Fighting Fire with Fire

July 15, 2021·42 min·3 clips

A firefighter recalls being told a 12,000-acre blaze was a once-in-a-lifetime event—now fires are close to a million acres.

1. How to Save a Planet, hosted by Alex Bloomberg and Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, investigates why catastrophic wildfires in the American West have reached unprecedented scale and what can be done. 2. Retired wildland firefighter Bobby Scopa, who fought fires from 1974 to 2018 and served as acting fire director for the U.S. Forest Service, is the episode's primary expert witness. 3. The episode's central thesis is that decades of fire suppression policy have created massive fuel loads in western forests and grasslands, and the solution — prescribed burning — is being blocked by misaligned incentives and bad zoning. 4. Bobby Scopa recalls that in 1974 her supervisor told her a 12,000-acre fire was the biggest she would ever see; today fires have approached one million acres in a single season. 5. The episode traces fire suppression policy to the 1910 Big Burn, in which sparks from trains during a drought caused a firestorm that burned 3 million acres across northern Idaho, western Montana, Washington State, and British Columbia in two days, killing at least 86 people. 6. After the Big Burn, U.S. policy became: when you see fire, put it out immediately, codified in the '10 a.m. policy' requiring any fire to be extinguished by the next morning after it started. 7. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson explains that fire suppression ignores fire's role in ecological cycles — the lodgepole pine, for example, has cones sealed with resin that can only melt and release seeds when heated by fire, making fire essential to forest reproduction. 8. By suppressing virtually every fire for a century, the Forest Service allowed dead leaves, brush, and small trees — called 'fuel loads' — to accumulate throughout western wild lands, creating a massive backlog of burnable material. 9. Smokey Bear campaigns beginning in the 1960s reinforced the false idea that all fire is unnatural and must be stopped, with a 1963 video narrated by Smokey telling a boy that fire destroys forests and offers 'nothing for anybody.' 10. Climate change has compounded the problem: Bobby Scopa notes that fire seasons in Washington State are now almost twice as long as they used to be, and Arizona now has wildfires year-round where it previously had none. 11. The preferred solution among experts is prescribed burning — intentional, controlled burns that reduce fuel loads — a practice that Native American communities had used for millennia for hunting and berry-picking before it was suppressed. 12. Prescribed burning costs as little as $300 per acre versus over $6,000 per acre for fighting an active wildfire, making it more than 20 times more cost-effective. 13. Despite its effectiveness and low cost, prescribed burning is routinely blocked: Bobby Scopa describes being shut down by the Clean Air Authority after public complaints about smoke — before she had even lit a match. 14. The structural reason for these complaints is the Wildland Urban Interface, or WUI — communities outside urban areas but near wild lands — where more than 25 million people have moved since 1990. 15. WUI residents include wealthy individuals like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in their $15 million Montecito, California home, but more commonly low-income people who have been priced out of urban housing markets. 16. Communities resist 'managed retreat' — voluntarily not rebuilding in fire-prone areas — even after destruction: Santa Rosa fast-tracked rebuilding permits after its 2017 fire, and journalist Susie Cagle notes that even liberal counties become 'very libertarian' when managed retreat comes up. 17. Santa Rosa's rebuilt homes nearly burned again in the 2020 Glass Fire, illustrating the consequences of rebuilding without reconsidering fire risk. 18. The episode proposes zoning reform to allow denser multi-unit housing in urban areas as the upstream fix, reducing pressure on people to move into the WUI, along with building code changes and insurance reforms that allow payout without requiring in-place rebuilding. 19. Listeners who want to act individually can visit readyforwildfire.org for a wildfire preparedness app, or bobbyonfire.com run by Bobby Scopa herself. 20. People who find climate-policy granularity rewarding will appreciate this episode; those looking for emotional storytelling rather than wonky solutions may find the zoning discussion dry.

As heard by us

A wildfire-focused climate piece that swaps panic for practical land-management answers.

How to Save a Planet frames western wildfire season as a clear-eyed climate briefing. It covers the smoke, the deaths, and the growing sense of emergency, then narrows to the harder problem of living with fire without letting it keep tearing through communities.

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Why you'd press play

Why some fires should burn instead of being fought to the last spark.

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