Rethinking Fire

United by Fire is a nine-part narrative podcast series that takes you inside the harrowing 2020 wildfire season in Colorado through the voices of those who witnessed it firsthand. Hear from firefighters and residents who found themselves in the path of the flames, as well as ecologists, land managers, community planners and entrepreneurs who are working to build a more wildfire-resilient future. 

The series is hosted by Kristan Uhlenbrock, Executive Director of the Institute for Science & Policy. For more information and resources from this episode, check out the episode summary page. Enjoy the transcript and to listen to the audio version visit institute.dmns.org/united-by-fire.

 

The Nightmare

JULIE KNAUF: I have nightmares of fire. I remember looking out the window and seeing the glow in the backyard. It's in the back of your head. The risk of fire and what could happen. So here we are. You look out and you don’t just see black and dead anymore, and that helps. Now we see some green grass, yeah.   

This is a hole. This is where our house used to be. Our driveway was right here.  

You know, when they say after a fire, look out for the nails. I was like, what are they talking about? You know, everything burned. Oh, my goodness. How nails don't burn. I mean, it was just wall to wall nails. Just, buckets full. Buckets full.  

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: Julie Knauf and her husband, Paul, lost their home to a wildfire in 2020. A year of historic blazes that ripped through the mountains and communities of Colorado… making us rethink what we thought we knew about fire.    

We’re at almost 10,000 feet in the mountains of Colorado. A half-built garage resides partway down Julie’s gravel driveway. We shuffle inside her 38-foot camper.   

JULIE: Anywhere you want to sit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, this is my dog couch. It's been shook out, and I apologize for all the hair, but anywhere you guys. Hey, hey, hey. Come here. Hey, here. Here.  

Not a lot of space when you have pets.  

KRISTAN: She shares the space with her husband, their dog, Jasper, and cat, Catch'em. It was supposed to be a temporary solution.   

JULIE: First, you never think you're going to lose your house. Then you never thought you'd be homeless for so long. I mean, in terms of not having a house with a garage and a front door.  

KRISTAN: Inside the camper, artwork, twinkly lights, and memorabilia from Julie’s outdoor adventures adorn the wood-paneled walls.   

JULIE: I've been living here in the Grand County for 35 years.  

I am a diehard local in terms of our outdoor activities and you do whatever it takes to keep on going in terms of work. So, I've bartended, almost all over, but I'm also a nurse. Um, I've been a nurse since 1989, and I spent 17 years commuting to Denver from here.   

KRISTAN: It’s easy to understand why someone would want to live up here. The views in any direction are of rolling mountains and valleys, connecting with a sky full of breathtaking sunrises and starry nights.    

When Julie was five or six, she remembers visiting this part of Colorado with her family.   

JULIE: I just remember how beautiful it was. I wanted to sit on the steps outside and stare at the stars while I ate my dinner. You know, we learned to ski here.  I just always figured I'd come back. And my dad said, I can't go until I graduate from college. So I graduated and became a ski bum, but I was always a nurse and I was always a bartender and I probably worked 80 hours a week and skied as much as I could and, and never left.  

KRISTAN: In 2014, Julie and Paul finally found their dream home.  

JULIE: So we looked around quite a bit and when we pulled up the driveway to this place, it was fall and the aspen leaves were all changing colors. There were horses in the meadow. I mean, we pulled up and we're like, Oh my God, this is it.  

KRISTAN: The property they picked is part of Shadow Mountain Ranch, a community of a few dozen large private lots outside of Granby. It’s about a 2-hour drive from Denver, on the western side of the Continental Divide, and not far from the popular ski resort Winter Park. Public lands stretch as far as the eye can see.    

JULIE: We have great views, and we're a little bit off the beaten path, which we also liked. you know, we're like, we're really going to have to like each other a lot if we move into this place because it's us. Lo and behold we had great neighbors, even though you can't see anybody around us. 

It's a dream, but when you get here, you don't realize how hard you have to work to actually maintain that lifestyle. People are always like, why do you stay there? Why do you still live there? You work so hard. And you know, it's like my family, everybody, we're just so tight and we've all kind of grown up together and take care of each other and it's a great community.  

KRISTAN: The fabric of that community changed fundamentally on Wednesday, October 14, 2020, when the East Troublesome Fire started in the Arapaho Roosevelt National Forest, not far from Julie and Paul’s home.   

JULIE: We could see this raging glow, like back behind that mountain behind our house.  And we didn't sleep all that night cause he kept looking out the window and like, is that glow coming? Is it coming? Are we going to have to get out of here? But everything calmed down. I went back to work on Friday.  

KRISTAN: At the time, Julie was a pediatric nurse for the hospital in Granby. And that Friday marked day three of the fire. But due to really low humidity and high winds, the fire quickly spread, closing a state highway, bearing down on Julie’s home.  

JULIE: We got a call Saturday morning at 7 a.m. saying you have one hour to get out. So we're like, Oh, now we're in panic mode. We're like, Holy crap.  

My husband pulled everything off the walls, like, we've had pictures framed from all our travels and stuff like that, put those in the travel campers. He was better at grabbing clothes. Because I just grabbed, like, I'm like, I know I have to go to work, so I grab my scrubs and I make sure I had work shoes.  

You're kind of thinking like what am I going to need for the next couple of days, or what if?  But you never think that you aren't going to come home again.    

JULIE: One of my heartaches is that I left one of the only things I got from my grandma was a beautiful standup jewelry box. It was probably from early 1900s and the lid lifted up and it was all velvet inside and it had a little turn that played music   

KRISTAN: Julie and Paul evacuated south. But she was still driving up to Granby for work. She remembers the day she stepped out of the hospital – it was the Wednesday after they evacuated – and she could see the fire tearing across the landscape.   

JULIE: I was sitting on my car, tears rolling down my cheeks, and I called my director. I'm like, this is bad. This is so bad. You got to put everybody on call.   

KRISTAN: The East Troublesome Fire ultimately claimed two lives and destroyed 366 homes and many more buildings.   

Julie knew within a couple of days that her home was gone. When she returned to her property about a week later, she saw it with her own eyes.  

JULIE: And we got to the house, and it was just breathtaking. We got out of the car and walked up there, and the only thing you could do is just drop to your knees and be like, I can't believe it, it's all gone.  And the only thing that was left was a part of the basement foundation and our chimney stack.  And that was it. I mean, it was so hot that it even burned and melted the steel. I mean, there was nothing left.    

KRISTAN: This is United by Fire, where we explore hard truths about our landscapes and ourselves.

My name is Kristan Uhlenbrock. From the Institute for Science and Policy, welcome to season 4 of Laws of Notion.   

Today’s megafires raise questions about how we manage our forests and where we choose to live. In 2020, Colorado experienced the two largest wildfires in the state’s history: Cameron Peak and East Troublesome. Together, these high-intensity blazes ripped through communities and challenged what we thought we knew about how wildfires behave.   

This season, we’ll look at what led up to that catastrophic year and what we’ve learned since. We’ll unpack our land management strategies, the impact of a changing climate, and what it means to protect what we love. This new wildfire paradigm brings both loss and opportunity:   

But the question is: can we learn to accept fire on our landscape?

  

A Bad Master  

CAMILLE STEVENS-RUMANN: So there's a great Finnish proverb that talks about how fire is a good servant and a bad master. Which I think is a wonderful way to think about fire in general and how we should be managing it, right? When we can be in control and we can use fire as our servant, it does really great work. It cleans out the understory. It takes care of all those fuels. It kills some of the smaller trees while still allowing a lot of the other trees to survive.  

But when it, when it is the master, when we can't be in control. It's terrible, right? It's when we see all these homes burn, it's when we see these landscapes really become transformed.  

KRISTAN: I’m sitting with one of Colorado’s leading experts in wildfire and our landscapes.   

CAMILLE: I'm Camille Stevens-Rumann. I am a Fire Ecology faculty member in the Forest and Rangeland Stewardship Department at Colorado State University. And I'm a co-director at the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute.  

KRISTAN: Camille has had an up-close relationship with forests – and fire – for most of her life.  

CAMILLE: When I was in undergrad I worked for the Forest Service as a wildlife technician. We hooted for owls and looked for goshawks and things like that.  

But multiple family members of mine were wildland firefighters. And so when I graduated from college, that was like a kind of logical place for me to go. I didn't want to be in a classroom anymore and wanted to be outside as much as possible.   

KRISTAN: In the early 2000s, she spent several years working on a hotshot crew – a specialized team of highly trained wildland firefighters – battling fires in nearly every western state.   

CAMILLE: It's one thing to go visit Yellowstone as, like, a tourist. It's a totally different experience to go visit Yellowstone on a wildfire, right? You're seeing this, this place experience drastic change in the matter of minutes sometimes  

KRISTAN: But Camille takes a long view of landscapes, and she’s got a deep understanding of what made Colorado and the West so fire prone.  

CAMILLE: Fire suppression has been the exception, not the rule, to how these landscapes have been managed for millennia. There were people on these landscapes for thousands of years before European settlers arrived, and they were managing these landscapes with fire. And so when we think about what these places look like today, that is a product of a very small window of what these places have experienced in terms of human involvement with fire. 

KRISTAN: In the early 20th century, the U.S. government set aside large areas of forest to protect and regulate an important natural resource: timber10. Because at the time, the forests were being slashed and burned by settlers to make way for agriculture, development, and the railroad.   

Then several major wildfires destroyed that valuable timber resource and nearby communities. After public outcry and a mandate by Congress, the Forest Service made putting fires out its top priority11. And that legacy has had profound impacts on today.  

CAMILLE: We're actually really, really effective at suppressing fires. It's only those that are burning under really extreme conditions, that get out of control, that are burning the majority of our landscapes.  

KRISTAN: 98% of wildfires are suppressed before they grow larger than 100 acres. That’s right, 98%. We’ve gotten so good at stomping them out, that people now expect this. Today, we have more and more people living in and near these wildland areas, we have dense, unhealthy forests with lots of fuel on the ground. And when you add a warmer, drier climate on top of that, you’ve got a tinderbox.   

CAMILLE: I usually think about the interaction between climate change and fire in two ways. One is how it's changing the wildfire itself. It's predisposing lots of fuels for those fires, the snow is melting sooner, the snow is starting later in the fall, things like that, that make a longer fire season, make those plants more drought-stressed, more likely to burn.   

KRISTAN: Much of Colorado has been experiencing severe drought over the past two decades. And 2020 was one of the hottest, driest years our state has experienced in modern history.  

CAMILLE: The other way that I think about how climate change is interacting with fires is how climate change is affecting what can come back after that fire, and what is likely or not likely to be there in the future, which has consequences for the next fire.  

I think we're getting to a place in some locations across the Western U.S. where the question is not like, should we do something, and if we don't, it'll still be okay or will still be a forest? I think the question is like, if you want a forest, what are you going to do to keep it there? Or have it there again?  

As we're interacting with ecosystems where climate change is a constant pressure on them, we need to be creative, and we need to start thinking actively today about what a climate adaptation strategy look like.

  

Your Dream Home  

KRISTAN: If you could live anywhere, where would that be?   

Colorado has been my home for six years now, and I can easily remember what my decision-making process was to move here. I had a job opportunity, plus connections to the state, and a few other things on a spreadsheet.   

But my main motivating factor was the outdoor lifestyle – I wanted more opportunities for skiing off a snowy mountain, hiking in a spruce forest, or scaling a steep rock face.   

Where we choose to put down roots, to make a home, a life, is influenced by our values and necessities. Yet how often when we choose to live somewhere, do we consider risks outside our control? Like fire.   

KIMI BARRETT: This is a problem for all of us because this risk is shared for all of us, particularly for those that live in the West.  

We see fires that are burning hotter, meaning they’re more severe. We see them lasting longer. In many, many locations, there is no longer a wildfire season, they're occurring on a year-round basis.  

KRISTAN: This is Kimiko Barrett, a wildfire researcher and policy analyst at Headwaters Economics – a nonprofit that helps communities make decisions about development and land use. Specifically, Kimi spends a lot of time thinking about where we choose to build and the risks involved, big and small.   

KIMI: So the wildland-urban interface has this terrible acronym of the WUI. You're talking technically about where humans – the built environment – interfaces or merges with the unbuilt environment or vegetation and wildlands. These are the areas that are most prone to wildfire because of this marriage between very, very vulnerable areas that are used to being burned and then people building homes in those locations.  

These WUI landscapes, these wildland-urban interfaces, they are one of the fastest growing land use types in the country in terms of development and housing construction.  

KRISTAN: Just under half of Colorado’s population — some 2.5 million people — live in the wildland-urban interface. Of those, more than 1 million live in areas with a moderate to very high risk of wildfire.   

This is a problem not only in Colorado but for all of us – from Hawaii to the East Coast.    

KIMI: Since 1999, the number of homes and buildings destroyed by wildfires have increased by 250 percent with some particularly acute devastating events, as we saw with Paradise. As we saw with the Marshall Fire, as we saw with the Lahaina Fire, these are big, devastating, and damaging events.   

KRISTAN: People move to the WUI for lots of reasons. Some want to be closer to nature. Some may find more affordable land and housing. And as populations grow, suburban developments often edge closer to these higher-risk landscapes.   

KIMI: They are beautiful places to live. They are adjacent to rangelands, grasslands, forests, and opportunities to run, hike, recreate, and explore. So, they have an appeal from an aesthetic and recreational perspective. And you can buy a lot of land if you are in that economic position.   

You also have a large portion of land ownership that have been grandfathered into those areas. Where they are a fifth-time generational homeowner or they inherited that land, they may not be in the economic position to move locations. It's not so simple as saying, you know, you live in a high-risk area, you need to move.   

KRISTAN: Kimi is very careful not to dish out blame. She’s more interested in how systems are structured and how people make choices.   

KIMI: We are placing homes in very high-risk locations. A wildfire burning in a forest where there are no homes is not much of a concern. It's not something you read about in the media. They occur all the time and you don't hear about it. It's really only when homes and communities are impacted or placed in harm's way that they get the attention. That is how we define a wildfire disaster. Before that, it's just a hazard.  

KRISTAN: One thing about us humans, we’re really great at starting fires. Campfires, fireworks, burning trash, dropped cigarette butts, or even arson. The National Park Service reports that nearly 85 percent of wildland fires in the U.S. are caused by us.  

The second thing about us: we’re really bad at calculating our own risk, especially related to wildfire. And we might not recognize the risk we put on others.   

KIMI: You can theoretically put a firefighter or a group of firefighters in front of your home and have it protected from a fire. You would never ever assume or expect that level of home protection in a flood or a hurricane or an earthquake. But we do this with fire and we've done it since the establishment of the Forest Service in 1905. It is an assumption that's baked into our culture. And unfortunately, it's now led us into this crisis where that ongoing expectation at a societal level assumes that we can continue to control fires and that we can protect our homes simply by having firefighters there and getting rid of the forest.  

KIMI: One of the biggest challenges we face with wildfire is what we call a moral hazard.   

KRISTAN: That’s when someone takes excessive risk, often economic, knowing that someone else will bear the burden.   

KIMI: There is not a lot of incentive for a county commissioner or a local elected official to adopt any sort of regulatory measure, like land use planning, like regulations or zoning, because when it comes to a wildfire, fire protection is a subsidized public service that is provided through firefighting support and paid by the American taxpayer. This means that local elected officials, county commissioners can approve development proposals, other new building in high-risk locations because when it comes to a wildfire event and the protection of those homes, they're not the ones that have to foot the bill.  

KRISTAN: From local to state to federal government, we spend a significant amount of money on wildfire suppression – we’re talking billions of dollars. No one has been able to calculate the total social, economic, or ecological costs. But we see the impacts pile up – from loss of homes, industries, and services, to degraded water supplies and ecosystems, to impacts on our health. And when there are limited resources, every dollar comes with tradeoffs.  

KIMI: If the problem we are trying to solve is reducing risk and impacts to people and communities, then people and communities need to be part of the solution. It's that simple.   

That means thinking very deliberately about how our homes are being built in these locations, how our community is designed in anticipation of that increasing risk, and what does that mean for long-term resiliency?  

KIMI: To resolve the wildfire crisis, we need to look at this at all scales, from the individual homeowner, to the neighborhood level, to that community scale, all the way up to state, regional efforts, and then the federal, because it is nuanced, because it is multi-scalar, there is no single solution to this.   

KRISTAN: With wildfires occurring at an unprecedented scale – with so much at risk – we have some tough decisions ahead. There’s no future without fire. But on whose terms will it burn?  

KIMI: We cannot contain, extinguish, and suppress every wildfire. That is simply not a reality. 

  

Can We Change?   

MONTE WILLIAMS: I had a forest supervisor a long time ago. He had this vision of what a forest supervisor’s life and arc would look like. He argued that, the first two years, you’re there learning and figuring stuff out and implementing the last person’s program. But in that time, you’re getting a vision. You're talking with people, you're learning and you're going, ‘Okay, this is where the forest needs to go and be in the next 10 to 15 years.’ And then he said, the hard part starts which is you’ve got to change that forest from the direction that it was going to the place that it needs to be in the future.  

KRISTAN: Dressed in a sage green Forest Service uniform, a brass badge pinned near his chest pocket, Monte Williams has a seriousness about him. His career has been filled with difficult decisions and disasters, like in 2020 when he was the Supervisor for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland in north and central Colorado. It’s an area that spans 1.5 million acres, bigger than the state of Delaware. A rich ecosystem ranging from dense forests of conifers to rocky alpine tundra to wide stretches of prairie. It’s difficult terrain to even try to hike, not to mention manage.   

And it’s also the largest swath of land impacted by both the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires.   

KRISTAN: Looking back from when you started nine years ago to today, what has shifted for you?  

MONTE: I think a number of things, you know, in a larger sense, a real focus on community and how we share decision-making space with our partners to a much greater degree than we ever did before.  

KRISTAN: This landscape will be the last stop on Monte’s career journey with the Forest Service, which has taken him from Tennessee to South Dakota to Idaho to D.C. and finally to Colorado. He remembers doing seasonal work for the agency when in college.   

MONTE: And I can still close my eyes as I'm doing now. And I can see the scene when I stood up and I said to myself, what am I doing?  This is what I love. I love people in the Forest Service. I love the sense of mission. I love the sense of every day I've done something that is of value, that's bigger than me.  

MONTE: Whether it's mining and minerals and things or whether it's timber for making homes or such or it's recreation. It's a it's a whole swath of opportunities that come off the forest. Our mission is trying to make sure that that's sustainable into the future.  

KRISTAN: So what does it mean to manage natural resources for the future? Especially when the fires are bigger than they’ve ever been.   

I’ve come to learn the way humans control forests to meet the needs and values of society is part art and part science. And there is a word for it: silviculture.  

MONTE: When I went to school, I found a book, a silviculture book that was printed in like the 1920s or 30s.   

I remember buying that book and, oh, I wonder how much it's changed. I had not changed at all.   

KRISTAN: Monte says we’ve been doing “random acts of restoration:” taking a scattershot approach to how we spend money and where we select projects.  

MONTE: We were trying to treat as many acres as we could, and we were looking for the places that were the cheapest and the easiest. But they weren't adding up to a change in fire behavior.   

Now we're talking about how are we managing fire, the size of this is so big. You're really thinking in a different scale and different ways.   

MONTE: The realities of what this landscape is going to look like in 50 years, especially with changes in climate. There are, I think, stark choices in front of people. I'm pretty sure that it's not going to look the same. The same is probably going to be unsustainable. The truth about these forests, though, is they're always changing. They've been changing – they looked completely different a hundred years ago when they were a lot more resilient to fire and now they look like this.  

KRISTAN: The West resembles a patchwork quilt. Public lands interspersed with private lands. Layered with conservation districts, watersheds, and different ecosystems and landscapes. Rural communities of maybe 90 people up to larger suburban and urban areas like the Front Range of Colorado. That’s a lot of competing interests, jurisdictions, and expectations pushing against one another.  

Meaning conflicting opinions when it comes to fighting fires.  

MONTE: I've been in different parts of the country where folks feel like the lack of attention to a 10 a.m. rule is the reason why these things are getting away from us. It's generally an uninformed opinion.    

KRISTAN: The 10 a.m. rule came from the mid-1930s as part of the no-burn era. The Forest Service policy was to control fires as soon as they started, preferably by 10 a.m. the next morning. And even though that 10 a.m. rule was dismissed by the mid-70s, the lingering effects of that suppression era continue. And sometimes, the expectations.    

MONTE: I've heard that on Cameron Peak. And how that thing moved and moved, there was no 10 a.m. ability there. Once that thing was established across the road and with flame lengths of 50 or 60 feet, I'm not sure who was going to stand in front of that and, and wave it down and say, stop, fire, stop. It wasn't stopping. It was torching across the road and, and was going to burn. And so it depends upon your focus of how do we create outcomes we want? And I think a lot of people agree that we don't want houses to burn down. We don't want watersheds to be destroyed.  

There are groups of people out there that still think it's suppression driven solution, that if we get more bombers,  we hire more firefighters, if we do more sales and just get rid of more trees, that, that will solve the problem.   

KRISTAN: Monte says we need to get at the heart of what’s happening and why fire behaves in certain ways. So we must update our knowledge. We must change. That’s our best shot at doing something.   

MONTE: Because once the fire's burning, it's all reactionary and it's all luck.

  

Fire vs. Us  

KRISTAN: You would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t love sitting under a dark sky with bright constellations and the heat of a campfire warming your nose. The dancing flames can keep you captivated for hours. Fire pokes at some of our deepest evolutionary traits, making it hard to look away.   

CAMILLE: We are a species that actually loves to play with fire, right? We all have this innate desire for that to be a part of our lives.    

KRISTAN: And we have a responsibility – whether we start fires, try to control them to protect things we value, or contribute to a warming world. That’s why Camille Stevens-Rumann thinks we should be questioning what we know. And what we do.      

CAMILLE: We are in a time of unprecedented ecological change. Climate change is happening at a pace that is beyond what we could have imagined. And our ecosystems are responding much more quickly than even 20 years ago.   

There's been a kind of perception that maybe I don't have to worry about it because the fire won't come here. And I think the more we can stress that it's not a matter of if it comes here, it's a matter of when, and are you ready for it when it happens. Because we're seeing so many fires and a lot of them, when we can't suppress them, we can't really control them.  

We still need to be there to shepherd it. You know, I'm talking about instead of us being fire suppressors, us being fire stewards, which is a really critical change of perception to how we have thought about fire in the last 150 years.   

KRISTAN: Wildfire makes unique demands of us as a species. It reminds us to look at our blind spots. To face up to the consequences of our actions — and do better next time. It pushes us to be grateful for the places we depend on and humbles us to realize that we might not have as much control as we thought. It forces us to ask: “If we are to steward this land, how might we do it together?”   

CAMILLE: I think wildfire is a weirdly uniting thing on that front, right? There's no political sides to a home burning down. There's no political sides to losing hundreds of thousands of trees. So the more we can glam onto that thing that is not politically divided in our politically divided world right now, I think the more, hopefully, we can get done.    

KRISTAN: This is United by Fire, a podcast examining hard truths about our landscapes and ourselves. In our upcoming episodes, we’ll take you through both the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires to learn about the lengths we will go to save the places we love, what we do in the aftermath, and how we prepare for the next one.    

KIMI: It is something these ecosystems adapted to well before humans were part of this landscape.  

DAVID WOLF: We can't increase our safety from wildfire without doing things like prescribed fire.  

CHIARA FORRESTER: People who live on this land who care about the forest We want their perspectives and values to be incorporated into forest management planning. You know, this is a community wide effort.  

JIM BOYD: I knew that if this house was going to survive it would be with whatever efforts I put in    

BRIAN KITTLER: It's not something that you can put a Band-Aid on. We need a holistic, comprehensive policy framework for the entire wildfire problem.  

TONY CHENG: You know, if this is a consequence of accumulation of human choices then all of us have the ability to maybe change those choices.    

Credits

KRISTAN: Laws of Notion is a production of the Institute of Science and Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. To learn more visit lawsofnotion.org.

I’m your host Kristan Uhlenbrock. This episode was produced by me, Carson Frame, and Tricia Waddell with support from Nicole Delaney, and fact-checking by Kate Long. Sound design by Seth Samuel. Original music by Ryan Flores. For a full list of credits, check out the show notes.  

To listen to the audio version, or for more information and additional resources on wildfires in Colorado, please visit institute.dmns.org/united-by-fire.

Check out all the seasons of the Laws of Notion podcast at lawsofnotion.org. 

  

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