Black Water

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 Domino Effect  

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK:  If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. You're catching us mid-series, so I’d recommend starting from episode one to get the full experience. 

As with most disasters, the immediate devastation after a wildfire is what grabs the most attention: the loss of life, the homes that need to be rebuilt, and the cause of it in the first place. But disasters often have a long tail and can sometimes lead to other crises.  

JIM BOYD: We had 12 flash floods. And people were just throwing up their hands, like, "When is this going to stop?" 

KRISTAN: This is Jim Boyd. He and his wife, Annie, live outside of Glenhaven, Colorado, in a rural mountain community called The Retreat. They narrowly avoided losing their home to the Cameron Peak Fire in 2020. But the following summer, when the rain came, it threw their recovering neighborhood into chaos—again. 

ANNIE BOYD:  The stream, the Miller Fork, sounded so loud. It was like, "That’s not normal. That’s too loud." I told Jim, and we high-tailed it down there. It had topped over—I mean, it was a flood, and it was a mess. 

KRISTAN: Rainwater can rush down the steep terrain when there’s no vegetation to slow it, causing mudslides. 

JIM: It can just be a wall of water. We actually had a resident who was cutting down dead trees by the stream when he got hit by a wave. He lost his chainsaw but managed to get himself out of the stream before it swept him away. Then, two floods later, he found his chainsaw downstream—it had been washed back up on shore or something. It’s built a lot of respect for the power of water. 

KRISTAN: The wildfires that ravaged Colorado in 2020 have had a major impact on our watersheds—from floods and mudslides to damage to the vegetation, soils, and organisms that act as nature’s water filter. Now, almost four years later, many of the forests and hillsides remain so severely charred that little to no regrowth has occurred. 

In this episode, we’ll dive into the relationship between fire and water—that critical resource that feeds our taps every day. 

This is United by Fire, a podcast exploring hard truths about our landscapes and ourselves. I’m your host, Kristan Uhlenbrock. 

 

Whack-A-Mole  

KRISTAN: Jim’s the kind of person who likes to keep busy. He recently retired from a decades-long career at the YMCA of the Rockies, but he still volunteers as a driver for the Estes Park seasonal trolley. He even built Annie a greenhouse so she can grow flowers year-round. Jim also takes a hands-on role in his community through the local homeowner’s association. 

JIM: I maintain the roads—or at least try to maintain the roads—in the Retreat. We have 12 miles of road, 24 lane miles, and they’ve been heavily impacted by the fires and subsequent floods. 

KRISTAN: Since Cameron Peak, Jim has been locked in a constant battle with water. And it’s not just any kind of water.  

JIM: Every time it would flash flood, it looked like crude oil rushing down, carrying all this debris. 

KRISTAN: This black water is filled with ash, contaminants, and other material from the singed landscape. 

JIM: Lots and lots of tree limbs and debris. The debris dams that formed would be 10 to 12 feet tall. Then, when they broke loose, all that debris would rush down, washing out driveways and roads all over again. 

KRISTAN: To keep the roads passable, he’s hauled in truckload after truckload of rocks and concrete blocks—and hauled out pile after pile of debris—to help his neighbors maintain access to their homes. 

JIM: We felt for those people because some of them would hire a contractor, spend thousands of dollars on a new culvert, new rock, and getting everything fixed up. Then we’d have another flash flood. 

KRISTAN: This past spring, I visited Jim’s home up in the mountains to get a better sense of the conditions on the ground. Driving up the long, winding gravel roads, I passed piles of rubble and construction equipment. In every direction, I saw stands of blackened trees. 

JIM: So this is all forest going up the ridge behind us. On our property, you can see some orange or pink flagging up there. All of those trees—I’ve cut them down, and now I’m limbing them and creating burn piles that I’ll burn next winter when there’s snow on the ground. Beyond that, it’s all National Forest, with lots of dead trees. Probably 80 percent of the trees were burned, blackened, and killed. 

KRISTAN: The National Weather Service offers simple advice about post-fire flooding: “If you can look uphill from where you are and see a burnt-out area, you are at risk.” 

Jim and Annie’s home is tucked into a hillside, which offers some protection from flooding but doesn’t eliminate the risk of debris tumbling down toward their property. While they aren’t directly next to a creek, the risk of water and debris impacting their neighborhood remains high. Jim is eager to show me the challenges his neighbors are facing and the work he’s doing to keep the roads clear. So, we jump into his truck and head out. 

We drive down to a stream that feeds into the Big Thompson River, a tributary of the South Platte. We pause at one of the water crossings. Some crossings have culverts, while others are just raised concrete sections designed to allow water to flow over them during high-flow periods. This particular crossing is critical for residents to access their homes.  

JIM: The flood we had last year was still six feet high over the top of this crossing. There were two massive cottonwood trees, and it completely washed one of them out—it’s now sitting in the stream channel. The concrete blocks we put along the edge of the road to help stabilize it—some of those eroded and slid down the embankments. 

KRISTAN: This crossing has been flooded out at least half a dozen times. In the first year after the fire, Jim kept a backhoe nearby just in case.  

JIM: I just left it parked down here because the water would overtop the road anywhere from one to four or five feet. It would leave behind a lot of sediment and debris—trees and everything else hung up on the road. We’d spend hours clearing it all off to make it passable again. 

KRISTAN: We continue driving down the road and stop to check out a different part of the stream, where the water is roaring. The stream’s walls have been gouged, exposing layers of soil and rock, and there’s little vegetation left around. 

JIM: Just for perspective, that used to be a little bubbling brook down there. But since the floods, it has widened the drainage by probably 30 or 40 feet—it used to be just 2 or 3 feet across, with a gentle bluff gradually sloping down to the stream. Now, it’s carrying a lot more water, especially this time of year, compared to what it used to.  

KRISTAN: When fire burns through, it can weaken the soil and coat the environment in ash, leaving the land unable to absorb or direct water. This sets the stage for erosion, especially during heavy rain events. The hotter and slower a fire burns, the greater its impact on the soil—it can become so water-resistant that it hardens like pavement. 

This problem is so severe in the Retreat that some of Jim’s neighbors have installed flood barrier bags. I’m not talking about small sandbags—these things are massive. 

JIM: They’re basically four feet by four feet by four feet—a type of canvas material inside a wire mesh. You fill them with sand or some kind of natural material, then tie multiple flood barrier bags together in a row. They’re wired together to create something like a dam or a wall, and people have placed them strategically around homes that are vulnerable. 

KRISTAN: Jim steers us past a house that sits level with the stream. The fence-like barriers wrap around part of the property, scoured and streaked with mud. 

JIM: They had water come in through that side window over there. It was high enough—probably five feet up on the side of their house—and it actually blew the window out. That was before they got the flood barrier bags installed on three sides of their house. 

JIM: These people have a great attitude. You can see some of the signs they’ve put on the flood barrier bags—one says “Welcome to the Ark.” They’ve got a good sense of humor. Another sign says “Beach in a Box” and “Beachfront Property.” 

KRISTAN: Water can pose just as great a risk as fire. In the summer of 2021, a rainstorm caused a flash flood that killed a family of four vacationing in a cabin near the Cameron Peak burn scar. But you don’t have to visit or live in these charred landscapes to feel the impact. 

 

The 2020 Story 

KRISTAN: Colorado is known as a headwater state because our water supports 18 other states and Mexico. One of the primary sources of this water comes from the snow that falls on our mountains and then melts. This meltwater flows through our landscapes and into a network of waterways, reservoirs, and tunnels. That’s why what happens upstream matters to us all.  

ESTHER VINCENT: Most people don’t know. I’ve talked to my neighbors in Fort Collins, and they don’t realize that this is water that traveled all the way from the headwaters of the Colorado River. The East Troublesome fire burned directly through the watersheds that supply the water coming out of their taps. 

KRISTAN: This is Esther Vincent. She has worked for Northern Water for the past 25 years, addressing both water quality and quantity issues through data collection, conservation, and efficiency programs. 

ESTHER: I’m the Environmental Services Director at Northern Water. I’ve been working on post-fire watershed restoration for the East Troublesome Fire as an executive sponsor on behalf of my organization. 

KRISTAN: For Esther, like many, the summer of 2020 was difficult. She had colleagues who lost their homes in the East Troublesome Fire and saw firsthand the devastation caused by more than 400,000 acres of burned landscape. 

ESTHER: These were watersheds we had worked in for years—decades, in some cases, like mine. It felt very personal, even though my house wasn’t burned in the fire. 

It’s not like we didn’t know there would eventually be fires in our watersheds, but no one envisioned something on that scale—two massive fires at the same time in our area, affecting the primary water supplies for two of the communities we serve. We certainly didn’t have a road map for recovery from anything of that magnitude.  

KRISTAN: The East Troublesome and Cameron Peak Fires impacted more than half of Northern Water’s supply. But the East Troublesome Fire posed a particular challenge for Northern Water due to its impact on a major water initiative: the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. 

This massive project, jointly operated and funded by Northern Water and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, moves water from the western side of the Continental Divide to the east through a process known as transmountain diversion. It begins in Grand County, at the headwaters of the Colorado River, and channels water to Colorado’s Front Range via the Big Thompson River, eventually reaching the South Platte. This water supports over a million people, sustains agriculture on the eastern plains, and powers six hydroelectric plants. 

So when fires ripped through the area, Esther had a long list of concerns: flash floods tearing apart natural and built infrastructure, or sediment-, ash-, and debris-filled runoff threatening water quality.  

ESTHER: There’s the initial shock of the event, and then there’s the question: What are we supposed to do about this? What do we need to do about this? 

From a water provider’s perspective, we don’t own any land. We’re downstream of the lands that burned, but we have no jurisdiction over those burned areas. 

KRISTAN: Northern Water found itself in a difficult position. First, they needed to navigate a massive patchwork of public and private lands while working closely with the community. Second, they had never undertaken a recovery effort of this scale before. But they knew they had to act. 

At the same time, the federal government was offering funding and support for the recovery, but they needed local partners with the capacity to lead the efforts in Colorado. 

Northern Water had to decide whether to step into that role.  

ESTHER: It meant we were going to have to work directly with landowners in Grand County, within the burn scar. 

As a transmountain diverter, we’re not exactly the most popular kid on the block on the West Slope. We do have collaborative, strong relationships with partners on that side, but at the end of the day, we remove water from these watersheds—and that’s been happening for decades. The local community isn’t necessarily all that gung-ho about it.  

KRISTAN: Ultimately, Northern Water stepped up to partner with Grand County and other organizations. 

ESTHER: At the same time, we felt it was very important to unite forces with Grand County and the other players involved in the fire recovery after the East Troublesome Fire. We all depend on these watersheds, and we wanted to be present for the community. 

We wanted to walk the talk—not just taking water out of these watersheds, but also protecting them and caring for the health of these systems. We’re all in the same boat, and we’re going to figure this out together. 

 

Through the Mountains 

KRISTAN: When faced with a disaster, humans have a remarkable ability to come together. At our best, partnerships aren’t just transactions. They’re relationships built on trust, shared vision, and mutual respect. 

MERRIT LINKE: If you do things to people, they almost always resent it. Doing things for people can come with good intentions, but if it’s not what they want, it generally doesn’t work. But if you do things with people—getting their input, or at least avoiding their objection—it usually works. That’s the “to, for, with” lesson. 

KRISTAN: This is Grand County Commissioner Merrit Linke. When the East Troublesome Fire tore through the area, Merrit was on the front lines, supporting his community and working with Northern Water and other partners to repair the landscape. He has deep ties to the area—his family has been part of the local ranching and agricultural community for generations. In 2012, he decided to venture into the political arena.  

KRISTAN (OFF MIC): Why did you run for county commission all those years ago?  

MERRIT: I’m tall, so I hit my head a lot, that’s all I can say. Just kidding. I think it’s probably more about practicing what I preach. That’s the lesson I’ve always tried to instill in our kids: If you don’t like the way things are going, stand up and do something about it. 

KRISTAN: His district is a rural mountain community that averages just eight people per square mile and includes the towns of Granby and Grand Lake. He has a clever way of articulating what he sees as the biggest issues facing his constituents. 

MERRIT: I kind of jokingly say it, but it’s actually quite serious. We deal with the West Slope W’s: water, wildfires, and wolves. 

KRISTAN: For anyone who follows Colorado’s headlines, water, wildfires, and wolves frequently dominate the news. These topics are often framed as conflicts between rural and urban interests, partly because there are genuine disagreements and debates about whose priorities should be represented. 

At the same time, many are working to find common ground on these complex issues.  

KRISTAN (OFF MIC): How do you talk about the value of water?  

MERRIT: Are you buying or selling? It’s incredibly valuable because it’s an essential component of the food we eat. 

KRISTAN: Merrit was a high school science teacher, but a couple of decades ago, he returned to the family business. Today, he does it all, from growing hay to being a feed dealer to leasing land for running cattle.  

MERRIT: I’m kind of the concierge of the cattle. Ranchers sometimes get a bad rap, but they have to be good stewards of the land. Because if they weren’t, they’d be out of business. 

KRISTAN: Wearing all these different hats, Merrit cares deeply about how we manage our landscapes and resources, both before and after a fire. At the end of May, Merrit and I visited some land he leases for grazing. We parked near a fence, gazing across a field that was beginning to turn green, ringed by dead trees on the surrounding hillsides. 

MERRIT: The fire basically moved from west to east, and this pasture lies perpendicular to the fire’s path.  

KRISTAN: Merrit grazed cattle in this spot during the summer of 2020, and he says it’s a key part of the story behind the East Troublesome Fire’s behavior.  

MERRIT: Fire requires three things, right? Temperature, fuel, and oxygen. The fuel on this pasture was removed because the cattle had grazed it, so the fire didn’t burn anywhere across this pasture. It burned around it on the north side, as you can see—it scorched that line of trees, jumped into the meadow we were just looking at, and even crossed the road. 

I think it’s an important point: cattle can be an effective fuel management tool. Hopefully, it’s a lesson learned by some of the federal land managers—that grazing can be an effective way to reduce fuel.  

KRISTAN: The use of grazing—whether by cattle, goats, or sheep—as a wildfire mitigation tool remains an open research question. Merrit’s experience serves as a real-world example and highlights the need to explore all options that could help prevent fires from causing such devastation. 

As we look out across the wide, green meadow that didn’t burn, Merrit points out that he’s spent the past decade transitioning it back to native grasses. He’s always thinking about the interconnectedness of soil and water systems and what it means to be a good steward of the land.  

MERRIT: Healthy soil contains plenty of organic material between the clumps of grass, allowing it to absorb moisture and resist drying out under the sun. A good ranch manager—something we all strive to be—moves cattle around carefully, avoiding overgrazing any one area. The goal is to always leave enough grass cover because the last thing you want is bare ground exposed. 

KRISTAN: Pastures and ranch lands make up a significant part of our landscapes, and we’re still learning how to manage them effectively. Healthy soils play a crucial role, impacting everything from wildfire risk to the quality of the water we drink. 

MERRIT: Grand County is the headwaters of the headwaters—the source of the Colorado River. It’s also the easternmost county on the West Slope. We’re essentially just one 13-mile tunnel and one 6-mile tunnel away from the East Slope. 

KRISTAN: These landscapes may not be in everyone’s backyard, but maybe we should all think of them that way. 

MERRIT: A healthy forest means a healthy watershed, which translates to better water for households on the Front Range, including Denver. And it likely even comes down to dollars—if the water is cleaner as it flows through that tunnel, it costs less to filter, saving money for the end user. Everything is connected to everything.

 

Getting the Team Together  

KRISTAN: After the fires, one of the first challenges was assessing the damage on the ground. 

ESTHER: Typically, the agencies involved in post-fire recovery will fly over the area to get images of the burn scar and assess the severity of the burn. 

KRISTAN: This is Esther Vincent with Northern Water. 

ESTHER: We had snow on the ground, which made things difficult. So we spent the winter doing assessments and preparing for what we knew would come in early July—the monsoonal rains. 

KRISTAN: About 90% of the East Troublesome burn scar is on public land, which meant Northern Water had to work with a range of federal and state agencies, as well as community partners, to map the severity of the burn, secure funding, and begin implementing projects. 

ESTHER: You get engineers involved, and they start designing mitigation projects, such as floodwalls, sandbags, berms, and more. If you have a lot of erosion happening in a certain area, and a house is close to the banks, that house might collapse into the stream if you don’t protect the banks. So, you’ll install riprap, big rocks, and harden the streambeds to protect against the volume of water and erosive forces. 

The goal is to keep the soil on the hillside for future revegetation and to protect downstream interests and values.  

KRISTAN: One of the primary ways to support plant growth and prevent erosion in a post-fire landscape is aerial mulching.    

ESTHER: These are helicopter operations. We had over 19,000 helicopter drops and mulched about 12,000 acres of the burn scar. 

KRISTAN: It costs about $2,500 to mulch one acre, so Northern Water had to be strategic about where to drop the wood chips, not to mention all the other restoration efforts. 

ESTHER: We’ve spent about 50 million so far on the East Troublesome burn scar. That’s just East Troublesome. A similar amount has been spent on Cameron Peak, and there’s still so much more work that needs to be done. 

KRISTAN: She estimates that the total cost of post-fire watershed recovery for both mega fires, plus the Miller Fork fire, was more than $200 million. Yet, despite that price tag, Northern Water hasn’t had to raise rates for consumers. 

ESTHER: We’ve been the victim of our own success because we were very successful in leveraging and obtaining federal and state funding to do the work. This really helped buffer the cost for water users on the east side of the Continental Divide in this case. 

KRISTAN: Esther says that, historically, the goal for a water utility was to stay out of the spotlight. 

ESTHER: Most people don’t think about it—they turn on the faucet, and water comes out. In the water community, we often talk about how well we did for so long as utilities, staying invisible. If we were talked about, it was because there was a problem. But we can’t operate this way anymore. We need to help our water users understand what it takes to bring water to their taps, including the infrastructure involved, the sources of that water, and what influences those sources. 

 

Who Foots the Bill?  

KRISTAN: As wildfires become more frequent and severe, putting valuable resources at risk, the cost of recovery is increasing. So, who foots the bill? 

To get some perspective, I spoke with Tony Cheng, the director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University, who often thinks about our policies and approaches to land management.  

KRISTAN: When you plant a tree or clean up after a wildfire, it’s difficult to capture those costs and benefits and charge any one entity. 

TONY CHENG:  Right now, the costs are borne by taxpayers.   These are not values that are accounted for by a market.  

KRISTAN: That’s why it’s often governments, through taxpayers, who pay for these things. Yet, we know resources are limited. Wildfires don’t just affect the areas they burn, but also the people, cities, and commerce downstream that depend on clean water. As a result, new funding models are being explored to incorporate the value of a healthy forest. 

TONY: I think there is a lot of interest in more market-based approaches, especially before a fire happens. Can you generate investments from downstream beneficiaries to fund upstream wildfire risk mitigation practices? These approaches have been tried in many other parts of the world. China, for example, has done quite a bit of this to reforest uplands that have been devastated by historic deforestation and agricultural practices. 

KRISTAN: Tony says examples like this can help us rethink how to fund these projects.  

TONY: Right now, we're pretty much in reactive mode, and reactive mode will always be much more expensive in the long run than proactive mode. We know that intact, healthy forests can provide nature-based solutions for many of our challenges. They can mitigate climate change by absorbing and storing carbon, improve watershed functioning, and help watersheds retain and slowly filter water, rather than having it come all at once. So I’m biased toward investing in forests—keeping forests as forests, especially in many of these burned areas. But right now, we just don’t have the momentum, attention, or resources for that. 

KRISTAN: So I asked Tony how he’d make the case to water consumers. 

TONY: When you turn on your water, where does it come from? It comes from the high, forested mountains of Colorado. If you want your water to remain clean, secure, and affordable, we need to keep those forested landscapes intact, healthy, and capable of recovering from fire. We have the solutions to make that happen, but we need your support as an aware and active citizen. If your rates increase slightly to fund forest mitigation, we want you to understand why and where that money is going. And if there are opportunities to show your understanding and support to land managers like the U.S. Forest Service or other agencies doing this critical forest work, please send that support. 

 

Ground Zero 

ESTHER: This watershed is sort of like ground zero of the East Troublesome Fire. 

KRISTAN: I’m standing on a gated bridge overlooking the Willow Creek Reservoir, a water storage facility located in Grand County and part of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. Nestled among mountains and forests, it’s designed to capture snowmelt. I’m here with Esther, and we’re both hugging ourselves to stay warm. The water’s surface ripples from the wind. 

ESTHER: The watershed upstream of the reservoir is 90 percent burned, and before that, it was 90 percent affected by pine beetle kill. The intensity of the fire is likely due to the large number of dead standing trees. 

KRISTAN: Seeing large stands of dead trees from a pine beetle epidemic or other pest infestations is not uncommon across Colorado and the West. These are essentially matchsticks waiting to burn. If that happens, all the woody material can wash down the hillside into critical water resources. 

Esther points to a yellow debris boom in the reservoir. 

ESTHER: They are anchored at each end of the boom and are designed to trap any debris that enters the reservoir. Because we have two. The one on the upstream end tends to catch more debris. This one downstream is meant to protect this specific piece of infrastructure we’re standing on—the canal that directs water to Granby Reservoir. 

KRISTAN: Once this water reaches Granby Reservoir, it flows through a 13-mile pipe across the Continental Divide, supplying the towns and cities of the Front Range, the farmlands to the east, and eventually reaching the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the water also flows into the Colorado River, heading southwest. It’s a critical upstream resource that must be maintained. 

ESTHER: We’ve collected a lot of debris, which is then removed using heavy equipment. We scoop it out of the water and pile it up. You can see a small leftover debris pile there, and then it gets hauled away. 

KRISTAN: Following the creek downstream from the reservoir, Esther takes me to visit a sediment trap—another tool used to help clean up the fire’s aftermath. We walk out across a raised rock bed in the middle of the stream. 

ESTHER: To the right, you have Stillwater Creek, which, without the impoundments, would flow as a fairly narrow channel into Granby Reservoir. What we have now is a berm made of riprap and dirt, which slows the water down on its way to the reservoir. 

KRISTAN: The berm acts like a road detour, causing the stream to slow down as it makes turns to go around it.  

ESTHER: By trapping the sediment here, then dredging it and hauling it away, we’re preventing that nutrient load from entering the system. 

KRISTAN: Post-fire sediments can contain heavy metals and toxins, as well as increased levels of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. 

ESTHER: There are many symptoms that manifest in water bodies when nutrients become too rich and concentrated. These include blue-green algae blooms, also known as hazardous algae blooms, which are associated with the production of toxins. These toxins are problematic for both contact recreation and drinking water. 

KRISTAN: Once that mixture gets to water treatment facilities, it’s more difficult and expensive to treat.  

ESTHER: The sediment trap has definitely done its job. We've hauled I think it's hundreds of truckloads of sediment out of this particular site. 

KRISTAN: This berm isn’t permanent, but it’s likely to remain for at least ten years. While there are signs that things are improving, watershed recovery doesn’t happen overnight. 

ESTHER: Oh, we are so far from being done. Our programs and frameworks are not currently set up to respond to these events at the scale they’re occurring or at the level of need. 

 

A Beehive Without a Queen 

KRISTAN: In the aftermath of 2020, everywhere I turn, people are saying we need a better plan—a new path forward, a reimagining of how we spend our dollars. 

The way we’ve been operating doesn’t work for the situation we’re in now: a wildfire crisis with ripple effects far and wide.  

ESTHER: We don’t have decades to plan for this and then start implementation 30 years from now. We need to take action on the ground much faster than that. The question is, how do we make it happen? How do we overcome the policy and institutional barriers, which, to me, seem to be the biggest obstacles right now? 

KRISTAN: Lots of promising collaborations and conversations are happening, but Esther says that both Colorado and the country need comprehensive forest health plans. 

ESTHER: A big roadmap that provides a compass for everyone to follow is essential. Without it, it’s like a beehive without a queen. If you’ve ever observed a beehive without its queen, the bees become disoriented. They start taking on jobs that aren’t theirs and do bizarre things. Eventually, the colony collapses. You need the queen, that central organizer, to provide direction. Right now, we don’t have that. 

KRISTAN: This is United by Fire. Up next, we explore why our values around land management come into conflict, what it means to create a resilient ecosystem, and how to live with fire.  

MICHAEL SMITH: It is part of the ecosystem to burn. It wants fire. It’s just a matter of balance.   

Credits

KRISTAN: Laws of Notion is a production of the Institute for 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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