Your American Lands - Grant Beebe Talks About Wildfire

Matthew Buffington: What's up, y'all?  You're listening to the first ever episode of Your American Lands, a conversational podcast where we talk to the various scientists, firefighters, land managers and all-around fascinating people at the Bureau of Land Management. Here we talk about all the things the bureau does, conservation, recreation and even commercial uses on public lands.

And today we're talking about a topic that easily touches on every aspect of public land management - wildfires. Our guest is Grant Beebe, the assistant director for fire and aviation at the National Interagency Fire Center. We talk about how the government fights and prevents wildfires. Climate change and how complicated and dangerous this work can be.

Now, before we jump in, let me just say that we're still feeling out how we want to do this podcast.  We would love any input you may have on topics, guests or even format. So don't hesitate to reach out to @BLMNational on Twitter and let us know what you think. So for now, let's jump into our season one, episode one conversation with Grant Beebe.

Grant, thank you for joining us today. So how are you doing, man?

Grant Beebe: I'm doing well, Matt.  Thanks for having me today.

Matt: Yeah, so like let's just jump right on into it. So I know you work a lot with wildfire's over at the Bureau of Land Management, and I know it encompasses more than just like one state and even not just the Bureau of Land Management. It's a lot larger than that within the Department of Interior. So let's just jump right into it - tell everybody who may not be familiar with how things are structured over here. Just talk a little about how you joined the Bureau of Land Management. How did you get involved in wildfires?

Grant: OK, well, let me let me start with that. So I was back in college studying to be a teacher and wanted to be a writer. I wanted to do a bunch of things and to pay the bills. While I was in college, I started fighting fire on a temporary summer basis with the Forest Service in northern California and eventually what I realized was that spending my summers fighting fire was really the high point  of my year, and that I liked it a lot better than what I was preparing to do with my college education. So it kind of morphed into it being a firefighter rather than a teacher in training. I ended up going to graduate school in forestry and turned what had been a summer job into a career.

Matt: Well, I feel like there's got to be a little bit more to that, because then like sometimes people will be like, oh, I did a roofing jobs or, you know, you get all kinds of different summer jobs or ways to get through college, but you just jumped into firefighting as like a side job?

Grant: Yeah. So I can remember clearly. This  was back when they had blackboards.  Do I have to explain everything to an audience.

Matt: I know you're going to be totally thorough.

Grant: There were blackboards in the college campus I was going to school at. I remember one day on the side of a blackboard, it said, “Hey, want to fight fire?  Come to this meeting” And I thought that would be great, because I had you know, after after I wanted to be a professional baseball player, I always dreamed of going out and helping manage public lands or a park or something like that. That seemed like a great gig, you know, be a ranger and not knowing really what that meant.  So I saw this sign and I went to the meeting and they said, hey, you can come fight fire for a couple of months. They, this organization I joined, they got a bunch of college kids together and put them into fire crews, 20 person fire crews, and sent them off to fight fire really anywhere in the state at that time and then across state lines as well, really any place in the country.

And so, yeah, it was a bunch of like-minded college kids organized into these crews. I started doing that and then after a few summers, I kind of ended up running one of those crews. Then I realized that if I try it, I might be able to turn that into a career. So it was a nice transition, kind of during college, right after college. I call those my lost boy years when I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I kept fighting fire in the summers, tried a couple of full-time gigs that were not fire -- I realized those were horrible and that I loved my summer work. So I really kind of realized that given the right academic background -- I went back to school, got this degree and a graduate degree -- with that right background I could make a living at this and it was still enjoyable. So I just kind of launched on it. I was a line firefighter, I came to Boise to be a smokejumper, which is an initial attack firefighter, I got hired by the Bureau of Land Management and came here to Boise from northern California while I was in grad school and met my wife.

At some point in my career, I decided that fighting fire is great but I was on the road all the time, and I was taking some risks that were that were not in line with my family situation – I’d just had a couple little kids, and so I decided to get into something a little less exciting than line firefighting. So I moved into fire management and did some budgeting, did some planning, and eventually became what I am now, which is the assistant director for Fire and Aviation for the Bureau of Land Management.

That being said, I’m at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. It's a place that's been here since the late ‘60s. We just celebrated our fiftieth anniversary as a place, not an organization, but a place. This is where the nation organizes its wildland fire response, and it has been that for 50 years.

You realize that wildfires don't recognize boundaries and that to manage fire across the landscape you have to have all the partners in agreement on what you're doing and to kind of contribute resources. So we like to say that wildfire is one of the places where this country is extremely successful in that we don't pay attention to whose land is whose, everybody contributes what they can and everybody fights fire together. We adhere to the same standards, share the same organizations and all contribute what we can to the joint effort and manage things kind-of across the landscape.

What we do here at the fire center with all of our partners, and that includes agencies like the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Fish and Wildlife Service,  the National Weather Service, the U.S. Fire Administration, the U.S. Forest Service, the national state foresters -- we are all here together along with DoD.  We're all here together, jointly making decisions on how to get firefighting resources to where they're needed across the country.

It's a huge task, especially in a year like this - 2021 is when we're recording this. Anybody who's living anywhere in this country has had some kind of impact from fire.  Folks who live close to landscapes that burn have had fire in their back yards. And then folks as far as Washington DC have had their skies colored with wildfire smoke. The last couple of years have been exceptional fire seasons and we're dealing with one right now that's on par with any of the worst ones we've had.

So we together -- all those agencies; the federal partners, the local partners, the state folks, are all trying to figure out a path forward with managing fire. So I'm really the host of this campus here, a 60-acre campus in Boise. All those partners that I mentioned are here with their national offices trying to make good, sensible decisions about policy, about standards, about decisions where we redirect resources from one area of the country to another. We also have some operational folks here, we've got a fire cache and we've got some equipment development. We've got some smokejumpers and we have a training center.  So we got a whole bunch of other stuff on campus here at Boise. It’s really a center of excellence for wildland fire in the country - it's something we're extremely proud of and I'm really proud to be the host, the chief administrator, I guess, if you will.

Matt: Oh, I hear you on that. And, you know wildfires just touching everybody …as I look outside my window right now, you know, this is August 2021, I'm sitting in Utah County and, you know, it's all smoky and hazy outside. Not to mention I remember last year in 2020 when some of the California fires, it looked like Blade Runner outside in San Francisco for a bit. It was quite overwhelming.

Grant:  Like Blade Runner?! That's a little apocalyptic, but I hear what you're saying. I guess Blade Runner without the drippy rainy landscape. We would like a little bit of that… a little more moisture than we got now. But I agree. And I think people in the West have experienced that the last couple of years. 

You can, you know, get on the web and see the plumes of smoke coming up right now. A lot of it coming from the Dixie Fire in northern California and just rotating around the west and really socking folks in. I think that's where it becomes real for a lot of folks. You know, my kids got suspended from cross-country practice yesterday, right, because the air quality was too poor. I think people are really getting the sense that fire is a big deal, that we've got more fire in the landscape than we can handle. Yes, fire is a natural process, but we need to manage it appropriately. Allow it where we can and fight it where we need to, manage our fuels better and make sure that we have enough firefighting resources to minimize the impact on folks where we can.

But smoke is the great leveler, you know? It can come from Canada, it can come from California, from Oregon, from Utah. It can come from right outside Salt Lake City and have an impact on people way downstream. And the regional smoke impacts over the last couple of years have really been profound.  I think it's caught the attention of a lot of folks who might not have thought before too much about wildfires - oh, that's just a Western thing. When your skies are colored in the Midwest or in the east, I think I think it makes it a little more real to folks that we've got to do something different about how we're managing fire.

Matt: And it sounds like just in your job, really in your career, you've really served in that whole gambit of like, you know, getting your hands dirty or wet. Actually being on the ground and now on the different side -- more administrative and managing and kind of like orchestrating where people need to go.

Do you also have to … have you … I'm guessing, related to school? There's got to be all kinds of you know, I mean, there's the nitty gritty   how do you fight a fire, but there's got to be a lot of science behind it. I'm just thinking of the logic of where you think fire is going to go or how to mitigate stuff. Have you gotten involved in a lot of that stuff?

Grant: Absolutely. I went to school for that. My graduate degree is in fire management. That's a blend of fire management practices and fire ecology. Obviously, there are places on the landscape where we can live with a lot more fire where free roaming fire isn't going to be a big impact on folks. And you can let it do its natural thing because you need to. And there are many places where we absolutely can't take that approach because if the fire gets up and runs on us it's going to have an impact on either people's livelihoods or their communities or their community values of some sort. So making those estimates of where we can be a little less aggressive about fire, either because it's doing its thing and it's a good thing or because it's unsafe or maybe not worth the risk to put folks in a certain area. Those kinds of questions really depend on having a good idea of what the weather is ahead,  how long a hot spell is going to last, where the winds are going to come, and where a fire is likely to go if you don't contain it in the first 24 or 48 hours. Those are decisions that managers have to make. They're really, really difficult decisions to make. Really, when you balance the safety of a fire crew and inserting a fire crew into a spot versus the risk to communities if you don't fight fire aggressively and you don't put a fire out early. Those are  really tough decisions, tough balancing acts with people who specialize in looking at a landscape and looking at an ignition and figuring out where it's likely to go. Usually we are on the side of caution. It's almost always better to just put a fire out early if you don't know where it's going to go and you're not sure what the effects are going to be our standby is to is to put it out early when it's easiest. Because if we let it grow big and then decide you need to put it out it takes way more effort, way more people, way more risk. So it's always a balance between aggressive initial response and large fire management  -- fire gets up and turns into five hundred thousand acre fire like we got going in northern California. There's a huge amount of risk to thousands and thousands of people, both in the communities and in the firefighting community.  And so, you know, you definitely want to err on the side of putting something out if you're not sure that you can handle what might happen if it gets away from you.

Matt: It seems like in every conversation related to the Bureau of Land Management, the word balance is always inevitable, no matter what you end up talking about. So thinking for a layperson who doesn't know a lot about wildfires or how they behave … I know of late there's all these news stories about all these like wildfires that have been happening that seem to be growing and growing and being more intense as the years go by. Maybe talk a little bit about the balance of do you clean up some of the brush or some of the, I guess, kindling, for lack of a better word, versus there's some fires that are completely natural and that you want to burn out.

Talk a little bit about how does that work or how does that come into your thought process of balancing out what proactive things you can do to prevent fires. But sometimes you just want to let nature take its course to prevent something from just growing too big in the future.

Grant: Sure. So your question really, really hinges on the region of the country you're talking about, and the kind of fuels you're talking about.  So, for instance, the southeast United States is a classic example of an environment that we've got where the managers down there, private managers, state managers, federal managers of lands, for the most part, want to let fire run across the landscape every couple of years, every, five years, because they've got both vegetation that depends on fire, Longleaf Pine is a good example, vegetation that depends on fire to propagate and undergrowth that’ll grow back incredibly thick  if you don't run fire through it really frequently.  So millions of acres are burned in the southeast every year in the interest of maintaining a landscape that's both healthy and resistant to wildfire. So that's a great example of a place where fire is such a key and accepted management practice that it's a viable tool there. It's been going on for centuries. People who manage their own private farms or woodlots or pastures have been using fire for quite a while. And it's really where the country first learned that fire is a natural process and a great management tool where you can apply it.

I think the people who live in the Southeast are used to smoke. They're used to people going out, burning in the woods, and they're used to the effect of it, which is, you know, smoke in some communities, smoke across some highways. They're going to drive slow. They're going to be careful.  And there's an expectation that fire is going to be in that landscape annually, because when you don't apply fire in that landscape, things can get in trouble. You can be in trouble rather quickly.  It's also a flat country and it's relatively easy to burn there. You can burn, you know, thousands and thousands of acres fairly  readily because you're burning across essentially a flat landscape. It's easy to manage fire where fire has been used consistently across that kind of a landscape -- you can burn in the big blocks. 

Now, move to the west and we've got landscapes that also need to burn. They burn longer, what we call longer return intervals. So a natural return interval in the southeast might be, you know, a couple of years, a couple to five years.  Some of our high-country forested landscape in the west think of Yellowstone -- that's a great example, lodgepole pine type situation. Those landscapes burn every couple hundred years in a natural circumstance. And so that return interval is a lot greater. And when those kind of landscapes burn, they tend to burn in large swaths of very destructive ... destructive is maybe the wrong word, but stand replacement kind of fires. So Yellowstone in 1988 is a great example. Much of that landscape burned because it needed to, its lodgepole pine, lodgepole pine needed a hot fire to burn through there, to release new cones and to kind of reset that landscape back into an early, what we call an early Cyril stage. So think of a mature forest needs to be cleared out so that you can grow a new one. So we got landscapes in the West that want to burn like that there. You know, coniferous forests especially wants to burn a little hotter or a little more destructively.  And it's a little harder to manage that, to manage fuels ahead of time. So we would love to be able to go in and take that Western landscape and do a lot more what we call active management and go in there and manage forests, range landscapes a lot more aggressively and make sure that we don't have a huge fuels buildup so that in the summer when we get a wildfire in there, the fire itself is easier to manage. You know, in this country there, you know, there's some there's some guesses out there, but say in Pre-European settlement times, 10 to 20 million acres burned annually across the west. It's hard for managers to achieve that with what we would call fuels management ahead of time. So I think in the fall, when you go out with crews and do some cutting, do some clearing, then 10-20 million acres is a big task. So we have a hard time keeping up with all the fuels management we need to do. There are certainly places in the west where there's some overgrown environments where fuels are built up because we've suppressed fires really aggressively and/or the forests are just in that kind of stage. So we’ve get a lot of catch up to do in this country, I think that's what we've realized over the last decade, is that we need to be a lot more aggressive about managing fuels ahead of time, about building control structures around communities; so clearing up brush, giving folks a nice fuel break around community or community and infrastructure so that we can manage fires a little more easily as they approach towns, as they approach infrastructure. We’re making a concerted effort to do more of that.

We’ve got a lot of landscapes that want to burn. What we want them to do is to burn in a way that we can control them, that when a fire starts in the middle of summer, we can manage that fire without having a big impact on people's lives, on their livelihood or on their houses. That could either be through aggressive initial attack or trying to confine a fire into a bowl, into a drainage, et cetera. We also have in the rangelands and the BLM is largely a rangeland management agency, we got 200 million acres to manage, that’s a big task.  We've got rangelands that are really dominated by, in a lot of places, invasive grasses. Cheatgrass is a classic example. Cheatgrass likes to burn. It can burn it once or twice a year - it'll burn every year if you let it. We are trying to manage cheatgrass and really eradicate it where we can and get back into it a more natural environment that's dominated not just by cheatgrass or other annual grasses, but by perennial grasses and forbs and shrubs like sagebrush. That's a big task.  BLM has been working on that for a while. And we actually need to be super aggressive about initial attack in those kinds of environments because they burn too frequently. We're trying to get them to burn way less, maybe every 25 to 75 years instead of every couple of years. So the BLM’s task in the rangelands is really to try to reestablish more natural environment to do that, we need to we need to get fires to burn less, to really restrict the footprint  of some of these big range fires that we can have in a given summer. Its not uncommon for the BLM to have a hundred thousand, 200, 300-thousand-acre fire in the range. And they're fast moving fires. They're not the classic fires that people think of when they think of forest fires that you see on CNN, but they're just as destructive. They essentially allow the rangeland to maintain its dominance with cheatgrass, with species that aren't as productive as the ones we want. It has an impact on species like sage grouse or mule deer.

So in the bureau, the Bureau of Land Management, we are really trying to manage these large range fires so that we can reestablish what looks like a more natural environment, more native vegetation and more sagebrush for the benefit of all people who recreate, people who hunt/fish, people who run livestock. Everybody benefits from having a landscape that's not dominated by cheatgrass. So for the bureau that means trying to maintain small fire footprints so that we can get at the business of reestablishing more native vegetation.

Matt: Yeah. I mean, wildfire definitely impacts literally everything the Bureau of Land Management does, but just everybody in the entire area.

So and I'd say like as that becomes more ... I don't know ... impactful on your average day person, people who live there, people who work, maybe you could talk a little bit about … As it becomes more impactful on people's lives, obviously they read news stories or people generate their own opinions or what they think. I'm sure everybody loves to second guess what you should or should not be doing. I wonder if you can just talk a little bit of what are maybe some misconceptions or things that people assume or think about what it takes to manage fire and manage such a huge organization that you're looking at. What are just some of the common misconceptions, I guess.

Grant:  Well, OK. Well, one misconception is that my fire is the most important fire that's out there. This is a great fire season to demonstrate that no individual landowner or agency has enough resources to manage their own piece of land, frankly. We count as a nation; we count on the sharing of resources.  And that's the whole purpose behind this fire center -- to allow for the free sharing of resources across boundaries. It's the most effective way to do fire management. Because in a given year, my patch of Idaho might not have a big fire season. This year is a good example where this part of southwestern Idaho, where I am, hasn't had a big fire season. So when we don't have a fire season, what we can do is take some of our firefighting resources and send them someplace where they're needed, like northern California. But people tend to get this misconception that what's going on in their backyard is the most important thing that's going on.  They don't recognize that there are other pieces of the United States that are also suffering through their own tragic fire season. Right?  So right now, we've got big fires going on in western Montana. We've got big fires going on in Washington and Oregon and northern California. You, Matt, have a fire near you outside of Park City or between Park City and Salt Lake. Well, I don't know where the hell it is now, but it's running all around. You‘re smelling it. They're smelling it. Right. And sometimes people don't get that. You know -- why can't I have five air tankers running in my fire right now? Because three of them need to be fighting fire in southern California. And we don't have enough stuff for everybody to be fully staffed for every fire that's going on in the landscape in a given time. We have to share resources because we just have to move them around and put them where their best used. So I think people sometimes don't understand that. They don't understand that, you know, completely overstaffing one fire means that somebody else has to go without.

Now, I do think what we're looking at in this country is, is we're recognizing that we don't have enough stuff as a nation, that we need more capacity, that between climate change and some of the fuels management issues we have, we're not in a position right now to just let our fire run across the landscape. Nobody has advocated anything like that and nobody's making those kinds of decisions. But we need more capacity as a nation to manage fire, given what we know about the state of the climate right now. I mean, we're exceedingly dry. We've been exceedingly dry for years. We've got forest die off in places. We're trying to catch up on some fuels management and we've got a ways to go. So in the meantime, we need more resources. We need more state, local, private, federal resources so that we can manage fires better, so that when a big fire goes like the Dixie Fire in northern California, for instance, we've got enough stuff to send there -- we've got enough crews, we've got enough managers to go in there and make good decisions and try to protect folks and their livelihoods in their communities. 

So we need a lot of stuff. But regardless of how much stuff we have, people need to understand that there's other fires going on the landscape when we manage fires nationally. And so we need to share. Sharing is caring and really true with fires that when we're slow, we need to send stuff away to our neighbors and friends. And when we're busy, then we count on them sending stuff back to us.

I think the other misconception is that we can just we just go out and cut some trees and cut some brush and will be in good shape. Right? We’ve got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of acres in the west to manage. The fuels need active management and on many of those acres. And that's a huge task.  It requires some prescribed fire in the off-season. It requires some prescribed fire in season. It requires crews out there, you know, cutting brush or cutting trees. It requires some selective logging in some places where it makes sense. It requires some clear cutting in some places. It requires it requires a broad effort with all the tools. That is a generational investment that this country needs to make. I’ll emphasize that – that’s a generational investment. We’ve got a lot of fuels management to do. And, you know, doing it this winter, it's like, oh, let's do it this winter and then next summer, we're not going to a fire season.  That's not how these things work.  It's taken many generations for us to get into the position we're in. We've got people moving into places in the landscape that they never lived before who expect to be protected from fire. We’ve got climate that's been changing on us for decades, and that continues to dry out in many places. We've got winter snowpack that's not showing up the way it used to. We got water sources that are drying up that used to be full. So generally, I think the fire community is seeing this -- we're seeing the climate impacts. We're seeing that we got a lot of fuels work to do. We're seeing that we don't have the firefighting resources that we optimally would have so we need to invest in all phases of things.

We need to get more firefighters out there, more professional firefighters, people who can make a living at it, who want to make a living at it. We need to be better at managing fuels. We need people to understand that managing fuels means that sometimes in the fall or the spring, even though they don't want it, that we might have to live with some smoke while some folks do some prescribed fire. They might have to accept that it means we're going to have to go out there and actually manage the landscape. We might be cutting some brush or cutting some trees that, you know, it looks like we're doing destructive work.  What we're really doing is trying to change that landscape so that when a fire runs across it, it's easier to manage. So people have to expect that the landscapes… it's a dynamic environment, it's not a static one.  You know, you look out the back door and you see a forested landscape that is a snapshot in time and so we need to go out and actively manage in that or else we're going to lose it in catastrophic fires. So I think people need to accept that.

That we're investing in firefighting resources, but also in fuels management and it's going to mean some inconvenience for the for the greater good. And that idea of the greater good is really something that we all need to commit to, that we're going to have to pay for these things.  We're going to have to accept some inconvenience at times to avoid catastrophe. I think sometimes people get the idea that, you know, not in my lifetime. It's going to happen in my lifetime. It's like, well you know, the odds are that in your lifetime you're going to see something bad happen to a landscape that you really treasure. And so I think we all should accept that a little inconvenience and some active management is well worth it in the long term.

Matt: So you mentioned earlier in our conversation, you know, this has been like 50 years, for the fire center. You know what? We're celebrating the 75th year for the existence of the Bureau of Land Management. So I'm just wondering, what are some of the milestones or what's something that kind of stands out to you. Even more so if we look twenty five years in the future, where we're celebrating the centennial and you're just right about … twenty five years from now is when you start thinking about retirement, Grant, right. So what is something that stands out over the last 75 years? And what would you love to see that we celebrate in the next, you know, for our centennial?

Grant: So well, a couple of things.  One, I know in the bureau we are taking way more seriously, but the idea that we need to more actively manage our fuels. And so my leadership has really tried to challenge the bureau to treat a million acres a year during the off seasons. A million acres of fuels treated annually to try to catch up to some of our greater fuels issues out there. A million is not enough, but a million is a good benchmark. So I think if I look at, you know, a generation out, I would expect the bureau to be treating a couple of million acres a year, to be really trying to catch up to some of that fuels management work that needs to go on. I think in the past, it's … it hasn't been an afterthought, but we recognize that we need to do better. I think we're going to probably hit a million acres maybe next year, you know, for an annual target. I think our bureau ... we're representative of, you know, just symptomatic or emblematic of all the bureaus we need to up our game. And I think after generation, we should be, you know, doubling or tripling that output and figuring out how to do that and making it happen.

I think as a bureau person, I would love to see … I don't know how it's going to happen, it's going to be a combination of fire management, fuels management and scientific investment in species management, but I would like to see the bureau having reclaimed half of the cheatgrass that's out there across the landscape. I think we're all aligned behind that. I think the nation hasn't invested in rangelands the way they tend to invest in forested landscapes. So I think the bureau having an answer to the cheatgrass issue, which is really a combination of other efforts that would be great to see. I always feel like there's a breakthrough about to happen that somebody is going to come up with, with a way to eradicate cheatgrass. It's going to break some of that cheatgrass cycle across the landscape and we're going to have healthier rangeland ecosystems across the west. It's a piece of the west that sometimes people don't notice. You know, you cross the Sierra Nevada, and you drive to Denver and it's a great basin, really.  It's that great country that sometimes people just want to drive through as fast as they can. It's an incredibly productive, valuable, and beautiful landscape, if you appreciate it. I think getting it getting back to what it should look like would be a great thing for this country.

What I've seen over my time here is what used to be called out as a huge conflagration is now considered just another day of business. So Yellowstone is a good example. A couple of fires, not necessarily in Yellowstone, but around there that went, you know, a hundred thousand acres, 200000 acres. And that was a calamitous event.  And I was laughing about this with somebody the other day that we used to be able to name, you know, just from our history, the big fires we were on.  Yeah I was on the Gorder-Rat fire in Los Padres National Forest in California. We don’t even make note of those fires anymore. Unless a fire like the Dixie Fire hits a half million acres, we tend to we tend to lose track of them these days. That is the scale change that has happened over my lifetime and my career. What used to be… what really earned huge notoriety as a big cataclysmic event is now kind of a daily occurrence. That's a frightening prospect. It's amazing what's changed. And that is not through want of trying. It's not because people aren't  trying to manage their fuels or aren't trying to catch fires. It's just that we are in we're in an environment now that is really volatile and really flammable and it's an incredible change. Like I say, a fire like the Dixie Fire that's going on right now, if that had happened 20 years ago, we would all talk about it nonstop. Now, it's almost like a daily occurrence - it's business as usual.  The last fire season was an incredible fire season in the Willamette Valley and the coastal ranges of California. That was some fire behavior in places that, you know, we've never, never seen in our lifetimes.  Not to say it's never happened before, but not for us to witness it. So those kinds of watershed events are happening on such a regular basis now. We're just shaking our heads and saying, what's next? So we need to get serious. We need to get serious about climate change and about dealing with the effects of climate change and manage things as best we possibly can and really try to catch up, because this is this is not your father's fire environment.

Matt: Yeah, really.

Grant:  Way different. And I feel for, you know, I don't fight fire myself anymore. Right. I'm a manager. I still have line quals, I can still go out but that's not my job anymore. My job is to run spreadsheets and do the book work. But I feel for folks who are coming in the business these days. I mean, it’s exciting.  You know, it's like, wow, OK, we've got these big fires. But man, they are working their fingers to the bone for all of us. And I treasure that. I honor their commitment. But I also feel for them because I think they have a hard time ever hitting the pause button … we're burning out folks. We need to give them a better a better life. And, you know, that means investing in their livelihoods and their well-being and really getting them more help. And I think the nation needs to commit to that, to helping out our wildland firefighters and giving them the support, they need.

Matt: Oh Yeah. Seriously I can't think of any topic… as we were coming up with topics for the podcast, I couldn't think of anything that's more impactful, more serious and just, you know, just pressing and how to deal with these wildfires. And then the work that you and your team are doing in not only herding the cats to like get everything else done, you know, it is just it's just insane.

Grant: Yeah, I know. So I'll tell you our current effort is multi-faceted, right? So we know we need to work on fuels. We know we need to fight fire aggressively. We know we need to add to our resources.  In the meantime, we're asking a lot of the people that we have employed for us.

Matt: Absolutely.

Grant: Many of them are not really well paid. You know, some of them are college kids, but some of them are just entering into this career. And so we've got some things we'd like to do. We'd like to make more of our seasonal workforce… so I was a seasonal worker, right?  As I said before, I started as a college kid, but we need more professional fire folks. We need folks to commit to this and to get folks to commit -  they've got a lot of other opportunities -   people have a lot easier ways of making money than fighting fire. Some people just have it in their blood. But other people are going to make hard decisions between, you know, firefighting and something else that's not as difficult and that can pay the bills. So we need to rebalance our workforce so that we have better opportunities for folks so that they will commit to us and they will be the kind of long term firefighters who will make good decisions, who will keep people safe, who will keep communities safe, who will be the most effective people they can be. To do that, we need to keep them around, right? So we're trying to invest in our workforce.  Give people better career opportunities, give them longer fire seasons, frankly.  You know, we end up laying off a lot of our firefighters after fire season is over and we just say, see ya! you know, see you next spring when it's almost time to go again. We're trying to recommit to folks and give them better work, give them a longer tour, and give them the opportunity to actually take some time off during the summer. It sounds crazy,  you know … I think everybody who has a "regular" job treasures being able to go to the lake on the weekend or go mountain biking, whatever, you know, our fire folks tend not to have those opportunities. So we would like to give people a good enough opportunity kind of a more year-round opportunities that they could take some time off in the summer, so they could reconnect with their husband or wife and kids and not be expected to just be on the road for six months solid just living with their coworkers and eating smoke all day. So we're trying to change our workforce.  We call it workforce transformation, but we want to give folks better opportunities so they'll stick with us and they can live a better life and fight fire. Because we don't want a constant turnover like every other employer. We want experienced folks who make good decisions and bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to their daily lives. To do that, we need to give them a life that they can actually sustain. So we're trying to boost their wages a little bit, give them better opportunities and give them a future so that they'll stick with us.

Matt: And it just seems as things move on … climate change … that this just keeps getting just more and more essential.  So it's it's critical to keep people fresh.

Grant: It does. It does.  And that other piece we just hinted at earlier is that people are also, with pandemic inspired telework, people are working in places that they've never worked before. They’re now working out of cabins. They're working in small towns, they're working up in the woods. And I think there are some different expectations sometimes of some people who've moved from an urban environment into a more rural environment. And so I think those people need to be … they need to understand as well - what they've done, right?  You know, it's like,  I've got a cabin in the woods like many other people. I don't have any expectation that fire is not going to have an impact on my cabin in the woods.  That's the devil in the details. Right? It's the deal you make. Yes. I love having a place out there.  And yes, I love, you know, living close to nature. But nature is you know, it's impacted by fire. Fire is a key principle.  So we need that expectation that when folks make that leap, that fire is part of it.  There's no place in the West that fire is not an integral part of. And so I think that's one of those great awakenings people need to have. It's like you can't banish fire from the landscape. It's going to occur in some intervals and you have to be ready for it.

Matt: Grant, I can't thank you enough for joining us. I'm just you know, I want to give a shout out for folks if you want to learn more. You always check out on Twitter @BLMFIRE. If you really want to nerd out, though, you can go to NIFC.gov But Grant, thank you so much.  This has been very educational and very enlightening.

Grant: No, no worries, Matt - thanks for having me.

Matt: All right, later, bye.