Fire Ecology with Robin Lee Carlson

Hello and welcome to Golden State Naturalist, a podcast for anyone who's ever heard that some kinds of fire are better than other kinds of fire and just really needed more information about that. I'm Michelle Fullner. And today we're talking about the role of fire in ecosystems across California. In this episode, you'll hear my conversation with Robin Lee Carlson about fire mosaics how often different kinds of ecosystems should burn for optimal health deer who chill next to wildfires, plants that want to burn the impact of fire on soil foaming newts, a little about indigenous fire practices bees that disappear for decades at a time and how Robin's understanding of wildfire shifted after spending years observing and drawing one of her favorite places. Before we get to the episode, I want to mention a couple of quick things. First, this is the first episode of season two of Golden State naturalist and I'm so excited about this season, there's gonna be everything from saber toothed cats, to tips on growing native plants to a literal sea in the middle of California to nature in the urban areas we call home today, and so much more. I think you're gonna love these episodes. And as Season Two gets up and running, I'm hoping you can help me out with something I would love to start the season on the science charts so that more people can discover this show, there are two things you personally can do to help make that happen. One is to add a rating or review in your favorite listening app. And your review does not have to be long, it could be something really quick like one thing you like about listening to the show. The other thing that helps a ton is just sharing with a friend or two or posting about the show somewhere on the internet like social media or Reddit or anywhere. You know there are people who would enjoy it. I cannot emphasize what a big impact every single person makes by doing these things. And as an independent podcaster who doesn't have a marketing budget or a social media team. I appreciate it more than you know one last announcement is that there's going to be an AMA that's an Ask Me Anything for patrons on zoom on October 26. You can become a patron for as little as $4 a month which helps me pay for things like audio equipment, gas to get to interviews in the field and necessary subscriptions for making the show. You can find me on Patreon at www.patreon.com/michelle Fullner. That's Michelle with two L's and Fullner is fu ll en er if you want to see what my face looks like, you can find me on Instagram and Tiktok at Golden State naturalist and my website is www dot Golden State naturalist.com. But now let's get to the episode. Robin Lee Carlson is an author and natural science illustrator with a particular interest in how landscapes and ecological communities change over time her work is based on observing and documenting the world around her as it unfolds. She's interested in questions like how are we moved by the places we find ourselves in when we experience a place? How do we change it? How does it change us Robin started out as a biologist and spent 16 years managing projects to track and analyze stream habitat restoration projects for salmon and steelhead as an illustrator Robin has created artwork for groups including the UC Natural Reserve System, the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County Caltrans and the Oregon marine reserves partnership. She's currently focused on ecosystem dynamics after disruption, especially how species and habitats respond to wildfire and changing fire regimes in the West. Her debut book the cold Canyon fire journals, green shoots and silver linings in the ashes is now out it was just published in August by Haiti books which might just be my favorite publisher. In addition to all of this Robin is a fantastic teacher and I had the privilege of learning about using shadow in art from her at the recent wild wonder nature journaling conference Robins work can be found on her website, www dot Robin Lee carlson.com and Instagram her handle is at Anthropocene sketchbook which is a great Instagram handle where she often posts very cool time lapses of her artistic process. So without further ado, let's hear from Robin Lee Carlson on Golden State naturalist.

RL

It's just this wonderful conglomeration of a bunch of different great important California habitats because of the way that the canyon is situated and because it is relatively sort of steep and variable topography, it has fairly rapidly alternating oak, Woodland oak savanna, grassland Chaparral and then riparian at the bottom of the canyon where the creek is. So it's a bunch of different ecosystems sort of flowing from one to the now and it's very rich.

It is very rich. So we're is this rich collection of ecosystems. I met up with Robin on a blistering August day at Stebbins cold Canyon reserved 638 acres of steep canyon terrain that's part of the universe. The of California natural reserve system. The reserve system, by the way, describes itself on its website as a library of ecosystems throughout California, which is just a beautiful string of words called Canyon is one of 41 uc natural reserves across the state and it straddles the line between Napa and Solano counties about a half mile to the east of Lake Barea says Monticello Dam. Before I learned about Robins work. I'd never heard of cold Canyon, which is funny because as a kid, I spent a lot of time on my great grandfather's property just a few miles away from the spot and many ways visiting the reserve felt like going home. Robin, on the other hand, has known about cold Canyon for most of her life. She hiked there as a child and continued to visit over the years into adulthood. When the rag fire burned the reserve in its entirety in 2015, Robin decided to start returning more frequently and with the purpose of observing and documenting the way cold Canyon changed over time after the fire. That project eventually turned into the book I mentioned in the intro of this episode, and in 2020, just five years after the rag fire, the reserve burned again, Robin observed and documented the aftermath of the Second fire in her book as well. After two fires in such a short time period, there wasn't a lot of tree cover as Robin and I started down the narrow trail that day. And we didn't stop for long enough to record until we got to an area that was a little less gold and more green. And we're sitting now in the bottom of this dry creek bed which is Cold Creek,

RL

the Cold Creek Yeah,

and it's just we're sitting on these rocks. Look around, and there is green around us just immediately close to the creek. It gets Browner and Golder as you go farther away. But in this creek bed I'm noticing like Willow and I think that's a walnut and maybe a cottonwood and a cottonwood and, and I saw mugwort and I saw you just a lot of things that I associate with more riparian areas and so but as we were hiking through completely different flora, so much toil on and so much what were some of the other words? Oh, yeah, yerba Santa,

RL

and shimmies. And see a notice and coyote brush and a bunch of great Chaparral shrubs and poison oak, what's not?

So there was so much poison. I could not believe the quantities of poison oak. Yeah. And so it was really interesting going through because, you know, I had read in your introduction, that there were several different ecosystems here. But it was still surprising. Yeah, it's surprising, you see, and it shifts that rapidly from one to another. Yeah. And

RL

since it's such a steep canyon in most of the places, I mean, it's Yeah, so you see just hiking along the bottom of the canyon, you see those rapid shifts from the riparian into the Chaparral and then start going up and then you're almost immediately in like oak savanna. And it's just oak and grassland. I mean, there's rapid alternation between habitats, which

is wild, just all these micro habitats, all these different aspects and different elevations and different proximity to water and different amounts of sunlight. And exactly, I feel like you don't you don't get to go to too many areas that shift that rapidly. A couple of things. First, we spend a couple minutes here talking about the police, we were hiking, cold Canyon, but if you don't live nearby, or have any personal connection with this particular place, that's okay. Part of what's great about cold Canyon is that its diversity of ecosystems makes it a fantastic place to talk about fire more generally throughout the state. So we're going to start with a few specifics of cold Canyon and then move quickly into a more general conversation about fire and its relationship with many kinds of places and species. The other thing is that if you got lost amidst all those plant names, no worries. The important thing to know is that the hike included a lot of chaparral plants or plants you would see in a brushy shrubby area without a lot of water and the creek bed where we sat down, and the adjacent area included a lot of plans you'd normally see in a riparian or river zone, which of course does have a lot of water, even though this creek goes seasonally dry. And as we sat in the creek bed, I could see charred stems and trunks of trees on a nearby hilltop, which made me wonder what this area looked like before the 2015 fire there was

RL

far far more dense shrub cover here before the 2015 fire also, because there's been another fire that has kept it open. But so it is even seven years since the 2015. Fire it's way, way more open on the hillsides than it used to be. And it's as you hike the trails used to be you hiked through a lot of dense, tall sort of small trees like Bay laurels and tall shrubs like Tony when you were hiking under them through their shade, and that there's much much less of that now. And so so it's a lot more open. You can see a lot more of the geology, you can see just sort of the shape of the hillsides and the canyons a lot more than he used to be able to there are almost certainly because of that more and more European grasses and other non native species that are enjoying all of this open sunlight. And that's that's really obvious now in the summer in August. In the cooler, wetter months, you also then can see far more native Irby type plants, annuals and smaller perennials with lots of beautiful wildflowers. So there's definitely still a lot more wildfires that come back in the spring because it's so open. We're definitely not that now. But we'll see that again in the spring. Although again, after the 2020 fire, it has been a whole lot drier here. And so there have not been the numbers of wildfires that there were after the 2015 fire, which is interesting,

that is really interesting. And it's hard to imagine all of the shade that you're talking about. And all of the cover, my brain can't fill that in. I'm like one of those people, you know, some interior designers can go into a room and be like, This is what this room could look like, I can never do that. So it's even, it's really hard to imagine, without just superimposing what a completely different place looks like, what that would be like in this place. Yeah.

RL

And I find it hard to and I I remember hiking here when it was like that. So I had something to draw on. But it's still a very much think of CES the way things are now.

And I mean, I think that some people are really great with directions, right? I use landmarks, right? And it's like, to me a thing is a place, right? Nothing is gone. Right? It's my brain is like this is a different place.

RL

Yeah, well, I think there's a lot to be said, for that. I think that's really important. And it was, I mean, because I had not been paying anywhere near the close attention before 2015 here, but I started to after 2015 in a lot of ways, the landmarks and the things that I saw after the fire are very much what I think of as this place being not what it looked like before at all so interesting. And so it's sort of a slow thing that gradually changed so that as shrubs re grew after that first fire, those sort of became slowly evolving landmarks. But that also still meant that it was a kind of a big shock after the second fire when they were gone. And it becomes just kind of a different voice again,

I just want to interject here to say there are many wonderful things about recording outdoors in the wilderness, like picking up birdsong on the recording or the sound of running water or just getting to sit under a beautiful canopy of trees. But there are also some unpredictable sides about recording. Oh my gosh, yeah, and there's walking. Thankfully, Robin is not the kind of person who is easily perturbed so we just moved along and found a different spot to sit down. Okay, so we had to relocate for Robin was getting well not attacked. Thankfully that didn't bite. Yeah. But and crawling. Yeah, investigated. And what I was just wondering about is the fires plural that happened here? Are those fairly typical of kind of more recent California the intensity of the more recent California fires or how would you describe those fires. So

RL

it has been a super interesting sort of sampling of California fires the two that have been here since it had been 30 years almost before the previous fire in 2015. For the Chaparral habitats that are here that's at the very lowest edge of what people think is a pretty healthy fire interval for Chaparral to burn. So Chaparral definitely evolved to burn but not super frequently. Okay, the intervals of more like 60 to 100 years or probably ideal. See, okay. 30 years is not quite enough time for everything maybe to come back. But most things are doing pretty well. And there's been time for seeds to be reset in the seed banks and for tribes to replenish all of their root barrel resources and all of that and so that first fire was one could say a pretty healthy amount of time had passed. So that was a pretty normal fire for California's fire history going back quite a way so that definitely a historically potentially healthy fire interval for Chaparral for oak woodlands. They definitely evolved with a shorter fire cycle and untangling What fire intervals were completely pre humans in California from then the the human managed fire cycles with the indigenous populations in California. I you know, there's a lot of uncertainty still about that. But definitely under Native American fire regimes oak woodlands were often burned fairly frequently because the Oaks really like fairly frequent like five or 10 years apart, low intensity fires it helps keep down the competition from other plants and it helps kill off some parasites of oaks and acorns and things like that. So that might not really have been quite enough fire for the oak woodlands but it was great for the Chaparral and Chaparral then also in contrast, what is best and healthiest for Chaparral habitats is a are these less frequent but higher intensity so hotter fires because it takes hotter fire to kill off the grass competitors that will eventually crowd out Chaparral if there's no fire. So before European colonization before all of the European grass species took over the state of California, there was still competition between Chaparral and the native grasses. And so to keep those in balance fairly infrequent but very hot fires, kept the grasses out of the shrubby areas and kept the shrubs really healthy. So that's what they evolved with. So it's a sort of this interesting push and pull of different cycles being healthy for different habitats here. And so what that means is after five years, that's way too soon for Chaparral. So that means that the shrubs here that are absolutely still returning after the 2020 fire are still maybe struggling more than they would have been if they'd had enough time to really build up the nutrients and the moisture in their roots or for the ones that need to recede for them to have grown up enough to flower and get seeds back into the soil to regrow. So that may be harder on the Chaparral and probably also harder on the Oaks here too, just because they're so close and interspersed with the Chaparral habitats, it means that things burned hotter and I think was harder on the on the Oaks as well.

All of this information about how different habitats burn differently and need fire at different time intervals was news to me, but it's been well known by native Californians. From time immemorial, indigenous people across the state burned 1000s to hundreds of 1000s of acres annually before European colonization using fire for a variety of very specific purposes, all to the benefit of the burned ecosystems. And thankfully, native Californians have held on to their knowledge despite suppression and punitive government policies over the past century plus, and now the state is starting to listen and understand why these practices are so vital all Lincoln NPR article with more information on that in the show notes. And I'm not going to get into a ton of detail on cultural burning in this episode, because I want to do a whole episode on the topic. And make sure to include indigenous voices in that I'm in touch with an expert who would be amazing for this. Our schedules haven't aligned yet, but I'm hoping we can connect for season three for now, as you listen to the role of fire in ecosystems throughout the rest of this episode, just keep in mind how many fires were and are lit by native Californians in order to steward this land we love. Okay, but back to the types of fires that burned cold Canyon. So

RL

it has definitely turned into this sort of living experiment and example of what's happening in California where everywhere is experiencing more frequent fires. What I'm not sure has happened here so much still is a lot of the problem too, is that the fires are becoming much more monolithic and burning the exact same way over a large area. And so one of the most important things for healthy fire is just a diversity in how things burn, you want things that don't burn it all. You want things that burn at a low intensity, and you want things that burn in a high intensity, and you want to sort of alternate between all of those things over not too large an area and then that gives plenty of opportunity for species to find refuges and come back also for different species to have the kind of burning that's best for them. And so I think, you know, a lot of the problem in lots of parts of the state is that there's just too much maybe high intensity burned over a large area or not necessarily high intensity, but just again, this loss of the mosaic of burning patterns here. I'm not sure that that has been necessarily, I don't know enough, say for sure. But it certainly at least from direct experience looks like there's been a fair amount of different pockets of things here that didn't burn or that burned differently. So that at least seems a little bit encouraging.

The idea of a fire mosaic is a key concept in fire ecology. It's one of the things that kept coming up over and over as a research this episode, so I want to slow down and emphasize it for a second. A fire mosaic is much like an actual mosaic where you have a bigger picture made out of small pieces that are all different shapes, sizes and colors. Except fire mosaics aren't made out of little tiles or like dried pinto beans. Instead, they're made of a little chunks of land that burned differently, some may have burned hot some may have burned not at all. The US Forest Service describes mosaic fire as a fire that produces patches have burned and unburned vegetation across the landscape and notes that the term mixed severity fire has been used to describe the same thing in the past. So you might have one area in a forest that burns which takes out some of the trees and brings more sunlight to the forest floor, which allows a wider variety of wildflowers to bloom. There it was blooms support pollinators, which support lots of other plant and animal species throughout the forest. The standing dead trees or snags are also great for certain species of birds and insects. Having an area that burned right next to an area that didn't burn create several kinds of habitat within a small area. And since biodiversity is a sign of a healthy ecosystem, this kind of variation is great for natural areas. But things are about to get even more complicated because fire mosaics and the amount of time between fires, like Robin mentioned earlier aren't the only important factors. When we're talking about wildfire. I'll let Robin explain.

RL

The other interesting things that I've learned from some of the scientists that I've worked with in doing this project is that it doesn't just matter how far apart the fires are but also matters how many of them there are over a larger timeframe so say in the past 100 Here's how many times the places burned might matter even more than how far apart those burns were. And so the fact that within the last 100 years Polk Canyon has burned to now for the third time, three times seems like it may be a kind of a tipping point they're finding out and so totally independently of how far apart any of those fires were, it may also really matter that this was the third one in 100 years. And so that may mean that there are now possibly some real shifts and habitats happening. And what that will probably mean is loss of chaparral, because that will get taken over by grassland, which is going to mean non native European grasses, because that's what's taking over everywhere. So the Chaparral will probably be replaced by grassland, the trees will probably also start to decline in how many there are and then in then they're just sort of smaller changes in types of species were some of the annual wildflowers for example, that come back really abundantly after fire, if their seed banks are slowly depleted and don't have time to regrow will stop seeing things like maybe the whispering bells that only grow here after fire, because they need time to get their seeds back into the ground to be ready for the next one. So there may be changes like that, too.

And that seems like it would have larger ramifications, right? Because if you're transitioning to basically a huge grasslands, what it sounds like, with fewer trees, fewer shrubs, less chaparral, I mean, a lot of those roots are really absorbing water, and they're really storing water in the ground. Right. And so if you lose those, you end up with more runoff.

RL

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a cascading cycle where Yeah, absolutely. There's a huge amount of services that the Chaparral shrubs and the trees are performing here. So that by them starting to decrease in number, then yeah, absolutely, the soil isn't being held in place, the nutrients that stay in the system by them growing and dying and getting recycled back into the ground are gone. Absolutely there. They're not there to store the water, they're not there to make sure that I mean, again, holding the soil in place also means that everything under the soil can stay in place. So yeah, so then that just hastens everything it makes it. Of course, if there are more grasses that makes it easier to burn the next time. So sort of once that cycle gets started, it's hard for it not to accelerate.

So this may sound really depressing, and it is. But I just want to remind you that this doesn't happen with every single type of fire. This isn't universal truth about fire on the landscape. The reason this starts to happen is because there's too much intensity of fire or too much uniformity of fire on a certain area, or the burning happens too frequently for a particular kind of ecosystem. And one of the reasons these bad fire cycles get started is because of our history of fire suppression here in California, which you heard about if you listen to the giant sequoia episode and season one. But in summary, European colonizers started suppressing fire in California in the middle of the 1800s. And didn't let up until the 1960s. This after, as I mentioned earlier, 10s of 1000s of years of indigenous people working with fire to the benefit of themselves and local ecosystems, there are ways of applying fire to the landscape where these negative cycles don't have to be the case. And there's also some more good news, which I'll let Robin give you.

RL

But the other thing is to sort of remember at the same time, and that has come from being here, you know, in person and really experiencing this overtime is it's not like this happens all at once. It's not like, okay, there's been three fires, it's over, this is never going to be the same because a lot of I mean, there are lots of shrubs here, they're still hanging on, they're not going to be gone anytime soon. It definitely is slow change. And of course, that's not the case everywhere. But you know, especially in a place like this where there is so much diversity in the habitats and in just these different geological conditions and the topographic conditions, there's a lot that is going to hang on and not change that rapidly. And so it's really easy to think of something burning, and it's just all gone. And that's definitely not the case, even after the second fire.

Right. Well, that's, that's good to hear. Because then it's pretty terrifying. You know, you start to think about that. So Robin mentioned that there were places that did burn and places that didn't burn in cold Canyon, particularly the creek bed where we were sitting for this interview, there was a lot of water stored underground, even though there wasn't water in the creek at the time of the fire. So that area didn't burn because the trees were so nice and green. But at this point, I got curious about the places that did burn and I asked Robin if she had any favorite plants that had an interesting relationship with fire.

RL

Yeah, well, I just love the relationship between a bunch of the different Chaparral shrubs with fire. So shimmies, which there is a lot of that shrub here has oils in its leaves that are highly flammable because shimmy is about to fire it wants to burn. It's much healthier if every say 60 years. The shimmy is shrubs burn and burn away all of the sort of extra branches and structure that they have so that they sort of start fresh, but it's still the same plant because it burns it can burn completely above ground. There can be nothing alive left above ground, but it's rubrail Underground still has stored carbohydrates and water and tons and tons of bugs. And so it'll come back right away. It doesn't even have to be a lot of water in the ground. I mean, it can be in the middle of the summer, because it's got everything it needs in its roots, and it's ready to just shoot up again. And so it loves fire, it wants to burn. And I just love the idea of it can lose everything that we think is the important part of that plant. I mean, we walk down a hiking trail, and we see shrubs and well, that's the important part of the thing above ground, the thing that we see the thing that's photosynthesizing from the Muses perspective, oh, it's important parts are underground. The stuff above ground is unnecessary for a while, but it's completely expendable. And just trying to think about that's a large percentage of its body. We can't lose that much of our body. It's such an interesting concept to just let go of all of that and start again.

Absolutely. You can't just like put your feet in a river and like what and everything else, then you're fine. Yeah,

RL

exactly. So I love that shimmies you know welcomes the fire Stokes the fire. But then there are other important Chaparral shrubs that have the opposite effects that are also completely fine with burning, it's healthy for them to but because it is so beneficial for fire to burn in a diverse and Mosaic way, the shrubs have evolved to have different roles and making sure that happens. So coyote brush can actually help dampen the fire a little bit, it doesn't burn nearly as well. It's perfectly happy. It also regrows from its roots after fire, but it also sort of helps ensure that the fire is hot here and not as hot there and moves through in a you know, in a really selective sort of way. And Toyota also does great after fire, you see it re spreading right away. It also helps dampen the fire a little bit. And so but I just sort of love the way all these things are working together for healthy fire regime.

Okay, this blew my mind because what this really shows me is that the plants are willing to work together and recognize that the health of the overall ecosystem benefits not only the entire ecosystem, but also them as individuals. And maybe I'm giving the plants too much credit here. But I do think that they're smarter than we give them credit for. We keep on finding out more all the time about how plants are communicating underground through their roots and through Mike Arisaig. So it's just might be possible. And at the very least, it's important to keep in mind that none of these things evolved in a vacuum. The whole study of ecology is the study of relationships between an among different organisms and their physical surroundings. And nothing just sprung out of the ground fully formed, these entire systems evolved together and so they work together really well. Okay, now let's hear about how a few more species interact with fire on the landscape.

RL

And then there are other things like Buckeye that do re sprout, and it's sort of interesting that they really rely on re spreading a lot of things can come back from seed and from sprouts after fire. But Buckeyes have such large fleshy seeds that they're just too sensitive to fire. So it really relies on re sprouting after fire. And so one of the things that it needs time between fires to really get seeds into the ground, if things burn through too many times, there's just it seeds never have a chance to regrow. So that's sort of an interesting thing.

Okay, some fun facts about Buckeye trees, because I love Buckeye trees, and I grew up around them in the Oak, woodland and Chaparral ecosystems that I loved as a kid, one in the spring. They are the prettiest trees because they have these big, beautiful cone shaped flower displays with a bunch of flowers all in one stock. And they're sort of pinkish, whitish, and you'll see them all around these types of ecosystems, when you're driving through to is that these flowers are actually super toxic to European honeybees. And it's unlikely that they're toxic to native bees. So that's pretty cool. Remember, honeybees are native to Europe and not the Americas. And most of the bees that we have around here are solitary. There are actually something like 1600 species of native bees in California. Also, My great grandpa used to tell me that Buckeyes were somehow remedy for poison oak. And I don't know if that's true, I haven't been able to find anything about that. What I do know is that Buckeye seeds are poisonous to humans unless they go through a very extensive leaching process. And I don't know exactly how that process works. So definitely don't do it unless you know what you're doing. Alright, but let's hear about some species that follow fire.

RL

Plant wise, I had sort of mentioned, there's only one flower that I'm aware of here that only shows up here after fire. And that's the whispering balls. Most of the places that it grows, it requires fire. And so it hadn't been seen in the canyon for nearly 30 years. Because you know, before 2015 Because it had only come out after the previous fire and so why does it need fire? Probably because it really wants the open space. I mean, okay, I don't think that there's any real answer why it doesn't come back at all after a while after fire. But I think because it's such a great opportunity when all of the tree and shrub cover has been burned off and there's all Have the sunlight and really probably more water left in the ground too, because they're the shrubs aren't as big in our psyche going up quite as much. And so it's a great opportunity for the small herbaceous plants that don't grow large and that get shaded out in a mature habitat. But most of the flowers that grow so vigorously after fire are here at other times just not nearly as abundant. So I'm not sure there's a great answer for these flowers that really, truly disappear. But I guess just the resources that they have after fire are just so great. It's worth

waiting for. Fascinating. As Robin points out, it's really difficult to say why whispering bells use this particular strategy of only coming back after a fire or for that matter really why any plant uses the strategy that it uses to reproduce and to live but she does get into some of the specific mechanisms of how that works with whispering bells in her book and I want to read this to you because it's a really beautiful passage. So she writes nitrogen dioxide in Smoke tells a whispering bells seed that it is time to germinate wildfire means that the ground will be perfect for new plants to grow fertile, ashy soil full of nutrients, the new whispering Bell sprouts have emerged from their decades long rest into open sunlight, a place that until now was too deeply shaded by the shrubs and trees that came to dominate five to 10 years after the last fire with less competition for vital resources, sunlight, nutrients, water and space. Whispering bells will thrive here for a couple of years by then other plants will crowd in and over them and the nitrogen dioxide in the system will return to pre fire levels, whispering bells, seeds will stop germinating and again fall into their long slumber waiting, like Sleeping Beauty for their next enchanted awakening. I love this passage, because I think it shows not only whispering bells as a specific species and how it follows fire and how that works. But I also love it as a representation of how an ecosystem responds to fire in general, and how fire is the kind of disturbance on a landscape that under the right circumstances creates this incredible boom in biodiversity. And here's another example of just a truly incredible interaction with fire from another species.

RL

And what's interesting, it's not something that's been observed here. It's something that's been observed in Southern California with whispering bells. But there's a kind of bee that appears to only pollinate whispering bells, and that it's the only plant that it appears to rely on and what happens to it between fires, nobody knows. And it may just be that people haven't collected it and it's out there. You know, sure. So many things that you never know if it's just a matter of collection bias. totally fascinating. Is the be also somehow going dormant. It's strange. Yeah, it's really interesting.

You don't think of insects as being particularly long lived, usually. Right?

RL

So what's it doing? Again, maybe it's out there, it's something you know, it's pretty obscure, not something that's gotten a lot of attention, or this funny little meter or

eyes on it. But that's yeah, that's fascinating. I love that. You might remember from the vernal pools episode, there are species of native bees that are highly specialized to just one species of flower. And those will often go dormant for a couple of years just waiting for their special flower to bloom. This reminds me a little bit of those except how could this be possibly be dormant for 30 to 60 years waiting for another cycle of fire in a Chaparral ecosystem, it's incredible fire is

RL

great for opening up opportunities for different kinds of bees to because opening up the ground to the sunlight means that ground nesting bees have opportunities that they didn't necessarily have when the mature habitat. And then also, of course, all the wildflowers are something that bees are going to flock to so that you can sort of watch as time passes after fire different kinds of bees, populations sort of boom and then decline as different flowers come in, and just also as different nesting opportunities, because of course, the other one is all of the wood that's been killed but not completely burned is another great missing opportunity for the wood nesting bees.

Wow. So that's exciting. There are so many little avenues and so many things to explore, and so many species of different relationships that is, you know, just endlessly complex.

RL

Yes. And I love just what we know about these few things. Think of all the things that we don't even know they're all that are happening out there.

It might sound overwhelming, but actually I love that there is more to know than I could possibly ever learn. I also love trying to learn anyway. And the bond that that pursuit creates between me and this incredibly complex, biodiverse planet we call home. Okay, there is so much more fiery quality coming your way. In the second half. We will talk about Robins book and artistic decisions. What happens when too many people smoke at the same football game, a more in depth look at what fire ecology actually is fires impact on soil, how animals respond to fire and the way that spending time in a burned environment change Robin's entire outlook on fire and what a healthy ecosystem looks like. More on all of that after a quick break.

And now more from my conversation with Robin Lee Carlson, I'm really curious about how you first got interested in wildfire. How did you end up on this journey?

RL

So my interest in just sort of in anything definitely in the natural world has always been in change. Why do things look the way that they do now? How did they get there? What does that mean about where they're going, just sort of understanding the world around me through understanding how it got there. And so what that meant was, you know, I originally was in college and graduate school studying evolution, because I was really interested in big questions about how we got where we are, and again, how you can understand that through the smaller changes that you can observe over time. And so what that evolved into, as I realized that I really wanted to focus much more on science communication, and, you know, getting to learn as much as I can about a bunch of different topics and turn that into something understandable and synthesizing things into a bigger picture, I decided I didn't want to be an academic scientist, and did then spent 15 years working on communicating about stream restoration and salmon habitat through data and reporting and monitoring and that way, and then decided that Well, what I would really like to do is much more visual communication and use the art that I've been doing my entire life as a primary communication tool. And so I didn't come to it with having specifically decided that fire was what I wanted to research. But what I was really looking for was ways to document environmental change, and had been thinking about all sorts of different ways of doing that, looking at drought, looking at agriculture, just any of the things that were happening in the world around me specifically. But then when this reserve burned in 2015, I thought, wow, that is a fantastic environmental change that I'll be able to visit personally and document and I get to do this as a field sketching, exercise, and let that build over time, because I know that things are definitely going to change rapidly after fire. And then also, here's this opportunity to learn in much more detail a place that I'm familiar with, but definitely don't know all the species that live here and the way that the habitats work together. And even really, what exactly all the habitats are. And here I get to learn about this wonderful process and disturbance in ecology, meaning fire, something that I have a basic idea of I know it's a healthy thing for the ecosystem. But you know, and I have some vague ideas about the way succession works after a fire but don't know any details about and so can sort of experienced this with fresh eyes and to try to have as open a perspective of just anything that grabs my attention.

Yeah, that definitely keeps it engaging, right, that's not getting old, there's always change. There's always something new to learn. Exactly. And so as you started to observe this area that blossomed into a book. So can you tell me about your book? Yeah, so

RL

the cold Canyon fire journals turned out to be, in many ways, actually much more personal than I had ever really expected it to be. Even though my whole purpose was putting myself in this environment and experiencing it with my instances and then communicating that haven't come from academia, I had always sort of pictured this going in a still a more academic direction. I you know, turning all of these into more sort of instructional graphics and things teaching about fire ecology, that was definitely how it felt to me even though I was very intentionally doing all of this sketching to communicate my own experiences. I just, I don't write about myself, and that seemed very strange. I

love that Robin pushed past that discomfort and did write about herself, partly because I found it more enjoyable to read, then something less personal might have been but also for two other reasons. One is that having a first person narrator mirrors the way we experience the natural world, or wherever we go there we are interpreting the place through our own lens and our own experiences. Robin, including herself in the narrative can be a stand in for readers to be able to place themselves in the book and almost experience cold Canyon firsthand whether they've been there or not. And the second reason is that again, ecology is about relationships. Humans are part of E ecosystems no matter how much we like to think about ourselves separately, which is something that native Californians have understood for a very long time. So not my original idea. But our relationships with those ecosystems matter in my mind. And maybe I'm saying this because I'm an English teacher, and not a scientist, but it feels like the most honest and accurate thing we can do to position ourselves within the story of the natural world. But I realized there are different purposes for different kinds of writing. So don't ask me, I'm speaking my truth here. Okay, here's a little bit more about the writing process from Robin.

RL

And so it was a really interesting process to have these at the point when I started working on the book five years worth of sketchbooks and experience, and then really start writing a narrative to go along with it and starting thinking of it much more as a literary thing much more, as you know, as actual nature writing to complement the sketches and leaving the sketches alone as much as possible, and letting them communicate in the way that I had actually, or always meant them to, but really sort of officially letting them have that role. And then writing in a way that used my experience really explicitly as a way of understanding what was happening, and really explicitly sort of tying the fact that as an observer, I bring all of these own things from my own history to this. And so of course, that influences the way that I understand this, but also hear all the things that this has changed in me and why I think that's so incredibly important for how we understand fire.

I love that just reading through it, it is beautiful, it is beautifully written. And I was surprised because I think I expected a little bit more of the clinical might not be the right word, but a little bit more removing exact right and seeing how personal it was. And then also, I don't know if this is coming from your experience, or if this was me interpreting, right, because there's always that with art. But looking at your illustrations. For me, it was very emotional. And I don't know if it came from an emotional place for you as well. But in particular, one that really struck me was the Blue Oak, that is just the the skeleton of the Blue Oak. And it was honestly a gut punch, just looking at that illustration. It is so striking, I highly encourage everyone to go go buy the book, go buy it, I just want to mention that no one is paying me to promote this book, I just think it's really good. And go and look at these illustrations because they convey I'm sure just an image of what is there. But there's also so much feeling in those images,

RL

ya know, and that's absolutely the case. And that's something that I think comes from those direct sketches made in the moment in the location in a way that I think is extremely difficult to do in a more finished illustration done after the fact at least something that I feel anything that I do at home as an illustration for something else where I'm trying to get the drawing perfect and accurate. I think it absolutely loses a lot of that emotion and then just the connection that I'm making with the subject that I'm drawing. But then I think that makes a big difference in what that drawing then how it can connect to someone else looking at it. And it's something I think about all the time. And so I tried really hard to figure out how to bring that life and connection into any artwork that I do. But I still think that there is absolutely no substitute for the immediacy of a field sketch. And because I am connecting so directly with that, then I think that has the power to connect with the person looking at it. Yeah,

I mean, it worked for me. It got to me. I was curious too, about your artistic methods. So it looks like there's an ink drawing. Do you start with ink? And then okay, yeah, so

RL

another intentional decision to convey as much life and expression in what I'm doing, I think it makes a huge difference to just commit fully to whatever I'm drawing and not have the ability to edit it and try to make it more accurate or perfect or anything like that. So I'm absolutely always drawing directly with ink. And some of that, too, is just my own personal aesthetics. I like ink and line, the most of anything colors nice, but the ink is the most important to me. And so that's absolutely the primary thing is just walking along and drawing things with ink into the sketchbook. That's certainly not how I work. You know, when I'm doing illustrations, other times I use pencil when I need things to be accurate, but just the practice of knowing that you're committing to what you're doing and doing that over and over again. It's actually really rare now that I'm all that upset about accuracy. There are things that are not exactly correct, but it's to a degree that I don't mind. And I also think that some imperfections in the drawing also really helped draw the viewer into I think that that also conveys life happening and things not being absolutely perfect, really bring you into the scene and sort of help you experience it through my eyes too. So that becomes I think a helpful part of artwork.

Robin told me that once she's done with the ink drawing, she'll go ahead and add color using either watercolor or colored pencils. And now that we've gotten into the proper interview part of this outing, I was wondering how Robin would define fire ecology.

RL

It is looking at the entire impact and cycle from one fire to the next and then across all of the different so if we're just talking about California, for example, all of the different ecosystems in California that it Experience fire. That means really looking into what types of fire did this habitat evolve with? And so what does that mean for these species and how they respond to fire? Or how they don't respond to fire? How it just kills them? And they have to come back afterwards. But all of these other ones that love fire, and how do they respond right away to the fire? And then How do things change each year after the fire, what returned when, and how does that change, if the kind of fire that they experience changes, like I was talking about with the different intensity, so that's the heat. But there's also differences in how frequently the fire happens, how uniformly it burns over a certain area, and then with the kind of fire how it's interacting with the conditions on the ground at that time. So if it's super hot and dry, then the fire is going to burn really differently. And it's going to have, you know, a completely different impact on the plant. So it'll have a different severity. So the severity is essentially how much it kills. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the intensity, which is though the heat that it reaches, I mean, often the hotter it is, the more it's going to kill. But those are definitely two independent things. And so just what the what all of the conditions on the landscape do to impact that. And so if everything is incredibly hot and dry, then you're gonna get a really uniform berm. But if you have these pockets of moisture, or just different species growing like I was talking about with the different shrubs that have different impacts on fire, that can be applied much more broadly to all of other species growing in these different habitats that can really impact how the fire moves across the landscape.

In other words, there is so much to know, when it comes to fire ecology, it's incredible. Here's one more thing to think about. So one of the things that is super important in ecosystem and is sort of foundational for everything is soil. And I'm thinking about like how does fire impact the soil. So

RL

right after the fire, so the ash and the hydrocarbons that come from the burned material in the fire sort of form this blanket on the top of the soil that is for a little while after the fire, really hydrophobic. And so moisture is going to run right off of those hillsides after a fire. And so that's why when the fire has been, you know, particularly severe and has really burned away all of the vegetation, then of course, that's why we have trouble with all of these landslides is because then especially if there's any significant amount of rain, it all just runs right down the hillsides and takes everything with it. And so it was really interesting to see after the first fire in 2015. I visited here first because they've closed the reserve. And they were offering tours to the public every once in a while. And so I went on one of those tours, it was in December, early December. And so there had been rain and the bottom of the creek was just this thick, black looking mud, because of what had washed down the hillsides in those rains. And it hadn't been so much rain that I don't know, there might have been some landslides after that one too. But mostly, it just washed all of this very black looking sludge down off of the hillsides. And so that can have an impact on how much moisture is getting down into the soil on the hillsides. And so ideally, what you get are some nice light rains that start to gently penetrate this hydrophobic layer of ash on top of the soil. And that sort of helps make things fluffier and open it up so that moisture can get in again. And so that's just sort of an interesting period until those get washed away or sort of opened up by the lighter rains, you know, you have problems with water running off the hillside. But all of that burned plant material from the fire is also full of good nutrients too. So there's also great stuff going into the soil after the fire as well. And so fire can definitely have a beneficial effect on the soils right away just by putting some nutrients back into the ground that had been bound up in leaves, and so not directly in the soil. And so that's another reason that plants find it so great to regrow in a burn landscape, because there are new sources of nutrition in there right away. And so that is also something that's not a concern here at all. But it's something that is really important to remember after especially fires in forests, the Fallen plant material, like fallen trees should not be removed. So clearing burned areas of the downed wood takes out huge amounts of important resources for that ecosystem. One of the really wonderful and important things about fire is the way that it helps return all of these nutrients back into the system. And if you go in and you remove all of the trees to sort of clean up a burned area, you're taking out so much important stuff so much important homes for organisms and food and nutrients and minerals that should go back into the system. And so that's this huge thing that fire does for the environment that we then just completely mess up and go in and clean quote unquote clean things up. Sure

and for maybe our own sense of aesthetic or what we imagine a forest should look like for whatever reason, right maybe who knows where even getting these ideas from but like, this is what we think it should look like. So let's try to make it look like that

RL

right a burned area looks really directly to us. I mean, a mature leafy area is beautiful and a burned area is ugly. But there's a whole lot of other species out there that think that burned landscape is gorgeous.

And I think yeah, that's a was really well, so something you said earlier, we weren't recording yet at that point. But you were talking about how it's not this line, right? It's not this linear, like, from burned to mature, and then you lose all that progress, and it's gone. So can you just talk a little bit more about, you know, what's maybe a better way of conceptualizing? Yeah, so

RL

that really was my most important, most important mind shift that happened in doing this, which was, I came into it thinking, I know, fire is healthy, it's good, everything, you know, it resets everything, and the habitat grows back. And you know, I know, it's good. I know, it's a force for renewal. And what really happened very slowly over time was realizing that fire is a good thing, because it's just one more step in this continuing cycle of any of these higher adapted habitats in California. So we think of ecological succession, because of the way that we talk about it. And the words that we use for it, it very much sounds like making progress, because humans really like the idea, at least, our modern current culture really likes the idea of making progress towards something. And so a very leafy green, lush landscape full of trees and shrubs and flowers that feels like the goal. And so everything in this habitat is always building towards this goal. And so then maybe something happens like a fire and it puts an end to that, and everything has to regrow back. But it's you know, we're always on this path of progress and realizing that well, no, we're not. That is just an incredibly current human interpretation of things. There are so many species who absolutely think the most important and the most beautiful. And, you know, what we're making progress towards is this burned landscape, everything's black. This is gorgeous, to a beetle that wants to lay its eggs in, in a dead tree, or a woodpecker that would like to eat that beetle. This is their ideal landscape. This is what they think everything is building for. And so there is no point on this circle that has fire in it and has that lush ecosystem in it and has everything in between nothing is the goal, or everything is the goal. But there is no end point. And all of it is beautiful to something

this was so eye opening. And it was one of Robins key takeaways from reading this book. And what I really want to emphasize is that it was born out of spending time on the land, looking at all of the incredible diversity of life that was present right after a fire. And in the years immediately following a fire, it really is kind of a reassuring thing for somebody from a culture who thinks of fire as something that is destructive and terrifying. This is actually a force that belongs on the landscape, especially in places like here in California, and it plays a vital role. The one caveat, of course, is that the types of fires we're often seeing now can be hotter and more uniform and more destructive. So those can be powerfully bad. So that's why we need to work on things like climate change, and listening to folks who really understand fire ecology and indigenous fire practitioners who can help us get back to a healthier fire baseline. Do you have like a favorite species, either plant insect animal that is a fire follower that that really stands out to you? Well, those

RL

beetles are really cool, because we happen to know a fair amount of detail about how they find fire. So they're called charcoal beetles. And they're in this area they're in, there's different species, but I think they're in most of California. And they like fire because they like the weakened trees. So the trees that are either dead or dying, or maybe not even dying, but just weakened enough by the fire, they don't have their usual defenses against any insect that wants to lay their eggs in them. And so the beetles come and they lay their eggs, their larvae hatch and can eat the burned wood is still great and nutritious, and the trees not kicking them out. So they come from potentially 100 miles away to fires. And they do that not by sensing the chemicals in smoke, but by sensing the heat from that distance. They've got infrared sensors under their wings that detects heat from that greater distance. If you were in Sacramento, and there was a fire burning in Berkeley, and you were a beetle, you could tell that there was heat that far away, and you would book it to Berkeley. And the reason I'm saying that and the reason people don't know so much about it was they first came to people's attention during a football game at UC Berkeley in the 50s. I don't remember for sure, but when people still smoked in the stands, there were enough people smoking, there was enough heat, and I'm sure that that wasn't enough heat to draw beetles for I'm sure it's wildfires that draw them from like 100 miles away, but beetles somewhere nearby, in large numbers were drawn to the cigarettes and flocked to the stadium and were they bite if they land. So they drew and some people got excited about him. And I know I don't know exactly when the research was done to find these infrared sensors, but it's technology that humans certainly haven't figured out how to To duplicate yet our infrared doesn't work like that.

Okay, so there's a NatGeo article about this, which I cannot read, because I am not a subscriber, but I can read the first paragraph, which is very informative. And it says that had happened multiple times in the 1940s. So that's wild. I'm going to link it in the show notes, just in case you do have a NatGeo subscription. There probably still lingering here somewhere. So

RL

yeah, and then I don't know how long they I don't leave my Nan. I mean, there's plenty of fire. So I don't I don't know exactly how widespread they are and what they're doing in between fires. But I'm sure that a bunch of new babies grew up then. So they're so cool. There's so many little things like that. And then of course woodpeckers come because there's all these insects that came specifically because of fire. And there's tons of them. There's Longhorn beetles that come because of fire. There's these Horntail wasps that I write about in the book, just a ton of insects that the trees defenses are down. It's like,

feast, right? And you think of fire as being this force of destruction. And it is right it is, but it's also a force of of life. And so much like that you would not have seen in this place, had it not been for the fires.

RL

Exactly. And there's woodpeckers here all the time, but knowing that they are so excited and happy after the fire is such a good thing,

right? And then I would imagine, it's like a different habitat as well, right? Because you have more snags? Exactly. I was kind of just wondering, too, about animals. So we talked about insects. And you've mentioned a little bit about flowers, you know, some some plant species that you've talked about. But what about animals? I mean, that's what I think that most people's mind goes through. And we think about fire, right? Like, did the animals escape from the flames themselves? Right? And so assuming that they can, they do escape? Right? What happens to animals after fire? So

RL

yeah, so it's a bunch of different things. You know, the large mammals are almost certainly moving away from it. And I have after the 2020 fire, because there are a couple of trail cameras that have been here, I think they were placed sometime after the 2015 fire. And so they were absolutely rolling and recording during the 2020. Fire. And you can see on some of the footage that there's fire nearby, and fair deer just wondering, clearly not concerned, they know what they're doing. And I've definitely read other accounts to have deer again in fires and maybe elk somewhere, but just definitely they know what's going on. They know what they need to do. They're not panicked, then. I mean, not that that doesn't also happen in right. In massive wildfires. Of course, mammals are getting killed. Of course, they can't outrun it. Of course, they can't flee. Of course, that's also an impact of fire. But it's really important to keep in mind that that is not always what it's like. I mean, it's something that just another thing that happens in the habitat, and they know what to do. So yeah, so here, especially, you know, in all the big mammals moved on and came and then the other thing you see is right after the fire, there's mountain lions wandering through, you know, everything's fine. And that's done here. The trail cameras are down here near the creek. So they're wandering through areas that didn't all burn, and there's still shelter and there was still water. And so there are resources. But it's important to also, I mean, on a fire map looks like this all burned, didn't all burn, there's still all these refuges and places where even the large mammals are finding shelter. So for smaller things that don't quite have the same ability to flee. Certainly, some of them died in the fire after the 2015 fire, there had been a lot of active ongoing woodrat research here because there's Awesome, well, there might still not be yet again, an awesome wood rat population here, but there really was before the 2015 firing some great research going on. And so they knew they had the woodrat minions mapped out and so they went and checked and almost all of them had burned because of course they have that big woody structure that they've built up and that their nest is and and almost the one of them didn't burn, and there was some footage of one last result they knew of in the canyon, possibly lonely. So you know, there are definitely casualties like that. And they're one of the things that probably do take longer to come back because they need to build up their structure again, they need to come from other places, and they are definitely not early fire successional returners

so for species like wood rats, fire can be devastating. But remember, there are other species that absolutely need it to survive. Robin explains this really beautifully.

RL

In any ecosystem, there is no goal state, all ecosystems are always changing. They are often reset by some disturbance, or at least we think of it as being reset. But there are disturbances in every ecosystem. And it's really easy to think of those as sort of an ending and then a new beginning. And so fire has definitely taught me that there's no ending. And just to really keep in mind the perspectives of all of those species for whom that is what they've been waiting for. And I think it's so cool to that, that just that really applies to anything that we think of as disturbance, something that we're all thinking about a lot right now is flooding that's happening catastrophically in so many parts of the country, but flooding is a really important ecological disturbance, too, and has a lot of ecosystem value and it's been a problem that we've prevented flooding in all of these places for so long, just like it's been a problem that we've been, we've prevented fire because they're critical. And they're not destruction and rebirth, they're actually just another part of the process that creates these optimal times in the ecosystem for certain species.

But if you're a person who stays put, right, right, in a house, right, that's right. We all know how much houses cost. And we all know how much we invest in having that spot. And having all of our stuff right in that right spot is a big time paradigm shift to think about. That's right, that not being a permanent part of the cycle you want. That's right. You want to build that you want to give that house to your kid, right?

RL

That's right. Yeah, no, I mean, really, we are wood rats. And the fire is a catastrophe. I mean, the wood rats would like to give their minions to their right humans, or wood rats, or at least our current culture or society. Yeah, right now, we are wood rots. And wood rats, fire is a catastrophe, for the most part for wood rats, not as much as it is for us. But absolutely, we're not the only ones that fire is really hard for and it takes a long time to recover. And they do need that time to come back and rebuild. And that's how we feel to but there are plenty of things that don't feel that way. And it's just so great to be able to see all of these examples of all of these different ways of interacting with an ecosystem. And to understand that humans have had that relationship with fire, too, it's really critical to know that there are options for us. Sure, we don't have to have this relationship with fire, it is entirely possible to see fire completely differently. We don't have to be with rats, I make it sound like it's bad. I love wood rats. It's great that humans are wood rats, because that's a wonderful thing to buy. Right? That is not the only way of looking at fire.

What do you think that people could do differently to have more healthy relationship with fire? Because, you know, it is hard to just say like, what would we do differently with our houses, practically speaking, just

RL

as far as homes go, people have learned a lot about ways that we can live much, much more safely. And of course, we're still with rats. In that way, we're still totally dependent on our homes and our belongings. And I mean, we have to be realistic, that's not changing anytime soon. But there are absolutely ways to build and ways to understand and approach wildfire that are considerably less likely to lead to the destruction that happens now, both of property and the human life, there are plenty of models out there. And plenty of ways people are discovering that you can build better. And of course, pick where you put your home better. And so those are all important, but more to the relationship itself is is something that people are becoming more aware of now in a sort of a general consciousness that fire can help prevent future fire, that burning regularly is important. But I think that the best thing that we can do is understand that it's not like you're just burning to prevent burning, there can be a partnership between humans and fire, where we really understand all of the things that fire does in the environment. And that was absolutely the indigenous understanding of fire as a partner in shaping the environment in a way that was very beneficial to the humans in that environment. I mean, made sure that they had all of the resources and all of the different aspects of their life that they needed. And also at the same time happened to make sure that the habitat was diverse and supported all these other species to that were not necessarily of immediate use, but also vastly benefited from fire. And so understanding that if we're going to have a partnership with fire, it's doing so many things out there that we don't even know about. And then we need, you know, we need to understand that this is a sort of an equal partnership where we don't have to control everything about it, we need to let it do what it does. And I loved it. It's exactly parallel to the beaver example, where let the beavers do what they do, because they're doing a lot of good things out there that we can't do that we don't even understand. And if we just leave them alone and let them do it, that they're taking care of a lot of really important things that eventually come back and benefit us too. But we don't have to control every single aspect of it. And fire is exactly the same way. It's that aspect of our relationship that just the most important to me is understanding that there's this potential equal partnership where fire is doing things that we don't ever have to understand. Sure,

absolutely. I think that Emily Fairfax, his words were trust the road and she's like, it sounds crazy, but at the same time, like trust the road, and because it's been here doing this for so long, and it really is part of the system. Yeah, it really is already part of it

RL

and fires the same way. And there's I mean, there's a million other ecosystem processes that are like that, too, that we don't know about. But I love that parallel between beavers and fire.

I love that too. If you've not listened to the episode about beavers yet Absolutely. Go back and do that. Not only do beavers influence ecosystems profoundly similarly to the way that fire does, they actually have an interesting relationship with fire itself and contributing to this mosaic style of fire on the landscape. So they're sort of the opposite of shimmies, which makes the fire go bigger and faster and hotter. They actually slow down and stop fires by creating wetlands. And humans, like I mentioned earlier, also have a really important role to play when we're talking about ecology. So let's hear a little more about that. What can people do in the midst of climate change and modern wildfires to be of service?

RL

Yeah, well, again, starting with the most immediate one, make good choices about where you live, and how you build and remaining aware of just your own impact in the world and your own susceptibility to fire is absolutely critical.

And if you do live in a fire prone area, it's really important to have what's called a defensible space around your home. So that's creating an area that is really hard to set on fire close to your house, basically. And there's a few different zones that can go into that CalFire has a great page on it, I'll post that in the show notes.

RL

But then I think it's really important to understand too, that there are many, many people in the state who still have the knowledge now also have the cultural understanding and history and memory of this relationship with fire. And as much as possible that you should be in control of fire again, in the areas that they know well and know how fire belongs in those areas. There's a critical training program that the Nature Conservancy does in cooperation with both federal and state agencies related to fire and then with local organizations, so that tribes as much as possible, it's also local landowner groups, depending on the area in assisting with and making sure that control of fire as much as possible goes back to the people whose land it is, you know, the land and who know how fire should be there. And so supporting that kind of effort, I think is really, really critical. It's, I mean, absolutely, anytime that people are embracing and understanding and doing controlled, burning, anytime that the state and federal government are doing that themselves, too, that's great, that's important. But I really really love the Nature Conservancy's initiative and understanding that the control of fire should be in the hands of local people.

I just want to emphasize really fast that the takeaway here is not fire is great, let's all go light one, it is much more nuanced. And we need to understand what's happening with fire locally, very deeply. And that's why the Nature Conservancy has these kinds of trainings. Also, I'm not a lawyer. And this is not legal advice. But I do know that you have to have a permit to do a prescribed burn in California, and probably other places, too. So remember, I did not tell you to light any fires, okay, thanks.

RL

That's the thing about the relationship with fire. It's not something that is monolithic. Once you know what fire does in one place, you don't know what it doesn't another, you have to know your one particular place incredibly well, incredibly intimately to really understand when it should burn and how it should burn, because it's absolutely different everywhere. And it's not something that you can sort of do as a top down approach. And it has to be really, really on the ground and holistic, I think supporting that kind of thing is the most critical beyond just making sure you yourself aren't controlling the problem,

right? Absolutely. As I looked into this research for this episode, one of the things that kind of kept coming up is like, don't try to paint with a broad brush, like, try to understand the nuance of each situation, rather than trying to have one solution. There's no one size fits all right, yes. What about coming here, or learning about fire or creating the art that you create? About a place like this? What about all of that kind of still blows your mind or takes your breath away?

RL

That's a really good question. Really, it's so there's all these sort of big exciting things I learned about and those are all really, really cool, like the infrared beetles, and, you know, all of these dramatic things, because fires are really dramatic. And so you sort of expect to learn dramatic things. I think what the most important thing to me and really the most mind blowing and perspective shifting thing isn't all the things that are not big and dramatic. It's in all the just the small details of life just going on. I mean, I think that the best part of it is the really slow the non mind. I mean, it is mind blowing, but the non sort of short, sharp shock type things but the really slow accumulation over time of, of understanding that life is always just going on that it's a fire happens, but there's a deer just doing its thing not very far from the flames or the nudes that I learned about that I didn't see but the nudes that just walked right through the fire and foamed up and we're totally fine. And we don't even know about this adaptation beyond one person's observation. California newts that on a controlled burn on a different UC reserve. They were sort of just tending this little tiny flame front to newts walked into the flames from the unburned area as soon as they hit the flames they found up something in their skin secretions is some sort of unnatural fire retardant kept going walked out onto the burned grassy area unharmed. The reserve manager picked one up he said I've handled hundreds of nudes Newton was fine, sort of brushed off. So we just kept talking, I mean, some incredibly huge hot fire wouldn't have been the same if it I'm sure they have some distance that they can make it before that doesn't work anymore. But no big deal like the deer, like the mountain lion coming through later, it's just part of life. And I didn't see that at all. In the beginning, it took a really long time to slowly accumulate all these stories and all these observations. And so that's the best thing is just a really slow accumulation, just daily life.

I'm here to tell you that that insect noise is gonna get worse before it gets better. But there's only about a minute left. So hang in there. That's so helpful as well. It's not this desolate picture, it's just life. It's just a different part of the cycle of life. And it's just continuing,

RL

just continuing. Yeah, and of course, we're messing with that. And that has to that does mean when fires are burning in this mosaic pattern, and you have all these different than densities and everything. And so that is absolutely threatened. But it's out there, it's still happening. It's something that that we can achieve. Because that's the other thing is we still can help. We see in the patterns of fires that burn, for example, in Yosemite, which has had a very enlightened fire policy for since the 70s. Of Control burning and also letting remote fires burn the big fires that keep hitting it burned totally different in the areas that have been allowed to have a more natural fire regime, much more mosaic pattern, much, much less severe, much less overall killing of all the trees and all that so and that's now and that's in these bigger, scarier mega fires. It matters.

So Yosemite.

RL

That's great. Yeah. So we've changed things a lot. There's a lot we set in motion that isn't going back, but it's not over nature isn't ending, we absolutely still have a lot of opportunity to change what happens.

All right. Well, thank you so much, Robin, I really appreciate your time and your insight and your perspective. It's been really nice.

RL

You're welcome. Thank you. It's been wonderful.

So I have a lot of closing thoughts, but I actually think that Robin captures them best in the cold Canyon fire journal. So I'm going to read a short passage for you from a section describing cold Canyon shortly after it burned. Here goes this recently burned land is a bright place with light reaching where there was only shade before now that much of the canopy and cover have been turned into gas and ash with each visit to cold Canyon, and every month that passes I see how vividly this landscape illuminates the secrets of fires place in the ecosystem. A narrative usually hidden familiarity and deeper knowledge are the antidotes to grief. I am watching the story unfold around me the story of this great disturbance that is actually its own form of nourishment and continuity. So do we have problems with fire in this era and our fire cycles way out of whack? Unfortunately, yes, absolutely. But can we learn to use and live with fire on the landscape around us according to the specific needs of different ecosystems, people have done it before. And living organisms in many parts of the state depend on our ability to figure out how to do so again, I'm really buoyed by the amount of interest and enthusiasm I've noticed around this topic recently, as well as what seems to be at least some openness on the part of the state to learning about fire from indigenous practitioners who carry traditions handed down for millennia through their families. And of course, scientists are doing incredible work to learn more about the relationships between various species and fire so that we can then apply that knowledge to bringing these fire cycles back into balance. Before I sign off, I want to say just a few more things. First of all, I'm incredibly grateful to Robin Lee Carlson, who is not only a fantastic writer, scientist and illustrator, but also a thoughtful and generous human being. She took something like four hours of her day when I know she had a lot going on to take me hiking on what was honestly a miserable sweltering summer day. She also mailed me a cool book about geology in the region around Lake Berryessa just because she's cool like that. So a big thank you to Robin and to Haiti books for helping out with coordinating this whole meeting. I also want to say thank you to the incredible community I'm surrounded by I may make this podcast independently, but that is very different from being alone. I'm so fortunate to have family friends, patrons and listeners who are all pulling for me and contributing in myriad ways to my continued ability to make this show that includes my husband being supportive of me taking a pay cut this year, so I can spend more time making this podcast my family and friends helping out with babysitting so I can go on far off interviews, patrons chipping in each month to help out with expenses or listeners being here for the adventure. Each and every one of you is so valued and appreciated. And this thing wouldn't be possible without you. Okay, I always like to end by sharing something from my week this week. I cleaned my room and that might not sound like a very big deal. But this is so embarrassing. It had been I it had been so many months. I don't even want to try to throw a number out there because it would be too embarrassing to even guess How many months it had been since I had cleaned my room and I have to take full responsibility for this. I shared this room with my husband, I am the messy stuff was laying around on the ground, it was all me there was a laundry basket that going through it felt like what it must be like to be a paleontologist because you just you would go down through the layers, and this is all clean stuff, you're like, Oh, and here at the bottom are like socks that don't fit my kid anymore. So I got all of that taken care of. And I'm very proud of myself. But maybe also I should just do more regular maintenance of cleaning my room. But literally I cleaned out so many clothes and put so many things away that I'm actually wondering if it will impact the sound quality of this episode. So that's a very embarrassing moment from my week for you but I'm also now I'm just so happy because I'm in this clean room recording. This is so nice. Okay, now that the episode is done, don't forget to go and leave a rating or review and share this podcast with a friend. Thank you so much for joining me and for sticking around to the end of the episode. I'll see you next time on Golden State naturalist bye The song is called ie to know by grapes and you can find the link to that as well as the Creative Commons license in the show notes. Oh my god, this episode got so long. Okay, I'm really going now. See you next time. Bye.