An Interview with Zeke Lunder, of The Lookout

A GIS expert with his own wildland fire website shares his insights on climate change, agency clashes, and how we can find our way forward, amicably.

I had the privilege of interviewing Zeke Lunder, who helms The Lookout, an online resource for all things wildfire and good fire. I’m not going to give Zeke a long introduction because you’ll get to know him in this interview, but you should definitely head over to his Twitter to see what he’s up to.

Stacy: What do you do in fire?

Zeke: I'm trying to figure that out right now. I've been working as a geographer around fire issues since about 1995. I worked for the Forest Service while I was in college on a timber crew, and did fire there on the district crew.

Stacy: Where was that?

Zeke: That was on the Eagle Lake district in Susanville (California). Then I got a degree in geography and in cartography. GIS was just starting to be used with fire planning, and I got some work through the university right out of school doing watershed planning. There was money for watershed research around Chico where I lived because of Chinook salmon in our local creeks. I got roped into writing the fire chapters because I had worked on a fire crew. That opened doors to do GIS on fires right when it was starting to be a thing. Since then I’ve been at this intersection of GIS and fire. A lot of it's been around working on large fires for the IMTs and being a contractor in that role. That's turned into a lot of wintertime work, pre-fire planning and fuels, community hazard assessments aa well as designing fuels projects.

Stacy: Through using GIS to just see fuel loading, et cetera?

Zeke: Yeah. And going out on the ground and interviewing people. Basic geographer work, I guess. Going to a place, talking to people, flying around in an airplane, driving, riding bikes, riding dirt bikes. Surveying. GIS has always been a communications tool, but oftentimes there's been a lot of field work. I like finding the balance of going outside because it's easy to get stuck in your computer and not really know what's going on. Luckily there's been a lot of that work in my local geography of Northeastern California, because we've had so much fire here in my career.

Stacy: Are you in a transitional period right now then, where you're trying to transition to something else?

Zeke: Kind of. I've been doing a lot of social media stuff for the last 10 years, mainly for my friends and family in Northeastern California. This year, during the Dixie fire and Caldor fires, I started The Lookout website and got into Twitter. That kind of blew up, for sure. Now we have enough donations for The Lookout to be viable as part time work for me. I spent a bunch of the donations on video gear and paid a copy editor. It’s the beginnings of a media company, but I've been in fire forever and it's boom or bust. I know that. Right now The Lookout gets donations because there was a whole bunch of action, but I've been part of companies that have folded because they were reliant on fires happening.

I don't know what The Lookout is really right now. I know that there's a huge appetite when things are on fire for context and an outside perspective, but it's hard to plan a business around wildfire. The Lookout was successful because there was this huge fire that threatened a really affluent area. But when fires are burning in the middle of nowhere, there's not a lot of big donations coming in, you know?

Stacy: Unless the smoke is affecting populated areas, yeah.

Zeke: The Lookout's definitely telling us that there's a huge demand for an alternative perspective from the PIO (public information officer) formula.

Stacy: That makes a lot of sense to me. Even as someone who has been working on a book and interviewing a lot of people, it can be really challenging and frustrating to talk to PIO folks, or folks who have essentially the best interest of the agency in mind. And so I do think alternative, informed perspectives really essential.

Stacy: I'm curious, if you could shape The Lookout into something that you think is really vital and necessary, what would it look like for you?

Zeke: Prescribed fire is central. We've been doing some work here with the local prescribed burn association, and I'm working on my burn boss qualifications. It's important to have good access to good fire. I feel like people are so deprived of experiencing good fire that if The Lookout can be a vehicle that really helps people get inside of a prescribed burn and meet the players and understand how it works, that’s valuable.

Reporting during active wildfires, focusing on the good fire is another objective. Mainstream media, they spend the whole day looking for the five seconds of video of the biggest flames, and then they play that over and over, even after the fire's out. Telling the good fire story as much as possible is what we want to do. Even in the midst of these terrible fire events, there's still good fire happening.

Like on the Dixie fire, it burned at a high severity over a huge amount of my home territory, but then there's also a whole bunch of good fire. Way more good fire came out of that then the Forest Service could hope to accomplish in two decades of prescribed fire.

Stacy: Yeah. That's amazing. I saw some of your GIS work there. I agree with what you're saying. That's what is so great about fire Twitter, is that it can interrupt these sensational narratives that mainstream media creates around wildfire; really old narratives that scream, “fire is bad.” It can be bad, of course, but nuance is important.

Zeke: I was just talking to my wife today about how no one's telling the story about our losses as firefighters. PIO never gets up and says, "We just got our asses kicked yesterday, and we've gotten our asses kicked for the last 30 days. And the Dixie fire has kicked our asses for 60 days. And we're just holding on to the very edges of what we can and trying not to die. And we're afraid to try anything. We're afraid to try to burn, because we've lost the last four burns we've done. And we're afraid to go direct, because that's not working either."

But that's the story of what happened on the Dixie Fire. It kicked our asses for two months. After losing a few burns, the command teams were afraid to burn, at least on the Cal Fire side. There are amazing stories there about the human factors and the limits of our ability in the face of unprecedented conditions. Those are the stories we want to tell. They're so key to the public understanding of where we're at with climate change and fuels and mental health of our firefighters. It's like, "Okay, we're watching the entire wildfire suppression system break down under its own weight," and then you see the briefing and it's like, "Everything's fine. We're making good progress in Division Mike, and over here in Division Charlie. We're not going to talk about anything in between, because it's all blown out. But we saved these houses.”

Stacy: I've thought about that a lot. 2010 was my last year fighting fire, so I haven't been out there in the past almost 12 years. So much has shifted. Something that appears the same is that, even on the hotshot crews, sometimes there was nothing we could do. We would be do unnecessary things because we were supposed to be doing something. That's something that needs more attention. The rhetoric around fire, the pressure of the public, because of needing to appear like you're making things happen as firefighters and that whole infrastructure, there's not the admission of saying, "Hey, there's actually nothing that we can do right now." And putting people in there and pretending that we can do something is a lie, and it affects the people that we're putting in there and it affects the communities.” There are things that we could be doing outside of the wildfire context (like burning), but that's not what's being funded. So then you're spending money on putting people into situations that actually are really unhealthy and unproductive.

Zeke: I agree. Yeah, that we had to try something. And it's true too, you do have to try something. You have to try to save Westwood, and you have to try to save Greenville. Even if it probably won’t work, you have to try.

Stacy: You totally do.

Zeke: It's tough. But those stories are worth telling, so I hope that we can have the access and have the anonymous insiders that will give us a good scoop. It's really tough to write critically about firefighting. And that's been the hardest thing during the Dixie fire, is I got calls from friends who were like, "Hey, I saw your writing and I thought maybe I'd call and tell you what's going on." And my heart sinks, because I think, "Oh, they're probably pissed because I second guessed their firing operation." And then they'd say, "It's fucked. I didn't want to light it, but I don't have any other choice, because otherwise Quincy might burn down. And we know what we just did. We know that our firing operation burned a huge area at a high severity, but we didn't have any other options.”

So that's nice. I was just relieved that they weren't calling me because they thought I was being an asshole. Because there's this huge, understandably, taboo about armchair quarterbacking when you don't have all the information. I think one thing that's changed though is that now we've got these almost real time IR feeds. And sometimes I feel like I had better information than anyone else. And so it's still taboo to armchair quarterback if you don't know. I'll never have the full picture from afar. But-

Stacy: And also people who are doing it may not have the full picture either. I think that's just a product of being in a situation, whether you're actually in it or seeing it from the outside. There are advantages of seeing it from the outside and there are advantages of-

Zeke: It's always going to be really delicate, like any kind of reporting. I'm having to learn how to be a journalist without really any coaching. You don't want to burn your sources, and you don't want people to not want to talk to you because you're an asshole, or because you're a shit stirrer.

One thing that's coming along that's helpful, I think, is I had a business that worked on these fires that I owned. I don't own it anymore and I'm not really involved in the day to day operations of it anymore, and so I have a little more leeway. In the past, I wouldn't have been able to be really critical at all, because the company I founded worked on the Dixie fire and it worked on a Caldor fire, and they were right in the middle of the planning section. I can't be the face of both.

That conflict of interest is still there a little because I still work for the company, but it's becoming clearer. I had a lot of conversations with the owner during fire season about trying to make sure I don't represent the views of my old company when I'm editorializing about a fire that they're actually involved with.

Stacy: That's challenging. I think that one of the challenges of actually still being in fire and also moving into a more journalistic viewpoint is that it's difficult to separate yourself. But you do the best you can. Because there are also big advantages to being in fire and writing about it.

I am interested in what you said about the Dixie fire, about some of those good outcomes. If you could just hone in on one of those stories of a good outcome from something like that, because I think that that's really important for people to hear and see.