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Alright, let's get it going. Alright.

Welcome to Connecting Communities,

a podcast about the environment

where we live, work, and play.

We talk with individuals from our community

and the greater Kalamazoo area who have a positive impact.

Today we're with three guests to talk about Fire Ecology,

Mary Par, fire Ecologist, Michigan

and National Features Inventory

for MSU Extension and of the Sioux Tribe.

Mitch Leto, Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy Conservation

and Stewardship Director

and Jessie Lincoln, plant Ecologist at Michigan Natural

Features Inventory for MSU Extension. Welcome everybody.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for

Having us.

This is, this is part two talking about burns.

So we talked about a lot of general items

and educational items on the last session.

So where do you want start us off this week for,

for going in a different direction?

Hmm. So many different directions. So you could go

Well in, in my opinion, I think

it makes a lot of, a lot of sense to start with

natural communities.

So natural communities are these assemblages of plants that

occur across the landscape.

So these repeated groups of, of plants

that occur under similar,

similar conditions across the landscape.

So we've classified like almost 80 natural community types

in Michigan as Michigan natural features

inventory where Mary and I work.

And some of those are very common Beach maple forest,

that was one of the predominant community types in, in

the lower peninsula.

And then all the way up to Isle Royal,

you've got these volcanic bedrock lake shores,

which are extremely rare.

And so we have these sort of rankings,

state and global ranks.

So is it globally rare? Is it globally secure?

Is it rare in the state or is it secure?

So we kind of, these natural communities are these

collections of plants and animals

and we do our best to understand their rarity

and the biodiversity that that they hold.

And some of these, some of our natural communities are

dependent on fire, fire shaped them for millennia

and they, these,

these fire dependent communities often have disproportionate

amounts of rare species.

So organizations like Mitch's

often focus on protecting those places.

The, the very few that we have left down here,

they're often extremely imperiled

and then they work not to step on your toes here,

but they work to get fire back in 'em.

So I, for me as an ecologist, I always start

with natural communities in this,

In this type of discussion.

Yeah. What in Michigan, what's the history of fire here?

Yeah, I can jump into that one.

So fire does occur naturally through human

and through lightning strikes for a long time

in the research

and academic lens, the story

of lightning strikes has been predominant

despite there being a lot of knowledge

and stories about Native Americans using

fire on the landscape.

And so as Jesse discussed

that these different communities have ties

with fire and require fire.

Indigenous peoples have been using fire for a long time,

which has shaped these communities as well.

And so there's a long le legacy of stewardship using fire.

I think one thing that was really kind of transformative

for me thinking about it was what Mary mentioned is

that you hear a lot about the lightning strikes.

People assume that that's how they happened

and there's a great record in sediments

and lakes of the pollen that has been,

anybody has seasonal allergies.

You know, there's literally, you know, billions

of these things floating around in the air.

You can't necessarily see them

but you can, you can feel them.

But when they fall on the surface of a lake, they kind

of fall in this very even pattern

and they lay down a record of the history of like the trees

and plants that were in the landscape

and ecologists know what trees are associated with

what climate conditions.

So you can have hot, you know, to make it really basic,

you can have hot or dry and you can have wet,

or sorry, you can have hot or cold

or you can have wet or dry.

So each combination so they can see through time

as things got, you know, colder

and wetter, maybe they saw more cedar pollen falling in

those years, things got cold and dry.

You might see something like jack pine

that likes it in the north but also likes it really dry.

And there are periods where the climate doesn't match

what happened with the trees.

And I don't know if that's the, I dunno

what the technical name of it is,

but basically a lot of like

folks looking at indigenous cultures

and fire are seeing that as a divergence from the climate

where the climate should have pushed the trees in one

direction, but because of repeated burning you're seeing

things like pines and oaks and hickories

and things that really like fire.

And so you see this, this fingerprint of human,

human shaping the landscape through fire.

So like I always go back to

that if we're ever getting any barriers talking

to the public about like using fire

that like it has been on the

landscape for a really long time.

I do wanna jump into ro chronology.

So while we're talking about evidence of human ignition,

so ro chronology is a way of using tree rings

to look back into the past.

And so you can look at these tree rings

and there's certain widths

and patterns to use it to model climate,

but also certain species

of trees like Red Pine are really good at recording

these fire events.

And so through a lot of work across the Great Lakes

and across the country, they've been using these tree rings

from a lot of pine species.

In Michigan we use red pine predominantly.

And the resin that is produced from the fire

and healing those wounds preserves the stumps.

And so often when we're doing ecological assessments,

we're looking for those artifacts

because they contain this record.

And so these records tell us the frequency

that fire happened.

So the intervals, if a stump has 50 rings

and there's six burns, then we know

that there is a higher interval in that natural community.

There's also evidence through

like seasonality sometimes you can see

that in the tree rings.

And so that's also informative when we're thinking about

restoring these systems

and what kind of fire they need

that helps point direction towards what kind

of season will they benefit from getting exposed to fire.

That is such a, such a great point

and it's, you know, taken me years of my career

to arrive at the a point that Mary just brought up.

And I think it's worth kind of saying it again.

The stumps that we're finding in these places

have the unique fire histories recorded in them

because these trees scar when fires happen.

And what she's alluding to

or saying directly is that we're seeing

historically fire frequency fire frequencies on on many

of our landscapes, 10 times

higher frequency than we can account for by lightning alone.

And so what that tells us is

that there is a massive indigenous cultural influence on,

on many aspects of our landscape.

Now she's talking about Red Pine, that is a crucial tool

for, for developing these fire histories.

Down here we don't have Red Pine,

but we know there was over a million acres of Savannah in,

in southern Michigan, there was prairie in,

in Kalamazoo County

and South hu I think 80,000 acres prairie r

and this prairie can't be explained

by climatic shifts alone.

So 5,000 years ago there were these big climate shifts

and a drying out period

and we had this huge expansion of the,

the tallgrass prairie in the center of the United States

and it reached all the way into so southwest Michigan.

Well that climate shifted back to cooler wetter patterns

and the prairie state

and that that can't be explained by, by climate alone.

It's a, at a certain point, the the,

the prairie was driven here by,

by climate maybe exclusively,

but it was kept here through indigenous

intervention with, with fire.

And it's, it's a really interesting point.

So it south of the Great Lakes,

it was never glaciated, right?

And you had millions of acres of fire dependent systems

for millions of years way

before people got here, way before people got here.

So I'm talking in Southeast,

you've got the longleaf pine systems

and those have incredible fire frequencies

of annual burns dating back thousands of years.

That's driven by largely through for millions

of years by, by lightning strike and,

and climate explanations.

Michigan was glaciated those left depending

where you're at in the state, everyone says roughly 10,000

years, but it's much more complex than that.

But as soon as the glaciers left, this state was this area

that is now Michigan was occupied by

by people and they brought fire.

And so all of our systems here have, for their, as long

as they've been in Michigan, have a long

indigenous cultural influence of fire.

One other point of evidence that I think is overlooked

that I do wanna highlight is we have stories about people

using cultural fire and we have like knowledge keepers

and elders that talk about it

and it's documented

yet we often rely on these western science sources

of evidence like the endocrinology

and cores, yet there's this group of people that's,

you know, it's always been here.

And so I think giving more weight

to those voices is important when we think about restoration

and natural systems,

I think too a really even bigger concept

that I don't think most people get, I think there's a lot

of conversation in our groups about it,

but that fire does a really good job at shining light, on

burning light, on trying to work a metaphor in there,

but is that people

pre colonization were not passive inhabitants

of the landscape with colonization.

We got a lot of these concepts of like wilderness areas

where the, the native people were passive inhabitants like,

you know, any other species that was out there.

But it sort of set up a ideological framework for,

to justify taking that away

because it wasn't being used to its highest

and best purpose or whatever.

But fire does a really good job of illustrating

that the inverse is actually true, is that people were

not just taking care of the landscape but shaping it

and the like the things that Jesse was mentioning

and the pollen record I was mentioning really show

that the climate, you know, this driving force that

that ha impacts everything.

They were actually able to, you know,

tend the landscape in a way

where they could maintain something despite that.

And so you see things like prairies,

there's mass producing trees, berry producing shrubs,

there's evidence of gardens and, and cultivation of crops

and wild rice

and all sorts of things as a, as this bigger idea

that people are active words still are active

shapers essentially of the, of the landscape.

And I feel like fire does it really,

to me it does the best job at like telling that story

Sophisticated.

That is, I mean it is one of the best words you can use for,

for the land stewarding practices, deeply sophisticated,

you know, generations of, of deep,

deep knowledge critical to survival.

I'm and back a long time, I mean there are tribes in the up

that have been mining copper for thousands

of years o over 5,000 years.

And so metal mining is

so incredibly complex and sophisticated.

That was the first metal mining,

metal refining project in the world was in,

in the up and copper country.

And I mean just to bolster Mitch's point,

like these are very long right, longstanding complex

and sophisticated relationships with the land

and fire is a massive and and really important part of it

and super important for protecting the biodiversity

that we have now and stabilizing the landscapes in this,

in this extinction climate crisis.

So it's, it's ultra relevant. Now

Can we, so going off the history of this,

if you look at the past couple hundred years when

I would imagine in some places fire has been looked upon as,

as not a way to tend to natural spaces

and also looking forward as we go into, you know,

much more turbulent times like

could you talk to that a little bit?

I I think like we can all agree like the fire use on the

landscape changed a lot as colonization occurred

and there were new people coming into the landscape.

You had the fur trade, you know, you had a lot

of wars that were happening.

There was a lot happening even into the 17, 16 hundreds

that were disrupting those cultural practices.

Like there was a lot of illness that came through

and then, you know, boarding schools started

with assimilation.

So throughout those things, you know,

we do see fire events happening in these

dro fire scar records,

but until you get to about 1850 is when there's kind

of a more clear halt

and that can be attributed to a lot of different things.

There's a lot of shout out

to the tribal preservation officers at different tribes

that are very fluent in the history

for their particular region.

But some of the landscape level changes are the influence

of timber harvest.

And so when large swaths of land are getting converted

to prairie when timber's being harvested,

when a lot more people are settling

is when fire becomes more of a threat to those ways of life,

especially when they're not familiar with fire

and how it can be beneficial.

And so that's kind of when fire started

to get more negative propaganda, you know,

smokey the Bear comes out and more legal

or making fire use illegal on the landscape.

Do you guys have more to add?

Oh, it's, there's a, there's a great book called The Big

Burn that is centered

around this massive fire event in 1910.

And a lot of the things that Mary said led up to that.

But most people, and this, this still happens today,

we hear about fire all the time in the news,

most people's reaction to that is, well, fire's bad,

we should try to prevent it.

Like, it's like any disaster, you know,

if you could do something to prevent it, why wouldn't you?

But what people don't see

and what's not really talked about is that

fire is part of this basically it it's inherent to,

to the place that we live.

It's gonna be here whether we try to suppress it or not.

And so what Mary mentioned is like this cycle

of regular fire was disrupted long

before, you know, this place was called Michigan

and you know, hundreds of years before that even.

And then there was a more overt policy

I think was it like a three

o'clock policy or something like that?

It was like when they found a fire had to be out

by three o'clock the next day.

It's probably not the right time, but basically 24 hours.

Okay. So the idea was that, you know,

these national forests were there for, for profit

and for for timber and they were like farming trees.

So fire was a threat to that, you know, economic outcome

that they wanted from those natural systems.

And so it was a very over, you know, legislative move

to squash fire.

And so what ended up happening is that the role that

that regular fire played, consuming a lot

of the dead plant material, rejuvenating the,

the plant life, you know, maintain these habitats for,

for different species of animals, things like

that was not happening.

And not only was it not happening,

but over hundreds of years.

So basically you're building this tinderbox

and then when fire does happen like in 1910

or like some that we're seeing right now, there's

so much fuel that they're no longer as much

of like the agents of healing

and restoration that they once were,

but they're just like sterilizing this

place 'cause it's so hot.

And so that is something that doesn't get talked about

as much in sort of the, the mainstream,

but a lot of what we're trying to do now in our work is to,

to bring that important concept back in

and get these regular return intervals.

And a lot of that is western US

and northern Michigan I would say

there's some systems like that.

What we've actually experienced in this area,

and I won't necessarily go into it now unless we want to,

but is that with the lack of fire I,

me we mentioned like the climate would've made things colder

and wetter, but people use fire to maintain these habitats.

We get a lot of rainfall in Michigan, I don't know like 60

plus inches a year or something like that.

So sort of left to their own devices without fire.

Things will get brushy and small trees will fill in

and squirrels do their thing, right?

It's just like part of the process

and they turn back into these shady canopy, you know,

lots of canopy, cover forested systems and you lose them.

So actually a like lack of fire can have different effects.

Like it can create a tinderbox in some landscapes,

but in, in, at least in southwest Michigan here, a lot of

what it's done is actually kind of like smother the history

of what was once there

because this's not really recognizable as a prairie

or as a Savannah because it is filled in

and we just see like the woods, right?

I think Mitch brings up so many good points there

and you know, there are so many points we could follow,

but you asked about like fire

moving forward, I think you asked about that and

because of the rainfall,

because of the, the Great Lakes we're really

buffered from some of the more extreme aspects of,

of climate change, some of the more extreme drought.

When you look at what's happening out west, especially

where you get this model of, you know, these,

these low severity, high frequency fires kind

of kept this landscape open.

And the absence of that, we've got these

areas just filling in with,

with trees becoming these dense forest, the inevitable,

the inevitable spark hits.

Now you've got 500,000 year old trees dying in these

landscapes that were stable for a long time

and fire is no longer the stabilizing force.

It's a destabilizing force that completely shifts the,

the structure of these natural communities

that you see mountain after mountain completely annihilated

by these infernos.

And now with climate change,

those trees that had just been there for thousands

of years are no longer actually able

to reproduce even if there was a seed source.

Those, those aren't suitable habitats for them anymore.

Their range has actually shifted.

And so now you've got a complete divergence from

what was historically there for, for thousands of years.

That's not quite true yet in Michigan.

And we're, we're not

as a culture here conditioned

to understand what's coming the way they are out west,

but it is coming for us.

And so in the same way you see these oak forests, you go

through these oak forests over

and over again in southern Michigan,

especially white oak is the dominant canopy tree

150 years old.

You look in the sub canopy, all you see is red maple,

not a single white oak for miles, for miles and miles.

And it's for, for a couple of reasons, it's for

because of a lack of fire.

White oak loves fire but it's also because of deer.

And now you've got this understory filled with red maple,

you get a wildfire there or somebody throws a cigarette out

and it burns it down in a drought year, right?

We're gonna have droughts that are gonna burn these forests

and you completely lost your seed source for white oak

and you have nothing coming back.

You have now set that system on a

totally different trajectory.

That is what's coming for us. That is what's coming for us.

When you go up north, it's an, it's an analogous situation

where you've got these vast areas of, of Red Pine.

They can't get red pine

to naturally regenerate over much of its range.

It's not regenerating at all.

And I mean this is a point that I've been obsessively

barking at these guys, Mr.

Red Pine, so you're gonna have to forgive me a little bit,

but in the absence of this natural reproduction or

or reproduction influenced by indigenous cultural fire,

they're converting thousands of acres of,

of our state forest to plantation with herbicide every year

because it's one of our most valuable timber crops

and they can't get it to reproduce.

And in the absence of the application of fire

and in a much greater footprint, I mean at least 10 times

what our state is putting down now is

what we need to be putting on the ground.

In the absence of that, we're gonna continue to face

management challenges that boggle the mind,

including huge applications of, of herbicide.

And we're gonna face increasing ever increasing risk

of wildfire and then new successional trajectories for the,

the systems on our landscape. Now

What's the struggle with the mindset

of fire management with the state?

I mean you don't have to speak entirely, you know,

I'm sure this is a massive amount of, you know, ground

to cover, but if you had a few points that you would like

to see addressed on a state level,

because I mean it's not just the state, right?

It's it's your counties, your townships, your cities,

all these places have probably different management plans

or lack of, and then everyone talking

to each other and making it work

Dedicated.

The state of Michigan or state government like would say,

well, I mean we're in the state of Michigan.

I think it's, it's fair to talk about us here

Dedicated, dedicated prescribed fire teams

in our state government system.

So in the same way we've got a wildlife division,

we've got a forest resources division,

we need a dedicated team of prescribed fire specialists

that operate across our state land.

And you know, you mentioned seasonality a little bit in

the, the stumps.

I would say like what I've seen in my community of of like,

you know, fire and restoration folks

that are practicing it is that most of the fire happens in

spring, right?

You know, not right after but

after the snow is melted,

things have warmed up a little bit.

The dry grass and leaves or the, the grass

and leaves have dried out a bit.

It's not super hot yet, the days aren't super long.

So the climate sort of puts these bookends on your fire

and makes it a little more convenient and easy to use.

But there's lots of records showing that one

of the predominant seasons that a lot of the native folks

around here we're using was like September and fall.

And there's some interesting research Mary

going on with seasonal use

of fire in different systems at different times of year.

And so like with the concept that Jesse's presenting,

you could have people, you know,

putting fire down in spring, summer, fall,

we've burned in December before if you get a winner.

That's not like the one we're currently experiencing.

We've had some that have been pretty mild

and not a ton of, you know, you get the La Nina

and Nino cycles, that sort of thing.

So you know, historically people were probably responding

to these in real time, but we're seeing enough

of good diversity

of results like showing us different things

that happen when you use fire in different seasons

that yeah you could be, have people dedicated

to using fire like year round.

And then obviously there's a ton of planning

and communication that goes with it.

So like it's easily full-time job.

And to add to that, like one of the current issues

of why we're only applying fire

or why certain agencies are only applying fire in the spring

is because they also service fires out west.

And so when there's a big fire, they often call resources

and often a lot of the big fires are happening in August

through September, which limits the ability

of these practitioners at home to be able to burn.

One other thing I would add

to Jesse's very good point about having a dedicated fire

management group within the agencies is

prioritizing collaboration with existing practitioners.

So there's a lot of people throughout the state

that are interested and excited about fire

and are, you know, fire practitioners as ecologists

for nonprofits, for tribal entities especially.

A lot of tribes have like resources

that they collect on state and federal lands

and there is some intention with co-management

of those spaces incorporating fire into their management,

but it needs to go further

and it needs to be a dedicated effort

to blend different crews to learn from each other

and to make sure fire is accessible and it's not gate kept

and restricted behind agencies.

That was such a great point

And, and as you can imagine, like there's, there's a legal

and logistical like minefield as far as like insurance

and all these other things that are not very exciting

to talk about unions, liability unions.

So there, yeah, there's a ton of

barriers in our modern world to, to using them,

but I think that's the,

that's the challenge is like working across boundaries,

you know, both lit literal boundary like property boundaries

but also like between jurisdictions and tribes

and nonprofits and all these sorts of things.

And so I think like the Michigan prescribed Fire Council

got touched on a lot in the last episode.

It's a good example of like that interface where a lot

of those conversations can happen

and Jesse speaking there and maybe

Yeah, well yeah, hopefully speaking what just

I think, let's imagine a hypothetical state that

created a fire program.

The programs in a lot of states have been built

to suppress fire to suppress wildfire

as prescribed fire has emerged as critical need.

It has simply been incorporated in the

fire suppression program.

So these hypothetical agencies have developed,

not Michigan necessarily have developed these programs that

were, are centered around fire suppression

and staff with people who are really good at that.

And maybe prescribed fire

isn't the a, a central aspect

of what they're trying to put down.

And so some of the nuances of, of prescribed fire

could be better handled in an organization that

is built by prescribed fire

or specialists who are educated and prescribed fire.

I'm trying to tiptoe around this

because it is, I mean, you know, we work very closely

with these people who are, are very good at their jobs

and take it very seriously.

But you know, you see sort of these differences in spirit

around prescribed fire and fire suppression

and as close as you think they might be,

they're often worlds apart.

They sound like opposite.

It's a different, it's a paradigm shift I think for sure.

And we, you know, we we're talking about

that like we historically with a fire suppression policies

and it's still there today

and we, you know, we work with local fire departments

and those fire departments are saving people's lives,

saving people's houses and like, so the whole framework

around what they do

and part of their identity is like putting out fire

and that is their job.

So sometimes we work with fire departments

and we're both familiar with fire

but in a very different way.

And so you see that the barriers of language and techniques

and equipment and sort of like the pace of even what needs

to happen and the strategies that they might use to,

to burn a prairie versus what we are going to do

are very different because you're, you're sort

of brought up in a different cultural box

and you know, we're having these conversations

but you're still kind of limited

of like your original baseline.

You have to sort of work through that. I think.

So that's a challenge

From, you know, just looking into

what fire departments do.

You're saving lives but you're also saving capital, right?

And so like you have humans that have been very centric to

what humans do

and then thinking themselves outside

of the national landscape where I think a lot

of us realize that's not the case.

And so I would think that's probably part of the hardships

of, of change their mindset.

Or another element is education, public education too,

which is one of our focuses through the council

because often people want to burn the leaves in their yard,

you know, they wanna be able to use fire

and, you know, manage their property for biodiversity,

but they have to know how to do it in a safe way.

And so that's where providing education

and training kind of gives them a fuller picture

of everything that's involved.

And now going forward, there's like in the state of Michigan

as citizens, we have the right to burn.

And so the state has created a certified burn manager

program to educate members of the public people burning

about this process, get them certified

and registered in a way

and then be able to better communicate with those people.

Could you expand a little on that?

'cause like just even within the city of Kalamazoo, right?

Like we are, we're a no burn city, we have leaf collections

and you know, we have some conversations with

citizens about, you know, just leaving the leaves

where they are, all of these different management programs.

How would you, how would you, how would someone approach

that if they had those stipulations?

I'm gonna turn to the Kalamazoo locals.

Yeah,

I mean I think it's, you know,

what are you using fire for?

Like in that case you're, you're burning the leaves, you're,

you're getting rid of what you know is a resource like

ecologically as a way to, to get rid of it.

Are you using it like to have a campfire

or whatever you can have raised, you know, fires in the city

of, of Kalamazoo.

But yeah, I think it, it's,

it's very context dependent I would say.

So it's always like the pervasive like thing in ecology

is always like, it depends.

So I would say it, it depends, yes,

sometimes like leaving the leaves could be the best

thing ecologically.

But you know, like we were,

Jesse was talking about the red maples

and the oak systems and that sort of thing.

The, the leaves and that system actually squash

and suppress a lot of the understory plants as opposed

to like our beach maple forest that are very adapted to that

where the flowers and the wild flowers

and things underneath actually need that pulse of,

of nutrients and the oak systems it smothers,

which is why burning happens.

So obviously people have different motivations for wanting

to use it for different reasons

and I would say yeah, very context dependent,

but I think the mindset of a city is like, you know, we've,

I don't know, 80,000 people in

Kalamazoo or something like that.

So, you know, for everybody using fire responsibly,

there's gonna be somebody who, I don't know,

maybe having a couple beers maybe walk away from the fire

for a little while and come back

and their front porch is on fire.

So I think there's, there's very good reason for those,

those policies on that local level.

But, so that's what we're trying to work through of like,

we also have nature preserves in the city of Kalamazoo.

So asylum, lake Kline,

stuck blowing the clouds, places like that.

We have used fire in these places.

But again, we're coming up a little bit about

that language barrier

and like, what's more important in a city typically is the

safety and suppression aspects.

And so there's a little bit of a world's kind of

bumping up against each other in that

When you, when you have a burn at like say bow in the

clouds, like how do you, do you have to work

with local municipalities as far

as like the government bodies to, you know,

talk about like when those things happen and who is there.

Yep. Yeah, all of that comes down to a burn plan.

And that is, that is I think a piece of common language

that the municipal firefighters like gives them reassurance

and gives us a plan to go by.

And it just, it's really, it's a, it's a good idea,

but in your burn plan you're gonna have lots of maps.

You're gonna have listed the, the resources for emergencies,

how many people you're gonna have there, what kind

of gear they're wearing, what kind

of tools you're gonna have on site, how many gallons

of water, what happens if it gets out,

do you have what's called secondary containment?

So maybe where you're trying to burn is bound

by like a creek and a trail and a road.

So those are natural things that naturally don't burn.

What happens if a little ember, you know, the wind shifts

or something ember jumps the, the, the trail

and gets on the other side, you know,

that would be like a secondary containment if it gets out,

what, what's your backup plan?

And then you, you would go to that.

So it's, it's a demonstration on the,

the landowner in this case like a nonprofit

that they're doing their due diligence,

they're doing their homework, they've thought this through,

you know, maybe like a, not if not if,

but when kind of situation where we,

we don't really say controlled burns anymore

because fire is a very living dynamic thing,

but we try to plan as much as we can.

And so that plan I think is a common language

that municipalities like to see,

but it can still be hard to even get that to rise

to the level of attention of even if you have a plan.

And to add to that,

like especially when you're burning in urban areas

or in places that have a lot of human interface,

like you have hospitals, you have interstates.

And so that's some of the things

that goes into navigating the burn plan is, you know,

knowing your weather prescription.

Like what are the needs of this site

and then what are the constraints that we're working within?

Like if you're next to an airport within 10 miles,

like you do have to call them

and let them know that you're gonna be putting smoke in this

direction during this timeframe.

Calling the dispatch

and just telling them we're gonna be burning,

we have approval, we have everything we need.

If citizens call you, reassure them that it's under control.

And so that's where it's very situational everywhere you

work, it takes a lot of community knowledge

to know who to talk to

and who to help navigate some of those things.

Yeah, and I mean this is super relevant for Kalamazoo.

You've, I mean as a, as a conservation scientist, I tend

to be thinking about these things on pretty large scales

and generally on public lands

or working

with land trusts like Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy,

which is a great, which is a great organization

and I'm not really thinking about like

burning leaves in your yard.

It's, it's just not really an issue often.

But in Kalamazoo we've got Gordon Neck,

we've got Gordon neck state game area

that is almost entirely within the city limits of Portage

and that's a big deal.

And so you start all,

everything Mary was just talking about like hospitals

or smoke management

or like literally interstates, everything she just said is,

is a massive factor in getting burns done.

And it's why it's incredibly difficult to get burns done

and Gordon act, I think they've done one in the last 15

years since I've been paying attention to this, this topic.

And they need, they should be doing hundreds of acres a year

probably they have about 2,500 acres of, of

land in go neck

and maybe a thousand acres of it is, has a,

a meaningful need for fire on a, on a regular basis.

And it's simply not happening

because of all these complicating factors.

And education is critical. Education is critical.

We should, I mean hopefully this helps, right?

What, what you're doing here today,

but there is a lot of fire that needs to happen in this,

in this local community.

Go Allegan state game area just an hour away.

One of our most important pieces

of public land in southern Michigan needs a ton

of fire every year.

And so the need

for this type of conversation to be had in a lot

of places is so extreme right now.

It's so important. It's so important.

There's so many rare species that are just barely holding on

and Gordon, Gordon has incredible rare species

that have their population strongholds there

and, and nowhere else in the state.

And a lot of those require

fire dependent habitat.

And so it's just a great time to be having this talk.

It's a really important topic.

And to add to that, like it is do, it is doable

to burn these places and spaces

and that's where members of the public, like it should be

exciting to see a smokestack in the air instead of that,

you know, feeling of fear.

And I think, you know, the members of the public,

like these state and federal agencies, they work for us.

Like they work for the members of the public

and curating those spaces and maintaining those areas.

And so if the citizens are demanding the stewardship,

I think it would provide more momentum

to getting fire in some of these trickier spaces.

'cause oftentimes when they're thinking about burning in

these very difficult areas

because of these different sources of infrastructure,

it's scary because of the public reaction.

So that's where, you know,

they have public information officers that work

with the media to help distribute the narrative of like,

this is what we're doing and why.

And so it, it takes a lot of people to

change the philosophy of fire being bad

to fire being good. Well you

Need, not only do you need local buy-in,

but you need local advocacy

For sure.

Yeah. And I think, you know,

Jesse talking about the rare plants

and talking about the ecology, I mean we could talk about

the positive results

of fire when you bring them back to these systems.

It just feels right. Like you see the response, you see

how the system changes and it's just like

this is a good thing.

And you know, and everything from box turtles to, you know,

wild flowers to things like that, to birds.

But none of that can happen, you know,

if the fire department gets called and shuts down a burn

because they see a smoke column.

So, you know, our kind of dedication to the ecology

and to the species has to also address a lot

of these barriers that we're, we're talking about.

There was one time where it's actually at a funeral,

but I walked out of the like post funeral luncheon

and my friends at the Kalamazoo Nature Center I knew were

burning a prairie that day

and I wasn't thinking about it at that time,

but I walked out and I saw like something kind

of coming down from the air a little bit

and I held up my hand

and there was a charred piece of grass,

it was probably like big blue stem

or one of these big, you know,

prairie grasses from like the north side

of Kalamazoo all the way down to Portage,

like by the airport.

And I actually was doing what it was supposed to,

it was lifting, they call it the,

the smoke column essentially

forgetting the name of it right now.

But anyways, you look at different atmospheric conditions

that are going to elevate the smoke so

that it's not staying on ground level

where people have to breathe it.

But yeah, it would be a really great cultural shift.

Like if, you know, like Mary said, if someone saw that

and just understood that like, oh,

they're probably burning the prairie, that's great.

That brings back, that brings back, you know,

henzel sparrows and bobble links in these, you know,

songbirds that only use these habitats when they're burned.

But anyway, point being that like none of

that good stuff can happen if it gets shut down

or these barriers get put up

and unfortunately people don't generally pay attention to

who was using the fire if it was one nonprofit,

if it was one agency, if it was a homeowner,

it's fire equals bad.

And so we have like a collective kind of obligation

to each other to make sure

that we're really doing our due diligence to communicate,

to put, you know, to knock on neighbor's doors

and to try to address some of these issues.

I I would also say kind of along this theme,

fire is expensive.

Fire is expensive and we're also in a,

in a unusual political climate, maybe not unusual,

but we're in a political climate where

I'd say it's unusual,

Well where, where there's a lot

of anti-government sentiment

and a lot of, a lot of candidates

that are running in this coming election are gonna be

running on anti DNR platforms.

So these are state and local positions

and I think the ano, I mean I work a lot with the DNR and

and federal organizations

and I think anytime we can get a municipality to, to like

chip in and say, I mean Portage is partnering

with the DNR already with the wildlife division

and I think if they were to like fund a burn and,

and platform it

and talk about it, it at, you know, meaningful government

meetings and really try to develop a partnership that would

go a long way in trying to, and

and allowing the DNR to get fire

and Portage in, in Gord neck

and it would benefit the city too

because we had that tornado go through there, right?

That's a ton of down wood on the ground in Gordon Neck

that is a fire hazard.

And a a, a controlled burn

or a prescribed burn would go a long way in mitigating

that risk, right?

And so what better partnership than Portage

who has means to fund a, a series of prescribed burns

and build that community education around prescribed fire.

It's, it's desperately needed.

It's desperately needed and I think it would go a long way

in kind of maybe helping the local

culture accept fire.

As we come to a close tonight.

Let's talk contact, how do we get ahold

of everyone here if people want to get involved with this?

I'll start. I would say best place for us

for southwest Michigan Land Conservancy is our website

SW mlc.org.

So we have volunteer opportunities there.

You can visit some of these preserves

where we have been using Fire Portman is one that's great.

Oak Savannah Chipman is very close to here,

bow in the clouds so you can find things like that.

We keep new newsletters, stories, what, you know,

what's happening with us.

And then on a more sort

of regular refresh is our social media.

So we have Instagram and Facebook

and kind of exploring some others right now.

But Amelia Hansen,

our media specialist does a really wonderful job with those

and that really sort of is the face of the organization.

So that's the best place to kind

of find out what's going on and get involved.

For us,

Michigan Natural Features Inventory has a website

and where we post all of our reports, which is a huge source

of information if you're interested in particular areas

that have had research and other things done.

And then we also have a staff listing page

that would have Jesse and myself, I believe we have Facebook

and Instagram maybe under MNFI.

So search those

Also give a plug for, for MNFI.

Their website is awesome.

Lots of great reports that these two

and others have been involved in.

One of the really cool tools

that Jesse mentioned at the very beginning was the natural

communities of the different diversity

of like these systems we had in Michigan.

You can look at maps that are really good approximation of

where these systems were in every county

and every corner of the state.

So like go find where you live

and you have this little slider bar where you can look at

what it looks like now and then

what the landscape was in these little colored polygons.

And it's just such a fun way to think about

what was here historically

and maybe why you see some of the plants

and animals that you do. Anyway. Just

Sounds like we, one last

Plug.

We do have a story map of a prescribed fire model

that is occurring on state lands.

And so that's a deeper read,

but the story map is a good overview of how

to prioritize fire on state lands.

And that's located where?

On the website. Okay. Yep.

Well thank you all so much for being here today.

Yeah, pleasure. Thanks for having us so

Much.

Okay, thanks.