Where there's smoke, there's ire
Earlier this year, our host Nate Hegyi picked a fight with Ryan Zinke.
Zinke is the former Interior Secretary under Trump – the guy who rode into office on horseback. In the midst of an awful few days in June, when Canadian wildfire smoke blanketed the entire east coast, Zinke took to Twitter and argued that the solution was “active forest management.”
Nate assumed that was a political code word for more logging, something Republicans have been pushed for years. But instead of firing back, he decided to fact-check his assumptions and study up. Why are Canadian wildfires getting so intense? Is it possible to stop the smoke by logging the boreal forest? And what would Teddy Roosevelt have to say about this?!
Featuring Phil Higuera, John Vaillant, Ryan Zinke, and Courtney Shultz.
Our free newsletter is just as fun to read as this podcast is to listen to. Sign-up here.
VOTE FOR US!
Our series, The Underdogs, is in the running for a podcast award through Signal for Best Sports Documentary!
There’s also a Listener’s Choice, which requires fans to vote — so if you’ve got literally 20 seconds to spare, check out the link in the show notes and cast your vote for The Underdogs.
SUPPORT: CELEBRATING 250 EPISODES
Can you believe it? Outside/In is celebrating 250 episodes of wacky, fun, and longform journalism. We hope to keep making more episodes (maybe even 250 more!), and to celebrate the journey ahead of us, we’ve got brand new Outside/In swag for you!
If you donate $5+ a month, you can select the Outside/In baseball cap as a thank you gift. Plus, the first 250 people to donate during this campaign will receive a special “Ginkgo Love” sticker. Click here to donate!
Talk to us! Follow Outside/In on Instagram and Twitter, or discuss episodes in our private listener group on Facebook.
Submit a question to our Outside/Inbox. We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
LINKS
Check out our episode about prescribed burns (10X10: Pine Barrens).
The NPS has a good overview of how indigenous fire practices shaped North America.
“As Canada reels from wildfire, First Nations hope for larger role” (Al Jazeera)
CREDITS
Hosted, reported and produced by Nate Hegyi
Edited by Taylor Quimby and Rebecca Lavoie
Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Jeongyoon Han, and Felix Poon.
Rebecca Lavoie is our Executive Producer
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
NH: Hey this is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi.
So recently, I picked a fight on Twitter – or I guess I should say on “X”– with a guy named Ryan Zinke.
You may remember him as President Trump’s former Interior Secretary.
He was the guy who rode in on a horse to his first day in office - in DC. He rode out, by the way, on multiple ethics scandals.
News clip: He was facing questions about his air travel, as well as travel for his wife through the…
Anywaaaaays, these days Zinke is a congressman for his home state of Montana.
And a few months ago… he posted a video of himself on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building. That day, the air was so hazy with wildlife smoke, you couldn’t even see the Washington Monument.
Ryan Zinke: You know, I don’t have any sympathy for the politicians in Washington D.C. that are complaining today about the forest fires in Canada. Our forests need to be managed, and whether you’re a climate change activist or denier, it doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility to manage our forests. If you don’t manage our forests, this is what happens. So welcome to Montana, Washington, D.C.”
<<music builds and fades>>
NH: My first thought was… how is American forest policy going to stop these massive fires… in Canada? Because all that smoke? It was pouring down from the boreal forests of Quebec.
So that’s what I tweeted at him.
And then I got a snarky reply from Zinke’s chief of staff, saying:
[Voice actor]: Don’t be cute, Nate. He never said the Canadian fires were a result of U.S. policies. He used the smoke in D.C. to show people what happens in the West every year because of poor management.
<<music>>
NH: Okay. Fine. That was a metaphor. But that response still irked me.
Because, from what I can tell, “active forest management” is a political code word for logging. It’s been a conservative talking point for years. From lawmakers…
Steve Daines: Unfortunately, this is what happens when you have more lawyers in your forests crawling around than loggers…
From talk radio:
Talk Radio: They don’t want us to do logging, they don’t want us to do any thinning projects. They just want to, to let it all burn.
Fox News:
Fox News: Nature is brutal and if you leave forests unattended they will eventually catch on fire and burn.
<<MUSIC OUT>>
I don’t think this is entirely true.
My hunch has always been that some Republicans use wildfires as an excuse to push a pro-logging agenda, and avoid talking about the big reason they’re really happening: climate change.
I wanted to tweet all this back at Zinke’s chief of staff… But then I stopped.
Because maybe I’m wrong. Can quote unquote active forest management actually stop the smoke?
Today on Outside/In, I’m pressing pause on this Twitter fight to fact-check my assumptions and study up on wildfire smoke. We’ll find out why Canadian wildfires are accelerating so fast… and we’ll find out if logging IS actually part of the solution.
We need those loggers back. We need those sawmills back.
Stay tuned.
<<music fades>>
NH: I’ve lived out West for two decades now. So smoky days aren’t new to me. But I had a layover in New York City earlier this summer and I’ve got to admit… The skyline looked like it was from Blade Runner. The sun was a red orb in the sky. It was freaky.
At one point, more than 120 million people in the East Coast and Midwest were under air quality alerts. And pretty much all of it was coming from what’s called the boreal forest.
John Vaillant: The boreal forest is the largest ecosystem on earth.
That’s John Vaillant. He recently wrote a book that’s all about wildfires in the boreal.
John Vaillant: And it really is like a green halo or something around the top of the globe.
In Russia it’s known as the taiga [tye-eeh-ga] … and here in North America, it dips down as far as northern Minnesota and Maine. But it’s mostly in the sub-arctic parts of northern Canada and Alaska.
John Vaillant: If you're at drone level, you're going to see just a sea of trees interspersed with bogs, the occasional lake, the occasional massive lake where you will lose your drone because it simply cannot fly across it.
The boreal is dense, muggy and muddy. It’s also a huge carbon sink and the largest source of freshwater on earth.
John Vaillant: What’s particularly significant, though, about the boreal – what sets it apart from temperate and tropical forest systems – is the fact that it burns a lot. And fire is part and parcel of the life cycle of many boreal species.
Historically, fire has acted like a reset button for the forest. It clears out the old or sick trees and the underbrush, making room for new trees to grow.
Like, there’s this one species, the black spruce? it's this Dr. Seuss-looking conifer tree with a drooping top. And its pinecones will only open when they feel the heat from a fire.
So… fire is good for the boreal. But ever since the turn of the century, these wildfires are getting bigger and more extreme.
<<music comes in>>
And that’s because of - you guessed it - climate change.
<<music>>
John Vaillant: We've had temperatures over 100 Fahrenheit in the northern boreal, which is simply inconceivable to most Northerners. And yet the thermometer is there. Thermometer doesn't lie.
On top of the heat, snow and rainfall in the northern boreal has been on the decline since the 1950s.
John Vaillant: The boreal forest is a, is a historically naturally damp, often sodden place. But so is your laundry when it comes out of the washing machine. And if you throw your laundry out on the line, on a damp, cloudy, 60 degree day, it's going to stay wet probably all day. You throw it out on a 95 degree day with 30 knots of wind and brilliant sun, and that thing is going to be dry in 20 minutes. So the forest floor isn't that different? You throw some wind in there, you throw some sparks, embers, a hot muffler, a cigarette, a campfire…
… and you can have a full-on firestorm. We’re talking wildfires so big that they create their own weather.
<<music fades>>
One of the first big ones was back in 2001 in northern Alberta. The story goes like this.
A U.S. Navy scientist was sitting at his desk, looking over satellite information.
John Vaillant: And he saw this massive aerosol plume driving up through the troposphere into the stratosphere with so much energy and force that there were only two causes: a volcano or a nuclear explosion which does the same thing. And he knew enough about Canadian geology to know there were no volcanoes in Alberta. And so he called officials in the province of Alberta and said, “Have you just detonated a nuke?”
They… had not. It was a massive wildfire burning in a remote part of the boreal. Scientists later calculated that it was releasing the energy equivalent of multiple hydrogen bombs.
All this kicked up a ferocious black cloud called a pyrocumulonimbus… or a pyro CB for short. We’re talking Old Testament stuff here.
John Vaillant: they can puncture the stratosphere. They can become an obstacle to a jet plane, and they generate their own lightning. They generate their own hail.
Pyro CBs — they can even generate their own tornadoes. John saw the aftermath of one of these fire tornadoes in Redding, California, back in 2018.
John Vaillant: It picks up F-150 pickups and just throws them around. It takes 100 foot high tension, electricity pylons made out of steel, rips them out of the ground, crumples them into a ball and throws them into the forest. It's energy that we have never seen before.
<<cello and chamber music begins>>
That’s what we’re dealing with now. This year, nearly 43 million acres of Canada have burned. That’s an area bigger than New England. Whole towns have gone up in flames.
Pyro CBs? They used to be a rarity, something that only fire nerds knew about. But this spring and summer, there have been more than 90 of them.
And even though the fires themselves are more terrifying than ever, it’s the smoke that winds up affecting more people.
It can cause headaches. Red eyes. But also wheezing… coughing. Respiratory illnesses. Long term exposure to wildfire smoke kills an estimated 6,300 people every year in the U.S.
So… Is there a solution?
Ryan Zinke: If you don’t manage our forests, this is what happens. So welcome to Montana, Washington D.C.
That’s Ryan Zinke again. To find out what he means when he calls for “active forest management,” I reached out to Courtney Shultz.
Courtney Shultz: Are you like a partisan podcast or?
Nate Hegyi: No, we’re public radio. Yeah, so, I'm curious about whether my assumptions are right or not.
Courtney is a professor at Colorado State University and is an expert on wildfire policy. She’s testified in front of Congress multiple times.
And she says that one reason we’re seeing all these big wildfires is that we’ve had a century of forest suppression.
And all those years of putting out small fires, has led to a big buildup of fuel.
Courtney Shultz: It's almost like we have a fire debt that has accumulated and now is coming due.
This wasn’t like a plot by democrats or environmentalists or something, by the way. Fire suppression was the policy of the U.S. Forest Service going back into the 1920s.
But that’s changed…
And what Courtney also told me, is that active forest management is a real phrase used by folks in the forest service and other agencies.
Courtney Shultz: Generally, I would say when people are talking about active forest management, they're talking about cutting trees and they're talking about applying fire to the land.
So the Republicans are right - the experts do advocate for logging… Or, as Courtney puts it, thinning.
But thinning and prescribed burns… they aren’t magic bullets.
Courtney Shultz: Yes, we can use active management thinning and prescribed burning to reduce fire behavior. But could we do it everywhere so fast that we can undo the last hundred years of what's happened and, you know, counter the effects of climate change? I don't think so.
<<piano, xylophone music>>
You see, these forests are BIG. They cover nearly half of Canada and a third of the U.S.
Stopping all wildfires through thinning would be like trying to mow a massive lawn with a pair of scissors.
Instead, wildfire experts like Courtney say active forest management is best used strategically - to create a kind of buffer zone around the stuff you want to protect.
Whether that’s your house…
Courtney Shultz: Get your wood, pile away from your house, mow your grass down as far as you can
your town…
Courtney Shultz: Clear your trees back so that you don't have as much fuel near your community.
Or… old growth forests or other wild places we want to protect.
Courtney Shultz: But yeah, we're not going to be able to do it everywhere. So we're going to want to start with, you know, the home and kind of work outwards.
But what if we’re in the middle of a drought. In summer. With temperatures 30 degrees above normal? During years like that…
Phil Higuera: Fire operates more like hurricanes or earthquakes. These large scale natural events that despite how hard we try, we we can't really get in the way of and alter.
That’s Phil Higuera. He’s a fire ecologist at the University of Montana. And he says no amount of active forest management can get in the way of these massive, climate-driven firestorms.
Phil Higuera: Another way to think of this is, you know, we wear seatbelts in cars, right? It's been shown that seatbelts are very effective at increasing our likelihood of surviving a crash, reducing injuries. We also know that if you're driving at 100 miles an hour and you crash into a wall, we don't expect a seat belt to do anything at that point.
<<music, >>
So if this is the case… Why do some Republicans focus on active forest management as the solution for severe wildfires… and what do they mean when they use that phrase? That’s coming up right after the break.
Hey this is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi. Nate Hegyi: Hey. Nate Hegyi of Outside/In. The show has hit the 250th episode mark! and we heard from one listener who has listened to all of them — in just four months.
Dale Freeman: My name is Dale Freeman and I live in Berkeley, California. I came across Outside/In when I was listening to Bear Brook, and they cross-promoted the Underdogs episode and I was hooked.
I really value long form narrative storytelling. I really enjoy that. And you guys do that at such a high level that whatever the topic is, I want to go through the the maple forests when they're in the sap. You know, I want to feel what it's like to experience the wind on the top of, I think it’s Mount Washington. And so I can't be there physically, but you make me want to be there. And I just I love that.
Nate Hegyi: We hope to keep telling stories for listeners like Dale – and we need your help to make that possible. If you donate 5 dollars a month, we’ll give you a brand spankin’ new Outside/In baseball cap — it’s a classy dark blue. It’s really new. I’ve got one coming in the mail that I’m super excited about. We’ve also got a special sticker for the first 250 people who make any donation.
Check out a picture of the hat and sticker at outside in radio dot org or you can find a link in the show notes.
Earlier this summer, I was watching a congressional hearing on wildfires. I noticed that Republicans steered the conversation towards logging… a lot.
Duerte: So we need those loggers back. We need the sawmills back.
Tiffany: You see the decline of forest production and you see the incline of fires over the last, um, what would that be? 40 years.
Westerman: Instead of burning all this timber and sending carbon up into the atmosphere, we could be building houses, we could be building businesses.
The main thrust of their argument was this: That a healthy, thriving timber industry means a healthy, thriving forest — one that doesn’t burn as severely, or as regularly, as it does now.
Courtney Shultz, that wildfire policy expert… She actually testified during this hearing.
Courtney Shultz: Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I’m a professor at Colorado State University…
Courtney thinks this is a classic case of correlation does not mean causation.
<<music begins>>
In the 20th century, the United States had a lot more timber production on public lands. It actually peaked in the late 1980s and early 90s. But then it declined.
There was less demand, foreign lumber got cheaper, … and there were a lot of environmental lawsuits that froze up timber sales on public lands.
And that drop in American logging — it correlated with a rise in catastrophic megafires.
Courtney Shultz: It's almost like an intuitive reasoning. Like, gosh, if we just had less fuel out there, it would burn less.
But that’s not the whole story.. Because in Canada… and remember, most of that smoke this year was coming from Canada… logging has actually increased over the past decade… and they are having the same problems with fire.
And another thing. The timber industry has traditionally gone after big, high value trees. The ones you can build houses out of. But…
Courtney Shultz: The areas that probably need the most active management are not places with valuable timber. And actually, a lot of places where we want to get the work done, the trees have low value or absolutely no value, or it would actually cost the government money to get the stuff out of the woods.
That’s because what really needs to get cleared out are the small, sickly, dead or dying trees and brush.
This does not mean that the timber industry can’t play a role in helping to thin forests.
Courtney says the government could just pay timber companies to clear out the brush via contracts.
And this year, Republicans introduced a bill that would make it easier to thin forests.
It’s called the Proven Forest Management Act, which would fast-track thinning projects on public lands if they are less than 10,000 acres.
Right now, operations like that… they undergo years of environmental review before they are approved. But the bill, it would essentially get rid of those reviews if it’s in the name of wildfire prevention.
The bill is based on a pilot project around public lands in Lake Tahoe. They tripled the amount of land they thinned over the past decade. The Forest Service says it actually helped stop a big fire from burning down a town there.
It also produced a lot more timber.
In fact, a new sawmill just opened up to handle all those those dead or small trees.
The first new one in more than a century.
So you could argue that Republicans ARE really trying to do something about wildfires, by focusing on active forest management.
But you could also argue that the GOP is missing the forest for the trees.
<<music>>
At that hearing I watched, Republicans barely mentioned climate change. One of the key drivers of more severe wildfires.
And every expert I spoke with told me that any short-term plan to combat these fires should go hand-in-hand with long-term plans to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
But guys like Ryan Zinke aren’t doing that. In fact, he’s co-sponsoring a bill that would fast-track drilling projects and remove incentives for fossil fuel companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In interviews, he pretty much shrugs climate change off.
Ryan Zinke: The temperatures are rising, the season’s getting longer, but we have to look at managing the forest. When you talk to the firefighters out there…
<<music fades>>
So now that I had learned all about active forest management, and talked to the experts… I decided to get back in touch with Ryan Zinke.
I asked him for an interview – fully expecting him to say no.
But he agreed to talk to me.
Ryan Zinke: Hey, you got Ryan Zinke. Good morning.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, Congressman. How are you?
Ryan Zinke: You know, it’s interesting being back…
First off, Zinke is a pretty affable dude. Kinda guy I’d get a beer with. Like, we somehow started talking about how ridiculous the show “Yellowstone” is, which is set in our home state of Montana.
Ryan Zinke: It's a drama that's set in Montana
Nate Hegyi: Oh yeah.
Ryan Zinke: Just like Star Wars is a drama set in space.
Yellowstone aside, we mostly talked about how to make wildfires less severe. Here’s the thing. If I wanted to, I could pull clips that would really make you think he’s actually super progressive on issues about climate.
Ryan Zinke: I think climate change is a mega trend and it is not a fad.
He sounded like a proponent for solar…
Ryan Zinke: I’ve always thought the best place for a solar cell is on top of a roof.
He even had this analogy for how Democrats and Republicans can be working together.
Ryan Zinke: A boat has two oars. Now I will admit I’m the right oar. I am the right oar. But I do recognize there’s a left oar. And if you only use one oar? What happens? You go in circles.
<<music>>
Montana’s soul resides in the land. So Republican lawmakers here have to walk a line between protecting and celebrating natural resources, without sounding like environmentalists, per se. Zinke kept calling himself a “Teddy Roosevelt conservative.”
Nate Hegyi: What do you think Teddy Roosevelt would think about climate change these days?
Ryan Zinke: You know, that's a really interesting question, and I would only answer it in the context of his writings and what he what he believed in and mostly is the pincho model of best science. Best practices. Greatest good. Longest term.
But … every time I tried to talk about climate change in any detail… the conversation went sideways..
Nate Hegyi: If we want to stop global temperature rise at, let's say, two degrees above pre-industrial times, we need to be carbon neutral by 2050. Knowing that —-
Ryan Zinke: All right..
Nate Hegyi: Wait a minute.
Ryan Zinke: Well I think the premise is not accurate, so
Zinke would go out of his way to make it sound like the science was up for debate.
Ryan Zinke: I s it significant? Is man causing the driver of it? Are there other issues?
He’d cherrypick data…
Ryan Zinke: Sea level rise is somewhere between one millimeter a year and a couple millimeters a year…
What he’s not mentioning here is that that number is projected to rise a lot faster as the polar ice caps melt.
Zinke would also repeat popular climate misinformation you’ll often hear on Fox News.
Ryan Zinke: For instance, the volcanic actions in Tonga? That emitted 50 million tons of water vapor. It was the biggest disruption in history on on instrumentation of, of recorded history,
That volcano, by the way, was a blip on the radar. It’ll temporarily warm the earth a bit, but nothing that’s on the scale of fossil fuels.
In other words, when it came to one of the biggest drivers of more severe wildfires: Zinke dodged.
And every expert I spoke with said this is something you cannot dodge.
Here’s the thing. And maybe I’m just being petty about the tweet that started this whole thing. But nothing we’ve talked about in this episode is going to stop the SMOKE.
Active forest management might save some homes, but the fires, and the smoke, are going to keep burning. And they are going to get worse.
And that’s not something that Ryan Zinke — or his counterparts in Canada — seem willing to admit.
John Vaillant: So a shorthand way for Americans to understand Alberta is it's basically Texas without as many guns.
That’s John Vaillant again. The author of “Fire Weather.” That book, by the way, covers a 2016 boreal fire that burned down an entire oil town in northern Alberta.
John Vaillant: And in spite of this, people on the conservative side are really reluctant to talk about climate. They've actually put a moratorium on renewable energy projects, basically to favor oil and gas.
For John there is a sad, poetic irony to all this.
John Vaillant: We talk about energy, we talk about oil and gas, we talk about petroleum, we talk about fossil fuels. What we're really talking about is fire.
<<rock music begins>>
John Vaillant: The only reason we're interested in everything from coal to butane and everything in between is because it burns. And there is this sense and this wish that we can manage our way out of these problems. And really what we have to manage is our appetites. And one of those appetites is for fire-powered energy.
Until that time comes… we’ll try to keep these wildfires under control through whatever means possible. But expect even the best laid plans… to sometimes go up in smoke.
One thing we really didn’t touch on much in this episode is prescribed burning - the OTHER big part of active forest management. If you want to learn more about what it is, why it’s so important, we’re gonna put some links in the show notes - and check out our old episode “10 by 10: Pine Barrens.”
And before I go, I’ve got a quick favor to ask. Our series, The Underdogs, is in the running for a podcast Award for Best Sports Documentary.
There’s also a Listener’s Choice, which requires fans to vote — so if you’ve got literally 20 seconds to spare, check out the link in the show notes and cast your vote for The Underdogs.
We’re really proud of how it turned out, and we’d love to see it get some more love.
This episode was written and produced by me, Nate Hegyi.
It was edited by Taylor Quimby.
Rebecca Lavoie is our Executive Producer.
Music for this episode was by Blue Dot Sessions.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Ryan Zinke: To a degree, that series reflects the Galt family.
Nate Hegyi: I didn’t know that.
Ryan Zinke: And yes they have a helicopter, and I think their holdings are somewhere around 350,000 acres.