Last week, I was invited to help with a prescribed fire at the University of California’s Blodgett Research Forest. I’ve had a bit of experience with broadcast burning, but never at this scale (we were hoping to burn 40 acres) and never in this kind of timber. The goal of the fire was research-related - part of a long term study at Blodgett - but there were practical purposes for burning, as well. By consuming some of the surface fuels during the winter, we hoped to take them out of the summer wildfire equation. In other words, yesterday’s fire will make Blodgett Forest more defensible during wildfire season.
Prescribed fire, necessarily, takes a great deal of planning and knowledge to implement. But it also takes on-the-ground knowledge. And hard work. As I was dragging a drip torch back and forth across the slope, I realized that I needed to be aware of many things - of where the receptive fuels were, of my spatial relationship with the other people lighting the fire, of the obstacles in front of me. And of the fire around me. In other words, I became more aware of the skill necessary to put fire on the ground safely.
Before we started the burn, my colleagues Rob and Ariel talked through the conditions - how they expected the fire to behave, what they would do if the unexpected happened. I was struck (again) by the similarity between prescribed fire and stockmanship. Escaped livestock don’t necessarily do the same damage that escaped prescribed fire can do, but planning - and communication - minimize the risk of both. Again, however, the actual work still needs to get done. The animals need to be moved. The fire needs to burn.
Driving home, I thought about these parallels. I’ve been working with another colleague on a policy brief regarding the use of prescribed grazing as a fuel-load reduction tool. I’ve helped others write technical bulletins about preparing for wildfire. I’ve spent much of my extension career focused on the science behind grazing management, fire mitigation, and climate adaptation. The “what.”
As an extension advisor, I’ve also focused on the “why” - why we need to reduce fuel loads. Why we need to provide rest from grazing to increase forage production. Why we need to think about non-lethal predator protection for livestock.
However, I realized last week that I’m most interested in the “how” - how do we accomplish this work? How do we manage sheep to reduce fire danger? How do we protect livestock from predators? How do we make our landscape more fire resilient? And I came to the conclusion that it’s more than more than “workforce development” - it’s developing a relationship with a particular piece of earth. An interdependence between people, communities, and the environment. And it takes skill.
Despite selling most of my sheep, I still see myself as a pretty decent shepherd - as someone who has the knowledge and skills to keep sheep alive, to produce a lamb and a wool clip every year, to manage rangeland vegetation with a grazing animal. But I’ve also tried to learn other skills necessary to living in my little piece of the Sierra foothills. I’m not a logger, but I’ve tried to learn how to run a chainsaw and fell a tree safely. I’m not a sawyer, but I’m learning how to operate a sawmill to utilize the trees that I drop as an amateur logger - or the trees that fall during big storms. I’m not a prescribed fire expert, but I’ve tried to learn the skills necessary to use fire safely to make my property more fire safe.
In my work, I’ve realized, I need to know the “how” before I can teach the “what” and the “why” - I need to know what it feels like to work sheep all day. What it feels like to lose a ewe to a coyote, despite my best efforts at protecting my sheep. Last week, after spending a day burning at Blodgett, I discovered I knew what my 57-year-old knees would feel like after sidehilling a steep ridge with a drip torch.
I’m not suggesting the scientific underpinnings of adapting to our changing climate are unimportant. They are critical. But adaptation will take more than research. We need people who know how to run a chainsaw. We need people who can build fence, herd sheep, or doctor cows. We need people who know their patch of the planet as intimately as they know their own skin. We need hard work. Day after day.
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