Fire and Us

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.

 

Forest Bathing 

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: It’s a chilly morning in Estes Park, Colorado, and sunlight is just starting to filter through the mist and trees. I’m following Blake Ellis as we wind through the campus of the YMCA of the Rockies. We spot an elk with a magpie perched on its back. 

BLAKE ELLIS: Alright! Interspecies friendship. 

KRISTAN: Blake is leading me and a small group of people to a spot that’s surrounded by boulders and trees. 

BLAKE: This is the most challenging part that we'll do today—just walking up this hill. 

KRISTAN: We’re all part of a conference called After the Flames, where scientists, land managers, and community leaders are learning how people and wildfire can coexist. 

About a dozen of us decided to get up early to experience a unique practice known as forest bathing. Blake is a certified forest therapy guide. She got into this work after the 2018 Camp Fire ravaged her northern California community, claiming 85 lives and displacing more than 50,000 people. 

She witnessed the long-tail impact that wildfire can have on a community.  

BLAKE: How can we help people recover from the stress and trauma they've undergone? But how can we also help them rebuild that connection to the land when the landscape has been so dramatically transformed and can often serve as a constant reminder of their trauma and grief? 

KRISTAN: We all settle onto the ground in a circle. Some have brought blankets. 

BLAKE: So, forest therapy is inspired by the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku. That translates literally to "forest bathing." 

KRISTAN: Forest bathing got its start in Japan in the 1980s.  

BLAKE: Spending time in nature is really, really good for us. But it's good for us in a multitude of ways. When we spend time in outdoor environments, especially in forested ones, this activates what is known as our parasympathetic nervous system. That's the part of our nervous system that can be thought of as the rest and digest system. It helps us recover from stress, heal, and even digest our food. So as we settle in, maybe take a moment to just get your bearings for where we're at in this space. Maybe peek around at who and what is above you, behind you, and beneath you. And once you feel like you've gotten your bearings and feel comfortable, I'll invite you to close your eyes. 

KRISTAN: Blake guides us through a seated meditation and then has us meander around the area. She wants us to slow down and observe what’s around us: sights, smells, sounds, and feelings. 

BLAKE: I wonder if you can imagine the heartbeat of this place. Maybe take a moment to consider all the beings, both human and more-than-human, who might have been in this exact spot before you today. You might imagine the long journey this place has been on. And perhaps, like us, it's never been exactly like this before. 

KRISTAN: Something that has stuck with me throughout this season is that we're not separate from these ecosystems – we're part of them. And like any relationship, it requires work, understanding, and sometimes, difficult compromises. When I ask people about their relationship to the land, I can hear a shift happen in their voice. I can see it in their eyes. Like when Monte Williams, the supervisor for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest, recalled his college years when he was standing in a forest during a summer job and realized this was his calling.  

MONTE WILLIAMS: I said to myself, what am I doing? This is it. This is what I love. I love the sense of purpose, the feeling that every day I’ve done something meaningful, something bigger than myself. 

KRISTAN: Or when Jim Boyd, a homeowner who faced the Cameron Peak Fire, shared stories of growing up in his family’s cabin, a place that shaped his decision to build a life in the mountains and live there for decades. 

JIM BOYD: I built this house in '86 and moved in in '87. It's been my dream ever since. 

KRISTAN: So, how do we take our deep connection to a place or landscape and learn to steward it in an era of change—not just preserving what was, but adapting to what is, and what’s coming? It’s about our relationship with the land and with wildfire. Because wildfire doesn’t just affect those who live in or near forests—it affects us all. 

I’m Kristan Uhlenbrock, and from the Institute for Science and Policy, welcome to this closing episode of United by Fire, a podcast exploring the hard truths about our landscapes and ourselves. 

 

Past is Prologue 

KRISTAN: Fire is deeply woven into the human story. It provided warmth and protection from predators. It transformed our diets, brought people together, and helped build communities and cultures. It became a tool for agriculture, and fueled our engines and industries. 

But fire is even more fundamental than that. It’s something unique to Earth. Here’s a clip from historian Stephen Pyne, giving a lecture at Brown University in 2017: 

STEPHEN PYNE: Fire has long been recognized as fundamental to the Earth, part of the ancient four elements, but, you know, among those four, fire is the odd one out. Earth, air, and water are all substances, but fire is a reaction. It takes its character from its context. It synthesizes its surroundings. So that makes it a shapeshifter. 

KRISTAN: Fire adapts and responds to the conditions it finds itself in. This makes me think about how we, as a modern human society, have created an environment conducive to large and destructive fires. According to Pyne, we’re living in what he has called the Pyrocene—the age of fire. An era where climate change and human choices are giving rise to a new type of fire, one that’s reshaping our planet. 

Pyne is someone I’ve heard quoted and credited across many of my interviews. Tony Cheng, of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, is one of those people. 

TONY CHENG: We have harnessed almost every aspect of heat and fire, and we are now living with the consequences of that. We have a lot of control, as individuals and as communities, in changing our actions and choices to shift the path of the Pyrocene. So, that gives me hope—because, as we give more attention to this world that feels like it’s on fire, we also need to acknowledge that the Pyrocene is something we've created as humanity. That’s something we can change. It's within our power, both as individuals and as a collective. We just need to educate ourselves, work together, and be much more intentional and strategic about how we make decisions about our land and our relationship with fire. Those are things we can control.  

KRISTAN: Pyne, Tony, and others suggest that to evolve our relationship with fire, we must reckon with the past. Kimi Barrett, a wildfire researcher from Headwaters Economics who has also worked with Stephen Pyne, reminds us of other pivotal moments in history when we adapted to fire. 

KIMIKO BARRETT: Stephen often points out that we've actually addressed this issue before in urban landscapes. When you look at Western settlement as it moved westward, we were building entire cities without considering fire. Chicago, Peshtigo, San Francisco—these cities routinely burned, rebuilt, and then burned again. 

KRISTAN: In 1906, an earthquake in San Francisco rattled the city and set it on fire. For three days, flames ravaged neighborhoods, destroying about four square miles and leaving nearly a quarter of a million people homeless. In the aftermath, San Francisco was forced to rethink how it prepared for disasters—not just earthquakes, but fire as well. 

KIMIKO: We began thinking deliberately about how the city and the urban landscape were being built with fire in mind. We eliminated things like sawdust insulation, wooden boardwalks, and wooden roofs. We installed fire hydrants, evacuation systems, and used concrete and non-combustible materials in our structures. Because of the proactive measures we took, we don't have the same level of structural fires today, and we no longer need to worry about them in the same way. 

KRISTAN: Though this was a different era and a different set of circumstances, these are critical lessons we could learn from. 

KIMIKO: We can do this again if we look at how our homes are actually being built with wildfire in mind. I think that’s really important because Stephen is suggesting that if we start thinking proactively about living with increasing fire, we need to ask ourselves: What does that truly mean for us as a society? What assumptions do we need to shift to anticipate this increasing inevitability? We can adapt. More than that, we can thrive with it, and we can have healthy ecosystems alongside resilient, viable communities. We just need to start making those deliberate changes now before it’s too late. 

KRISTAN: While we can learn from the past, what must we rethink to manage our landscapes for the future? 

One person who has thought deeply about this question throughout his career is Forest Supervisor Monte Williams. He believes that with change, we must also bring grace. 

MONTE WILLIAMS: We know what we know. And you can interpret that in different ways. I’ve done the best I could with the science, the knowledge, and the people available to me when making decisions. But I have no doubt that in 10 years, someone will look back and say, "Man, you really missed it here." They’ll say, "What we've learned shows that what you did was wrong, and we need to do something different to achieve the goals you were hoping for." When I think about this historically, I want to argue that we often look back and wag our fingers at those who came before us, saying, "Why didn’t you know better? Why didn’t you do something differently?" But you can only know what you know. 

KRISTAN: There’s an old saying – an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But with wildfire, it’s not that straightforward. Every dollar we spend comes with tradeoffs and no guarantees. We can’t predict when or where fires will start. We can’t predict how big they’ll get or who they’ll impact. 

What we do know is that we’re facing a future with more people choosing to live in high-risk areas, increasingly severe droughts that make it harder for landscapes to recover, and land management practices that are still catching up to what science tells us about working with nature rather than against it. So it means we have to do things differently. 

 

Can We Adapt to the Risk?  

KRISTAN: Another fundamental relationship that this series has asked us to examine is our relationship to risk and responsibility. 

When it comes to wildfire risk, the US Forest Service defines it as the likelihood of it occurring and the potential effects it could have on things we care about. There is a whole team of experts calculating communities and values most at risk, then determining what steps can help prevent disaster and how to communicate those steps. 

But therein lies one of the biggest challenges. We live in a diverse society with very diverse opinions on who should bear the risk, who should bear the cost, and who is responsible. 

There is a concept discussed in the emergency management community known as risk transference. Here’s Fire Chief David Wolf: 

DAVID WOLF: If I don’t deal with this, somebody else might have to. So I’ve transferred the risk to someone else. And sometimes the person I’ve transferred the risk to is better suited to handle that risk. 

KRISTAN: Firefighters are an example. 

DAVID: The average person on the street, running into a building, should transfer the risk to a firefighter who’s fully equipped with the proper gear and has the training to handle that environment. That person is better suited to manage that risk. 

KRISTAN: Insurance is a common form of risk transference. We buy policies to cover us during emergencies so that we don’t have to bear the full financial loss if something happens. 

David points to other types of risk transference outside of formal structures. These are more about the societal choices we make as individuals, and they can have unintended consequences. 

DAVID: There are plenty of other things where we end up inadvertently transferring the risk to somebody who isn’t as prepared to handle it. When we don’t deal with some of these problems, I think that’s the social side of this we started talking about a little bit on the phone. We could choose to do nothing about the wildfire risk in our areas, and that will impact the people who can’t afford to move away. It will impact people who don’t have access to the internet or phones to receive emergency notifications. The risk will get transferred to someone, and it may not be transferred to someone who is better equipped to handle it. It might just get transferred to someone who doesn’t have a choice. 

KRISTAN: He makes the point that doing nothing about wildfire becomes its own kind of decision. His experiences have shaped how he views responsibility. 

DAVID: There is a greater good argument and there's a personal rights argument. I tend to lean more towards and work towards that greater good argument over the individual one, because while I recognize the importance of the individual side, I also know there’s a group out there that doesn’t have a voice. If someone doesn’t argue for the greater good, then that is the group that’s going to suffer the consequences. 

KRISTAN: These challenges cut straight to the heart of how we function as a society. But the impacts of wildfire reach far beyond any one community. Smoke drifts across state lines. Damaged forests can’t filter the water that flows to our cities and farms. Rising costs of firefighting and forest management often get passed on to taxpayers. In a very real way, we all have skin in the game. 

 

Taking Responsibility 

KRISTAN: In these wildfire discussions, I hear a tension between personal and collective responsibility. 

While systems and policies matter greatly, change also has to happen through countless individual decisions – things like whether to cut trees, where to live, or how to build, all the way to the choices we make that contribute to a warming climate. 

Like fire itself, these choices have far-reaching consequences. 

After the Cameron Peak Fire, Jim and Annie Boyd found themselves confronted with that tension. 

JIM BOYD: A lot of people, it was a good wake-up call, and they’ve done mitigation now to make their homes more resilient from wildfire. But a majority of those, the people in this very same subdivision, have not. There’s a lot of people that still have trees growing right up by their houses, by their decks, and they haven’t heeded that knowledge and that warning that it could happen again. Just because we had this wildfire here, it doesn’t mean we’ll never have another one. 

ANNIE BOYD: It’s a blessing to live in the mountains, but it comes with responsibility. 

JIM: And it comes with some trade-offs that you have to take seriously. 

ANNIE: Some things just can't be helped, and with our changing climate, there are going to be more events. We can only do so much. But the other part, the people part, is what I think I became more aware of – the importance of community. So, whether it’s in a mountain community or a mountain town like Estes Park, your neighbors really matter. 

KRISTAN: Loving a place and knowing how to care for it are two different things. As our climate shifts and fires grow more intense, we’re being asked to reimagine our role as stewards. Sometimes, that means letting go of how things were or making difficult choices about what to protect. 

For the Boyds, it’s about showing up to be good neighbors. 

JIM: One of the people who lost their home had so many trees around it, so we organized a rally day. We rented a couple of chippers, brought in a bunch of people with chainsaws, and by the end of the day, we all looked like coal miners, cutting down all these blackened trees and running them through a chipper. So it’s about the community and helping where you can. 

KRISTAN: Agency can mean feeling empowered with the knowledge and resources to make informed decisions about the land. 

Yet, many people still struggle to imagine a devastating wildfire happening to them, making it difficult to justify investing in preparation for a threat that feels distant or abstract. Action can be motivated in different ways. Sometimes, the desire to be a good neighbor can shift people’s behavior, while others are driven to protect what they love. 

For the Boyds, stewardship is the price of admission for living in the mountains of Colorado. 

JIM: I love living as a neighbor to the forest, and I wouldn’t want us to reach a point where we say, "Okay, people should live in cities and let the wild be wild, and no one should live in the forest." I’m not one of those people. It’s very meaningful to me to live here, with the peace and quiet and the interaction with the wildlife. But we have to do our part to clear the trees, limb the ladder fuels, and keep the grass and brush cleared so that we have a better chance of surviving in the future. 

KRISTAN: Because fire doesn’t stop at property lines or jurisdictional boundaries, we’re forced to confront difficult questions about who’s responsible for protecting whom, and what we owe each other as members of fire-prone communities. 

 

We Need a New System  

TONY: What we’ve done in our society over the last 150 years is outsource our relationship with wildfire. 

KRISTAN: Here’s Tony Cheng. 

TONY: We’ve named agencies and organizations to be the masters of fire. 

KRISTAN: Whether it’s putting out fires or controlling them, we’ve placed much of the responsibility for managing wildfires on federal and state agencies. Sometimes this is justified, but other times, these agencies may not be the most well-suited due to the limitations of their authority.  

TONY: The emphasis has been on federal land agencies managing federal lands to reduce the risk of home loss from fire. But that’s not what these agencies were designed to do. They were created to manage the lands and natural resources on federal property. I understand that there’s a transmission of fire risk from federal lands to private lands, especially where homes are in the path. So, there is a connection to address. But it’s unrealistic to expect federal land agencies to protect private property from fires. There's a mismatch between their authority, jurisdiction, and what they can actually do. 

KRISTAN: We have a system that wasn’t built for the challenges we face today, compounded by conflicting perceptions of responsibility. While we have many effective components, what I hear over and over is the need for a more comprehensive strategy, the right policies, the right incentives, and more people at the table. 

TONY: Can we create a more community-based model to re-establish our relationship with fire? By making space for managers, partners, stakeholders, and community members to come together, we can develop science-based knowledge about what’s happening in their environment and figure out proactive actions to improve it, rather than reacting to disasters. Managing the interface between public and private lands requires different programs and organizations, perhaps cooperatives between federal, state, and local governments. Local governments have a big role to play in terms of where and how they build, how they authorize development, and incentivize fire-adaptive practices. We also need to align land management treatments with building codes and development standards to make communities more fire-prepared, resilient, and adaptable. Private insurance companies also have a significant role in shaping where decisions are made and how we create standards for building and rebuilding. 

KRISTAN: Just as critically, we need to learn to live with fire. 

TONY: There is no future without fire. The question we, as a society, need to ask ourselves is not if there will be fire, but what kind of fire we want. My end-state dream is that wildfire is treated like any other weather event—a significant, but not overwhelming, event. There would be some news coverage, a bit of a buzz, and then it would fade away. It wouldn’t have a major impact. It would be like a big snowstorm in Colorado—lots of snow, maybe some problems, some accidents, but hopefully no tragedies—and then it just fades into the background. We know snowstorms are coming. We prepare for them. Oh, here’s another one. Now we’re over it. That’s what I’d love fire to be, because that’s what it has to be. Again, there is no future without fire. 

 

A Hopeful, New Tapestry 

KRISTAN: Like weaving a complex tapestry, creating fire-resilient landscapes and communities requires many hands working with different threads. The pattern may not look exactly like what came before, but its strength lies in how these diverse strands support each other. 

Monte Williams from the US Forest Service recognizes that the path forward involves many hands and authentic relationships. 

MONTE: First and foremost, this is their backyard, and these folks have expertise and abilities that we don’t have. We spent a lot of time working with the community, helping to create organizations that are now really driving the work being done. They’re designing where it’s going to happen, implementing it, and working together across boundaries. That’s very different from what we were doing before. 

KRISTAN: If you take a step back, you can start to see the threads connecting, a new pattern emerging. Monte points to the efforts he’s seen come together across Colorado, both before and since the devastating 2020 wildfire season.  

MONTE: We have the ability to go out and get things done ahead of time and ask, "What if a fire comes through here?" How do we, as a community—not just the Forest Service—decide where we want to hold this fire? Where is the first place we want to work? What's our highest priority? These are the things we can do, and that’s what we’re doing in Northern Colorado. It's the power of people, being focused on changing outcomes. How do we change fire as it moves through the landscape and its effects on what’s important to us? There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for each place. The solution lies in working with partners, figuring out what we can do here to change the outcomes—not just treating the forest and hoping it all adds up. Instead, we should ask, "How can we change the fire behavior? How do we catch it on a bad year?" And then, how do we do this together? 

KRISTAN: For Monte, the future is hopeful because he’s seeing change happening on the ground. It might not be making headlines, but it's there. 

MONTE: I think the citizens of Colorado should actually be excited and have some hope, maybe for the first time in a while. What's happening in northern Colorado is beginning to make a difference. It’s working—not just because of what a federal agency is doing, but because of this whole group of partners working together to change the landscape for a better tomorrow. 

KRISTAN: Like most things in life, the only constant is change. So, if we want a better tomorrow, if we want to feel successful, it means accepting that we can’t control everything. Instead, we must focus on what’s within our control—like how we adapt and respond. Here’s Chiara Forrester from the Watershed Center. 

CHIARA FORRESTER: I think we’re definitely entering a new age of forestry and forest management. I think every generation has said that, which is awesome. But I think we’re more equipped than ever to balance human and ecological objectives. 

KRISTAN: Chiara points to a framework that might help those struggling with the complexity and trade-offs of a decision. It’s called the RAD framework, which stands for Resist, Accept, Direct. 

CHIARA: There are a few different options we can consider when thinking about how to manage our ecosystems under climate change. One is to resist the change—we paddle upstream and try to keep things exactly as they are now. Another is to accept that change will happen and do our best to mitigate its negative effects. For example, we know glaciers are melting, so we prepare our communities for rising sea levels. The third option is "direct," which is about guiding the ecosystem toward a state that might be more successful under future climate conditions. It's really about learning from the past to manage for the future. 

 

Fire on the Horizon 

KRISTAN: Learning to live with wildfire is a generational challenge that requires both immediate action and long-term vision. The forests of tomorrow are shaped by the choices we made in the past and the ones we make today. 

To get a sense of the scale of our challenge, I hiked up to the Devil's Head Lookout Tower, one of only four fire lookouts still active in Colorado today. 

I’m meeting with the person staffing the tower. 

ASHLEIGH FARINACCI-SILFIES: My name is Ashleigh Farinacci-Silfies. I'm a fire lookout at Devil's Head on the Pike National Forest. 

KRISTAN: And you’ve been doing this for how long? 

ASHLEIGH: Yes, I’ve been working at Devil's Head for five years. 

KRISTAN: For half the year, Ashleigh and her husband Trace live in a cabin just below the lookout. It makes her commute to work... very short. 

KRISTAN (OFF MIC): After you. I'll follow you up. 

ASHLEIGH: 143 stairs to the top. 

KRISTAN (OFF MIC): Do you ever get tired of walking up these stairs? 

ASHLEIGH: Yes, sometimes I have to walk up them like seven times a day if there's lightning. I can't stay in the tower during a storm, so I go up and down, up and down, in between storms. 

KRISTAN (OFF MIC): Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine... 

KRISTAN: We top out on the red metal stairs that wind through granite boulders, offering 360-degree views of rock formations, dense forests, and iconic mountains like Pikes Peak to the south and Longs Peak to the north. To the east, I can see the Front Range corridor. 

It’s July, and the sky is a little hazy across the horizon due to the Alexander Mountain Fire burning about 100 miles to the north. 

Located in the Pike National Forest and situated almost 10,000 feet up, the Devil’s Head Lookout has been in continuous operation since 1912. At one point, there were over 8,000 fire lookouts across the country. Now, it’s down to the hundreds. Ashleigh is one of the rare paid, on-the-ground staff in an era where cameras, satellites, and aircraft are more commonly used for wildfire detection. 

We head into a four-sided glass, 15-by-15-foot building. Ashley radios down to the nearby fire dispatch. 

ASHLEIGH: Pueblo Dispatch, Devil’s Head Lookout.  

DISPATCHER: Okay, Pueblo. Go ahead.   

ASHLEIGH: Show me in service. Good morning. 

DISPATCHER: Copy that. You’re in service at 9:29. 

KRISTAN: She grabs her binoculars and starts looking across the landscape  

ASHLEIGH: I scan the horizon every 5 to 15 minutes, depending on fire danger. I use my binoculars and follow a very patterned motion—up, down, and around 360 degrees. If I see smoke, I go straight to the Osborne fire finder and figure out the location. 

KRISTAN: Stationed in the middle of the tower is a topographic map with sight lines to help pinpoint where the smoke is coming from. 

ASHLEIGH: I write it all down and call it into dispatch. The dispatchers then contact the nearest fire crews, who respond in their fire engines and decide on the next steps. Sometimes we use helicopters or air tankers, but often we can just send in a hand crew. 

KRISTAN: Leaning against one of the windows is a whiteboard listing recent wildfires and their causes. 

ASHLEIGH: Lightning, human, human, human. Lightning, lightning, lightning. Human, human, lightning. 

KRISTAN: Many of the wildfires Ashleigh tracks are caused by people, often due to carelessness—campers not dousing out their fires, sparks from a dirt bike, or a discarded cigarette butt. In fact, 87% of all wildfires in the U.S. are caused by humans. 

That’s why, for as much time as she spends scanning the horizon, she spends just as much time talking to people about fire. 

ASHLEIGH: Mostly, people ask me about my lifestyle up here—how I carry my goods and all the questions about the strange life I lead. But I always try to navigate the conversations back to fire, to our recent fires, and whether they live here in the forest or just down in Castle Rock. I ask if they've mitigated their homes, if they're prepared for a fire, and if they know that it could happen to them. A lot of people living just down the mountain separate themselves from the forest and the fire danger, and it’s important to communicate that. It's not just about the beautiful view up here. We have 40,000 visitors a year, and that's 40,000 people to talk about fire mitigation, prevention, and our history. 

KRISTAN: Standing here in this historic fire lookout tower, I can’t help but see it as a symbol of our complex relationship with fire.These towers were built during an era when we thought we could control nature—spot every puff of smoke, stop every flame. But now, I see this tower serving a different purpose. Yes, Ashleigh still watches for fires, but just as importantly, she helps people understand their connection to this landscape and their role in shaping its future. 

The tower itself bridges our past and present, reflecting the transition we’re making from trying to eliminate fire to learning to live with it. Just as Ashleigh looks out across the horizon, watching for smoke, we too must look ahead and face difficult questions: Which fires do we fight? Which do we let burn? How do we protect what we value while accepting fire as part of our world? 

ASHLEIGH: I have hope because I see things changing, even though I’ve only been working in fire for five years. We’ve seen a lot of changes when it comes to addressing the wildland fire crisis. There’s a lot more funding going towards fire budgets, and more people are becoming interested in fire. I see fire being discussed on platforms like TikTok. It’s part of people’s daily conversations now, especially with all of us being affected by smoke. Before, it was just Smokey the Bear telling us to put out the fire, and that only you could prevent it. But now, we’re starting to see those changes and putting more fire on the ground. I think that’s really beautiful. 

 

Closing 

KRISTAN: Fire is woven into the fabric of who we are as humans. It has shaped our evolution, our communities, and our relationship with the natural world. 

While it's easy to feel powerless in the face of something so elemental, so daunting, I've learned through this journey that progress happens through countless small actions. 

The path forward isn't just about technical solutions or management plans. We need those. But it’s also about building relationships, shifting mindsets, and finding ways to work together.  

There is an urgency to stop doing things the way we've been doing them. We can no longer afford to work in silos or cling to old assumptions. The solutions will come from weaving together many threads - science, lived experience, personal responsibility, community values, and political will.  

Wildfire is not a red or blue issue. It can transcend political divisions because it affects all of us. That's why I believe we can be united by fire. 

The future will look different than the past. But if we approach it with wisdom, courage and care for one another, we can find a way to live with fire once again. 

I hope you enjoyed listening to the full series, and I encourage you to stay tuned for more exciting extended and bonus content coming very soon. Also, we’d love to hear your thoughts on what resonated or what questions you still have. You can send us an email at institute@dmns.org.  

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 Jordan Marks, 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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