Translator: Katelyn Nicholson Reviewer: Denise RQ
This part should be easy because my worst fear already came true.
It happened when I was only 7 years old.
It was a warm summer in northern New York.
In the middle of the night, the smoke alarms went off.
My house was on fire,
but my family had a plan for this, I did what I was taught.
I got up, and I felt the door, and it was cool
so I opened it and looked down the hallway, and there was no smoke.
I ran down it; I ran out the front door over to the big maple tree.
That was our meeting spot.
And now I know how afraid I was
because even though my bedroom was the furthest from the front door,
I was the first person to the meeting spot.
But soon enough, my sisters and my parents came bursting out of the house,
and I expected to see flames bursting out behind them.
But they never came, it was a false alarm.
No matter how many times my parents tried to reassure me
that my house wasn't on fire,
there was no way I was going back in there.
Instead I pitched a tent in my backyard,
and I decided that I was going to sleep out there for the rest of my life.
And I don't know how long I lasted;
maybe, a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks,
but I do know that this is
when I first fell in love with the wildlands.
Because it became a sanctuary for me against my biggest fear.
And now, fast forward 12 years: I left northern New York for the first time.
I got on a bus to Yellowstone National Park
to work for the summer.
72 hours on a Greyhound bus, can be a very harrowing experience.
So you can only imagine my disappointment
when I get off the bus to see that over 50% of my sanctuary
had, of all things, burned down in 1988.
And even though more than a decade had passed since that fire,
all I could see was dead black trees.
But throughout that summer, I started to realize
that my fear of structure fires really has no place in the wildlands
because fire hadn't destroyed these areas, fire had saved them.
Fire creates the type of ecosystems that provide us with clean drinking water
and our favorite hunting spots.
Now, fast forward another 15 years,
I've been working in fire management for about 10 years now.
I'm starting to realize
most people must have the same fear of fire that I used to have
because for over a century, the status quo for fire management
has been to put the fires out.
97-99% of all fires are successfully suppressed.
But that one to three percent that got away?
They're in a category on their own.
I like to call these fires the 1%.
Similar to Wall street, the 1% of wildfires have all the wealth.
They consume about 90% of the fire budget,
and they are accountable for 97% of all acres burned.
These are the ones that we read about in the newspapers all the time.
With headlines like, "Extreme fire is raging out of control."
Sometimes when things get really, really bad, this happens.
I can tell you that there is nothing more terrifying
than the thought of this coming at me.
[Sharknado] Jessica Hass: No.
(Laughter)
But these fires are also associated with extremely high losses.
Losses to our clean drinking water, losses to our homes, and irreplaceable losses.
In the past decade,
an average of 18 firefighters have died every year fighting these fires.
And now here's the kicker:
we, both society and the fire management community created the one percent.
By building in the fire-prone areas that we so much love,
we created the conditions for the 1% to cause harm.
And by suppressing the 99%, by being afraid of them,
we created the landscape conditions for the 1% to thrive.
Historically, fires burn all the time;
every year, when conditions were mild,
whether we set them on fire, or whether lightning did.
And they consume fuels.
But these are the kinds of fires that are really easy to put out.
See, these are the 99%.
And when we get rid of them, fuel starts to build up.
And then when we get hot, dry, windy summers,
the conditions are right for the 1% to breakout.
And once that happens,
all the firefighters and airplanes in the world can't stop them.
We first learned this way back in 1910.
Despite firefighters' efforts,
over 3 million acres burned across northern Montana and northern Idaho.
It killed almost 100 people and burned down five towns.
And while this was a rare event,
we're starting to see events like this year after year.
And while we can't prevent fires
or stop these fires from happening once they break out,
we can prevent them from starting in the first place.
And I'm not talking about Smokey the Bear fire prevention here.
No, what I'm talking about really is using that 99% to limit the 1%.
Fire is self-limiting so if we let some of these fires burn this year,
they will make it a lot harder for that 1% to get up and going next year.
But that sounds like kind of a risky idea right?
Well that's where I come into play.
I'm a risk analyst for the wildlands,
and similar to how your risk manager might try to decrease losses of money
to your stock portfolio,
I try to decrease losses of homes and lives to wildfires.
And currently our losses are increasing.
If we want to change that, we're going to have to do something.
And the best thing that we can do
Is to start to eliminate the chances of that 1% from happening in the first place.
And now with advances in computer simulation modeling,
we can predict where in the landscape that 1% fires are most likely to occur.
Let's look at Yellowstone National Park.
These red areas have the highest chance of a 1% fire,
the green areas, less so.
Now look around the lake.
See those black circles? Those are the most recent fires.
See how green everything is underneath them?
They are reducing the odds of that 1% fire from happening.
Here are the fires from 1988.
Even 30 years later, they are still having an impact on the landscape.
And now, if we start letting the 99% burn,
we have similar tools that can allow us to figure out where they are going to
in the next month or two.
If the outcome is bad, we'll probably have to put those fires out.
But if it is not so bad, we need to start letting them burn a little bit
so we can start changing those red spots back into green spots.
And our second part of our losses here deals with our assets.
And this is our homes.
Here are those odds for the state of Montana.
These black dots are the homes.
We are literally moths drawn to a flame here.
And Gallatin county is one of the fastest growing counties in the country,
so this is only going to get worse
if we don't start doing something about it.
But at least we don't live over in the Bitterroot.
(Laughter)
A homeowner who decides to live in the wildlands can do a couple of things
to try to reduce the chance that their home's going to burn down.
They can build with fire-resistant materials,
and they can create what is called 'defensible space',
which means it is going to be easier for a firefighter
to get in there and defend that house.
Let's looks at this picture. Do you see these green trees?
These houses didn't burn down because a 1% fire raged through them;
they burned down because an ember from a nearby wildfire landed on a wooden roof
or on a wood pile next to them.
These are the kinds of losses that we can stop.
And in Montana, 64% of all of our homes are in the wildlands.
well in the range of an ember landing on a roof.
But unfortunately, people tend to be reactive rather than proactive.
If we don't have a wildfire in our backyard,
we don't really think about it.
And this is a big problem because the time to adjust to this issue
isn't when the 1% fire like this is knocking at your door.
By then, it's too late; it is going to be way too dangerous for us
to get firefighters in there and try to save the house.
But the beauty of risk assessments
is that they can be performed way before the fire breaks out.
So we can be proactive.
And now I know what a lot of you guys might be thinking,
"Hey I live downtown, so this isn't my problem."
But, that's not true.
I mean we all love these landscapes right?
We certainly all need the resources that come from them.
So the solution to this problem is going to involve everybody,
because once we have more fire on the ground,
that means there is going to be more smoke in the air.
Maybe your favorite hiking trail or hunting spot will be closed
for a little while.
But we need to remember that more smoke in the air this year
means probably less smoke next year.
We are going to have to start asking ourselves
some pretty hard questions here.
So let me ask you: is clean air this year worth dirty-drinking water next year?
Is saving a timber stand worth losing a keystone species from our ecosystem?
Now is your house worth the life of a firefighter?
These are the hard questions.
These are the tradeoffs we need to be thinking about.
And I'm certain when we start looking at these tradeoffs,
we are going to stop fearing fire
as a disaster that plagues our communities.
We are going to start using it as a tool that can save them.
Thank you.
(Applause)