MUSIC

Change is coming, oh yeah

Ain’t no holding it back

Ain't no running 

Change is coming, oh yeah!

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

This is Degrees: Real talk about planet-saving careers from Environmental Defense Fund. I’m your host, Yesh Pavlik Slenk. For the better part of the last decade, it’s been my job to help students use their talent and passion to get experience and jobs that serve the planet.

I’m thrilled to introduce you to Frank Kanawha Lake and his job as a fire ecologist with the US Forest Service. He researches why fire burns, where it burns, and how to prevent wildfires. 

BUT this episode is about so much more than fire. In the context of your green career, I want you to listen for three essential threads of wisdom:

1. Consider working for an organization that you might now see as an opponent! In working for them, you could make very important changes.  
2. The soul of good policy and practice is strongest when we understand the history of how we got here. 
3. Community buy-in is essential -- and we’ll get into that!

On to the episode.

Frank is doing something that would have been unthinkable not that many years ago: bringing indigenous fire management practices to the Forest Service. Frank grew up learning from his Yurok and Karuk family how to set fires for cultural burns and spiritual ceremonies. 

His work is at the heart of a conflict that’s raged since the Forest Service was founded in 1905: Is all fire bad? Can we use fire for good? How? 

If you live in the western half of the United States, you already know what it’s like to live with fire seasons. To be unable to open your windows, or breathe, or spend time outdoors. You may have had to evacuate, and you probably know people who have – and people who’ve lost their homes or lives.

As I’m recording this, in California alone, there’s the Mosquito Fire, Fairview Fire, Mountain Fire, Forward Fire, Dutch Fire, Eliza Fire, Barnes Fire, and Radford Fire. Hundreds of thousands of acres are being burned, RIGHT NOW. 

But if you’re in the east or midwest, like me, wildfire sometimes still seems intangible. It’s hard to understand the magnitude unless you’ve actually felt the burning air in your lungs or seen the fire consume the place you live. 

Wildfires have been more and more common, and more destructive in the last decade. 

If climate anxiety is keeping you up at night, there is a way to feel better: make climate change your career. And if you care about fire, make the fire problem your career. There are a lot of jobs YOU can get: predicting fire, preventing it, controlling it. There’s the tech – like remote sensing and mapping, drones, and innovations still to be developed. Policy, and funding –  and politics. Helping people who lost their homes and their businesses. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Back to 1999 and the Megram fire. As it burns, firefighters are trying to suppress it. But many people, including Frank, don’t know what to do. 

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

You know, it was pretty traumatic because the tribal community there and other community around that area was, “What is going to stop this?” And, and, you know, there's a sense of, on one hand, what you can do to react? But on the other hand, there's almost a sense of helplessness and it's, it's just gonna rip and tear and you have to almost get outta the way.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Ultimately, when the November rains come, the Megram fire finally dies. In the end, 125,000 acres were gone.

And Frank -- it made him rethink everything. Up until this point, his passion was 

Fish. He’d been a biologist at fisheries -- he studied salmon, watershed ecosystems and Native American culture in college at UC Davis. It was a part of his childhood too.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

And I also grew up with the Yurok fishing culture and very much fish was central. And in between the spiritual work up in the mountains, or our camps, it tied everything from the ridge to the river as a holistic watershed perspective.

And I thought, well, if I'm gonna restore fish, I have to understand fire. If I'm gonna understand fire, then I need to learn from both the history of that and that history comes from the tribal community and elders. How to live with fire as it affects the watersheds and our foods, the medicines, the basket material and the fish.

And so there was also at that point, a philosophical difference between how you manage fire or what control you can have over it, versusunderstanding what are the factors that make it rage or make it actually beneficial.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Frank wanted to figure fire out. See the big picture. 

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

And so for me, it was that more holistic perspective of understanding your relationship between fire and the forest and the spring flow and the fish, that connected everything through.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

So Frank went to graduate school at Oregon State to study fire -- the, quote, “western” way and connect his tribal knowledge with hard science.  

He would wind up devoting his career to answering one of the biggest questions about climate change today: How do we learn to live with fire? 

But to truly understand how incredible Frank’s work is -- especially while working for the Forest Service – we need to go back to his childhood. When his community went head to head with the Forest Service over sacred tribal land. That’s after the break. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Yesh here, back with Frank Kanawha Lake. 

Growing up in Northwest California, Frank was raised among the jagged coastline of the pacific ocean, vast prairies, and Redwood forests with some of the oldest trees in the world. The Klamath River, rich with salmon, wound its way from the coast into the Klamath mountains where indigenous people have lived for millenia. 

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

You know, one of the most extraordinary things about my Karuk and Yarok upbringing in these mountain ranges is the ability to be on one of the high sacred peaks in a very diverse area and see Mount Shasta of the Cascades to the east, and then be able to see the Pacific Ocean to the west. And knowing that that's a landscape of very long cultural history of ecological importance. 

       

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

It's breathtaking. It, it actually -- I, I truly can't imagine the majesty of being there. Can you describe what your first memory was of having a relationship with nature? If you can think of it.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

One of the earliest is growing up in Trinidad. It's a small fishing town located north of Eureka and Arcata. And nestled right there is one of the old Yurok villages, Tsurai. And for me being down at the beach and having my dad bring me down there to make offerings and to pray across the water and to recognize our sense of place there. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

At the beach, Frank learned creation stories that connected him to his surroundings.

Frank Kanawha Lake:

The rocks and the plants and animals, all having derived as spirit beings that turned into physical things that then we learned from nature, how to caretake and be responsible for.

So there's a deep Hoopa,Yurok and Karuk belief around everything has the right to thrive, reproduce, and, and, and, and be in your environment. You also, as a human, have a responsibility in helping facilitate that.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Frank’s dad was a huge influence on him. 

Frank Kanawha Lake:

My father was one of the founding professors of ethics studies, which later then became the Native American studies program at Humboldt State University, which is now Cal Poly. And at that time, there was a cultural revival and resurgence of indigenous or Native American movement around the environment. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

His dad wanted to preserve and protect sacred tribal sites, like the old growth forests and the redwoods. 

But in the 1970s, the Forest Service wanted to build a 55-mile logging road through Karuk and Yurok land. It was called the GO Road – and Frank’s family, and his community, well, they wanted it stopped. 

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

There was, um, a politicalized tension around developing what we call the GO Road in which it was going to go through one of the most sacred and biologically diverse areas of the local tribes. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

For Frank’s dad, this was personal. He was angry. So he started working with community members and brought Frank along, even though he was just a kid. 

Frank Kanawha Lake:

So this was taking place anywhere between when I was 6 to 12. I remember that.

And so my father went around to visit lots of elders, to talk about how their knowledge and how their beliefs and practices were relevant to natural resource management. And so for me, the influence I had growing up was around the tension between more industrialized forest management, such as clear cutting and mining that affected tribal community interest and reliance on those places.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

The fight over the GO road lasted many years. Much of it got built. But 13 miles were slated to cut through a sacred area. The dispute got taken to the courts, eventually being argued in the Supreme Court. But in 1988, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Forest Service. The tribes lost. 

But, it turns out, the land would end up under protection because of an act passed a few years earlier. In 1984, Congress passed the California Wilderness Act, which protected three million acres in the state, including the last 13 miles of the GO road. The designation prohibited logging. The GO Road was never finished.

However, it’s important to point out that U.S. Courts still use the GO Road as a legal precedent to develop and extract from sacred Native American lands. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about how Frank was just a kid, watching this controversy swirl around him.  

And then, that he went on to have a decades long career with the Forest Service? I needed to know more. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

It seems like a formative time, 6 to 12, but at that time, I mean, how did this experience shape the work that you wanted to do?

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

It very much influenced -- from the perspective of the traditional teachings-- about a responsibility for the knowledge and commitment to community and environment. And I knew at the time that there was disagreement or there was the tension. I saw it -- very up in front, uh, between the logging industry, between the forest services management and the US government. And that there needed to be more alignment, there needed to be agreement and consensus. And so for me, I grew up within that tension, but always was wondering, you know, how, how can we basically get along? Cause you teach children, you know, get along, play nice. And why weren't we able to do that over some of the most critical resource areas for our watersheds, for fisheries, for forestry and other biological and cultural values?

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

It was those influences, and those questions, that played in Frank’s head when he went to graduate school at Oregon State. He studied tribal fire management practices and how fire actually works in the ecosystem. 

Fast forward to around 15 years later, Frank is still working with the Forest Service. Now as a research ecologist specializing in fires, combining indigenous knowledge and fire stewardship with fire science, in order to prevent wildfires. His day to day involves field work, lab research and reading tribal accounts of fire history. 

Frank studies how a particular area might handle fire -- like will it fizzle out or turn into an uncontrollable monster. And he performs treatments. Treatments are things like thinning out a forest so that there is less fuel for a wildfire. He’s careful to note how fire changes with each treatment.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

So what happens before you treat it and do the thinning? What happens after that, before you burn it? And then what happens after you burn it and how you manage and essentially look at the changes in that condition to see if you're beating what you want to in your intent.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Frank is also a fire line resource advisor, meaning he helps manage how the Forest Service suppresses wildfires. A big part of Frank’s job is to mitigate the damage a wildfire can cause – before it even starts. This includes treatments like prescribed burns.

Prescribed burns use fire to manage a forest. Also known as cultural burns, they’ve been used successfully for thousands of years by indigenous people across the globe.  

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

Well you don’t want to fight fire --  And a lot of indigenous people say this, you don’t wanna fight fire when it's most angry and the strongest, you wanna be able to affect it when it's more gentle and calm. And so that's where the philosophy of cultural burning and indigenous fire stewardship comes into those landscape restoration strategies.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

It’s like, burn a little bit now, in a controlled way, so that if and when a fire starts in the future -- either from a lightning strike or a cigarette butt or a firework -- that fire doesn’t become a devastating and deadly force. 

There’s a long, complicated, dark history with prescribed burns and the Forest Service -- I will get into that  in just a minute. But first, let me tell you how the Forest Service and other groups are using them today.

Frank told me about a recent prescribed burn in the Six Sisters National Forest outside of Orleans, California. It was a collaboration between Karuk tribes and the Forest Service.  

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

They got together to say-- the crews, both the Karuk and the forest service -- and said, we're gonna burn this area here. Our goal is to reduce the fuels here since the last wildfire was in that place. That will increase access for tribal communities to have the foods and the basket materials in there.

It'll also reduce the threat of fire, And that was, you know, a small step in success to be able to say, Hey, this is how you work together. This is how you bring your different values and your different ways of understanding and working a fire to protect the tribe and a broader society.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

So if fire can be used for good -- why do most Americans think it’s bad? If prescribed burns can help slow down or even prevent a huge wildfire from happening, why hasn’t the Forest Service been using them? 

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

This was kind of a turning point in the Forest Service’s history. So a lot of the national forests were created back in 1905. And then there was a series of catastrophic fires back in, I think, 1910, 1911.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

These fires in 1910 were known as the Big Blow Up. In only TWO DAYS, three million acres burned in Montana, Idaho and Washington. The Forest Service was only five years old. Its leaders were afraid of another Big Blow Up. 

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

At the same time, there was a proportion of the west, both tribal and non-tribal, that wanted to continue fire use as the tribes and early settlers did because they saw the benefits of that, versus a more conservative approach, which was to conserve the forest and not let it burn up.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

So in 1910, the Forest Service banned all fire. Understandably, they didn’t want to chance another Big Blow Up. But there was a lot more at play. The idea that fire is bad was wrapped up in colonization and racism and the government’s awful track record with Native American communities. 

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

And so what we've seen after a hundred years, how that's played itself out, and the challenge has been changing both policies and other perspectives politically about the role that fire has. But then also the federal government has the ability to learn from tribes about the importance of fire, and then the ways in which they can bring that back in. There's ways in which fire is beneficial. And this is the way in which we can use it to achieve a lot of what we want together.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Frank says, fire suppression needs a more holistic approach. Which includes, recognizing the past.  

Frank Kanawha Lake:

It's very much a decolonization process. You know, we think of the US as a colonial entity and agency, and then you have the indigenous community and there has to, again, I say the reconciliation, there has to be the acknowledgement of what has happened through that process. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

And then, the big question is, how do we move forward… together?

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

We have to have a sense of where we wanna go. We know that with denser forests, we know with the warming climate, with the changes in the weather pattern that we're now experiencing around climate effects on the atmosphere and jet streams, and it affects the temperature of the winds and everything else -- that that's only gonna drive fires more. And so for me, ideally, is how do we learn to live with fire? And how do we begin to use fire in part led by that indigenous perspective about treating it in a place that saw frequent fire for thousands of years -- in part natural and tribal, purposely burning -- to be able to have that for protecting our resources, our communities, and our interest in living with fire.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Frank’s job is so challenging. He’s trying to get the Service to trust that fire can be beneficial – and to use prescribed burns as a tool to combat wildfires. I can only imagine the tension. 

At the same time, Frank’s been working with the Forest Service since 1994 -- so he’s been wading through this tension for decades. 

He knows it’s there. So he tackles it head on. 

He told me about navigating a burn with Western Klamath Restoration and the Nature Conservancy. The first steps weren’t forestry treatments -- but instead, public meetings. People needed to talk to each other. 

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

We all came together, you know, tribal agency, community members, industry, environmental groups. And we developed what we called shared values. And around those shared values, we thought about how do we restore fire as an ecocultural process, that is gonna not only protect community from the aversive effects of wildfire, but also allow us to reintroduce fire in places in ways that lead to food security that lead to more enhanced vegetation, earth resistance.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

So it sounds like the exercise of bringing these communities together, these stakeholders together, has been part of the process from the very beginning.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

It has, but there also has been a strong assertion from the fire suppression and, and fire exclusion, parts of the federal policies and state policies about excluding fire. And so you still have a part of the community who looks very much at wanting to suppress all fires to protect and keep fire out. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

That reminded me about the wildfires in New Mexico this spring. They were the most destructive wildfires the state ever experienced --- displacing thousands of people. And the wildfires were caused by two Forest Service controlled burns… There was a lot of public backlash. I asked Frank about it. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

What do you say to people who point to New Mexico and worry about using prescribed burns?

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

Fire has long been absent from some of these places that they're reintroducing fire. So there is always some risk. The unfortunate circumstance of that one is that it got outta control and became a wildfire. But ideally we have an incremental appreciation and understanding of the role that fire can serve and that we can work past some of those challenges. There's also revival of that knowledge and that relationship to even conduct cultural burns. And so, you know, there's gonna have to be some understanding and some willingness to try, but knowing that also sometimes things won't necessarily work out as you had intended.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

The Forest Service paused prescribed burns for 90 days to figure out what the heck happened. An internal review concluded a part of the problem was that conditions were much drier than the crew initially understood. 

So Randy Moore – he’s the Forest Service chief – told the New York Times that something like 99.84% of prescribed burns - do go as planned. So that’s only a tiny, tiny fraction don’t. 

But if there’s a fraction of a chance that something could go wrong, well, trust is really hard to come by. 

Moore said, “It takes time to rebuild that. Words don’t build that trust. Deeds build that trust.”

Trust can be hard to come by. Frank knows that deeply. It’s an important reason he holds stakeholder meetings before prescribed burns. He also likes to start small and show people that it works. He told me about a partnership between an Orleans-area Wildfire Safe Council and local basketweavers.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

We looked at areas where we could do initially small treatments: areas along the roads around homes, where you could also thin out the hazardous fuels and that would reduce the threat of wildfire, would also enhance basket material and foods. And from there, we scaled that up. And so now you have a much buy in and a lot more understanding. Communities feel safer about the way that the tribe and the Fire Safe Council or the Forest Service is using fire. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

He knows it will be a long time before cultural burns are fully accepted – he says, because colonial views of fire are deep seated.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

And for me, that decolonizing process is to change the narrative often taught in colonial Western institutions. Who are the managers and who are the leadership in the Forest Service or our federal government? Where do they learn about indigenous people? If they didn't learn about them in their forestry and their wildland fire science classes, they're not gonna have the understanding of indigenous stewardship. So for me, it's been changing that narrativeto say what you thought was a natural wilderness environment is actually, in part, developed over millennia by indigenous people.

When you look back at your paleo climate in your fire history studies or you look at the scars, for fire years burned on a tree ring record, in part, some of those are indigenous. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

So do you see part of your role as an ambassador to introducing this conversation and this acceptance of Native cultural knowledge?

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

I -- very much so. And I also see myself as a translator. Uh, it's been one of the unique things to go through Western academic training and define how that academic perspective marginalized or excluded indigenous peoples, and then to also bring an indigenous perspective to that. 

And when you recognize that, then you can have a more acceptant place for indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and practices at the table as co-leadership in that solution to wildfires.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

Fighting wildfire is not going to get any easier. But as I spoke with Frank, I thought a lot about the resilience of indigenous knowledge. In a way, that gave me a lot of hope that we can figure it out, adapt and work together. 

And Frank has worked for decades with the Forest Service -- as a scientist, a researcher, fire practitioner, land steward and translator. He’s done it all. So I asked him about what he sees as the future of fire jobs and skills. He said everyone should understand all the uses of fire and history of fire -- all those things we just talked about.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

It's an educated workforce about one, what is the appropriate or the right fire for the right place in the right way. And then, what is it that you need too, to be able to accomplish that. Not only do you need people on the ground who are running the chainsaws and the equipment and have the fire qualifications, but you also need people who can understand grants and agreements and budgets.

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

We need people who can run bulldozers to suppress fires, or harvest logs with a skid-steer. We need wildlife biologists and hydrologists to see how fire impacts whole ecosystems. 

There’s a whole new field incorporating new technologies into wildfire -- which can work with Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

And not only do I see this as an emergent field for a lot of young Native people who have traditional teachings and upbringings like I have, but also who are getting the, the Western academic training in remote sensing, GIS and modeling. So there's a way of looking at an actual fire event, how it's burning and what's going on for fire behavior. There's also the more, you know, remote sensing level of looking at that fire or a complex of fires in an area, that helps you assess the vegetation or to fuel loading and the risks to community or the benefits of where fire could be applied. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

 Frank taught me so much, not only about fire, but the importance of understanding history, how to change a system from the inside. And about getting community buy-in. 

But I still had one more question for Frank….

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

I have to ask, are we too late to stop the wildfire problem?

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

No, we're not, but it didn't happen overnight. It took over a hundred years and we have to have a real hard truth long look at this, longview look.

Frank Kanawha Lake: 

We really need to come to action. We are gonna have to learn to work together because we're all in this. But we also have to overcome the inequities and injustices that have gotten us to here. For many indigenous people, they're not the direct contributors to deforestation, to excessive carbon use, to industrialization, to the suppression of the fires, but they're a product of and affected by it.

A more resilient and a more adapted forest starts with the generation today. And then from a tribal perspective, what you leave and what you create for your future generation of great, great grandchildren. I want my grandchildren to be my effectiveness monitors. The work I do as a scientist, the work I do as a practitioner in managing or stewarding the environment for foods, for medicines, thinking about the fish and water, going to those high mountain springs to check in on them. Each and every one of us can have a form of responsibility that we do today, but starts and plants a seed. But we know it has -- it's not gonna happen overnight. It's gonna happen in generations. It's gonna be what you choose to step up and do and take responsibility for.

ASK YESH

Yesh Pavlik Slenk:

Now it’s time for Ask Yesh, where I help you with your biggest green career challenges. Send me your questions on Twitter, at Yesh Says, with the hashtag Ask Yesh. 

Today on the show, Where do I look for green jobs?

Well, any job search will feel crushing until you determine exactly what kind of job you’re looking for. And for good advice on that, go back to the Ask Yesh segment of the episode with Ryan Panchadsram. That’s season 4, episode 1. 

Once you have that north star ahead of you, look for that job -- and only that job! 

Let your network know what kind of move you’re trying to make and why you’re qualified for the role you’re after. This kind of announcement might be a LinkedIn post or an email for passive mass consumption. 

But here’s how it works in the real world -- and I’ll share an example with you. A few years ago, I met a job seeker who really knew what he wanted to do – he wanted a career in renewable energy But he hadn’t had a lot of luck landing one. When we connected, we went through the job seeker checklist - updated resume, laser focus on the role, skills, etc. But that wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t until he really committed to getting involved with specific sustainability communities, and attending networking events, that things started coming together. One night, at one of these events, he told everyone he met what he wanted to do. And that’s where he met his future boss. That was 7 years ago now, he’s still there and has grown in his career in renewable energy. 

So to help you with your online search, I’ve put all of my favorite job boards in the Green Jobs Hub on our website, like Ed’s Clean Energy & Sustainability Jobs List and Brown Girl Green’s job board. It’s a one-stop shop. Check it out!

Also in the Green Jobs Hub is a list of green careers influencers I follow, like Katie Kross from the Duke EDGE program. She not only shares job opportunities but also helpful tips and resources.

Dear job seeker, you’ve got this! It will take time. It will be tedious – and sometimes disappointing – but you could not be doing anything more important with your talent. The right job will come. Also, I’m happy to chat if you need a good pep talk! Seriously. Hit me up on Twitter at Yesh Says and we’ll find a time to chat. Talk soon. 

Yesh Pavlik Slenk: 

And that's it for this episode! Make sure to listen and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening now. And share this podcast with a friend so you can both tune in each week, hear how you can help fight climate change. And learn where the jobs are and how you can make a difference. 

On the next episode of Degrees, we talk with climate tech investor Mia Diawara, a partner at the firm LowerCarbon Capital. By investing in kick-ass companies, you’ll learn how healing the planet and making money aren’t mutually exclusive.

Degrees is presented by Environmental Defense Fund. Amy Morse is our producer. Podcast Allies is our production company. Tressa Versteeg [ver-STEGG], Elaine Grant, and Matthew Simonson worked on this episode, with help from Rye Taylor. Special thanks to Tania [TAHN-yuh] Ellersick. 

Our music is Shame, Shame, Shame from my favorite band, Lake Street Dive. And I’m your host, Yesh Pavlik Slenk. But the foundation of the show, dear listener, is you. Stay fired up y’all.

MUSIC

Change is coming, oh yeah

Ain’t no holding it back

Ain't no running 

Change is coming, oh yeah!

Degrees is produced with Podcast Allies. The artwork is by illustrator Bee Johnson. Degrees theme music is by the amazing band Lake Street Dive. We love their powerful video and song Making Do, all about climate change.