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The FAC CIRCULAR
Offering you Fire Adaptation Ideas Outside the Box
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Stewarding the Land, Empowering the Practice
Landscape treatments are an opportunity for communities and land managers to enact their values and put fire resilience concretely into practice. Landscape treatments take many forms. Prescribed burning, hand thinning, grazing, mowing, establishing fuel breaks, and cultural burning are all manifestations of people’s relationship with the landscape. If landscape stewardship is an opportunity to embody a different relationship to fire, and responsibility to place and each other, how can we ensure that more people are able to participate in this work? We must address systemic liability issues that are preventing more people from using one of the most critical and powerful tools in our stewardship toolbox: prescribed fire.
Fire resilience depends on returning fire to fire-adapted landscapes. Prescribed fire and cultural burning are powerful approaches that bring fire, place, and people together. As one of the most effective – and underutilized – tools in our toolbox to become fire adapted, “good fire” faces significant challenges to scaling - especially for individuals and private entities. One of FAC Net’s sister networks, the Fire Learning Network (FLN), worked with The Ember Alliance (TEA) earlier this month to produce an important blog post on one particular challenge for prescribed fire: access to liability insurance.
“Private entities create a public good by reducing wildfire risk and protecting communities, but many are forced to internalize all the risk. Without prescribed fire liability insurance, these organizations expose themselves to existential risk to their finances and their operations and, understandably, many choose not to engage at all.”
The blog, written by TEA’s Director of Programs and Partnerships Daniel Godwin, was originally posted on the Ember Alliance’s site. Daniel’s piece is an example of the hard work and thought-leadership Fire Networks members are contributing to the conversation around fire resilience. Emily Hohman, Director of FLN, writes, “Prescribed fire liability insurance is an often-limiting business necessity for many private burners such as contractors and non-profit organizations. It is a consistent top concern among prescribed fire practitioners in the Fire Networks.”
Those interested in joining the conversation around prescribed fire liability are invited to contact Daniel Godwin (daniel@emberalliance.org) or Emily Hohman (emily.hohman@tnc.org). A special thanks to FLN and TEA for their work in bringing attention to these issues. Please read on for more resources on landscape treatments and inviting more collaboration into these efforts.
With hope,
FAC Net Staff
Want to share a story or resource with FAC Net? Have feedback on this newsletter or our weekly blog? We’d love to hear from you.
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Hannah Hepner is the Plumas County Fire Safe Council Program Manager in Quincy, CA. The Council works within the community on a wide range of fire adaptation activities, such as conducting prescribed burns and thinning projects, offering free chipping services, and cultivating defensible space for senior and disabled community members. Hannah also supports the Plumas Underburn Collective, the area’s local Prescribed Burn Association (PBA). We are delighted to have Hannah as part of the FAC Net community.
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Eric O’Connor is a Lieutenant with the Rapid City Fire Department’s Wildfire Mitigation program in Rapid City, SD. His work supports a variety of fire adaptation projects, including fuels reduction services and the development of a prescribed fire program. The Department recently conducted broadcast burns with successful outcomes in firefighter training, reducing excessive surface fuels, and promoting the positive effects of prescribed fire within the Rapid City community. FAC Net is lucky to have Eric and his depth of experience in our member network.
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"For the past year I’ve led a project for Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition (RVCC) intended to facilitate cooperative burn partnerships between nonprofit organizations and the Forest Service. While cooperative burning is by nature a more expansive practice involving many sectors and partners, there were several reasons why we hoped to focus on the specific dynamics between these two entities. Nonprofits can face unique challenges in fire work, and have fewer resources and systems available to them than other partner types. They also offer a wealth of local expertise, community engagement potential, and workforce capacity at a time when the Forest Service, and the West, urgently needs to expand its qualified workforce to address our worsening wildfire crisis.
It was with these considerations in mind that we embarked on a project to understand the successful strategies that have allowed cooperative burn partnerships to gain traction and propose solutions or agency reforms that would address the most common barriers slowing or preventing their adoption."
In this blog, Becca Shively, Program Manager for Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition, shares reflections on a recently completed project looking at what might help scale-up the use of cooperative burn partnerships between nonprofits and the Forest Service in order to accomplish more prescribed fire across the West.
Read more here.
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"The direct ancestors of the AMTB [Amah Mutsun Tribal Band] have been putting good fire on the ground for hundreds of generations (likely over 800 generations). This history of fire was broken by the past 250+ years of colonization in which fire was outlawed and all Native spiritual and Earth-tending practices were violently interrupted. With the AMLT [Amah Mutsun Land Trust] the Native Stewards continue their stewardship and use of fire – without federal recognition of the tribe (as is true for many California tribes) and without ownership of land. All of their good work is done through partnership and relationship. One project the Native Stewards are completing is fuel reduction and burn-piles on a 110-acre unit in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
[...] It would be more effective to prevent catastrophic wildfire in California if multiple trained groups could burn in parallel with CalFire – and certainly with continued braiding of knowledge between Indigenous, cultural burning practices and state-agency prescribed fire practices. CalFire is supportive of efforts for private landowners to do more burning, and TREX is one of the opportunities that CalFire is engaged in."
Joanna Nelson is an independent, non-indigenous scientist and researcher at LandSea Science. In this blog, Joanna shares insights from her experiences working and burning alongside Native stewards with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, including reflections on liability hurdles to getting more fire on the ground.
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"At WTREX, as with most training exchanges, prescribed fire is only one piece of a much larger training and community-building puzzle. We burn as much as we can, but we also integrate a wide variety of workshops, trainings and special guests into the mix, [including] Maria Estrada, a consultant from Salt Lake City who leads Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice workshops for various groups around the country.
[...] The morning after the oyster bake, we sat on the back deck talking about power dynamics with Maria. [...] Some of us walk through this world with very basic, almost invisible powers: being white, being straight, having financial security and good health. These are things that give us an advantage in this world, whether they are earned or not. But all of us also have some power downs: poverty, insecurity, gender, sexuality, family history, lack of education. What I like most about this exercise is that there is no wrong way to be; it doesn’t matter what your power signature looks like—it’s about how you use it. If you lean toward the powerful, don’t feel ashamed—but make sure you’re using your power to do the right thing."
Lenya Quinn-Davidson is a Fire Advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension. In this blog, Lenya reflects on the 2022 WTREX event in Virginia. Her insights remind us that landscape treatments like prescribed fire do more than offer ecological benefits to the land, they bring people together in meaningful and empowering ways.
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JULY BLOG POSTS
The most recent content from our weekly blog
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We've been lucky to work with some fantastic authors this month on informative and often vulnerable stories about fire adaptation. FAC Net staff member Annie Schmidt and Travis Dotson of Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center wrote a powerful piece about mental health and wellbeing in the fire management workforce. Amanda Milici of the Tahoe Resource Conservation District shared optimistic stories of neighborhoods coming together to prepare for wildfire. And just last week, Magdalena Valderrama and Eliot Hurwitz of the Seigler Springs Community Redevelopment Association wrote about their struggles to develop a cooperative housing model for their community after the 2015 Valley Fire in Northern California.
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Do you have a resilience or fire adaptation story to share?
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