- [Narrator] A fire in Simi Valley,
a fire in Trinity County,
a fire wipes out Paradise.
California has had a rough couple years.
Just look at the sheer acreage of land
burned there by wildfires alone.
And it's not like the state has done nothing to help.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
has witnessed skyrocketing suppression costs
every year for basically 20 years.
But even with a billion dollars spent in just one year,
wildfires are spreading like, well, wildfire.
Of course, wildfires have always happened,
but climate change is definitely making things way worse
and fires that much more intense.
And this might not be a problem
California can solve from the top down.
To save California from hellfire,
private citizens are literally fighting fire with fire.
It might sound strange,
but it's actually an approach the experts recommend.
- So this idea that you're gonna stop a disaster
from happening by doing things that are like it
seems really bizarre.
It's like, how do you stop a hurricane?
You don't add more hurricanes in the system.
But how do you stop a wildfire?
And so, a wildfire really starts to become huge
when you have lots of fuel on the ground,
and we know that prescribed fire
is a tool that we use to reduce fuel.
So if we can consume that fuel with a prescribed fire,
that means that any future wildfire
won't have the ability to burn that fuel and become larger,
and so large that we can't do anything about it.
- [Narrator] It's a tactic called a prescribed burn.
It's where small blocks of land are slowly lit on fire.
That burns off the underbrush
that a major wildfire would use as fuel,
so that it either can't burn or, at the very least,
becomes much more manageable than it would otherwise.
Ironically, the state of California
does conduct its own prescribed burns,
but they control very little of the land in the state.
Much of California is actually private land
or owned by the federal government,
so there is only so much
that California itself can really do.
- Our federal lands are using prescribed fire,
and hopefully they'll increase their pace and scale,
but on our private lands, we need to find
a solution that works for the people
who own those lands and who live there.
- [Narrator] Let me introduce this guy, Dario Davidson,
ex-forester and Firewise champion.
- Firewise community is a community that has gotten together
to work on reducing the fire danger in their community.
The benefit of the Firewise community
is it gets more people educated on what they can do.
And a lot of people are looking for answers,
and a Firewise community helps people find the answers
and helps people work together
and help each other get things done.
So I think every community in the wild lands in California
needs to be a Firewise community.
- [Narrator] Those communities are the ultimate idea
where everyone who does a little
can impact the problem a lot.
These guys are just some of those people
trying to light things on fire for the better.
Some of them are just local community members
and ex-foresters.
Some of them are academics
and work for the university system.
Some of them are just people
trying to have their house not burn down.
- We burned right through here.
This whole stand is about a 30-acre area.
We did this with students from Cal.
- I started out with the five-acre parcel that I live on,
and I cleaned that all up, but then I looked at a map
and imagined a fire sweeping across the landscape
and realized five acres is a tiny little bit.
It's not gonna do any good.
So I started talking to neighbors
and got some of them interested.
And each time somebody did some work in the neighborhood,
we added a larger and larger area of protection.
- [Narrator] That's why this is one of the first years
that the UC system is offering courses for people
to teach people how to maintain their own land,
because fire safety is a habit, not a one-time thing.
And while the UC educational program is still fledgling,
Firewise communities are booming.
There are nearly 200 registered in California alone,
and over 1,500 in the U.S.
Unfortunately, though, even you are being an active
and ideal burner, the state has to tangle
with some hairball rules around prescribed burns.
For larger land owners who would make the most impact
by burning down lots of land,
they have to get a permit from the EPA
which states how much smoke could be released from the burn.
And that prescribed burn contributes to the cap
that California has on how much of a pollutant
it can put into the air.
The problem is, if a wildfire happens on its own,
it's categorized as just an act of god,
and the air impacts don't count against the state.
That means that regulations
ironically work against the thing
that would be the most effective method of prevention,
which is why it comes down to Firewise communities,
large groups of small landowners, to agree to be smart
about the environment that connects them all.
Since those smaller landowners, like Dario,
can burn down fuel regularly, they can maintain
their own safety without it counting against the state.
And it's that all-for-one mentality
that's going to be critical for California
to get through the worsening parts of climate change
and the wildfires that come with it.
And hopefully, the saying "there goes the neighborhood"
won't have to be so literal.
- Hi, thanks so much for watching, guys.
We hope you really like the video.
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and we'll see you next time.