Latest / The Wild Idea / Dr. Erica Smithwick: Fire, Climate, and Forest Resilience in the East

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Dr. Erica Smithwick: Fire, Climate, and Forest Resilience in the East · The Wild Idea

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Welcome to our continuing conversations for a wild and connected world, what we like to call the "Wild Idea" podcast. My name is Bill Hodge, and along with my frenemy,
• 0:11
  Anders Reynolds, we bring you these conversations because we have a real curiosity about things. We have a great episode for you today, conversation we've really been looking forward to having with Dr. Erica Smithwick. She is a distinguished professor of geography and director of the Earth and Environmental
• 0:29
  Systems Institute at Penn State University. What we're going to talk to her about, though, is she is sort of the lead on the newly empaneled Eastern Fire Network. We're going to talk about wildfire in the East,
• 0:43
  and really looking forward to that conversation.
• 0:46
  I'm a little nervous because it's also the day before taxes are due. Are you ready?
• 0:52
  Oh, hi, Bill.
• 0:54
  Yeah, I'm ready. First of all, I'm ready for this episode. It is still eastern spring break. We're still digging into some of the landscapes out here that you and I love best. I know we're going to talk about fire regimes across the country, but I'm
• 1:11
  particularly interested in Dr. Smithwick's work
• 1:16
  on the rapidly changing fire regimes in the East, and I think we're going to learn a lot. I know I will. And this has been one of those episodes that took a lot of coordination, had to change some times and stuff, so there's been emails flying back and forth. But right before this started, I got an email from you. I don't know if you meant to send this to me, but it's your tax returns, and I'm looking at some of the deductions, and I cannot believe what I'm seeing. Some of the stuff you're claiming as a deduction. I got to read some of this stuff to our listeners because this is shocking. First of all, you list almond shimmer body oil. I don't know what that's about. And then, oh, God, look at this list. Later down, there's tuxedo, but in parentheses, you've written, "Top only." I guess when we record, we only see each other from the waist up, so that's a work uniform, I guess you're claiming. That's somewhat defensible. But this one is really egregious. You have claimed clarinet lessons, and then in parentheses it says, "For treatment of an overbite." First of all, your overbite's not that bad. [laughing]
• 2:30
  Well, thanks for exposing my potential tax fraud to the world.
• 2:35
  Should I forward this on to Uncle Sam?
• 2:37
  Yeah, just go ahead and forward that on. Just go ahead and get it filed. I'm hoping that there's a refund coming because of all those-
• 2:43
  [scoffs]
• 2:44
  ... interesting deductions. I noticed you didn't mention the
• 2:49
  deductions for all the mental health services I have to employ because of working with you on a week-in, week-out basis. [chuckles] So-
• 2:56
  Yeah
• 2:57
  ...
• 2:58
  those would be legitimate. Those would be legitimate deductions.
• 3:00
  Yeah. Those will pass muster, I think.
• 3:03
  [laughing] How are you going to spend your tax refund check, buddy? I want to know how that's going to be spent.
• 3:07
  Oh,
• 3:09
  ugh, I'm paying off my various enemies. I don't know.
• 3:14
  Will I even get a refund? If I do, how would I spend it? Hmm. A nice trip. Maybe a trip out to see you and Laura. I'd love to come visit-
• 3:23
  It'd be nice to-
• 3:23
  ... Flathead Valley sometime.
• 3:24
  It'd be nice to have you out here in the Flathead Valley. Be great.
• 3:26
  Yeah, I could bully you in person for a change. [chuckles]
• 3:28
  Exactly. [laughs] Well, let's stay in the East for this conversation. I think it's a great one. I think you guys will enjoy it a lot. Our conversation with Dr. Erica Smithwick begins right now. [whooshing] Dr. Smithwick, welcome to the podcast. This has been an interview that Anders and I have been excited about for some time. I'm going to kick us off where I usually do, somewhere near the beginning, before the undergraduate work at Tufts, before the graduate work at Montana and Oregon State, and the post-doc work at Wisconsin. Where did the interest in forest ecology make its way into your life first? I'm curious.
• 4:03
  I grew up in the woods.
• 4:06
  I grew up in a wooded house in Western Massachusetts. There is a big oak tree that still stands outside my bedroom window. My mom has refused to cut it down because she knows how special it is [chuckles] to me, despite perhaps its risk to our home.
• 4:25
  Pretty tall now. But yeah, I think just being around woods, being around a forest, really sparked my interest. Although, it's funny you mention my degree at Tufts. I was a geology major at Tufts, and geologists always joke that trees get in the way of doing the science. [laughs] So I was kind of forced away from that, and it was only when I went to the University of Montana, where they asked if I could TA a soils class because they thought, well, I knew rocks, I must know something about soils, which was completely untrue. [laughs] But it landed me in a forestry program, and so that ended up being really fortuitous because then I was able to actually study the forest that I grew up loving.
• 5:10
  Dr. Smithwick, I'm so happy you're here today. I want to jump right in to asking you about the Eastern Fire Network because I'm so curious about how it all came together. There's, to my mind, a pretty eclectic group involved in that network. That includes ecologists, social scientists, even a nonprofit fire research station. How did you assemble that particular set of partners, and what does each bring to the table? What are we working toward with the Eastern Fire Network?
• 5:42
  That collection of eccentric and smart people [chuckles] was intentional.
• 5:49
  What happened was I have studied fire in the Western US context for a long time. I, however, had been living in Pennsylvania, I'll be entering my 20th year of living in Pennsylvania, and we never thought wildfireWas on the radar. I was trying to keep a toehold in doing the science out West and other locations. I did become involved in proactive prescribed fire management work in the East, and I hope we talk about that. But, at the time, I was also paying attention to my phone and weather alerts, and all of a sudden, there was wildfire warnings coming on my weather alerts in Pennsylvania. We then had a few burns, wildfires in Pennsylvania, and I started to see the science emerge from lots of different places about the potential for future risks. In my other work, I spend a lot of time thinking about not just the ecology of the system, but how we manage landscapes. And to do that, you really need to engage with many sectors, not just scientists, actually. You need to actually start with non-academic
• 7:00
  folks, people who are living and working in the landscape to make sure that the science fits the needs of the communities. And so I was already thinking about how to do work that is, we call it transdisciplinary. That's the jargony way of saying that. But how do you co-design a science with partners, and how do you think across disciplinary boundaries to come up with creative solutions to those challenges? So when the idea of wildfire in the East started to emerge, I was like, "Wow, we have to go deep here to think about who should be engaged." And even our leadership team, I mean, you mentioned many of those folks, they don't represent the full set of who we wanted to engage. And our goal with this network is to bring people to the table to really broaden the conversation and set the research agenda for how we better understand future wildfire risk in the East.
• 7:52
  I'm happy we're going to dig into that. And maybe one way to do that is to move from the eccentric to the novel. I've noticed the word novel in a lot of the titles of your research papers and grant announcements, and that feels deliberate. What makes eastern fire systems novel, and what does that mean in practical terms for how we should be thinking about fire in this part of the country?
• 8:18
  Yeah. Some might find that word controversial. I guess I'm curious about the things we don't know. I'm curious about where the new frontiers are.
• 8:32
  And maybe we'll get to this, but my work in the West, working in the Yellowstone context and the sub-Alpine Rockies,
• 8:41
  was the first time where I started to think that there were surprises. My own career showed me surprises. The science surprised me about the future risks. And so when I started to engage with the question of fire in the East, I was like, "Wow, what don't we know? Where are the frontiers?" So that's the way I think about the novelty here.
• 9:07
  Scientifically, what that means is that we don't consider wildfire risk in the northern part of the East Coast as being
• 9:16
  a threat historically because we don't have records of severe wildfires like we're seeing here in the West. And we just don't think that fires in our
• 9:30
  recent history, in the time of past couple hundred years, that fires have burned in any way that we should manage towards a fire system. [chuckles] And it's not to say that there haven't been fires. We know that cultural burning happened. It's just a question of the scale and the impact of people's historical burning on the landscape. We know there were lots of fires as people
• 9:56
  sort of went through the forest and converted it to agriculture,
• 10:00
  and that caused a lot of wildfires on the landscape, railroads, iron ore industry. There are lots of reasons why we know fires happened in the past, but we don't think of it necessarily as a sort of normal historical disturbance in the East. We have lots of other disturbances, right? We have insects and storms and so on, hurricanes.
• 10:23
  But this might be changing, and that's really what we wanted to get at with this
• 10:29
  study.
• 10:30
  Yeah, I'm going to expose my sort of layman brain on these sort of things, but I'm assuming
• 10:38
  the difference between the West and the East, besides the West is obviously way more arid, but the difference in fire regimes in sort of the two halves of the country is
• 10:48
  not that there has been an absence of fire of one and fires played a more prevalent role in the other, it's just that the fire role is different. And I'm curious if I'm thinking about that differently. I mean, I remember
• 11:00
  working with and supporting the Forest Service on a prescribed fire idea for the Linville Gorge Wilderness in North Carolina. And the science, as I understood it there at the time, was there historically had been fire in that part of the Southern Appalachians, but for the most part, it was probably a 7 to 10-year fire regime, and I'm talking about long history here, and it was probably low, slow, not what we would call stand replacement fires, not dramatic fires. But of course, now what we've had is decades, if not a century of suppression. But am I thinking about the differences between the West and the East right? That maybe fire has always been a part of both, but it's just maybe plays a more, for the lack of a better term, a more dramatic role in the West.
• 11:43
  You know what you're talking about. [laughs] I'm impressed.
• 11:47
  Don't tell him that, please. Please don't send us down this path.
• 11:51
  Yeah. So, with a twist, a couple of twists, I would contribute. One, even in the West, we have variability in those fire frequencies. So, the Southwest will have some frequent understory burns,
• 12:07
  maybe even more frequent than what you suggested. And that has created, historically, as we understand an open understoryFires that would be at relatively low intensity, so the trees are able to withstand those burns even as they happen so frequently because they've developed this thick bark. It rarely gets to the canopy. And in the absence of those fires, let's say 50 to 100 years of fire suppression, you have basically now skipped five to 10 fires, and that means that the fuels are building up in the understory. And when then a fire occurs, it can actually climb up into the canopy. That's why we call these fuels ladder fuels. And then it can burn into the canopy, and those become "unnatural" relative to that historical baseline, and that's where you're starting to get canopy mortality, and then the trees don't regenerate in the same way. But it's also true in some parts of the West that you have severe stand-replacing fires, and these are some of the systems that I studied in the Rockies, sub-alpine Rocky Mountain region, where you have historically very severe canopy burns that, as far as we know, happened every 100 to 300 years for the past 10,000 years. And it's just we haven't seen that scale and over that time period to know that that's natural with our management time frames. Right? But if you look at the plant traits, we can see that they've evolved to be able to survive even after a stand-replacing fire. They have cones that actually are waiting to be heated to a certain hot temperature before they release their seeds. And so that's an evolutionary adaptation to those very severe fires. So fire has geography, and that geography really matters to what we are managing towards. It doesn't make a lot of sense or it may not have as much impact to a positive impact to do a prescribed burn in a place that normally has a stand-replacing fire regime. So you want to match the intervention to the historical fire patterns. Now, if we go to the East, there's again, tremendous variability from the south to the north end of the eastern landscape. And as you mentioned, the southern Appalachian region is again different. The coastal plain is different. Each of these places have a different history. I like to think about it as a different relationship with fire because it's ongoing, it's evolving, it's changing. And in Mid-Atlantic region and the Northeast, the absence of fire over this time period has done a few things. It's really shifted the fuels that are able to survive in the absence of fire. And so now you're getting these fuels that just don't burn very well, and we call those mesophytic fuels. These are your maples in the understory, and they really, the litter packs down, collects a lot of moisture, especially this time of year, where it just collects a lot of wetness in the understory, and
• 15:07
  it doesn't burn very well. And so that's why we haven't thought about fire in the Northeast as being something that's normal because the fuel doesn't really support a lot of burning historically.
• 15:20
  But yeah, you're right. I mean, the frequency of a fire regime, that historical pattern varies widely across this region, and so that's something we're paying attention to in this project, for sure.
• 15:32
  But in addition to the geography and the wetness you find in the understory and just the general relationship with fire, we're now overlaying changing climate regimes, right? How is that impacting what you're seeing?
• 15:48
  Yeah. There's a lot going on in the East here beyond this fuel question. So
• 15:55
  one, in terms of climate specifically, the thing we're worried about generally with increasing wildfire risk is that we're getting hotter, drier conditions generally. And this is absolutely exacerbating fires in the West. Ten million acres is now not an abnormal fire year for the Western United States. And we know that is due to large increases in fuel aridity. At least 50% of that increase in fuel aridity is caused by human-caused climate change. And so we know that that is contributing in the West. The question in the East has always been, well, it's getting wetter in the East, right? Isn't that what climate change is going to do? And the answer is, in general, yes, especially in the Northeast. We are expected to see, on average, increases in our moisture conditions, more flooding, for example. But we're also likely to see more extremes and more whiplash. That's kind of the term we're using [chuckles] a lot. And I think we can relate to that now, where we're seeing these really cold days and then these really hot days and these very dramatic storms come through. And that's tied to a lot of climate-related changes in atmospheric conditions that we could talk about. But what that is resulting in are these conditions like flashy droughts or extended drought periods, even if on average we might be wetting. And unfortunately, that's a little harder to predict with our models, like how likely is it that we're going to get these extended drought periods. But we know the East is already seeing-- We already have a baseline of drought in the East, believe it or not. And on top of that, now we're getting these extreme drought events. So in 2025, we had 25% of our normal precipitation in the East, and we saw a 50% increase in our fire in our burned area. So we know it can happen. We've seen historical droughts before. It's also true, we've had droughts, and we haven't seen the fires emerge. And so that raises the science question of what is it about the combination between these particular climate periods in the East and when a fire might occur. It's also important to note that in the East, we have a different window in which we might see fire risk increase. So in the East, we have what are called shoulder seasons, the spring and the fall.Where we likely see the heightened fire risk. Why is that? That's because we have a lot of deciduous trees in the overstory, they drop their leaves. That means more solar radiation can get to the forest floor. It can dry out the forest floor, that [chuckles] wet forest floor that I was talking about before, it can dry it out. And you have all that litter on the forest floor that can actually burn under the right conditions. So if you have this combination of those flashy droughts, the right fuel structures occurring, and then you add on top of that the big factor in the East, which is human ignitions,
• 18:57
  you have the recipe for having increased fire risk. And so we've got this sort of multiple whammy [chuckles]
• 19:05
  set of factors that are emerging, which has us question, okay, what are the conditions under which we might see fires change in the Eastern United States?
• 19:16
  Yeah, I was thinking, I just saw a friend of mine from back in North Carolina post about that the fire risk in the Southeast right now is pretty high. I mean, right now in the spring, I generally think of April showers bring May flowers, right? But right now it's so dry that fire is at risk. I lived back in the Southeast during the tragic fires and loss of life in Gatlinburg, for example.
• 19:38
  Oh, wow.
• 19:39
  And I'm curious how you and your work and the work of the newly sort of empaneled
• 19:47
  network are thinking about looking at
• 19:51
  as fast as possible providing land management agencies, private landowners,
• 20:00
  tools to respond as quickly as possible, right? I think about the Gatlinburg fire, and it, of course, was assumed that that fire was going to punk around in what was called the Chimneys up in the park, up in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. But
• 20:14
  problem is,
• 20:16
  very late, a forecast for hurricane-force winds was caught, and that very small sort of punky fire suddenly blew embers into the town of Gatlinburg. But I'm curious, do you guys need to take a long sweep of time to sort of do an analysis of the data that exists, the data that you'll gather, or are you quickly trying to already provide tools? And yeah, the idea of prescribed fires I know in the East gets complicated because you're right on top of populations in public land areas, and so people obviously don't want the smoke and that sort of thing. But I'm curious how fast you think the network is going to be providing tools to public and private land managers.
• 20:56
  Oh, that's such a great question.
• 20:58
  No more gold stars for Bill, I can't.
• 21:00
  Okay. You'll be next. You'll get a gold star next, I hope. [laughs] Pressure's on you. Yeah, no, I
• 21:09
  think that we are challenged by a number of things in our network, despite our lofty goals. One of them is that we do not have the data streams that we need, data sets that we need to answer these questions in a good way, in a robust way that would inform efficient management. And unfortunately, that's the state of the science. So one of our goals is to, this is a longer-term goal, is to identify where are the data gaps so we can do exactly what you're saying, which is that we want to provide evidence-based strategies to help support management on the ground. And to do that, we need better data, I think. And that is one of the goals of the network, is to identify where those gaps are. And I say that because in many parts of the East, the South is actually a place where we do have more robust information than in other locations. But some of these fires are small, and especially since we don't have the historical records, because the past may not be an analog for the future. [chuckles] The future may emerge differently. We don't have those historical fire records in many locations, and so developing the relationships between drivers and past occurrence isn't necessarily a good way to approach the future. So that is definitely one of our challenges and something we're grappling with. That being said, we are trying, and I think this is really exciting, I may be biased, but bringing all of these groups together, we're hoping we can get there faster. Because I think that what we tend to do is stay in our silos of what we know. And we know, I would say that people who manage
• 22:46
  with prescribed fire and manage our forests through prescribed fire are tremendous experts in their field, and they know what they're doing, and they know how to control smoke.
• 22:55
  That is a tool we have in our toolbox that it can be effective even in urban areas. We also have folks just start, and especially in the West, we did one of the first studies in social science in the East of what do community members think about this? Where are the opportunities to engage with community members so those practices can get out in the field? And then we have folks like emergency first responders, firefighting agencies, rural firefighting companies have even come to us because they are seeing this as a potential threat, but don't necessarily have the capacity or the resources or the training to respond in time. And then we have policy. Where are the policy levers in the East?
• 23:41
  So all of those need to be worked on at the same time, but I think they're going to be stronger if we bring them together in conversation about where are the collective opportunities for us to partner and also learn from each other. So the reason this is a network approach is to say, what can people in the southern Appalachian region and North Carolina, South Carolina, what can they learn from folks in Georgia or Florida who have been dealing with these wildfire issues for quite a while? What can people in Pennsylvania and Maryland learn from the people in North Carolina? And so on and so forth. And so we really want to bring into conversation a network so thatWhen those things emerge, people know who to go to and know where the resources are. Yes, we're going to probably identify more gaps in research opportunities than we are answers, but I hope that we can start to inform strategies that will move us forward. Because you're right, if what we fear comes true and there are some locations with this heightened risk, we want to get ahead of the game. We do not want to be caught on our heels as unfortunately many parts of the West have been. And so if we can do something towards getting us there, that's our goal.
• 24:58
  More of the conversation after a word from those who support Wild Ideas.
• 25:02
  [whooshing] I'm Brian Miles from Memphis, Tennessee, and you're listening to the Wild Idea.
• 25:07
  Dr. Smithwick, I want to return to something you mentioned in the first half of the interview, because I'm really curious about it. And that was a moment when you were talking about cultural burning. I know you've written about better integrating indigenous knowledge into forest decision support tools.
• 25:28
  In the Eastern context specifically, how is that changing what
• 25:33
  land managers know and how they make decisions?
• 25:37
  Yeah. Thank you for raising that. This is a really important topic, and one that's very near and dear to the way I approach my science and how I know many of my colleagues are thinking about this. Which is, and again, just for context as well, I work internationally on topics that relate to local and indigenous communities, and thinking about climate adaptation strategies in multiple contexts. I'm always thinking about how can we integrate traditional, local, and indigenous knowledge in the way we're approaching our work, even the knowledge systems, even how we're asking questions. And at the broadest level, I think what we've learned about how traditional communities, indigenous communities, think about these challenges is that they inherently see them as coupled. They inherently see humans as part of nature and nature as part of humans. And that's not something that we, with our traditional academic
• 26:35
  lens, we usually approach the problems with. And so how can we think of this as a coupled system? And it's not that we fix the forest or that we fix people. They cannot be separated. So at the broadest level, I hope as scientific research fields, we are approaching our problems with that kind of a lens. Specifically, in the Western United States, and other locations globally, I think there's been more work on thinking about fire specifically, and how we manage with that knowledge system, but also leading
• 27:18
  with indigenous voices and with indigenous perspectives about how to do that effectively. And that is happening maybe in some small areas in the East. I'm thinking in the Southeast, there are some locations where that's occurring, and I'm looking forward to learning more about that myself.
• 27:35
  It is challenging in the Eastern United States.
• 27:39
  Many indigenous communities have been forcibly removed from their local traditional homelands, and a lot of that knowledge is not in place right now, or worse, has been lost. When we look at historical charcoal records, or we're trying to piece together cultural burning, we're often doing it with evidence that doesn't include the voices of indigenous peoples. We know indigenous peoples in the East are tremendously diverse. We know their livelihoods were diverse, and that remains true today. And so we can't easily summarize what is the role of cultural burning in the East. That, I think, is going to emerge as one of these, I'll say gaps, but opportunities for how we better manage fire moving forward.
• 28:29
  Maybe I'll stop there. That's a pretty high-level answer, but I think that's because I'm still cautiously approaching that topic because I want to respect that we have not fully engaged with communities as I hope that we do in the course of our project.
• 28:44
  Speaking of other high-level opportunities, another thread I don't want to lose from earlier had to do with the policy levers you were mentioning.
• 28:55
  There are so many groups right now making an attempt to reimagine public lands management.
• 29:03
  If you were on a panel tasked with engaging those kind of problems, what would you argue is the biggest institutional gap between what forest science knows and what public lands policy actually does? Are you seeing those kind of gaps closed by current legislation or administrative action? How does your work in general just interact with state or federal decision-makers?
• 29:32
  Yeah. Thank you for that question. Gold star. [laughs]
• 29:39
  Yeah. So the interesting thing about the East, and this is one of the things that we talk about quite a lot in our project, is that managing fire from a policy or regulatory perspective in the East is profoundly different than in the West. And that's because of the different level of jurisdictional boundaries of the governance systems. And so in the East, you have a lot more private land. You have a lot more state-level land compared to the West, where you have a lot more federally managed land. And so a lot of the conversation around fire management is less around
• 30:21
  federal policy as it is around state and local-level management and policy. And so that presents all sorts of questions around how that gets coordinated across the East. And I can say from my own experience that it's not well coordinated right now, even in terms of strategies that we know are effective.So how do we incentivize prescribed burning? Things like lessening liability around the managers who are putting burns on the ground and ensuring that they have the protections they need to do that safely and well. That's a state-level policy at this point, for the most part. And Pennsylvania didn't start
• 31:03
  allowing for prescribed burning until 2009, which is relatively recent. Other states are still behind the curve on that, and yet others have been burning for quite a while. Like New Jersey, for example, where they have state-level fire service, and they've been burning for 100 plus years, and they know how to do that well, and that's because their fire risk is inherently higher. But that's a state-level shift, and we're
• 31:31
  neighbors. [chuckles] And so it makes it really challenging to coordinate at the landscape level when you are having to deal with those fine-scale differences in policy, let alone differences in objectives across institutions and how they want to manage for those lands. So you may have agencies, not picking on names, but who are managing for certain species. They have certain objectives relating to their mission, and that may not match the objectives of another agency that's managing for habitat more broadly or something like that. And so you run into these inter-agency tensions, and that's where I've seen most of the work needs to happen, is to get to how do we manage at a landscape level across multiple objectives, and what is the role of fire in doing that? And oftentimes because agencies and units are managing at these fine scales for narrow objectives, it's more expensive and it's more complicated. And so I'm always looking for where are the opportunities for us to coordinate some of this at a larger scale. That being said, I think the way we can interface with federal policy is to allow that federal policy provides agency for these agencies. That's not the right way to say that. [laughs] To
• 33:04
  observe what's working on the ground and to be able to be flexible and responsive. So for example, in the East, we have very historically, we'll see how this changes in the future, but relatively narrow burning windows for putting fire on the landscape. And frankly, that could go either way in the future where we have more extreme events. The windows for putting fire safely on the ground could shift. But managers know this, right? They are trained to do this, and they need to be able to have flexible dates and time frames where they can manage safely. And so there's going to be this learning curve of how do we provide resource managers, land managers with the tools they need while also coordinating across scales. So yeah, a lot there to unpack, I think, for sure.
• 33:51
  I'm wondering, and this may be both an East and a West thing, about integrating
• 33:58
  fire components and conservation easements. Like you said, there's a lot of private land in the East, a lot of private land in the West too, generally adjoining public land or connecting landscapes or habitats. But I'm wondering, do you think that's something you guys will look at? Sometimes conservation easements that people put private property into sort of have a broad definition, but I wonder if we actually would start looking at conservation easements from a forest land resilience perspective and particularly with a fire lens.
• 34:30
  Yeah. I think that's a great observation. There are groups working on private land forest stewardship with fire and how to incentivize this. One of the issues is around capacity.
• 34:47
  Agencies are already over-tapped to put managed, controlled burns on lands that they manage themselves. So you need to have private contractors, trained burn bosses to come out and presumably do that work. So certification programs are starting to grow. Pennsylvania now has a prescribed burn certification program that is launching. Other states do as well, so that we can increase the capacity of trained personnel to come in and do that in concert with the Nature Conservancy, who also have their own personnel.
• 35:20
  So yeah, I do think that is happening to a certain degree. Again, where is the guidance as to which systems that would benefit from that kind of an approach
• 35:32
  and how to think about it in a proactive sense? On one hand, it's a risk reduction. It's an investment in your easement to make sure that you are managing it from a future wildfire hazard. So there's that motivation. The other motivation could be for habitat itself. So you're managing for certain species, you want certain trees to be there, certain game species, whatever, and you're managing for that condition. It also can be that you are managing for landscape-level biodiversity because you want variability on the landscape at the highest level. So you're going to manage for historical prairie and know that that comes with a certain frequent fire regime, as well as you're going to manage for old-growth deciduous forest systems with a longer fire return interval. And so yeah, incorporating that into your planning up front can help you maximize the landscape level and then the motivation for why you might want certain conservation easements in certain locations.
• 36:30
  I'm not going to let this opportunity go by without asking about a very specific landscape in the East, and that's wiregrass longleaf pine. I think safely we've lost 90% of that ecosystem in the coastal plain along the southeast.Have you guys already been engaging in that subject? I mean, that is clearly a fire-dependent ecosystem, and I'm curious if there's any engagement early on in the network.
• 36:57
  We have a colleague at North Carolina State University, Rob Scheller, who I'm sure is more plugged in than I am with that particular ecosystem. But we are definitely thinking about those kinds of ecosystems where we need to think about rapid proactive fire management and fire stewardship to support that. Yeah, our challenge with our network is we're dealing with so many of those different kinds of [chuckles] really precious ecosystems. And so ultimately, we will probably not focus directly on any one system in our project. But we are looking for case studies, right? We're looking for systems at the end members of these challenges to try to-- and maybe that's one of them, maybe we should bring that into our conversation of like, where are these systems that are places that we can learn from collectively? What is working?
• 37:44
  Maybe that's a great system where the community engagement around that topic is far along, and thus how did they get there, right? What are the big wins there that we can take to other systems?
• 37:56
  And also how have managers been able to effectively manage that system? How have data streams, how have monitoring, all of those factors. We're also going to be looking at places that have experienced extreme wildfire in the past few years as another way to think about case studies. So places in Long Island. [chuckles] Why is Long Island burning? Let's talk about that. Let's talk about Minnesota. Why is Minnesota burning? And try to bring those into conversation so that we can focus in on certain landscapes. So I can't say that we're going to specifically focus on that topic, although I'm sure it will emerge in one way or the other.
• 38:35
  I'm going to switch subjects on us real quick. I'm interested in something else I know that is important to you, and that's a project known as Science Moms. Could you tell our audience a little bit about this group? I have to admit, I was
• 38:48
  not aware of it until doing a little research for this conversation.
• 38:52
  Yeah. Happy to get the word out about it. It has been really fun to be part of Science Moms. I am a scientist, and I am a mom. So for me, I have been living with understanding the threat of climate change on our ecosystems. Again, as I mentioned earlier, I've seen with my own eyes and my own science that these systems are changing in surprising ways that do not fit our historical understanding of how these systems should work. And it's alarming. These are places that are very, very special. Places like Yellowstone National Park, places like my backyard. Places that my kids and I vacationed in. And they're changing in really novel ways. And so I do feel it's those of us who are part of Science Moms feel it's our obligation to share what we know about the science of these changes, and to help educate, communicate, share stories about, and give people voice about their own stories, right, and how it's changing so that we can protect these places for our children. And I'm not afraid. I mean, maybe when I was young, I wouldn't necessarily hold both of my identities so loudly in front. Like, "Oh, well, I'm a scientist. Oh yeah, by the way, I'm also a mom." But I'm laying claim to both of those spaces right now in pretty loud ways because it's so important. It just breaks my heart to think about our children not experiencing nature in the same way that I did, let alone our grandparents. And so, yeah, we're out there to help give voice to things that I know a lot of moms and parents are really grappling with, which is this is really scary for our kids, and we don't want to leave the world
• 40:40
  in this state for future generations. And so how can we use science? How can we share what we know to help shift and allow other moms to feel empowered to do the same?
• 40:51
  A perfect pivot to sort of how I wanted to wrap up our conversation. I want to ask you about hope. You're obviously in the business of understanding complex data, and these days, as you've sort of alluded to, that data sort of paints a troubling future for the natural function of our world, because of the shifting climate,
• 41:11
  because of the tools to manage the way ecosystems are changing with the shifting climate are hard because we have so many humans that live in the landscape that we obviously have to protect those humans. But
• 41:22
  I ask about hope because I'm leaning a little bit into "Project Hail Mary." Here's a pop culture reference for you guys. Leaning a little bit into "Project Hail Mary." I read the book, loved the movie. And I share this because the message that I took there is there is hope for us humans to solve the seemingly unsolvable, maybe with the help of an alien creature. But
• 41:46
  the storytelling, of course, is there to give us that hope around solving big problems that maybe humans can solve.
• 41:56
  Are you hopeful that we are capable of still solving problems as big as the one that you're taking on with the Eastern Fire Network and your research in general?
• 42:04
  Oh, I am. I am so hopeful. And that's-- I mean, it must drive people crazy, but I am an optimist. At the end of the day, I really, really don't like the doom and gloom part of talking about my work. I really don't. It is scary, I'm not going to lie, but what gives me hope, I'll tell you, on a day-to-day basis, is that I'm engaged in the work. I know that there are others engaged in the work, and we're coming together as community to fix these challenges. And that in and of itself, just being part of the conversation is hopeful. I think when people say, "This is not my problem," or, "It's somebody else's problem," despair can creep in. But being engaged in the solution space myself gives me hopeFirst of all. Second of all, I am working with tremendous scholars and students who are creating new ideas all the time. So, in particular, the passion of students who want to work in this space and being around the next generation of those who's like, "Yeah, actually, this matters to me. I want to figure out how to be involved." And the faculty and the other scientists that I'm around, the technical solutions, so many of them actually exist. Honestly, they exist, and it's just a matter of scaling them. It becomes a policy and a political issue, unfortunately. But that means that we have hope. And then the third thing I think that gives me hope is that even in the political back and forth around this topic, we are still acting at local scales. There are still things happening at state levels and local levels, municipal levels,
• 43:46
  because people know now. I actually have more hope now than I did probably 20 years ago because people are now talking about climate change. Most people can relate to it. Unfortunately, 75% of people can relate to an extreme climatic event. They know that this is happening now. They just don't necessarily make the connection that it's caused by fossil fuels, and that we need to shift the way we fuel our economies and our daily lives. But we're getting there. I think that with
• 44:18
  the right kind of commitment and some luck [chuckles] around policy coordination,
• 44:25
  we know how to do it. It's just we have to get the right people in the room with the right power, frankly, to kind of shift the conversation a bit more. But yeah, the combination of all those things, of being engaged in the work, learning from those, and all the time around the innovations that are happening, and then seeing the shift in where the energy around the solution is. It's not gone away over recent years. It's just shifted to different scales, and frankly, maybe the scales that they should be at, at local levels, with local communities and local people. And so I'm very hopeful at the end of the day.
• 45:01
  Well, despite all his gold stars today, I can't say I
• 45:07
  am working with a tremendous colleague like you are. But like you, I do believe the hope is in the work, and I am really, really happy you joined us today to talk about that work. You synthesized a lot of complicated and important stuff, and this offer of hope at the end is really just the cherry on top. So thank you. Thank you so much.
• 45:33
  Thank you so much.
• 45:36
  Again, not always a pleasure to talk about, but it's really important, and I'm really glad you're interested in it, and so thanks so much for the opportunity.
• 45:45
  Yeah. Dr. Smithwick, thank you so much for coming on. We really have enjoyed the conversation. Look forward to tracking all the great work you do with the Eastern Fire Network coming up. But we'll make sure we link to a whole bunch of your work for our audience in the show notes. Coming up on the Wild Idea podcast, we check in with Wild Cumberland in coastal Georgia, and we journey our way back to Tennessee, and elected official that carried some water for Anders and I both. That is still coming up this month on the Wild Idea. We would love it if you would sign up for our newsletter. You can do that at thewildidea.com. Certainly follow us on all the socials, and please rate, review, and recommend the pod on your player of choice. We hope to find you right back here next week or on Friday for the Wildline, but whenever it is, we will see you on down the trail.
• 46:29
  [outro music] The Wild Idea is a production of Wild Idea Media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds. Production and editing by Bren Russell at PodLab. Digital support by Holly Wilkoszewski at Dipak Digital. Our theme music, Spring Hill Jack, is from Railroad Earth, and was composed by John Skahan. Our executive producer and ringleader is Lara Hodge. You can find the Wild Idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating. And if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at thewildidea.com.