An Interview with Lenya Quinn-Davidson, Part Two

Biomass, logging, and SB-322

About two months ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council. I’d heard Lenya’s name several years ago, when I was in France researching and starting to write my book HOTSHOT (which will eventually be published). Lenya is part of the prescribed burning renaissance many communities are experiencing in California.

This is Part Two of Two:

Lenya: I called that project Silent Straws. If you imagine how many extra trees are growing throughout the landscape, the amount of groundwater they’re using is mind-blowing. Simultaneously we have climate change and drought. I think the answers to all these questions are so interwoven. We don't hear about that a lot. You talked to Frank (Lake) so that's great, because he talks about that part.Stacy: Can you speak more about that?

Lenya: Last week I was helping us to workshop in my home county (Trinity County). If you were a firefighter, you probably went there because it's like the epicenter of fires.

My hometown's in the middle of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, a really small town, say 2000 people. We were doing a workshop because they're forming a prescribed burn association, which is awesome. I was talking about this idea of that all the extra vegetation in the absence of fire, how overly dense our forests are and how basically you're sucking a lot of the water out of the ground, and how when we restore fire to a landscape that greatly increases the water availability and the amount of flow in the creeks rivers.

The landowner who I was with, he owns a big ranch with two primary creeks on different sides of the ranch. The one on the West side had always had a higher flow than the one on the North side. He had names for them. I can't remember what they were. But he said the one on the West side was always consistently the better Creek with more water. The other one would dry up in the summer.

When land is left untouched, forests can become overgrown, resulting in less available water as well as, ironically, more virulent fire behavior and a more difficult ecological recovery.

Lenya: In 2017, the one on the north side burned, and he saw an immediate response. Since then, the north side creek consistently has higher flows than the unburned west side one. He said it was clearly the fire, which thinned out the watershed, that increased the amount of water available.

Climate adaptation, fire adaptation, and all these things are all interwoven. When we think about the big major fish kills we're seeing and the warming of the waters, everything is connected to a lack of regular fire in the landscape.

So I have a good friend who works as a fisheries biologist; he and I talk about this a lot because I think there's a real opportunity, especially with so much of California burning. I've been trying to encourage him to look across California before and after some of these major wildfires and see what the flow response is. It'd be hard to control for fluctuations like annual changes in climate and, but I think you could because there's such vast landscapes that burns now. I think there's a huge connection between fish and fire.

There are other connections too. Frank Lake has looked at the effects of smoke on water temperatures, especially in areas like the Klamath where he lives, where you have these really steep canyons, they get strong inversions. In the summer when they have really heavy wildfire smoke, it can have a pretty incredible effect on air temperature and stream temperature because of that. It's kind of like a nuclear winter effect.

Stacy: That's really remarkable. There’s part of me that wants to release a newsletter saying: “Forests are bad,” just to get people’s attention. There's the whole Justin Trudeau thing about planting millions of trees, so much talk of more trees.

Lenya: Right. And it's like the forests themselves, I think these are such complicated things to talk about.

In late September, I was part of a small group there. There were about 25 of us who came together with Governer Jerry Brown. He invited us out to his ranch, in this random location. We went and it was a group of fire scientists, tribal folks, forest industry. People from the timber industry. Someone from the tech industry. An interesting group of people who are big thinkers in fire. We focused on shared visions.

Ken Pimlott, a former CAL FIRE director; he and governor Brown pulled this group together. We spent four hours other focused on a shared vision for California and wrote this two page briefing paper. We were trying to write it to appeal to legislators and the media, so it’s a little dramatic, but very true. Focused on how we are losing our forests.

A lot of these areas burning at high density are not going to grow back as forest. They're just not, which means that all the benefits those forests provide, if they're resilient, if they're healthy for us, we're losing those and it's pretty alarming really.

Stacy: I've been thinking a lot about how we can find a connection as we being people who want to introduce prescribed fire, want to work towards more resilient forest and grasslands, et cetera, how we can find common ground with the timber industry. I remember like Headwaters Forest and all of those protests and everything going on up and down the West coast when I was a teenager. As a child-environmentalist who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I was anti timber, anti logging, and still in a lot of ways am when it comes to traditional logging and clear cutting, but I also want us to find common ground. It's hard to think about thinning, how mechanical thinning impacts the land, watersheds and the ecological health of the land. But then, also thinking about succession and the magnitude of landscape that we have to essentially rescue.

I'm interested in your thoughts on how we could be working with the timber industry to make these changes.

Lenya: It'll definitely be good for you to read that document that I just shared because we did have three people from the timber industry in that group that day. It's really interesting if you think about the situation there, especially in California, where the whole future of their industry is really in question right now. There's a company called Collins, that's a smaller timber company and they're known for their progressive force management, uneven age management. They have two main properties and one of them burned completely in the Dixie Fire at high severity. They lost everything. And he said that they had been doing everything they could to build resilience on that forest.

They were practicing land management and doing a lot of post thinning treatments. I don't think they had used understory burning. I think that they were doing a lot of pile burning. He said they had put a lot of thought into it. They're known for their thoughtful management. It all just cooked and they lost all their timber. And so they have the other property that didn't burn, but it could burn next year.

Green Diamond was there, too. They aren't small. They're pretty big actually, too but they're aren't as big as Sierra Pacific. They were all saying they have a desperate need to figure this out because if they don't do the right things, they don't stand a chance of persisting as an industry in California. So I'd say the motivation's there.

They realize things have to change. They signed the document. They signed onto it, but they're still probably kind of operating in a pretty solid suppression mindset as far as wild wildfire. But there’s a heavy interest in prescribed fire that they haven't historically had. A major openness to different kinds of silvicultural prescriptions.

The time is right for these conversation. It’s not helpful for all of us to squabble about the past. I think we're all in a brave new world and we need to look at each other a little differently, and who's more invested in the future of our forest than the forest industry? They're totally dependent on it. There's an opportunity there. We're on the brink of the point of no return, which is, in its way, helpful for finding that shared vision.

The Dixie Fire was devastating both for communities and foresters. Image: Getty Images

Stacy:

What are your thoughts is on how the forest industry would function successfully in the future? What would that look like if they're not doing clear cutting, and if they're working in tandem with people who are also interested in ecological health?

Leena:

Different management strategies that focus on heterogeneity, and involve fire, and involve patchy distribution of trees and less stocked landscapes, for starters. That was one of the things they were talking about, how they would like some changes in forest practice rules to reduce heavy stocking. Because they're basically forced into having dense on forests because of the California Forest practice rules. So if they could have less dense forests, more open stand conditions, less barriers to using prescribed fire.

They're very concerned about liability when it comes prescribed fires, so the liability change that we saw this year may help. They could provide jobs and create revenue off these landscapes while supporting essential work like thinning and burning is an important piece of it.

What they really need are biomass facilities. I don't want to call it the environmental community, but kind of like whatever community that is, that's so opposed to biomass; we’ve got to get over that too. That's an important cog in the wheel, being able to utilize this small diameter stuff that we're taking out of the forest. That’s useless for a lot of timber industries, but when converted to biomass it’s very useful.

We need to solve some of those problems.

Stacy: Those are definitely problems that can be solved.

Lenya: They can be solved. They're just human problems. There's this fear that if we put in biomass facilities that we're going to have such a demand for material that we'll be wiping out our forests. But there's so much material out there, and it's all growing all the time. Anything we can do to put a dent is helpful.

One thing that I liked about the infrastructure bill was this prioritizing of larger trees and keeping larger trees in forests. That would mean a consistent harvesting of these smaller trees that grow so fast. There is space to work together.

Stacy:

I feel like so much of this disaster we are in has to do with the fact that it's just been oil and water and there is been no communication. Obviously, people have been trying but it's been really challenging.

Lenya: That was the point of this governor Brown thing, was to find a shared agreement. The only group that's not represented there is the extreme environmentalists, kind of like the “we love high severity” side of things, which pretty much everyone in the group agrees is so out to lunch, from the ecologists to the tribes.

Stacy: If I could just ask you one more question. What are your thoughts on SB-322?

Lenya: I'm super excited because I worked really hard on that bill. The way it works now, if you're a burn boss who works for a federal or state agency and something goes wrong, you're completely indemnified as long as you were operating within the scope of your job. So our counterparts on the federal and state side enjoy full indemnification in their prescribed firework.

Meanwhile, private folks who are almost always doing projects that benefit the public are taking on all of that personal liability every time we put fire on the ground. And it's not fair. And it's not a way to scale it up. So we've had situation where only the most passionate people lead prescribed fire efforts because they're the only people crazy enough to take on that risk.

I could name those people on both on my two hands. That's how small the very active prescribed fire community in California is, like a handful of us. We do things that most people wouldn't do, like leading burns without insurance. This bill is breaking that down a little bit and making it fairer. It's not perfect, because it's not giving us indemnification from damages, it's just dealing with that fire suppression cost piece.

But really that's the piece that keeps us up at bay, right? That CAL FIRE's going to show up, they're going to have dozers and crews and they're going to bring their helicopters. They love to do that. And they're going to send a bill. And why shouldn't they be there to support us if we're doing good work? And if something weird happens and, and we need help, why shouldn't the state back us?

Also, cultural burners don’t have to have a burn plan. It basically gives cultural burners the same status as a certified burn boss. That's the first time we've ever seen anything like that in state law. But we still have to go through the permit process and do all the bureaucratic stuff. We're not going to get rid of that at anytime soon. At least this gives us some protection.

Stacy: Yes. That is definitely a huge deal for sure. Okay. I want to be mindful of your time. Thank you so much for talking to me. And I just, I really appreciate you taking the time. I feel like I could talk to you for a lot longer, so thank you.

Leena:

Yeah, no problem. And I look forward to seeing your story when it comes out.