Fire in the Southwest Ep. 5: Using Wildfire To Build Resilience at the Landscape Scale, with Dr. Jose (Pepe) Iniguez

Life with Fire

For our fifth episode of the the Fire in the Southwest Series, we're talking managed wildfires, which has a number of alter egos depending on who you talk to in the wildfire world, some of which include "wildland fire use" or "managing wildfires for resource benefit".

Dr. Jose "Pepe" Iniguez, a research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, is our fearless leader on this journey through the fraught, occasionally contentious world of managed fire. Pepe has had a long career studying wildfire impacts in forested landscapes while building a better understanding of how our public lands have been shaped by disturbances like wildfire. His takeaway? We can't effectively manage forests at the landscape scale without the help of wildfires, and managed fire is the most feasible answer to the question of how we reach "scale" in our ability to build landscape resilience.

In short, managed fires are often lightning-caused wildfires that are determined to be burning in an area that is not likely to impact nearby communities, infrastructure, watersheds etc. As such, they are not managed with "full suppression" as the main priority. They are heavily monitored by ground resources (if its accessible) and aircraft, though on occasion these fires become "wildfires for resource benefit" merely because there are no resources to attend to them. See: the 2021 fire season in California. Often, these types of fires are burning in wilderness areas where fire suppression is often extremely difficult because of a lack of access and, and made all the more difficult by designations that disallow the use of things like chainsaws and helicopters.

Want more information about managed fire? Check out this fact sheet from our sponsor for this episode, the Southwest Fire Science Consortium.

A huge thank you to both the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Arizona Wildfire Initiative for supporting this episode and all of the other episodes from our Fire in the Southwest Series.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Episode Start

01:31 - Pepe's Background

07:56 - 1996 Fires

11:04 - The Early Days Of Managed Fire

14:01 - Thinning Versus Fire, Thinning PLUS Fire

16:00 - Prescribed Fire Scales As A Tool

17:40 - Pepe's View On Managed Fire

19:48 - Lessons Learned with Managed Fire

22:24 - The Benefit of Starting Small in Building A Managed Fire Program

25:24 - Experimental Forests

28:27 - Hotshot Crews Work On the Long Valley Experimental Forest

30:47 - Smaller, More Local Incident Management Teams Often Work Better

32:56 - Social Implications Of Managed Fires

35:29 - Thoughts on Improving Public Perception of Managed Fires

38:30 - Prescribed Fire and Managed Fire Have Different Liabilities

40:06 - Do We Need A Fire Influencer? Pepe suggests Britney Spears.

41:37 - The Work of the Southwest Fire Consortium

49:50 - Episode End