Wildfires with Glynis Humphrey

Published Mar 13, 2024, 7:01 AM

For decades, Western governments have pursued policies of fire suppression. But researchers like Glynis Humphrey have shown that these methods don't work – especially as global heating worsens wildfire risks. Today, Glynis joins the show to talk about wildfire management, and what we can learn from the traditional practices of Indigenous communities around the world. Show notes from Chris:

  • Glynis is an author of an excellent but sobering United Nation’s report on how wildfires are becoming more intense and frequent. You can download “Spreading like Wildfire: The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires” for free. But this report also gives hope: Indigenous and traditional knowledge can help prevent and reduce the impact of wildfires in a hotter world.
  • There are some heartbreaking (and compassionate) movies on wildfires. Rebuilding Paradise (2020) directed by Ron Howard and Fire Front (2022) directed by Eddie Martin are powerful documentaries that capture the devastating impacts of wildfires and the terrific importance of community.
  • If you want to find out how best to plan for and respond to wildfires, there are a wealth of resources online. Some excellent examples are the New South Wales Rural Fire Service (the NSW RFS for short) and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (aka CAL FIRE). These websites are packed with life-saving information.
  • For those wanting to learn more about the Australian “dinosaur trees”, the Wollemi Pine, there is an excellent recent article by the ABC. You can see how close the fires of 2019-2020 came to destroying these amazing trees by clicking here. The movie in this article has extraordinary footage.

We're heading into a warming phase if governance doesn't take a niece into the fact that the burning of fossil fuels are increasing the surface of the earth and the temperature on the surface of the earth, and that's been trapped and this envelope that surrounds that surrounds us, that is causing a heating up of the earth. The fire fire is responding to that heating of the globe, and that's really important to be aware of. And if we don't halt our activities on the ground and really change that, we are going to head into a catastrophic zone.

Ah fucked.

Welcome to I'm Fucking the Future. I'm your host, Chris Turney. I've been studying the climate for close to thirty years now. In most professions, after thirty years, you might say I've seen it all. But in the climate crisis, there's always something new. The headlines make everything feel pretty scary, and that's because in a lot of ways it is pretty scary. But being alarmed about the fate of our future isn't enough. We've got to get activated and think creatively about tackling the climate crisis together. So let's dig in.

We're fucking the future. Weird are fucking the future.

If you're listening to this, congrats you lived through the hottest year on record, and with the hotter temperatures, we also saw increased intensity in wildfires, and for many of us it's personal. It doesn't matter if you live in the country or a city. Wildfires are becoming a part of all our lives. For me, wildfires became a huge part of my life. In twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, it was summerre in Australia and the whole country seemed to be a blaze. As you can see, it's nuke it's just gone.

A state of fier emergency has been declared for the first time in Queensland's history.

Fifty nine million acres were burnt. That's two times the size of Pennsylvania. Thirty four people tragically lost their lives. Three billion animals were either killed or harmed. In Sydney, the sun cast a weird orange glow and the air was filled with smoke for months. It fell like a movie Blade Runner. You could even feel the grit of charcoal and toxic dust between your teeth. It's estimated the city air was ten times above Hazard's levels. So last year when the massive Canadian wildfires happened, I had a pretty clear idea of a horror's millions there were facing smoke shut down seats in both Canada and the US. Air quality crashed and it had devastating effects on the environment. The Canadian wildfires are released four hundred and eighty mega tons of carbon in twenty twenty three. That is an eye watering amount that few of any of us can imagine, which is also to say, we've really got to figure out wildfires if we're going to solve the climate crisis. That's why today I'm thrilled to be speaking with Glennis Humphrey, a virocologist at the University of Cape Town. She studies fire history so that we can better understand and prepare for fires in the future. The interaction between human history and environmental history is at the core of Glenus's research and gives us valuable insights into what's coming next. In my field, we focus a lot on how humans are damaging the natural environment, but there's another side of this. Indigenous peoples have been the custodians of our earth for thousands of years, and their practices of land management are often regenerative rather than destructive. That's what and this is research focuses on how and what we can learn from historical land practice.

I had the problem of been lectured by Norman Myers.

Norman Myers was a British environmentalist who consulted for the European Commission, the United Nations, the World Bank, and even the White House. Needless to say, he's a pretty big deal.

He gave us a lecture of a very interesting human perspective and ecological perspective. So it's been aware that this is a delicate and fine balance, and I think that was when I realized that we need to manage these circumstances, and I developed an interest in human, social, and ecological circumstances.

Glynnis looks at all of it in her work and she tries to understand how the climate and humans are shifting fire patterns across the world. But to understand fire today, we've got to go back to basics. First things. First, fires can't happen with dry vegetation, and that means areas experiencing drought are particularly vulnerable to wildfires.

So fires is really linked to rainfall, but also to the absence of rainfall and to draft periods. So if vegetation dries out to a certain extent, it becomes what we call in the fireworld or fire science world, is fire weather.

Fire weather is a convergence of several environmental factors high temperatures, low humidity, and often high winds.

And when you get a convergence of these different weather conditions and you have an ignition, you'll have the start of a fire. So I think those are dynamics which are really important to understand.

When those ingredients are in place, there's a very real risk of wildfires, which brings me to the second point. There are good fires and bad fires. A lot of places have naturally occurring fires that have happened for millennia and crucial for a healthy ecosystem and landscape. Those fires tend to look like small fire patches where the flame is contained to a small area because much of the floora nearby is too wet to ignite. But bad fires look like the ones we're seeing a lot of lately, huge swaves of land destroyed. Unmanageable and truly frightening. Fires are also a major contributor to carbon emissions. When a landscape is burned the carbon it has been storing is suddenly released into the atmosphere and the amounts can be truly staggering. For massive wildfires in Canada, last summer emitted three times as much carbon as Canada typically pollutes annually.

There was a lot of carbon dioxide released and that's will results in global heating that will heat up the earth and actually accelerate. You get those fires cause they own fire weather, cause their own fire winds, which generates bigger, bigger fires. They've burned for longer. With an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we really need to be taking measures and listening to people on the ground and working together with people in order to manage these bigger fires that are happening across the world.

Today. Wildfires are becoming too large, too frequent, and too intense. It hasn't always been this way. I mean during the Australian wildfires in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, the Walamie Pine was nearly lost to the fires. Walamie Pines are the dinosaur trees. They've survived unscathed for ninety million years, hidden in canyons just two hundred kilometers from the city and rediscovered just a couple of decades ago. Just think about that this tree species has been around since the dinosaurs. There's only a few of them left on Earth, and we almost lost them because of these fires.

What we're seeing is different from the past. We're seeing basically a change in the intensities of fires, the frequencies of fire that we haven't actually seen before. And we're aware of the fact that we're having increase in heat waves in drying our periods.

Ecologists like Glennis look for fire patterns to determine what is normal and what isn't.

What we understand as fires scientists is we study a fire pattern, and that's a repeated pattern of fire in a certain place, at a certain scale, in a certain vegetation type. So fire differs in different ecosystems all over the world, and that's very important to remember when you see a change where fires occurring where it didn't occur before, or it's occurring at a much bigger scale than it did occur before. I think that's what's alerting us that something is off. That's a warning to say things are changing because it's different from the past.

Glenna says that one of the greatest inventions is actually for Humble satellite.

What's really been pivotal is the release and the advancement of remote sensing data. There's been a change in the advance of remote sensing data, which is basically satellite data. So satellite data is measuring variables on the surface of the Earth, and when it comes to fires, heat signals, heat and the possession the geolocation of fires are detected by satellites that are moving and circulating around the globe. And I think from a fire perspective, these beautiful maps that we're emerging that could actually where you could see where fires were occurring across the globe. And that was about the early two thousands, and I remember it was a NASA produced image, and I think you might remember it. It's this beautiful map that you can see where fires are occurring. And those maps were rarely illuminating to say, wow, look at the extent of fire on the surface of the Earth.

That's incredible, isn't it, Because before it was spot observations, someone sort of fire here and there, and people put up on the map over time. Whereas here you're getting that single almost like a single shot of view from up above looking down.

And also you know, satellites are able to measure fire intensity. It's one of the fire variables that we need to really be aware of because it's related to how hot fires or how coolifire it and that is really important in understanding how whether fires are damaging or not. Fire intensity is really important to be aware of when understanding how fires move through our landscapes and in different vegetation types and in a point in time.

And the bad news is that fire intensity is increasing in many vulnerable areas around the world.

We are seeing an intensity of fire increasing. And to take an example, the recent fires in Siberia in the Russian tundra, and those fires are I think is unusual. And the fires that are seen in the boreal regions, the Arctic regions, that is something new that scientists are still grappling with.

Let's take a brief pause here and unpack what g Linus is saying, because it's massive. What the fuck are you talking abou The Artic is heating up at least twice as fast as the rest of the world. Fires are now able to take hold fare and with far greater ferocity than before. And it's not just for humble tree catching on fire. The Arctic is covered in peatlands or peats, which are a type of wetland and packed with dead and decaying plants spanning back thousands of thousands of years. It's basically like a massive pool of carbon sitting just below the Earth's surface. And in normal times, say fifty years ago, most peatlands had a high water table and weren't prone to fire. But because of the increasing temperature, the water table has lowered, making the peatlands dry out, and unlike most forest fires, you don't have a huge, intense firestorm. Instead, these fires sit under the surface, smoldering away. In fact, one lab experiment found that smoldering peat fire could survive at below minus thirty five degrees. It's like they're cooking the Earth's surface, and obviously all the carbon release from the plants goes into the atmosphere, causing even more global heating. The bottom line is the fires in Siberia and the Arctic are so much worse for the planet's climate because it causes two problems. First, you have the carbon released from the fires themselves, but the fires also melt the permafrost for frozen ground, releasing more carbon and also creating huge amounts of that far stronger and nastier greenhouse gas methane, which we talked about in the last episode. And that's what the fuck we're talking about. What the FuG are you're talking about? Okay, back to Glynnis. I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it, Glinnis? Because those are fires in Siberia going up towards the Arctic, and we're getting these major landscape fires. They have never been seen before on this level. That's right, It's just not what we expect to see fires. I think most people should not be able to relate to that.

It was the first time in history that fire is recorded so close to the North Pole, and that should be an alarm signal that something is wrong.

That's a massive red flag, isn't it. That really is.

It's a red flag that the world is heating. There is heating going on, and because we are seeing ecological changes in places that didn't burn previously at that extent and that intensity.

So we've got fires in places where previously they would have been unimaginable. But we also have a growth in the size, frequency, and intensity of the wildfires in areas where they were once a positive part of the environment. This is caused in part by a heating world and decreased rainfall in many parts of a globe. But colonization has also had a heavy hand to play in this crisis, which brings us to the segment we call holy Fuck. To understand how colonization and fire policy interact, let's look at one single biome. For savannah is the most fire prone environment in the world. This biome is characterized by seasonal droughts and extensive grasp for when dry is extremely flammable. It's not a specific geographic place, but rather the savannah exists in several places around the world Brazil, Australia, Central and southern Africa, and many of these have been plagued by European colonization. But for our purposes, let's just take the African savannah, which accounts for almost half of Africa's total land area.

I worked in the central Kalihari with the Quessan and Humbakush people, and I spent time tapping into their knowledge and understanding why they're used fire. And these people genetically are some of the oldest people on Earth.

For at least four hundred thousand years. Humans in Central Africa used fire as a tool for life.

It's part of their life, it's culturally connected to them, it's part of their society. So the burning of vegetation and the burning, the use of fire has always been there.

It wasn't just a way of cooking food. Fire was used to clear land, to hunt and later for agricultural purposes, replenishing the salt in the process. But when Europeans began colonizing and stealing land that belonged to indigenous peoples, they brought harmful fire suppression tactics with them. Europeans claimed that traditional fire management practices would destroy resources, properties and the environment. In reality, the opposite is true.

With colonization came an idea that fires is bad and that we should stop fires, and that's where the friction and the conflict started and where people were practicing traditional practices and then all of a sudden they had to stop doing and were told that fire is bad, and that's when things and that happened globally. It happened in Australia, it happened in America with the Native Americans, it happened in Africa.

Europeans banned fire as a land management practice, and those harmful policies are still in place in many parts of a world. The legacy of fire suppression from colonization has led to a huge number of wildfires in these areas. Today, for Savannah, biom accounts for eighty six percent of the world's fires. It's the kind of surprising fact that makes you sit back and say, holy fuck. Colonial legacies have led us to this moment, and now we're baling towards a pretty blique fire prone future.

It becomes really serious when it impacts people's lives. It's impacting on the urban fringe. It's moving into spaces where people aren't prepared to respond because there's been changes, for example, in the vegetation around certain places is not being managed sufficiently to actually manage these catastrophic fires and these wildfires that happen.

We're a fucking the future. We're a fucking the future.

Glennus has been working with indigenous communities to better understand their historical practices. This helps governments make more informed decisions about fire policy.

So in my research, I worked with indigenous traditional people living in the Central Kalahari area in Namibia, and I asked people how they used fire, to understand how they used fire in the past. Why people use fire and wife is important for them, so what reasons why they used fire.

These kinds of questions and studies are critical to addressing the legacy left behind by colonization.

If you don't burn and use fire to manage fire, we're not going to address these issues. That's really important. So we use a term called prescribed fire or early dry season burning. When you talk about traditional fire management, we really need to realize that fire is something we need to use in order to manage life.

When Glennis says that it's not just a nice SoundBite, fire is absolutely necessary to a strong and healthy ecosystem.

Fire is essential. We can't live with our fire. From a management perspective, there's certain plants that only respond to fire. So, for example, in the system where I'm sitting right now, surrounded by the ferin boss in a bi university hotspot in the Western Cape, certain species like for example, the protea species need fire to germinate. In other parts of the world, the seeds are actually trapped in those pine cones and the actually need heat to explode. And there's another perspective, we live with fire and there's people in really remote areas of Southern Africa and Africa that live with fire on a daily basis, and people use fire to manage the vegetation around their homes, to manage fire to manage plants that they depend on. For example, the Quersan in Namibia, they burn certain areas to actually encourage the grass of vegetation. It regenerates the grass and it results in improved productivity. We've known for millennia that a flush of green grass will attract a herd of zebra for grazing purposes.

Glennis's work with local communities led Namibia to make policy changes that will help put the country on a more positive track.

For the first time in history, the Namibian government changed from a policy of fire suppression but actually recognized indigenous knowledge and traditional knowledge and the use of fire. People are using fire to manage fire. At the ministry level, I was in asking people how they understood fine, why they're used fire, and how they were using fire. International Park where actually it was a very unique circumstance because the indigenous community were allowed to live in the park.

Usually people are removed, yes, of course, which.

Is a sensitive issue across the world, people have been removed from ecological from protected areas. This was a unique circumstances where people were living amongst wildlife and fire, and so it was a brilliant from a scientific perspective, what a wonderful experiment to actually be able to ask people about why, how they were using fire, how they were living fire. And I think that was revealing in a sense that when I asked the ministry how they were using fire, they recognized that the use of fire in the season to actually remove the vegetation and the fuel load was really helping them manage the latter hot, dry season fires that've were damaging to biodiversity. There was a consensus between why the ministry, at the government level of the park management why they were using fire, as well as the community. They were using fire for the same reasons. And I think that's really important to realize is that the rationale was the same. You just had to bring different people's different knowledge forms to come and understand, say why using fire and try and understand that. And I think that really needs to be elevated because we can learn and we have learned, and governance can learn from traditional communities how to manage these artbreaks of fire. If we don't use fire to manage fire, we're not going to stop the infernos and the conflagrations which are occurring all over the world. We really need to apply that knowledge.

But if we want to solve this crisis, Glynnis says, what's happening in the media needs to happen at a much larger scale.

There needs to be greater recognition of traditional fire management practices in order to address some of our wildfire issues. People need to be allowed to burn and local authorities need to be allowed to burn in a certain area. And that is because fire, as I explained, is really essential to ecological functioning in the majority of ecosystems across the world. Just that the vegetation type and the fire cycle will differ according to the climate and the current and the rainfall patterns and the weather patterns, and that really needs to be monitored. From a scientific point of view, that data is really essential for understanding when to light fires. But the sort of the convergence between people and when they burn and the fire science, if you bring those two together, that's where you can reach consensus and actually understand and actually use fire. But an important aspect of people need to be allowed to burn. We shouldn't be suppressing fire. That is terminology which has caused a lot of damage in the past. But to move into a new era of addressing the wildfire scenarios, we should not be using We should not be talking about fire suppression and fire prevention. We should be talking about fire management because that is fire prevention. Fire management equates to fire prevention. So in order to dress global biodiversity and health impacts, and to support and look after our planet and are the ecological functioning of it, we need to be thinking where we actually living, and communities can create awareness about the fire problem and be activists for fire. Fire activist degrees awareness that my home is surrounded by alien invasives and actually create a group yourself and start removing vegetation from around your home to protect yourself from fire. So there are things you can do from where you're at.

And perhaps most importantly, Glenn said, we shouldn't lose hope. There's been a lot of progress in the fireworld.

I've seen huge leaps in changes and the recognition of the importance of the social dynamics in ecological and science circles and That's what gives me hope is being able to bring different disciplines and people from different walks of life together. And if we can do that, we can actually really move forward and address bigger issues. But it requires the social process, which is often leather intensive scientist stuff and run away from people, Johnathan, You we know planting cologious and nervous of people, and you know not all scientists like people. We need to bring people together to come to some sort of consensus and actually rarely engage in exchange knowledge to actually dress some of these issues. And I've seen that in the last twenty years, and that's what gives me hope.

I was so inspired by my conversation with Glynnis. By learning from traditional practice in South Africa and elsewhere, we can help reduce the risk and severity of wildfires even as global heating accelerates. But a lot of what Glynnis is talking about will happen in the policies of our local and national governments, So you might be wondering, what the fuck can I do?

What the fuck can I do?

The wildfires in Australia pushed me to join the New South Wales Raw Fire Service or RFS for short. This is the world's largest fire service and it's run almost entirely by volunteers. It's an incredible and diverse group, and since joining, I've learned a ton about fires and how to prevent them. Many places across the world rely on volunteer firefighters, and I can't recommend you joining your local group enough. It's an amazing way to serve your community. But that's not all. To talk about other ways you can help reduce the risks of wildfire. I'm proud to welcome back our friend and act t vist Maggie Bed. Maggie, what did you take away from the chat with g Linnis?

There's so much to talk about here, but I want to highlight one important takeaway I had from this conversation. The power of gardening. Right, okay, Well, specifically, I am talking about keeping any green spaces you own clear of invasive plant species. So at first this might sound irrelevant to wildfires, but actually they're a huge problem when it comes to unmanaged fires. They fuel wildfires, accelerate their spread, and increase the likelihood of unusually severe wildfires. So walk around your house with a plant, identify your app on your phone and check to see which species are invasive.

Ah, that's great, Maggie. And the other thing I dadd is we should be regularly cleaning debris on and around our homes, especially for gutters. Dried leaves and small branches get trapped in there and they're highly flammable.

Right.

I love that, Chris. All of this speaks to the importance of preparation. We need to actively maintain our homes and green spaces to prepare for potential wildfires. And for more tips on how to do that, there is a great website you can check out called Ready for Wildfire dot org.

And that's what the fuck you can do?

What fuck can I do? Oh?

Fuck?

That's all for this episode. Next time on I'm Fucking the Future, we'll be talking with Kochako and Voacom. She's a Thai landscape architect who is changing the way we build cities.

We assume that and Cuckle be able to enlarge it capacity to our greed.

Right, we want more people, we want more buildings, we want want more economics, we want more tourists, and we assume that Fank can handle it.

Whereas the line itself, every line or every infrastructure is have its capacity, and we also destroyed the natural infrastructure to reduce its capacity without.

Knowing until then. I'm Chris Turney signing off from Sydney, Australia. Oh by the way, if you like this episode, please subscribe, rate and reviewers wherever you get your podcasts. I love reading your comments. They really do make my day. Thanks for joining me to Unfuck the Future.

We're Fucking the Future.

I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Imagine Audio and Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted by me Chris Turney. The show is written by Meredith Bryan. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Amber von Shassen and Rene Colvert. Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carl and Nathan Chloke are the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse Burton and Katie Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice. Sound design and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by Lillly Hayden and producing services by Peter mcgriggan. Sam Swinnerton wrote our theme and all those fun jingles. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review Unfucking the Future on Apple Podcasts. Or whether you get your podcasts

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