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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry

Speaker 2: Exploding into the largest inferno in the state this year, the Oak Fire burning near Yosemite is also the most volatile blaze of the season, torching everything in its path.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The Oak Fire in Mariposa County, California has scorched more than 18,000 acres since it started last Friday.

Speaker 3: Over 2,500 firefighters are battling this fire from across the state.

Speaker 4: Flames engulfing more than 28 square miles.

Speaker 5: Evacuation orders are still in place for over 5,000 people in that area.

Speaker 6: The particles that are in the air are just downright toxic.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It comes several weeks after the start of the Washburn Fire, which is now more than 85% contained but both fires have threatened Yosemite National Park and the communities surrounding it. For more, I spoke with Manola Secaira, an environment and climate change reporter for CapRadio in Sacramento, California.

Manola Secaira: The Oak Fire is pretty notable since it's the largest fire California has seen this year. At the moment, it's burning just over 18,000 acres. It's been described by firefighters as being this particularly aggressive fire. Not just that, comparing to previous years, it might not be the largest fire we've seen in the state, but it's caused around 6,000 people to evacuate from their homes and already some homes have been confirmed destroyed by this fire. It's been pretty destructive in a place where people live.

Then there's this other fire, the Washburn Fire, a smaller fire that's mostly contained at this point that popped up about a couple of weeks ago. That was actually in Yosemite National Park. That one was concerning for other reasons. There is a town in Yosemite that was under threat but there were also ecological concerns for the park. Yes, these two fires happening has been just a big concern for people living in the area who've already had to deal with fires in the past few years.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you say a bit more about the ecological concerns in Yosemite relative to the Washburn Fire?

Manola Secaira: Yes. I think that Yosemite being a national park and also having some pretty famous ecological components, I guess, to it is a big reason why it got a lot of attention. A big part of that is the giant sequoias that are in Yosemite. Basically, these giant sequoias are between 1,000, 2,000 years old. They're a really big draw for tourists. People seem to really be familiar with them. Already in previous years, there have been giant sequoias that have been killed off by fires.

People were really concerned when they learned that this fire in Yosemite called the Washburn Fire was getting closer to the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias which, as the name suggests, has a lot of giant sequoias in that part of the park. Luckily, they haven't been harmed by the fire, but that was a big concern. Luckily, the park has been treated previously for fire so the trees were able to keep safe partially because of that. Then also fire does have a role in the life of sequoias. It's not always necessarily a bad thing but I think it would have been this case.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do you have a sense of what the outlook is for this fire season? I understand the ways in which it can be quite difficult. It's a bit like saying, "How many hurricanes do you think are going to come through?" What are experts saying about the expectations to this season?

Manola Secaira: It's funny. I almost don't want to talk about it. I was talking to someone else about this, we feel like we're jinxing it or something. A couple of weeks ago, I think people were saying this is a slow start to the fire season. We aren't seeing as many fires. Right after that, now we're seeing the Oak Fire which is the largest fire of the season. It's hard to say exactly how many big wildfires we'll see if we're going to see anything more. In California, this is not the end of fire season, this is just the beginning. For the next couple of months, we'll have to be prepared for whatever is to come.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's the short term, the kind of this season, but looking into the future with the realities of climate change, what are folks telling you where you're reporting about how prepared Yosemite and particularly also the residential communities where we're seeing both the Oak and the Washburn Fire, how prepared are they for the next decade of fire?

Manola Secaira: I think it's interesting because Yosemite National Park, there's been a lot of research interest in the park, there's been a lot of effort to cultivate the park because of the fact that it's a national park and there's a lot of nationwide interest in it. That park actually has seen some treatment in its forest with controlled burning and other methods of treating it to make sure that these wildfires that are just massive don't break out in the park. Some people I've talked to, some researchers have said that might be why the fire in the park didn't get to the extent that other fires have gotten.

Then for the Oak Fire, I know that firefighters have said that a part of the reason why it was able to grow so quickly and get to the size that it has was because this part of California had not really seen a lot of fire in a really long time, so it was just ripe, I guess, for a really big fire to break through. Now they're coming up against areas where other fires have been in previous years so it's expanding towards old burn scars which helps in containing it. Basically, we're seeing an example of how untreated forests without fire can really create a lot of harm.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Clearly, we are not breathlessly awaiting a future where climate change is affecting our lives. We are living in that moment right now. One of the challenges obviously is that cities and states cannot alone make decisions to fully mitigate risk. I'm wondering how Californians are talking about national efforts or the lack of national efforts to address some of the climate change concerns that are affecting the forests and communities and the giant sequoias of California.

Manola Secaira: Yes. I think Californians specifically have just so many examples on their doorstep of how climate change is impacting them. We're seeing drought conditions here, obviously these huge wildfires, rising waters from the ocean towards communities. There's all these examples of things we need to mitigate. I guess part of the problem is that maybe in other parts of the country, forests operate differently. It's just really different issues in different parts of the country when it comes to how we should be treating forests and making things safer for reducing the risk of wildfires in this example.

There's definitely a need, I guess, for better understanding of those complexities. In the meantime, I guess California has really been trying to move forward its own initiatives. A big part of that is something that I mentioned a bit ago, which is just really working with tribes as well in treating forests and taking care of forests because for a really, really long time, for thousands of years, Indigenous people in this area were on top of how we should actually be treating forests, which is working with them and working with their natural ecological cycles which in this case is talking about introducing fire or just keeping fire in forests rather than suppressing it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Manola Secaira is an environment and climate change reporter for CapRadio. Manola, thank you for joining us.

Manola Secaira: Yes. Thank you.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Just ahead, we talk with professor Scott Stephens about fighting fire with fire and why setting prescribed burns is one of the most effective ways to prevent uncontrolled wildfires. Coming up on The Takeaway.

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Smokey the Bear, Smokey the Bear.

Prowlin' and a growlin' and a sniffin' the air.

He can find a fire before it starts to flame.

That's why they call him Smokey,

That was how he got his name.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Back with you on The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. That of course was the Smokey the Bear song. For generations, Smokey taught Americans the only you can prevent forest fires. It means the idea of fighting fire with fire feels a little counterintuitive to some of us, but it's a practice with plenty of history and success in mitigating fire damage. Yosemite's giant sequoia trees, for example, remained relatively undamaged by this month's Washburn Fire. Many experts believe that that's due to the use of prescribed fires. To learn more, I spoke with Scott Stephens, professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Scott Stephens: There was actually a debate in the early 1900s whether or not we should exclude fire or should we actually include it. Some people were advocating for including it thinking that it was something that would actually keep forests sustainable for long periods, even including their economics if you wanted to harvest them. Others, particularly the US Forest Service, came to the conclusion that it was actually too difficult to use, it wasn't a tool that maybe was best on Western science.

Indigenous people have been using burning for millennia. They didn't think that was actually appropriate for a new Western science approach. Eventually, the heavy pressure from the Forest Service and federal agencies took fire out of the systems here in California. That's where we are today.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's my understanding that back in May, there was a prescribed fire that actually spread across New Mexico and caused a substantial fire there. Talk to me a bit about how states make these decisions relative to their neighbors.

Professor Scott Stephens: That's true that that fire did escape and it is a challenge. Anytime you put a fire on the ground, there's risk. I've been on probably about 130 fires in my career, and we've had some problems with some of them. Not very many. If you look at statistics, you're looking at well below 1.5% or 1% have any issue at all, and even less numbers that actually cause harm like, unfortunately, maybe building burning down or some other impact. When you plan this, you're trying to do the best you can to look at the weather, to look at your conditions, and try to basically keep that fire within the boundary.

You also have a contingency plan, so you can try to mitigate the negative impacts, but none of this is simple. I think what we're going to have to do is probably start burning a lot more out of tit season. With climate change, we're seeing more dry winters and periods that are relatively warm in the winter. Especially out here in California, this last year, we had no rain from January to middle of March. That's basically a period when we should have snow rain all the time. That was an incredible period maybe to do prescribed burning on this state but we almost did none at all, mostly because we have no workforce at that time and probably we need to create one.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For those of us who've never been involved in fighting a fire, whether intentional or prescribed, how does one contain a fire?

Professor Scott Stephens: What you do essentially is you create a fire line around the fire unit. That really is something just like a little path. We all walk on paths in the woods, three feet bare mineral soil. You take away some of the low canopy around that area so fire can't go up into maybe a small tree, torch out and throw some embers or sparks on the other side on the line. You really do a little work by cutting fire lines around your unit.

Certainly, you use things like roads or maybe a creek or some rock outcrop. That actually is a discontinuity of the fuel bed, so you can burn to that feature and the fire won't propagate. You create essentially a unit that you think has a good chance of keeping the fire in. Then you look at the weather. The weather is everything. Out here in the Western US, relative humidity is so important.

If humidity is low, below 30%, you really get enabling the embers that come out and start new fires outside of your unit. If relative humidity is 50% or above, very difficult to do that just because there's enough moisture in the air to keep those fuels a little bit wet. Then you go about setting the fire with a crew, and that's where we're really inadequate. We don't have enough people. We don't have enough workforce. We don't have the experience. The Southeast US is the prescribed fire capital of the United States of America. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, they've been doing this for 50 years and they show that we can do it at scale.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are some of the lessons that come from the Southeast that you think need to be implemented in a place like California?

Professor Scott Stephens: One thing is people can deal with fire. The smoke, they basically just know that it's something that they have to put up with once in a while. The state of Florida burned 1.2 million acres of forest last year prescribed fire. 1.2 million acres. California did 60,000. When you're burning over a million acres a year, you're putting out a lot of smoke. You've got fires near communities, you've got fires near roads, and it becomes somewhat routine in the Southeast. I've seen it down there, it's amazing. People are burning along areas, re-burning areas that have been burned 3, 4, 5, 10 times in the last 50 years. It's just routine. Politicians know about it. They're not too worried about it.

If something escapes, something goes wrong, people try to learn from it, but they don't say, "Okay, we're going to set this thing all down. We're not going to do this anymore because the reaction politically is tough." Also the social side, people support it. They don't mind having a little bit of smoke for a couple of months basically knowing that in the long term, this makes sense. That's all big here in California because we have none of that. We don't have really the social capital yet. We also don't quite have the political capital, but it's growing. We'll have to give the state credit, the Newsom administration and others have really pushed for more prescribed fire, but it's going to be a journey.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You mentioned a bit ago climate change and the ways that the drier months, the lack of rain, what are some of the other ways that our climate and our changing, not just changing but worsening climate, have affected the capacity to do this kind of prescribed burn?

Professor Scott Stephens: It really has made it more complicated. It really is the truth. Early in my career in the early '90s, you almost expect to have a decent window in the fall here in California right before the rains really hit, the time when you're between your late summer and the fall. You're going to get some good conditions, maybe sometimes a week or two you could do some prescribed burning. Those things are starting to evaporate.

When you have drought like we have right now, we have two and a half years of drought, the droughts are warmer because of climate change, you're really changing the structure of this system and making it harder maybe to use those traditional windows that we relied upon for many years. That's why I think we have to even become more nimble, so we have a month, maybe in the dead of winter, maybe in February with no precipitation, and maybe you don't have snow on the ground at a lot of areas of the Sierra Nevada, you go out in earnest and you begin burning. That is an opportunity.

We got to use those opportunities at those times so we can try to do this as safely as possible and get that work done. Otherwise, we continue just to chase our tail. Look what's happening out here. Fires almost a million acres in size at Dixie Fire last year causing devastation to our landscapes. We've got to work with these landscapes or they're going to change right in front of our eyes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Scott Stephens is a professor of fire science, the University of California, Berkeley. Thanks so much for having joined us.

Professor Scott Stephens: I was happy to talk.

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