Support this indie podcast, made with love for the world. Join our community on Patreon for as little as $1 each month to get

1. Exclusive early access to new episodes
2. Access to our discord (and bookclub)
3. A back catalogue of bonus content
4. Stickers, patches, hats (and a 50% discount on all merch at any membership level), and
5. Your name listed at futureecologies.net/join — forever

— — —

This episode features the voices of (just some of) the CFMC crew. In order of appearance: Elizabeth Azzuz, Dylan Stevens, Rick O’Rourke, Margo Robbins, Robert McConnell, Annelia Norris, Isabel Guerra, Amanaka Yancey, Jordan Spannaus, Claire Brown, Max Brotman, and Will Bruce.

Plus music by C. Diab, Thumbug, Adrian Avandaño, G̱a̱mksimoon, and Sunfish Moon Light

With special thanks to the Confluence Lab's inaugural Artists-in-Fire Residency (Sasha White especially). Thanks as well to Fern Purdy, and Anita & Micah Williams. Heads up — Adam is writing a blog post about his experiences at the CFMC. We'll link to it here when it's out!

Cover art by Ale Silva

Catch up on all our other episodes On Fire:

1. FE1.5 - Camas, Cores, and Spores
2. FE1.6 - Combustible Communities
3. FE2.2 - In the Wobble
4. FE5.4 - Under Water
5. FE5.5 - Walking on Two Legs
6. 
   

Plus three related episodes:

1. FE4.7 - Phase Change
2. Earthkin's Trial by Fire
3. Disintegration Loops (by The Wind)

You are listening to Season Six of

Future Ecologies.

I, as a four year old, got caught playing

with matches by my grandfather, my Karuk grandfather, and he

decided that I needed to learn my responsibilities to the

mother if I thought I could play with fire. And so here started

my journey. I have always burned with my family, pretty much

rogue or illegally, you would say, just because that was how

we were able to maintain our gathering grounds and our

hunting grounds and our food sources and materials that our

women needed. And so I learned that fire was a tool, not a toy,

and that fire gives us our foods and our medicines, and it

purifies our water. You know, it helps all living beings in the

forest and in the rivers. You know, out there, you're taught

to fear everything. Here we're taught to live with everything.

Hi Mendel.

Hey, Adam. Who was that?

That was Elizabeth. I was interviewing

her in her fire engine. But we'll get to all that. Mendel, I

am so freaking excited to tell you about what I've been up to.

What have you been up to?

Oh, ever since you and I first started this

podcast, we have been, I think it's fair to say, a little bit

obsessed with fire.

A little bit?! We've done, like five episodes

That's right, the very first pilot episode that we

on fire... so far.

made together was all about fire. Since then, we have

interviewed Indigenous Fire Keepers, permaculturalists,

researchers, firefighters...

Rogue landowners who refuse to evacuate.

And we've visited areas that have been burned

intentionally. We've visited areas that have been burned

unintentionally in catastrophic wildfires. I feel like we've

done just about everything except actually participate in

lighting some of those fires ourselves.

Today's the day! Enough talk, more walk.

Exactly.

So how are we going to make that happen?

So to be honest with you, even after having all

these conversations, I was thinking about fire in a pretty

theoretical way. And then this opportunity came up. I was

invited to apply for this brand new experimental artist in

residency program that was offered from a place called the

Confluence Lab at the University of Idaho, Mendel.

Okay?

I applied, and surprisingly, was accepted.

Hey, you're an artist!

Yeah, podcasters are artists, right?

We are.

So I became one of the 10 inaugural Artists in

Fire.

Congratulations.

Thank you. Appreciate that. That meant that

I had to get myself on the fire line, and quick. So I took a

handful of online courses with strange acronyms and bought

myself a very expensive new pair of leather boots, did a field

day and pack test. and that's how I found myself standing in

the middle of a narrow, one lane road at the top of a seemingly

vertical slope covered in dense brush, and wondering to myself

just how in the hell we were gonna pull this burn off.

What's your burn experience like?

None.

Cool.

I am amazed at how like steep this site is, and how

much like material there is still on the ground.

You're like, Whoa, there's a lot of fuels on

the ground, and it's steep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my impression.

Yup. Welcome to the Klamath.

The Klamath! We passed through there back in

season one. It is... steep.

It's very hilly, yes. When I lived there for a

year, way back when, I was up river in Karuk territory. But

this time, I went down river — for the very first time,

actually — to Yurok territory, which is near the mouth of the

Klamath River, where it lets out into the Pacific Ocean. It's

about as rural and rugged as it gets, twisting, unpaved roads,

scattered settlements and mountainous terrain. The

hillsides are steep but green. They're covered in Douglas fir

trees. The river is beautiful and wild because, very recently,

the last remaining dams were removed. That's a story for

another day, but an incredible one. And so what you're gonna

hear in this episode is sort of a medley of voices of all of the

different people I spoke to while I was there, the crew

members who are bringing good fire back to the land in this

part of the world.

That's pretty steep, man...

Rick O'Rourke: Yeah.

We're gonna burn this?

Rick O'Rourke: Yeah, this is the black.

Holy smoke.

And you know what? Mendel, we burned that slope.Aand then we

burned 30 acres over the next three days.

Hell yeah.

From Future Ecologies, the sixth entry in

our seemingly never ending series On Fire. This is Out of

the Green, Into the Black

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design, and sound.

Okay, so a little bit of background. The Cultural

Fire Management Council, or the CFMC, is a Yurok-led,

community-based nonprofit organization with a stated

mission to facilitate the practice of cultural burning on

the Yurok reservation and ancestral lands, which will lead

to a healthier ecosystem for all plants and animals, long term

fire protection for residents, and provide a platform that will

in turn support the traditional hunting and gathering activities

of Yurok.

The objective is just to restore fire to this

place, right? This is the home of Rick's people and many others

of the Morek village here, just right up this way. Right, Rick?

Rick O'Rourke: Yeah.

this is Rick O'Rourke. He was around since

the very beginning of the CFMC. He's an old hand, and we were

burning on his family's land.

What'd you call it? Morek?

Rick O'Rourke: Morek, yeah.

And that was the village site?

Rick O'Rourke: Yes. Bones of my ancestors from the beginning of

time are there.

It means a lot to me to be able to burn the

place where I live.

You said we're gonna burn around your place?

Yeah, tomorrow, I guess.

Yeah. Is that right? Like, just your

neighborhood, or, like, literally, like, where your

house is?

Robert said in my backyard.

There's no other crew like the one that we have

here and that we're building here with cultural Fire

Management Council.

I've grown up in fire here. Now that I've gone

out on wildfires and like burned with other prescribed burn

crews, I realize like, how freaking special this is, and

also how vastly different, like burning objectives can be.

Yurok territory is like everywhere else in North

America, in that Indigenous stewardship of landscapes was

criminalized for generations. California banned Indigenous

cultural burning in 1850

I was raised to learn that the red and green

trucks probably wouldn't shoot a child,

The red and green trucks being those of the

California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention and

of the National Forest Service, respectively.

But they would shoot or arrest adults for using

fire.

And it wasn't until well into the last century

that burning became a practice that would not potentially get

you killed, and I think that's just something that's really

important to recognize. People put their lives on the line to

keep this knowledge alive so that their descendants would be

able to steward their territory as intended.

We're just here to take care of the land, take

care of the people.

Restoring our land how it used to be before we

weren't allowed to burn.

One thing that they've been able to learn from

comparing historical aerial photographs with what things

look like now is that they have lost something like 96% of their

open prairie ecosystems.

Rick O'Rourke: Well, with no fire for 130 years, the

encroachment of the conifers onto our prairies, it just

happens fast. As well as the Forest Service and agencies like

that having them planted with trees and the subsequent removal

of the porcupines, which one of their main staples is the little

firs.

Oh, so the porcupines help keep the firs

down.

Rick O'Rourke: Yeah, that help with the encroachment.

Really?

Rick O'Rourke: Yeah.

They eat them?

Rick O'Rourke: Yes, that's one of their main parts of their

diet.

And what do you mean by the removal of the

porcupines?

Rick O'Rourke: I think they poisoned them or something like

that.

Yeah, this hit me way out of left field. I had no

idea that we are in the middle of a complete collapse of the

porcupine population. And that is from up here in Canada all

the way down the coast. It turns out porcupines helped regulate

the in growth of trees like Douglas fir, because they like

to munch on them like any good rodent does. The sad reality is

that they were treated like many rodents. They were singled out

as a threat to the forestry industry, and so for

generations, these creatures were poisoned. They were shot.

And killing porcupines was encouraged by both government

and industry.

Several decades ago, we stopped killing porcupines on purpose,

generally, as a society, but their populations have not

really recovered. So in many ways, the work of the CFMC is to

undo the damage from the policies put in place by the

Forest Service.

When I was talking with folks on the crew who were older, they

were telling me that when they were young, you could look

across the river and look down slope and see all the way

through because the forest was open. It was full of deciduous

trees. It wasn't packed densely with conifers. Is this starting

to sound familiar now? And so there's just no question that

the lower Klamath used to be a mosaic of ecosystems which

included some coniferous forest, but also included these large

areas of oak woodland and Prairie and grassland, and that

the Yurok people stewarded these areas with fire to have the full

range of foods and medicines and materials for their cultural

practices.

Well, a lot of people just burn for what they

call hazardous fuel reduction, but we're burning to restore the

land.

It's step one of an intergenerational, iterative

restoration process. Yep, day one — coming!

Day one for me too.

And this is something that, many folks told me, sets the CFMC

apart from other burn crews. Their goals are as much about

cultural resources as they are about consuming the fuel.

You sometimes could get an agency person

that's just like, oh, let's just burn, burn, burn. We'll slow

down. You know, things need to be done a certain way.

That's Elizabeth again, Elizabeth Azzuz. She's a

founding board member of the CFMC, and she drives the fire

engine known as 111.

We're in someone else's home right now,

you know, and so we try to be respectful when we do that, we

ask permission from the land and the animals and the trees to

come into their home and do this. Government agencies don't

do that. You know, it's all about the acres. Get it done.

Get it done fast.

You know, the thing about prescribed fire,

about cultural fire, is that you can only do it under very

specific weather and environmental conditions. And so

when there is a good burn window, the CFMC is on it, and

they are taking advantage of every last minute that they have

during that burn window to get as much good fire on the ground

as possible.

We don't want to impact the values down here,

which is the water system.

And before a fire, there's always a briefing. When

the CFMC was first getting started, they had to rely on

non-Indigenous burn bosses, because they didn't have anyone

locally who had that designation, who had those

skills. But now they have Robert, Robert McConnell,

so we're not getting any of those petroleum

products near their drinking water, which is right there.

And at the end of every briefing, Robert would

say,

Go forth. Have fun. Be safe. Look out for each

other, learn something,

have fun, be safe, learn something. And that was

exactly what we did.

So to kick off the real work of day one, we had to prep the

site. I helped clear gutters and move brush away from a nearby

home that we were gonna burn — not the home, like, burn to the

home.

I should hope!

Yeah, other squads were blowing leaves around with

a leaf blower, checking and charging the water lines,

getting all the gear lined up, you know, weed whacking the

grass on the side of the road, like all this activity. And then

everybody comes together. We're back at the top of the slope,

and folks are goofing around...

By our powers combined... wind, water, fire,

Do you know what we're waiting for?

earth, heart!

Test fire.

Test fire.

And when everyone is present and accounted for, it was Rick who

stepped forward to light the test fire on his family's land.

He took a lighter to this beautiful, long, silver bundle

of Wormwood that they used to start the fire, and he murmured

a prayer while lighting up a patch of ground.

Rick O'Rourke: Creator, look after all of our People who are

here do your service, helping heal our land, heal our people,

bring back our animals, create balance. It's an honor.

Can I ask you a question about the test fire?

Yeah.

Every time you guys do the test firing,

everybody gathers around. There's a prayer, there's song.

What's the like, what's the importance of that moment?

What's the importance of prayer? [Laughs]

Yeah, like, what, you know, it's not how, like, a

typical, you know, prescribed burn starts.

This is Margo Robbins. She runs the show at the CFMC. She's the

executive director.

Fire is medicine on the land, and when you smell

that Wormwood, it makes it even more real. It takes it from a

mind-knowing thing to a deep down heart-felt thing, and it

helps us connect to that spiritual part of who we are and

to connect to the things around us.

Yeah, it's really helpful. I've been on

other burns where that practice isn't held and it's just

immediately a cortisol level spike, then go... into this

really like dangerous experience with a bunch of different

people. Some you've known, have worked with for a long time,

some you're maybe just meeting, and that collective pause is

really potent.

I totally felt that. Just taking a moment for

everyone to align their intentions and spirits and also

just to get our heads on straight, it was so valuable,

especially to me as someone about to do something I'd never

done before with people I did not know.

Rick O'Rourke: To me, putting fire down on the ground is like

putting prayer on the ground. Really like seeing the land for

what it is and how important it is. I mean, this land needs us

as much as we need it, and we believe what we are doing is the

right thing to help heal this spot, as well as sending out

knowledge to help other spots start the same thing, you know,

so we can all do our part.

The purpose of a test fire is to make sure that

what we're seeing on our instruments, and what we're

seeing in the weather report, and what we're seeing on the

ground is actually conducive to the kind of fire that the burn

plan calls for.

Rick O'Rourke: It's receptive!

Meaning that it burned really readily. Still

within the parameters of the burn plan...

Rick O'Rourke: Think just dots will do it.

But all it took were the tiniest dots of fuel

from the drip torch to get the fire going.

And with that, the whole crew kicked into gear, and I had to

find my squad. Fire is running on the ground, and suddenly

everything starts moving really, really fast. And oh man, did we

get right into it. That fire started pretty hot, and so

within minutes, I had a hose in my hand and was standing in

thick smoke, putting water on some trees to prevent the fire

from getting off the ground.

And I was getting a total crash course in fireline lingo. Are

you ready for this?

I think so?

All right, so on a fire line, you don't breathe

smoke in, you eat it. And boy, I was eating smoke on day one. I

was putting water on some logs on the ground to keep them from

burning, because they just burn forever. Those are called

heavies. and the whole crew took special care to inspect the

bases of trees that they wanted to protect, like Oaks and Arbutus.

Take extra care to look for cat faces.

Will do.

They look for these injuries called cat faces,

that if fire gets on them, it can burn the tree internally and

cause issues. By the way, firefighters don't go anywhere.

They bump.

You want to go bump below the smoke and work with

Amanaka for a bit?

I'm happy to.

Alright — yeah go for it.

And you don't just bump your body around. You can

bump things around too, like Jerries.

Jerry!

Which are... cans of gas.

Oh yeah, bumping Jerry.

Or... piss pumps, which are backpacks full of

water that you can use to make a nice stream. So you're walking

on the slope and something gets dislodged and goes tumbling

down, you're gonna yell really loud... ROCK!

Yeah, no matter what it is, if it's rolling down

the hill — rock.

So there are different roles on a fire crew.

Rock! Little rock.

Rock!

The first role that I was assigned to was Holding, and

holding has the responsibility of making sure that the fire

does not escape. And so when you're on holding, you got to be

looking out for spotting. Which is when little embers jump your

line and get started. And jackpots, which are unburned

patches of dense fuel that could explode. Fire can do so many

things. It can crown, it can creep, it can back, and it can

torch, which is when the fire starts climbing up into the tree

canopy. And when that happens, if you're on holding, you've got

in what shape. Too much, and the fire can burn too hot and harm

to get some water on the fire and knock it down. And folks who

are on holding are often on the sides and up along the top of

the burn right. They're coming down as the burn is moving down

the hill, keeping it contained.

the things you're trying to protect, like a valuable old oak

tree. But not enough, and the fire won't really move how you

want. It'll kind of stay static. The experienced hands on the

crew just sort of knew how to fire in each circumstance to get

the effects that they wanted. Finally, you've got the Green

and you've got the Black. The green is the unburned area

outside of your containment lines, and you want to prevent

that from catching fire. The black is the burned area inside

your lines.

I'm seeing a little bit of wind coming up

towards us with these embers. So while we're talking, maybe

You want to have an eye on the green over there.

We'll glance over our shoulder every now and

then

You know you can keep an eye on the black. I'll

keep an eye on the green.

Fantastic. Thank you.

Temperature, 81, down 4. RH, 43 up 4.

That is the hourly weather report delivered by the

FEMO, another acronym. Let's take a quick break from the

smoke and check in with them, eh?

Smoke break!

So FEMO stands for Fire Effects Monitoring, which

is like a task, and also usually a person on this burn that was

Claire Brown.

Everybody gets to hear the trends through the day

and build that picture in their own minds of like how they can

expect things to be changing as the weather changes.

It's kind of like monitoring a patient during a

procedure.

It's like taking vitals exactly,

PIG shaded 30, down 10.

Our probability of ignition in the shade is 30.

30%?

Yeah, 30% so if 10 embers landed on this fuel bed,

we could expect three of them to catch.

How do you copy?

Burn Boss copies, thank you.

Firing copies.

Holding copies.

One of the roles that FEMO has is the

documentation that supports the burn boss legally, because we

have a prescription in our burn plan and we have to have fire

behavior that's inside of that prescription parameter. Like the

burn boss needs to have a record of the weather for the day.

Every burn plan has these parameters, so the

burn plan can only be executed if the conditions are correct.

That's why there's constant monitoring. Is the temperature

still appropriate? Is the moisture content of the fuel

still appropriate? What is the wind doing? Is the wind going to

start to create problems?

And I want to say yes, we were wearing the traditional outfits

of firefighters. We had on our Nomex, we had fire engines, we

had our tools. We looked for all the world like firefighters, but

the context, to me, felt profoundly cultural. And this is

something that many folks told me sets the CFMC apart from

other burn crews. It's right there in the name, it's the

Cultural Fire Management Council, and so cultural goals,

cultural practices are front and center in this model of

prescribed fire. This is first and foremost about community

empowerment, and it's driven by cultural values related to the

responsibility to the landscape and the relationship with the

Creator. Cultural values related to what is a healthy landscape,

what is a healthy forest, what is a healthy watershed? It

encompasses everything from the movements of animals and how

they will interact with the landscape down to the flow of

water through the entire environment.

Rick O'Rourke: What we're doing is essentially creating a

landscape wide water filter.

This time of year, right now, when we're

burning, we know that the rain is coming, and so that's going

to put everything to sleep. It's going to take this charcoal and

ash filter clean water back into the water table, down into the

creeks, into the river and into the ocean.

And cultural values for significant foods,

medicines and materials... like beaked hazelnut.

Rick O'Rourke: With the canopy how it is now, those Hazels grow

good — because, you know, they got that canopy. They're

stretching long, straight sticks. That's what we're after.

That's what the ladies are after.

All of those small bushes. That's Hazel.

That's what we use for our baskets. So once the fire goes

through, they'll send up new shoots.

Our name for Hazel is Holihl.

This is Annalia Norris, and when she's not

lighting fires. She makes baskets.

Yeah, I'm a weaver. I've been making a lot

of baby baskets because there's a high demand for thosoe.

Like a tiny little basket for your baby to

carry.

No, no! You put you put the baby in the basket!

Yeah, they're the safest way for our babies to

sleep. You know, it kind of mimics the womb and that feeling

so that babies feel secure, you know.

The Yurok are widely known for their baskets,

for their variety, and their artistry, and their quality.

I've done some burden baskets, and I really

enjoy that. That's like an open weave. We call them a kewoy —

gathering basket, packing basket. But I also do some

closed weave work, which is like your watertight baskets. And in

this region, we're known for our watertight baskets. That's what

we cook our acorns in. You know you have dipping baskets for

your water, cooking baskets. And then we also have our really

fine weaving, like our ceremonial caps and our, you

know, tobacco baskets, trinket baskets, those kinds of things.

How... the material, like, why does it need

to be burned to be good?

Well, it makes it stronger and more pliable.

You know, when you burn the tops of these larger Hazels, and then

new shoots can grow up. And then they grow nice and straight

without, like, little stems coming off. So the burning helps

to bring new shoots up, because that's what you're using, is the

new shoots, right?

So, like, there's a hazel right behind you, and

like, maybe you wouldn't use that so much because it's all

kinky.

Yeah, because you don't want a crooked basket,

you want a nice, straight stick.

Rick O'Rourke: You know, putting these sticks on the ground for

our basket weavers is my way of giving back, like, to the

dances, because these sticks are, like, so important. We keep

our food in them, our babies, our medicine, we send up prayer

with them. You know, without it, we wouldn't have been able to

live here and thrive like we had.

The Hazel is just one element of Yurok basketry,

but there's so much more to it.

We use the Blue Willow. We call that pergern. We

also use spruce root, Sitka spruce. Spruce root is called

'wohpeg — that's what we use for our watertight baskets, because

it expands when it gets wet. We use bear grasses, haamoh, we

call it. We use the re' go', which is the maidenhair fern.

The woodwardia fern, or pa'app'. We take out the insides of that

and we dye it with Alder bark, and that makes the red in our

baskets. We have yellow in some of our medicine baskets, and the

yellow is porcupine quill that's called tegee'n, and we dye that

with that yellow wolf moss.

Maybe you get the sense, Mendel, that it takes a

whole healthy cultural landscape to make a single basket. They're

burning for basketry materials, and they're burning for

medicines, and they're burning for game. They're also burning

to release oak trees so that oaks can be productive and

produce acorns again. And then they're burning under those oak

trees to prevent those acorns from getting infested with

weevils. And by taking part in this cultural burning, Annelia

is helping to restore that landscape.

It feels like the right thing to do, and I

feel like I'm fulfilling my purpose as far as like taking

care of the land where I'm living at and that's what we all

should be doing wherever we live. It's like... caring for

that landscape. We've normalized the cultural burning, like we've

really taken leadership in asserting ourselves and our

culture and our land management. You know, it just started

catching, catching fire. No pun intended.

Oh, pun always intended over here. I'm sorry.

Because cultural values are driving everything that happens,

because they're not just trying to burn off fuel, the burns look

really different from what can sometimes happen on other

prescribed fire crews, right? If your objective is just to burn

off as much fuel as you can without lighting a wildfire on a

piece of land, then you can burn through it really quickly,

right? But for the Cultural Fire Management Council, they have so

many values that they're trying to protect on the lands that

they burn — that they're trying to protect and enhance, right?

And so they need just the right fire intensity to where it's

going to move through the ecosystem slowly, to where it's

not going to kill the oak trees. It's going to provide

blistering, but not completely kill off the Hazels.

Rick O'Rourke: It looks really good. The cambium blisters down

at the bottom when you hit a certain heat point with this low

intensity fire. It's a longer duration and lower intensity,

and it blisters the cambium so that there's a top kill, and the

new shoots for our baskets come up in the spring.

So you can tell that you're going to get good

shoots absolutely just from the blisters.

Rick O'Rourke: Yes.

So I'm lying on my back in the tent first burn

today. I am so tired. Today was little over two acres took

something like seven hours. I'm told that tomorrow gonna take

the same number of people and we're gonna burn 11 acres. Who

knows how long that's gonna take? Anyway, Adam, day one of

burning on the Klamath with the Cultural Fire Management

Council... signing off.

When we come back, day two, where we turn up

the heat. That's after the break.

Welcome back. I'm Mendel.

I'm Adam.

This is Future Ecologies, and today, Adam is

bringing us all along on his trip to Yurok territory on the

Klamath River, so we can get a sense of what it's like to be on

a cultural fire crew,

That's right. And on this particular crew, it was

a really great mix of professional structure and then

also flexibility. People were shifting roles, and it seemed

like the leadership viewed every burn as an opportunity to give

different people at different stages in their fire journey new

experiences.

Simply, I love it. I love how it pushes me. I

love how I learn something new every day.

That's Isabel Guerra, the firing crew lead.

One of the things I see in creating a learning

environment is, yeah, you want to challenge people, but you

also need to let them know that it's okay to fail, and it's not

actually failure because you have your whole team holding on

to you, creating that safety net.

Rick O'Rourke: I tell the people I'm training, I'll put you out

of your comfort zone, but I won't put you in danger.

Learning is such a sacred process.

Fire is such a team effort. It's like a sports team.

You know? It's like football. We like make our plan. We modify

the plan as we go

Max Brotman — holding boss and drone operator.

And I'm not a sports person, but I imagine

it's like playing football.

We're gonna do it rose, bud, and thorns. So Rose

is something that you think went really well. Thorn is something

that you think could have gone better, and then the Bud is how

you would grow that into a better way of doing it.

Every year, in the spring, we do fire effects

walks, where the whole crew goes out to the units that we had

burned in the last year. We look over our notes from the FEMO

report —

because we can relate, like, oh yeah, our

weather that day was like this. And so we ended up trying this

strategy out, and we got this result. And like, now we're

seeing how it's regrowing, or what died, or what have you.

We talk to all the people who worked the fire about

what they remember about that day — what happened here? Did

you light this? Who was lighting here? Oh, yeah. What did you do?

Where'd you get hung up? Was there a jackpot? How did we

impact the canopy? How did we impact the sub canopy? Is there

more light? Did we kill some trees? Why did we kill those

trees? Is that a good thing or not? You know, if we're trying

to thin out a thicket of young Doug firs. Like, could we have

modified what we did to do that better?

There's just so much learning that happens after the fire, and

so by doing that, all as a whole crew, and not just the

leadership, everybody gets to learn about the impacts of like,

looking at how their firing patterns worked, how did that

affect how we move through the unit, and then what effect did

that have on the forest?

The reality is that Yurok territory is big, and

there has been over a century of fire suppression. And so there

is just a lot of area that needs good fire. Even on the areas

that have been burned, they often need to be burned on two

or three or five or eight year intervals, right? And so when

you think about bringing all of those lands back into good fire

stewardship and then also going into the areas that haven't been

burned, it's a huge job. It's just enormous.

This is, like, pretty representative of, like,

what the ground looks like in places that haven't had fire in

a long time, where you see the black oaks stretched out with

the crown super high, tied in with like a much younger age

class of fir trees — big firs that are probably still younger

than our eldest people here on site today, who will love to

tell you how they used to see clear across everywhere when

they were with kids.

You know, we should be able to just walk

across the land. And we should be able to see from, you know,

down near the bottom of the hill all the way up to the ridge.

It's real thick in here. Got patches of Himalayan

Blackberry. We got patches with English ivy.

It's a process, but there's areas upriver here

that have been worked repeatedly, that were just walls

of broom and blackberry, and they're not anymore.

Rick O'Rourke: You know, we prayed to have people come up

here to help us, and in that prayer, it's like we weren't

like gender specific or religious specific or race

specific, whoever would come to help us, we'll accept it

gratefully and try to feed you good and sit around and burn

together and eat together and we become family.

Yeah, you know, people often ask us, you know,

why we have non Indigenous staff? Well, everybody cares for

the planet. Everybody loves the Mother Earth, you know, whoever

wants to take care of whatever, and if we can provide that, we

will.

I love all the people involved. I love the

land. I love watching the land respond to fire.

Will Bruce, GIS specialist and my crew lead.

I love being in here, lending a direct hand to

Native people exercising their rights to manage this land.

Yeah, it just feels like a great place to be. And I feel very I

feel very appreciated. You know, everybody that's part of this

work is appreciated.

When we started out, it was just a handful of

us, you know, Margo and I worked in our cars or any office space

we could bum, basically. Or our kitchen tables, you know. And

then eventually it was like it was too much for her and I to

do. And we needed equipment. We needed vehicles and things, you

know. So the grant writing process has happened, and the

elders that sit on our board were like, you guys, got your

Hazel now? What about our acorns? What about our berries?

What about our medicine, you know, what about all these

things? I was like, Oh, shoot. And so it just kept growing, you

know, evolving.

Rick O'Rourke: A lot of these guys and gals, I trained them up

on their first day of lighting, and look at them now.

We try to hire community members, locals. We do

cooperative burns, where we train other government agencies

to do what we do. Aspiring fire lighter burns, that train people

who've never worked with fire. One of my favorite things about

these training exchanges is seeing their aha moment when

they realized that this is actually what they were meant to

do, that they were meant to care for the land, that they were

meant to evolve into the people I watched them become. We have

one kid. I use them as my example for everything. When

people are like, well, you know, why do you do what you do? Well,

this young man really, really wanted to work for us, bad but

he had some bad habits. You know, he wasn't living well.

Margo and I sat with him and said, Well, you have to do this,

this and this, and then we'll give you a job. Well, he did it.

He went and got himself cleaned up and brought us certificates,

and sat down and said, I did what you said. Now, where's my

job? He's been with us ever since. Loyal is the day is long.

He tells people he'll never leave us. We didn't do it for

that. We did it for him. So when you get about 15 or 20 of those

guys running around, it's worth it all. It's worth the two

o'clock mornings, you know, all the late shifts we do, but you

know, look what they're doing. They're caring for their land,

and they're making their elders happy and providing for their

families. And that's the whole goal, for me, is to make sure

the younger generation can move into the future safely and

happy. It's nice to evolve into what we are and why we do what

we do.

I started off wildland fire, and after seven

years of wildland just transitioning to prescribed

fire.

that's Jordan Spannaus. He's a firing boss.

Little bit better as far as things like

being able to go home at the end of every night, not not missing

birthdays and stuff like that.

Like, good for the family, too.

Good for the family, good for the land. But

yeah, fires, fire is just one of those things that I love.

One of the coolest things that I witnessed while I

was down there was seeing them do drone ignitions for the first

time.

We're ready to launch the drone.

Copy. Tell me precisely where you want it.

So if your drops are slightly below the contour

that would be perfect.

Okay, launching.

They've been using drones for years to map fire

intensity, because you can use heat sensors on the drone to see

where the fire is burning and how intensely. But this was the

very first time they had used this absolutely enormous drone

to drop these little incendiary dragon eggs into the middle of

the burn.

Flying it is kind of like steering a boat, whereas

the other drone is like a hummingbird.

So that was pretty cool.

Go for firing.

It was big deal.

Oh my gosh, there's the freaking dots, guys.

The drone is going to help them access areas that

are hard for people to get into, in the middle of those burn

blocks, and hopefully make the process more efficient, right?

Speed it along a little bit.

When I spoke with many of the crew members, they told me this

moment that we're in right now where we're using Nomex clothing

and fire engines and all this technology, the drones, the

hierarchical structure of a fire crew, the certifications — all

of this is this moment that we're passing through because of

over a century of fire suppression. The Yurok need to

adopt these tools to achieve what they want to achieve in

this colonial system, but also because the condition of the

forest requires that level of technology, of safety equipment,

of planning and of organization. It is so extreme compared to

what it was historically. And so the vision that they expressed

to me was that this is a transition from a time of fire

suppression to a future where community members will just be

able to go out into their backyards, into the places where

they gather, and light fires themselves, with their family

members, and yeah, maybe they call in one of the local engine

operators for support. Or maybe that's not even necessary

anymore, because the ecosystem is safe to burn, and people have

become comfortable enough and knowledgeable enough again that

they can just do it when they're ready, when it's time.

Absolutely we have to get it back to where

it's safe for people to just light their little Hazel patch

or their acorn grove, or whatever it is, you know. What,

maybe three years from now, I'll I'll come light this up myself,

and then just say hey, I'm gonna light up my Hazel patch So FYI.

You guys could be on standby.

We do cultural burns and family burns, where we

do bring out families and even children sometimes to come and

watch or get involved in our burns. All the children and

stuff that burn with us get really into it. All talk about

wanting to do this when they get older. So I think everything

that we're doing out here is pretty good for our community,

for all the people around here, I think.

That's a really beautiful vision, not just for

fire, but for this time that we're moving through right now,

that there is so much to do. We have to work within sometimes,

and use the tools that the colonial system has to offer.

And then at the same time, we have to be moving towards a

place where maybe we don't need them anymore. Like, people have

been doing this for 1000s and 1000s of years. When you

experience it for yourself, you realize, not only can it be done

safely, it's a thing that we can do proactively in a world full

of forces beyond our control.

Rick O'Rourke: She's like, Oh, I wasn't expecting that. You were

expecting that monster coming at you, like you see in the news,

right? She's like, Yeah. No, it's not like that. There's ways

to mitigate all those dangers and then be able to put some

fire on the ground.

Doesn't have to be rocket science. Doesn't have to

be scary.

Rick O'Rourke: It doesn't have to be scary. They could be just

like peaceful and calming and just a good burn.

End of the second day of burning. It is 2am. We

burned until midnight, and I have nothing left. I'm conking

out.

By the third day, I had a drip torch in my hand, and I was

standing in the middle of a burn block that went as far in each

direction as I could see.

Thick patch of poison oak... and Himalayan Blackberry. and it's

on fire! But it's burning really good. Standing in the middle of

an inferno... wild. What a feeling!

We don't talk about it, but wildfires do not only consume

whole landscapes. They they consume living beings. They

consume animals. And in a cultural fire, in a prescribed

fire, the fire is so much less intense, and it's moving so much

more slowly, and it gives many creatures the opportunity to

escape and then to return to habitat that is still intact.

There are, however, some slow moving creatures that might have

gotten out of bed a little bit late that day and need a helping

hand.

Hey, Lloyd, I got a little salamander right here that I'm

gonna take across the road, alright?

Oh, my God, it's freaking adorable, by the way. All right,

little buddy, go free. Stay cool. Oh my God, look at you go!

Ah... I love salamanders.

All of the plants and animals, they all have a

spirit just like us. And people from this place, our spirit is

connected to all of these things. And so when, you know,

when they're healthy and feel good, that reflects on us, and

it's a link to our health too.

You know the deer are going to come rolling

here tonight. Get rid of their fleas and ticks. They love ash

for that. You know, we've seen all these things.

Like what you see, Robert?

This backing fire is beautiful. It's gonna

take time, though, because it's so steep in here.

Good copy. Yeah, we're getting great backing on

this downriver area. Things are looking beautiful.

There's beauty you have never seen before that

exists in a burn.

So for the people who don't have eyes and are in

the future, what are we looking at here?

Coming down to the last piece of this burn coming

into a nice steep section with fire gently backing through fir

trees, Hazel, Bay trees. Kind of like everybody's just in this

meditative state, just helping it walk down the hill. You know,

you can see, it's just like bringing itself down so nicely.

What do you think be here till midnight putting

things out?

Yeah, that seems like a fair guess to me.

When a fire has burned its way through a given

burn block, it's time to put it out.

We're gonna just touch on our mop up plan,

Mech Ney-kem kue po-o.

Because fire suppression has in many ways,

been a very militaristic practice. The term that is often

used for that is mopping up. But mopping up is a term that was

basically used for when soldiers go across the battlefield, look

for anybody who's still alive, and kill them. So the CFMC calls

the penultimate stage in the burn...

Kem kue po-o. We were saying Mech Ney-kem kue

po-o, which is put the water on the hot stuff.

Amanaka Yancey, she was my squad lead.

Then they shortened it to Kem kue po-o,

which is... put water on it.

And it is the unglamorous job of trudging

through the ashy landscape with shovels and piss pumps, and

putting a little bit of water and a little bit of elbow grease

into making sure that every last part of that fire is out. It

definitely feels like something you don't want to do at 1am

after you've been burning for 10 hours straight, but it is a very

important part of the job.

Imagine you end up spending a lot of evenings this way.

Mmm... guess so.

I love my job.

That night, I didn't record anything before

bed, I just hit the ground and was gone.

The day that I left, I woke up so tired and so sore, and all I

could think was... where are we going to burn next??

This episode of Future Ecologies was recorded

and reported by my co-host, Adam Huggins. It was edited and

produced by me. Mendel Skulski.

It featured the voices of Elizabeth Azzuz

Just me and my big mouth. You know, I don't

know what possesses me to open the damn thing.

Dylan Stevens

When we were prepping, I was like, I think

these roots are gonna catch on fire. They did.

Rick O'Rourke

Rick O'Rourke: But I'm compelled to share my knowledge with

people, because it was shared with me from people who forgot

more than I'll ever know.

Margo Robbins

[Scream]

[Screams respond in the distance]

Look what you started. I gotta work on my

scream a little bit so that it doesn't sound like I'm in

trouble, you know.

It's gotta come from deep in your belly.

Robert McConnell

Let's have fun. Be safe, learn something.

Annelia Norris

I can still scale these freaking hillsides,

so I'm not that old.

Isabel Guerra

You put, you put, you put your time in!

Amanaka Yancey

Prescribed fire so hot right now.

Jordan Spannaus

Gonna take a long time, but this is a good

start.

Claire Brown

Like a classic FEMO role is to make a report

that nobody reads.

Max Brotman

We don't say breathing smoke, we say eating

smoke.

And Will Bruce

I know you wanna burn it all, gotta wait 'til

fall!

and music by C Diab, Thumbug, Adrian Avendaño

G̱a̱mksimoon, and Sunfish Moon Light, plus cover art by the

wonderful Ale Silva.

Huge gratitude to the CFMC for making this episode

possible. I talked to lots of other folks and just couldn't

include everything. So thank you to everyone who spoke with me,

and special thanks to Margo Robbins, Fern Purdy, Max

Brotman, Claire Brown, Will Bruce, and Amanaka Yancey for

corresponding with me, helping me put this piece together,

hosting me, helping me get my qualifications and keeping me

out of trouble on the line. Big thanks to the Confluence Lab at

the University of Idaho, and especially Sasha White, who

supported me through this process. Thanks also to Anita

and Micah Williams.

You can find the CFMC at culturalfire.org. You

can find us and all of our episodes at futureecologies.net,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. We make this podcast

and keep it ad free with the support of our incredible

patrons, who we literally cannot thank enough. To join them, head

to patreon.com/futureecologies, and help us make the show for as

little as $1 a month. We've got a back catalog of exclusive

bonus episodes, 50% discounts on all merch, a Discord server, a

book club and more. Plus, you can show off your name at

futureecologies.net/join — forever. But the biggest favour

you can do us is free. We believe stories can change the

world, and really, that's why we make this show, but we need your

help for them to spread... and maybe even catch fire.

'til next time. Stay lit.