(wind blowing)

(somber music) - my neighbor knocked on my door very aggressively and said, "shirlee, get out here." and i said, "what's going on karen?" and she said, "santa rosa is burning down." (fire crackling) (wind gusting) i couldn't believe what i was seeing. we got into the helicopter and the winds were blowing 40 to 50 miles an hour. there was smoke and fire everywhere. all i could do was look and say to mike thompson, our congressmen, who had been in vietnam,

"it looks like a war went on down there. it looks like a bomb." and he kept turning to me and saying, "yeah, that's what it looks like, but it's actually worse. hard to talk about still. those first few days were so hard. we didn't sleep much. we worked all the time. - the night of october 8th, we had a wind storm, and that wind storm led to 17 different fire starts across this landscape all around santa rosa. those 17 fires sort of rushed into each other and became two main large fire events. stop lights were out. the power was out. people did not know which direction to go. it was really chaotic. - [news reporter] there are close to 20 fires that are scorching hundreds of thousands. - [news reporter] thousands of firefighters have been unable to- - [news reporter] across eight counties and hundreds more people are missing. - [news reporter] it had traveled 16 miles

in an instant seemed like. it just came roaring over the hills. - i've seen a lot of forest fires, but i had never seen anything like this before. it was, it was otherworldly. (intriguing music) - [man] the wildfire issue has become intense in the united states, and it's gotten so much worse over the last 10 and 15 years. it's startling. - [woman] we've had years and years of drought here in california, and there's no doubt it's gotten hotter and windier, and those conditions are ripe for wildfires, which now turn into urban fires, it turns out. - [man] there are more people in harms way, and the harm is getting worse. so, i think people are starting to realize that we have a crisis on our hands.

- i think it could very likely happen again here. that's part of the sadness of all of this, is that we all want to rebuild and recover, and yet we still live with these tremendous risks. (train horn tooting) (siren blaring) - these wildfires are increasingly becoming an urban phenomenon. i mean, this to me, you couldn't illustrate it more than this. we're not up in the hills, you know, we're in downtown santa rosa. the fire blew into santa rosa in the early morning hours. i think it was about four in the morning. i know people in this neighborhood who got the warning, looked out, saw a wall of flame, got in their car, escaped,

and four minutes later, their house was on fire. so that's how rapidly the fire moved through here. - we've increasingly encroached our communities into these landscapes where we have removed fire and grazing from a lot of the landscape. and so, the shrub layer has built up, the grasses have built up, and now when fire does come, it's a conflagration. we've been suppressing fire here for so long, that you could live here for an entire generation, and have never seen an event like happened last year. so it's in that beginning stages of a learning curve, culturally here. my biggest struggle is helping people understand that landscapes have always been actively managed by indigenous people and that we have a need to steward our parks and open spaces,

and that that will make them safer, and it will also restore habitats both for wildlife and for our forest. we need to be burning. we need to be thinning. and that's a big lift. a lot of people have deep skepticism about that. - fire is only one tool in the box, right? so one thing we're doing, is trying to ramp up our sheep and goat grazing program. really get those critters out there, browsing down the shrub layer. the second tool is mechanical treatment, you know, so going in there hand cuttings, but by far, the cheapest tool in the box is prescribed fire. so, to the degree, to which we as land managers can get the public comfortable with prescribed fire, we'll be able to do a lot more acres for a lot fewer dollars. and that's kind of the goal. (women laughing) - nice to see you. - all right. this is my daughter keirra. - hi, i'm fran, nice to meet you. come on in. - this is beautiful. thank you so much. - you're welcome. - marty. - marty roberts. - good to meet you. my goal tonight, is to make sure that if you have any questions

or you feel like you're gonna get tough questions, i can help you answer them, right. so, basically, the ballot measure is roughly carved into three buckets, safety, access, and then the third is my favorite, 'cause natural resources. so, protecting the environment. and for everyone in this room, what i want you to understand is that this is a game changer for us. if we get this ballot measure, this little thing that i stood up, called the natural resource division at sonoma county regional parks, which is mighty, but small, will really be real. i mean, we will have the funds to do. a lot of what i do is looking at these landscapes and trying to figure out, how do we restore the natural process. let's make sure that we get prescribed fire back in our toolbox in this part of the world, which is my goal, because that actually draws down the fuel loads and helps protect our neighboring towns and communities. (water trickling) (peaceful music)

- by the time i was eight years old, i had discovered that in fact, there was a profession called forestry, and they paid people to actually go out and spend time in the woods. and i decided right then that's what i wanted to do, and that i wanted to work for the forest service. the mindset of the forester in mid 20th century, it was very much that a forest were a collection of trees that you manage to produce wood. in the post-world war ii era, there was tremendous pressure on the forest service to increase the timber harvest on federal lands, in order to provide the wood that was needed to build all the homes for the veterans that were coming back and starting their lives over again.

the agency sorta went over to the dark side. and through the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's, the timber harvest just continued to go up. yeah, i'm a history buff and certainly world war ii history because i was a kid growing up in the middle of it. up until the 70's and 80's, science had all been oriented towards, how do we manage forest lands to produce trees as a crop, and nobody had done any significant research at all on, what was the nature of these forest ecosystems? so, all of the pre-world war ii period was devoted very much to creating a forest service that could detect and suppress fire. (upbeat music)

the real mistake was made, which was to assume all fire was bad, and all fire should be put out. it was particularly effective in areas that had historically had a lot of fire, frequent fire. they had very low levels of accumulation of fuels. they had forest structures that were very resistant to fire, but in order to maintain those kinds of conditions, fire needed to be allowed to continue, and we didn't allow that. (upbeat music continues) the fuels began to accumulate, the structure of the forest changed, fuel filled forests would now be consumed by fire.

historically, in these fire frequent landscapes, the fires were often very large, but they weren't intense. our problem today is that we have large intense fires. in the inter-mountain west and the sierra nevada, we're talking about millions of acres that need treatment. (upbeat music continues)

now, at the same time, there were other forests like our douglas fir hemlock forest on the west side of the cascades, that the fire suppression policy didn't change their fundamental nature. these were forests that didn't burn frequently. these are the really classic forests of the coastal pacific northwest. very high productivity, lots of down wood. and of course, all of this organic material represents fuels. they have a very different kind of relationship with fire, then the forests that are in the dry part of the country, the frequent fire forests. the appropriate strategy for a forest like this, is to in fact be very aggressive about detecting and suppressing fires,

so that fire doesn't get into this sort of a forest. and the neat thing about that, is suppressing fire in this forest, isn't going to make it unnatural. these forest are used to going for hundreds of years without fire. this one is, is doing things on a scale that defy our ability to modify greatly. we need to understand and respect these environments. - i was born in oregon, studied forestry at berkeley, and then i was planning on a career working for the forest service as a silviculturist. and unfortunately, the year that i graduated was the year that the bottom fell out of the timber market and feel very fortunate that i landed my current job with the wilderness society.

and that was 26 and a half years ago, so. there was an erosion of trust in the agency's commitment to non timber resources. policies of the forest service rewarded timber management above all other resources on the national forest. and through the 60's and 70's, was leading to the intentional elimination of old growth, which was considered to be slow growing and not an ideal resource for forestry. and foresters had been so successful at that, that there was very little old growth left. wow, you just don't see this kind of board anymore. this is a coast redwood board, cut from a single tree in 1940.

this place hasn't changed in 50 years. (laughing) amazing. (upbeat music) - my name is susan jane brown, and i'm a staff attorney and wildlands program director for the western environmental law center. i got involved in forest environmental issues when i came to oregon in 1997 to attend lewis and clark law school and wanted to practice environmental law. i had never seen old growth forest before. when you hear people talk about how there are these cathedral forests,

and it definitely feels that way. it's good to be humbled by a place like that. particularly here in the northwest, there's a lot of old growth logging. depending on who you talk to, between two and 5% of those native forests are still left. they need all the help that we can give them. i felt that that was really my calling. that was what i wanted to do. i wanted to protect those places. certainly, legal work is really challenging, 'cause at the end of the day, somebody wins and somebody loses. and if you don't win, you know, the implication is that a special place is lost. back in the 70's and 80's we were harvesting billions of board feet every year off of the forests in oregon and washington alone. you can only do that for so long before the ecosystem starts to give out. and that's exactly what started to happen. it wasn't sustainable.

- once the scientists started detecting changes in wildlife populations, including the spotted owl, people kind of put two and two together and realized that the disappearance of old growth forest was leading to the potential extinction of species, and that drove environmentalists to act. - the trust that the agency lost, the public trust, was substantial, and they're still trying to come back from that. so when the agency says, "oh, just trust us, don't worry." it's like, "no, i don't trust you. i remember logging without laws, no." (tree crackling) - just like the amazon, you know, once you cut it down to a level, it's gone. - i've spent 18 years in the saw mill business, and they're toying with my life. - over time, as we learned more about these forests, and as congress learned more about these forests,

the tide turned. too much was being lost in this very aggressive pursuit of converting the national forests to timber farms. - bill clinton directed that a team be assembled to facilitate an economic transition away from large amounts of old growth logging, toward a community economy that could be sustained at a lower level of logging. and then that became the northwest forest plan, which designated a series of large protected mostly old growth areas, across the cascade mountain range and west in washington, oregon and northern california. and that sort of set off dominoes across the national forest system. harvests on the national forests fell by an order of magnitude in just a few years.

(engines roaring) - well, we come here in 1945, and then at '65 i quit the forest service, partnered with my folks and run the store. we had anywhere from two to three hired help, that was on the floor with us at most time. and we run from about seven o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock at night. when we locked the store down, this was the liquor store. and over here in this section, we wrote game licenses. i do miss the people that you used to get, 'cause there was all kinds of people. there were nice people and they were interesting and whatever else, but the rigamarole you had to put up with with the government, (tongue splatting) i don't miss that.

they marked off that timber up there as old growth timber. you can't log it. you can't do anything with it and its old growth. then the saw mills quit out and the logging quit, then i couldn't make enough money to pay hired help. so that lost a lot of population. then they shut the forest service down, that lost some more population. and so, we're down to probably, i don't know, 60, 80 people. i don't know what the logic is, but basically, it's government, government logic. (shoes tapping) - hi brenda, hi brooke. - hi mark. - [clerk] hi. - how's clerking going? - [clerk] it's going well. - my name is mark webb. i'm currently executive director for blue mountains forest partners. before that i was grant county judge for one term, six years. i do remember one time, commissioner britton and i

were at a meeting with the state fire marshal and some other folks out of monument. and i was new to office then and a state fire marshal had misled me on something and i went over to the desk to get him, (laughing) and commissioner britton pulled me down. so that's probably what i remember most. i was ready for something. before collaborative involvement, the environmental community really didn't appreciate what we were trying to do in grant county with our respect from the landscape and there was a lot of animosity or distrust. - well, i was skeptical that there was compromise possible. i started doing east side timber sale work when i was still in law school. - as long as i could remember, there had been at least three mills going here, prairie wood products, grant western, and malheur lumber, both grant western and malheur lumber were big log mills, so they took old growth. - i'd done a bunch of litigation.

we'd shut down the malheur's timber program. so there really just wasn't anything happening, and that worked fine for me. (doors banging) - when you shut down an industry, and it's about the only industry that provides a livelihood here, you're pretty upset and it's hard to talk. - [susan] it was an interesting time. it was very challenging. my first trip to grant county, i brought somebody with me, because i wasn't sure that my safety was assured. - i didn't meet susan jane until the former county commissioner that i served with, boyd britton, had a federal lawsuit. and as boyd would do, he wanted to know who was shutting us down. somebody pointed him susan jane and he went over and asked if we couldn't do things differently essentially and invited her out. - i had met mark webb for the first time in 2004, maybe. i know what mark thought of me. mark thought i had horns and a tail,

is what mark thought. you know, i was a lawyer and i'm a liberal female from portland coming into his community to tell him what to do. (solemn music) you know, the impetus for being out there was a bad fire season in 2002. we had a lot of big fires in oregon. those sorts of occurrences were becoming more and more common, whereas every, you know, decade or so, you'd have a bad fire year. it was now every four or five years, and then it was every two or three years. and now, it's pretty much every year. - the only reason industry and the environmental community came together at all, is because neither had an option anymore.

sj and others had essentially shut down the logging industry and they were desperate for wood, and they were willing to take anything they could get as long as they got some more wood. fortunately for us, the environmental community was also coming to appreciate that, while they might've saved the old growth trees from the timber industry, they were beginning to lose them increasingly to catastrophic wildfires. fires that would have been unnatural in the landscape in the past. and so, they were confronted with the challenge of having to address that through active management, which they've been spending a lot of time shutting down. - this problem is not abstract. there are a few places where people have taken aggressive action to reduce the fuels around their homes and around communities, and then those places are definitely much better off. but at the larger scale, the fuel buildup continues. the climate continues to worsen, making it warmer, lowering relative humidities, perhaps even causing changes

in wind patterns and precipitation. and now we have more extreme fire weather when we get it. (wind gusting) the problem that we have in the u.s. right now, is that we put out every fire that we can, so we only get fire behavior associated with fires we can't put out. that means that the majority of the fire that we get is high severity fire that burns in a way that we don't want. and then, more and more people are living in the wildland- urban interface, the place where wildland fuels come in contact with homes. and so, there are more people in harms way, and the harm is getting worse. (dog barking) - my dad's family has been here since the 1850's. so, his father, grandfather, grandmother, great grandmother, they were all raised up here.

this is what the house looked like. my mother passed away a couple months ago, so, i'm kind of glad that she's not here to see what happened, but yeah. (branches crunching) (dog barking) - been less than a month since this area burned. there's green leaves popping out

all through the canopy of this forest. these trees are gonna survive, they're gonna be fine. so, it's a fire adapted ecosystem for sure. it's the houses that were not very fire adapted unfortunately. issues of community wildfire safety and forest ecosystem health, led to the desire to do fuel treatment work. and so, we've spent the last 25 years or so trying to work through that. and progress has definitely been made, but there's still work ahead of us. (soft music) - the carr fire and the accumulative impacts

of fires over the last, you know, decade of my living here in this really active fire environment, where you deal with this acute stress every summer and it persists over months is, you know, it's hard to live with. i just sort of back up to, this is a generational problem, right? we created it over generations, and so it's gonna take generations to fix it. you know, my job in my lifetime is to make an increment of progress towards something better. the watershed center, you know, is an organization like many other community-based organizations that were born out of the timber wars. we came into our work with an idea that we could find this elegant solution that linked economic development with land stewardship. so we were raising money to run crews that are doing, you know, thinning all around the county in partnership with the forest service and private land owners. we were getting cooperative agreements

to do prescribed fire work in and around our communities. and so, hearing melanie talk to me about what she's doing after the wine country fires last year. and we're already talking about ideas about how we're gonna work together, because we're doing this innovative prescribed fire work. and now, people in sonoma county want to do that same work. i've got something to share. this one here is a perfect example, it's a trailer blowout as well. and so, here you go, it starts racing on the west winds, right? communities here, there's a high school, we're like here. this isn't just a fuel treatment save the day. - yeah. - yeah. - you know, fire suppression still matters, preparedness, all those things, right? but this fire blows out, runs across town, looks like it's gonna be this conflagration, runs head on into this prescribed fire treatment, less than a year old and just lays down. it literally cannot burn through that, and so it flanks, and it lays down, and they pick it up.

look, prescribed fire in this place makes the difference. - that's a great story. - and if we can start reinforcing that with these overlapping and, you know, staggered polygons of fire, you know. - [melanie] you gotta come tell that story in sonoma county. - happily, happily. - this fuel complex that we're standing in the middle of, is kind of the classic western problem of a relatively open high fire frequency forest, that's now been partially logged and left fire free for decades. and you can see the result. it's now choked full of second growth douglas fir. so there are a lot of factors that have all kind of come together at the same time. historical logging, grazing, and fire suppression allowed all these seedlings