This is the Cater Daily podcast for Friday, December 27th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The interactions of states, feds, private landowners, and longstanding wildfire policies have a huge impact on the severity of wildfire.

In August, I spoke with Hannah Downey of the Property and Environment Research

Center about policy change. It can make wildfires less devastating. We have the feds,

we have states, we have localities, we have private landowners who all care about wildfires and mitigating them, managing them,

and in some cases, just put them all out.

And so, and there are a lot of different incentives at play, and it's really just a very complicated issue to deal with this ongoing,

irregular natural disaster, massive wildfires. So how do you get at this question of how

what's the best way to do it? What's the level at which it ought to be done,

and who ultimately ought to be responsible for a lot of the dealing with however decided,

dealing with wildfire.

Yeah. Well, in order to get to a lot of that question, we got to start with what's causing these wildfires.

We're seeing an area larger than the state of Nevada burning in wildfires over the past

decade. There's a current fire in California, the park fire, that's 10 times the size of Washington,

D.C. That's just one fire. So we're dealing with a massive problem here. And the biggest

cause of all of this is that we simply have too many fuels in our forests. And when I say fuels,

I mean dead and dying trees, too many things that can catch on fire and burn hotter and

bigger and cause all of these problems. So in order to kind of get to the root of this wildfire

crisis, we really need to get at that fuels issue. How do we remove a lot of those fuels through

mechanical thinning, prescribed burns, proactive restoration activities to help quell the wildfire

situation we're seeing right now? Okay. So what is the, what's the interaction between feds and states on dealing with wildfire?

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